Nation and Nationalism in Japan [1 ed.] 0700716394, 9780700716395

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
Note on names
1 Rethinking nation and nationalism in Japan
2 The politics of pragmatism and pageantry: selling a national navy at the elite and local level in Japan, 1890–1913
3 Picturing political space in 1920s and 1930s Japan
4 Substantiating the nation: terrorist trials as nationalist theatre in early Shōwa Japan
5 Between samurai and carnival: identity, language, music and dance among the Japanese expatriate community in 1930s Brazil
6 In a house divided: theJapanese Christian socialist Abe Isoo
7 Saving for 'My Own Good and the Good of the Nation': economic nationalism in modern Japan
8 War, commemoration and national identity in modern Japan,1868–1975
9 English and nationalism in Japan: the role of the intercultural-communication industry
10 Japanese nationalism in comparative perspective
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Nation and Nationalism in Japan

Nationalism was one of the most important forces in twentieth-century Japan. It pervaded almost all aspects of Japanese life, but was a far from simple notion, frequently changing, and often meaning different things to different people. This book brings together interesting new work by a range of international leading scholars who consider Japanese nationalism in a wide variety of its aspects. Overall, the chapters provide many new insights and ways of thinking on what continues to be a crucially important factor shaping current developments in Japan. This book re-examines Japanese nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the light of new theoretical writing, and using a comparative perspective. It considers Japanese nationalism not only as a political phenomenon but also as a crucial factor shaping everyday behaviour and thought. The contributors bring different approaches to the analysis of a complex phenomenon. An introductory chapter sets the chapters in their theoretical context. A concluding chapter compares Japanese nationalism with its European, American and Asian counterparts. Contributors to this book are Sandra Wilson, Murdoch University; Stephen S. Large, University of Cambridge; Kosako Yoshino, University of Tokyo; J. Charles Schencking, University of Melbourne; Elise K. Tipton, University of Sydney; Beatrice Trefalt, Newcastle University, New South Wales; Sheldon Garon, Princeton University; Stewart Lone, University of New South Wales; Vera Mackie, Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia; Frank B. Tipton, University of Sydney.

Nation and Nationalism in Japan

Edited by Sandra Wilson

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

First issued in paperback 2011

ISBN13: 978-0-700-71639-5 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-51533-7 (pbk)

Contents

List offigures List of tables Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Note on names

1 Rethinking nation and nationalism in Japan

Vll

viii ix xi xii 1

SANDRA WILSON

2 The politics of pragmatism and pageantry: selling a national navy at the elite and local level in Japan, 1890-1913

21

J. CHARLES SCHENCKING

3 Picturing political space in 1920s and 1930s Japan

38

VERA MACKIE

4 Substantiating the nation: terrorist trials as

nationalist theatre in early Showa Japan

55

STEPHEN S. LARGE

5 Between samurai and carnival: identity, language, music and dance among the Japanese expatriate community in 1930s Brazil

69

STEWART LONE

6 In a house divided: the Japanese Christian socialist

Abe Isoo ELISE K. TIPTON

81

Vl

Contents

7 Saving for 'My Own Good and the Good of the Nation': economic nationalism in modern Japan

97

SHELDON GARON

8 War, commemoration and national identity in modern Japan, 1868-1975

115

BEATRICE TREFALT

9 English and nationalism in Japan: the role of the intercultural-communication industry

135

KOSAKU YOSHINO

10 Japanese nationalism in comparative perspective

146

FRANK B. TIPTON

Notes Bibliography Index

163 190 208

List of figures

3.1 3.2 3.3 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5

'Universal Suffrage', 1928 'Fight 1928 Together!', 1 January 1928 'Do Not Go Astray', undated 'Let's All Work Together: Diligence and Thrift Is Number One!', 1925 'Diligence and Thrift: It's for My Own Good and the Good of the Nation', 1925 'Savings Patriotism', 1941 'Export and Thrive, Save for Prosperity', 1946 'The Economy as Linked to the Kitchen', 1962

45 46 51 105 106 108 111 113

List of tables

Primary school enrolments in Europe, the United States and Japan, 1870-1920 10.2 Radios in use or licensed, 1920-70 10.3 Televisions in use or licensed, 1940-88 10.4 Weighted average of years of education per person aged 15-64, 1820-1992

10.1

150 157 158 158

Notes on contributors

Sheldon Garon is Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Molding Japanese Minds: The State and Everyday Life (Princeton University Press, 1997) and The State and Labor in Modem Japan (University of California Press, 1987). He is currently writing a book on the promotion of saving in Japan, Europe, the United States and Asia. Stephen S. Large is Reader in Modem Japanese History at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Emperor Hirohito and Shiiwa Japan: A Political Biography (Routledge, 1992), Emperors of the Rising Sun: Three Biographies (Kodansha International, 1997) and Organized Workers and Socialist Politics in Interwar Japan (Cambridge University Press, 1981), and is the editor of Shiiwa Japan: Political, Economic and Social History, 1926-1989, 4 volumes (Routledge, 1998). Stewart Lone is Associate Professor in East Asian Studies at University College, the University of New South Wales. His publications include Army, Empire and Politics in Meiji Japan (Macmillan, 2000), The Japanese Community in Brazil 1908-1940 (Palgrave, 2001) and Japan's First Modem War: Army and Society in the Conflict with China, 1894-95 (Macmillan, 1994). Vera Mackie is Foundation Professor of Japanese Studies at Curtin University of Technology. She is the author of Creating Socialist Women in Japan: Gender; Labour and Activism, 1900-1937 (Cambridge University Press, 1997); co-editor with Anne Marie Hilsdon, Martha Macintyre and Maila Stivens of Human Rights and Gender Politics: Asia-Pacific Perspectives (Routledge, 2000); and co-editor with Paul Jones of Relationships: Japan and Australia, 1870s-1950s (University of Melbourne, 2001).

J. Charles Schencking is Lecturer in Japanese History at the University of Melbourne. His book, Making Waves: The Political Emergence of the Japanese Navy, 1872-1922, based on his PhD dissertation from Cambridge University, is in preparation. He is currently researching a history of the 1923 Kanto earthquake and Goto Shinpei's reconstruction plans for Tokyo.

x

Notes on contributors

Elise K. Tipton is Associate Professor in Japanese Studies and Chair of Asian Studies at the University of Sydney. She is the author of The Japanese Police State: The Tokko in Interwar Japan (Allen and Unwin and University of Hawai'i Press, 1991), editor of Society and the State in Interwar Japan (Routledge, 1997), and co-editor with John Clark of Being Modem in Japan: Culture and Society from the 19IOs to the 1930s (University of Hawai'i Press, 2000). Frank B. Tipton is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Economic History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of numerous works on European and Asian economic and social history. His most recent book is The Rise of Asia (Macmillan, 1998). Beatrice Trefalt is Associate Lecturer in the School of Liberal Arts at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. Her doctoral thesis from Murdoch University, conferred in 2002, focuses on public reactions to the return of stragglers in post-war Japan. She has a strong interest in theories of memory and commemoration, and has also written on Japanese prisoners of war in the Pacific and on the Occupation period. Her current research project centres on the processes of repatriation in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Sandra Wilson is Associate Professor in Asian Studies at Murdoch University. She is the author of The Manchurian Crisis and Japanese Society, I931-33 (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor with David Wells of The Russo-Japanese War in Cultural Perspective, 1904-05 (Macmillan, 1999). Kosaku Yoshino is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Tokyo. He is the author of Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan: A Sociological Enquiry (Routledge, 1992) and Bunka nashonarizumu no shakaigaku (A Sociology of Cultural Nationalism) (Nagoya University Press, 1997), and editor of Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism: Asian Experiences (Curzon, 1999).

Acknowledgements

Most of the chapters in this volume were originally prepared for a conference on 'Nation and Nationalism in Japan', funded by the Japan Foundation and organised by the School of Asian Studies, Murdoch University in September 2000. We are very grateful for the support of the Japan Foundation, without which the conference could not have been held. We are also grateful to the Hyogo Prefectural Government Cultural Centre, its Director, Mr Masahiro Ogawa and staff, for hosting the conference in their beautiful premises in Perth, and to the School of Asian Studies at Murdoch for providing administrative support. We wish to thank all who attended the conference for their comments and criticism, especially Iwane Shibuya, Morris Low and Ben Tipton, whose comments turned into a concluding chapter. The editor thanks all contributors to the volume for participating in the project, and is also delighted to acknowledge the support of Radha Krishnan, David Hill, Yasuo Takao, Narrelle Morris, Tsukasa Takamine and David Wells. Additional thanks are due to Narrelle Morris for her assistance in preparing this volume for publication.

Note on names

Following normal East Asian usage, Japanese personal names appear with surname first, except for authors writing in English who choose to reverse the order. Macrons have been omitted in the case of Tokyo and Osaka where they appear in the text, in translations of titles and organisations and as places of publication.

1

Rethinking nation and nationalism in Japan Sandra Wilson

Though nations and nationalism surround us, there is no single way of understanding what they are. Some theorists cite a list of important characteristics - for Anthony D. Smith, for example, a nation is a 'named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members' .1 Others place less emphasis on substantive criteria and more on feelings and beliefs. Thus, it is the sense of connection among members of the nation who will never know or meet most of their compatriots that is important; 2 or, more specifically, shared feelings of 'fraternity, substantial distinctiveness, and exclusivity, as well as beliefs in a common ancestry and a continuous genealogy'. 3 Yet clearly, the modem world is made up not just of communities based on such feelings and beliefs, but of 'nation-states', where each nation-state maintains 'an administrative monopoly over a territory with demarcated boundaries (borders), its rule being sanctioned by law and direct control of the means of internal and external violence' .4 'Nationalism' can be understood on one level as the ideology that produces and maintains such nation-states. 5 By whatever definition, a consciousness of nation has been widely considered to be very important to modem Japan, especially during the pre-war period. Japan's relative cultural homogeneity, apparently natural geographical boundaries, isolation from much of the outside world between the midseventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries and its ancient imperial house have seemed to indicate the inevitability of national consciousness. Rampant nationalism, too, has been one of the most widespread shorthand explanations for Japan's disastrous involvement in the Second World War. At the same time, however, reference to the Japanese case is almost entirely missing from the contemporary theoretical literature on nation and nationalism. Perhaps the reason is that Japan conforms to none of the best-known models of nationalism, in particular because it is Asian but was not colonised, and because Japanese nationalism after the Meiji period can scarcely lay claim to a positive image. Though orthodox interpretations of late-nineteenth-century 'nation-building' have often cited the nationalism of leaders and people as an important factor in successful modernisation, for the ensuing decades there was no attractive story

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of liberation from colonial oppression, or winning of independence or selfdetermination for a subjugated people, but rather a story chiefly associated with conquest, subjugation of other peoples, war, and after 1945, the vexed issue of remilitarisation. For Japanese historians, the subject is painfully associated with partially unresolved wartime issues, so that nationalism often seems to represent what Miroslav Hroch has called in another context 'an antiquated deviation, a historical error' .6 Writings on modem Japan have accordingly tended to emphasise a particular type of nationalism. Much valuable work on the Meiji period has revealed the efforts of political and bureaucratic leaders and others to inculcate nationalism among the people, somewhat counterbalancing the impression that nationalism was virtually inevitable for modem Japan. One doubtless unintended result, however, is an inference that the project of creating a 'sense of nation' 7 was largely complete by the end of Meiji; and that thereafter, the only really significant development up until 1945 was a greater leaning towards militarism. After 1945, nationalism in this view was discredited and largely abandoned, excepting the activities of some fringe groups, and perhaps the economic nationalism famously practised by the Japanese state. Japanese nationalism after 1868, in this rendition, is first and foremost an ideology, transmitted principally through compulsory education and conscription of adult males. Furthermore, it is a largely static phenomenon, relatively coherent and monolithic, in that it is exclusivist, and centred on a set of core ideas about what constituted the Japanese nation and the essence of Japanese identity, including the assertion that the Japanese had always existed as a separate people, that the imperial house had continued unbroken for over two thousand years, that the Japanese people possessed unique attributes and pure blood, and had a unique mission to lead Asia. This version of Japanese nationalism is also a top-down creation centred on state and emperor and, increasingly, the military, with the addition of a few mad ultra-nationalists outside government. Ordinary people are certainly involved, but mostly as a passive populace manipulated from above, and often as misled masses charging towards war. Nationalism is certainly in part an ideology, and as such it may be particularly conspicuous when national identity is felt to be threatened, inadequate or lacking,8 as in Japan between 1868 and 1945. Yet nationalism is much more than a political project or a doctrine, as recent writers have clearly recognised. Rather, it is a 'way of talking, thinking, and acting' ,9 as integral to life in a stable democracy as to participation in a movement seeking a new state to represent a particular 'nation'. 10 At its most basic, nationalism can be understood as a form of discourse - a discourse which links a variety of projects, policies and movements undertaken in the name of the nation. 11 Thus, it is not 'a latent force that manifests itself only under extraordinary conditions, a kind of natural disaster which strikes spontaneously and unpredictably'. Rather, it is 'a discourse that constantly shapes our consciousness and the way we constitute the meaning of the world', claiming, implicitly or explicitly, that 'the interests and values of the nation override all other interests and values', ultimately accepting the nation as 'the

Rethinking nation and nationalism in Japan

3

only source of legitimacy' and operating through a series of binary divisions'between ''us" and "them", "friends" and "foes"' .12 The chapters in this volume are based on such an understanding of modem nationalism. Taken as a whole, they therefore suggest a more fluid and flexible type of Japanese nationalism than that which has appeared in many previous writings. They further suggest that Japanese nationalism has existed and continues to exist in some variety, rather than in a single dominant version, with different concepts of nation competing in the public domain; and that a wide range of agents has been involved in the negotiation and transmission of discourses of the national interest. These agents include many people in the articulate elites inside and outside of government. But they also encompass a great variety of ordinary and anonymous people who participated in nationalist discourses as much through their actions as through any written or spoken manifesto. If nationalism is accepted as a basic way of thinking, talking and acting, then its basis is much broader than has previously been acknowledged in the case of Japan. It is as much relevant to nameless members of the middle and working classes, for example, as to national leaders and political groups on the right and the left. The 'nation', in our view, has been constructed by many hands, not necessarily under any guiding plan or with a common intent or understanding. The linking factor among a variety of projects, policies and actions is, again, the discourse of the 'national' interest. The chapters in this volume also treat Japanese nationalism more as a process or series of processes than as an established dogma, though dogmas have undeniably played their part. The process has never reached an end-point, though critical milestones can certainly be identified, they do not indicate a linear path or known direction, and the discourses of nationalism continue to unfold. As will be clear from these introductory remarks, Japanese nationalism is considered here as a phenomenon that has much in common with other nationalisms. The Japanese case is unique in the sense that, all cases are unique- specific ideas, movements and projects spring primarily from particular historical and cultural conditions in Japan. For reasons already mentioned, moreover, the Japanese case is in many ways an unusual one. On the other hand, as Frank B. Tipton's concluding chapter demonstrates, there is much to be learned from a comparative perspective. In Tipton's view, while Japan's claims to nationhood in the mid-nineteenthcentury were better developed than those of other countries, in subsequent periods the trajectory of Japanese nationalism was surprisingly similar to that of other nationalisms.

ESTABLISHING THE 'NATION' In hindsight, Japanese nationalism may indeed appear as inevitable. In Frank B. Tipton's terms, Japan was in fact 'a far better candidate to become a modem nation than virtually any other contender' in the middle of the nineteenth-century, owing to its relatively clear geographic boundaries, comparative linguistic uniformity,

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common elite culture and established central government. Yet, for most of the Japanese population at that time, nationalism was far from an established orthodoxy, and membership of the 'nation' was certainly not taken for granted. Local allegiances were more pressing than national ones for most people, status distinctions were overriding, and knowledge of the emperor was sketchy and confused. 13 Nationalism thus had yet to be created, implanted and propagated among the people, for many of whom it was an unfamiliar and perhaps unattractive idea. Much work was done during the Meiji period to change this situation. Among the educated classes the idea of Japan as a distinctive community already had a long history by the time the new Meiji leaders came to power. The notion that Japan and the Japanese were of divine origin, and hence different from and superior to others, was propagated well before 1868. There was a well-established distinction between Japan, on the one hand, and China and India on the other. By the late Edo period, further distinctions were claimed the noted scholar Hirata Atsutane, for instance, specifically asserted Japanese superiority over the peoples of Cambodia, China, Holland, India, Russia, Siam and other places. 14 The bakufu itself had a certain sense of national identity, as seen, for example, in the edict of 1636 closing Japan, in which Japanese people were forbidden to travel abroad, and much later when the bakufu dispatched a mission to the Paris Exposition of 1867. In this sense, ideas about nation were by no means new in the modem period. It was the conditions of post-1853 Japan, however, which 'fundamentally transform[ ed] the pre-existing ethnic identities and [gave] new significance to cultural inheritances' .15 The perception of national identity that might already have been fairly familiar in the samurai class became an urgent practical issue with the intrusion of the West into Japanese affairs from the 1850s onwards- the threat from external nation-states thus did much to destroy more local and regional allegiances in Japan. Throughout the Meiji period, nationalism permeated all areas of Japan's high culture. Amongst the educated classes, it rapidly became common sense; it was not at all controversial, except occasionally in terms of its application. The discourse of national interest in fact was a common thread linking widely diverging political positions, right through to the liberalism of Oi Kentaro and the socialism of Kotoku Shiisui. 16 The nationalism of the mid-nineteenth-century, however, though crucial to the overthrow of the Tokugawa regime and the establishment of the Meiji nation-state, was by and large the nationalism of a small elite. As noted above, it was greatly overshadowed at that time by more local loyalties - to villages or to domains, rather than to any 'national' entity- and by considerations of social status. Regional consciousness was so strong, according to one analysis, that opposing sides in the battles of the Meiji Restoration saw each other not only as enemies, but virtually as different 'ethnic' groups, with different cultural characteristics including regional dialects that seemed like different languages to the other side. Moreover, the upper class before the Restoration was considered so distinct from the middle and lower classes as to be barely part of the same ethnic groupY In the early 1870s the journalist Kurimoto

Rethinking nation and nationalism in Japan

5

Joun found proof of a lack of national consciousness in the causes for which people died: Granted, in Japan from ancient times a great many people have died for their own sake, for the sake of their families or their village or their district; or for an employer or a lord. But so far we have heard of no-one who has died for the country (kuni). Even if there are some who have died directly for their country, their deaths resulted from the spirit of dying for a ruler (kimi), and so the idea of the word 'kuni' does not yet exist in the hearts of our people. 18 In the early years of the Meiji era, the Japanese population was by no means convinced that the new national system of government was preferable to rule by domain, especially as it was evident that the conventional forms of protection provided by the old regime were now gone. 19 Uprisings occurred in a number of places, some of them armed uprisings, revealing a substantial level of anxiety about the new conscription system and other government initiatives. Ordinary people, in other words, did not automatically see service for the 'national' good as a natural or obvious obligation. In the mid-1880s, while some observers were beginning to make hopeful statements about the unity of the people, the political activist Oi Kentaro, on the other hand, believed that the national consciousness of the Japanese was still 'extremely languid and obstinate' .20 According to Takashi Fujitani, 'Not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did nearly all of the people living in "Japan" realize that it was commonsensical and natural to possess a national identity and to feel a sense of responsibility to the national collectivity' .21 As late as 1943, when external perceptions of an overpowering Japanese nationalism were at their height, the scholar D. C. Holtom pointed instead to 'strongly diversifying, not to say disintegrating, tendencies', noting that 'The particularism of a feudal regime that was split into rival clans and pocketed behind mountain barriers and secluded on separate islands has not even yet been fully transcended' .22 Given the relatively strong feeling of national identity common to the elite levels of Meiji society, in a context where the unequal treaties with Western countries significantly infringed Japan's sovereignty and autonomy, it became an urgent task for Meiji leaders to encourage the rest of the population to identify with the nationstate, and in particular to become more willing to make sacrifices for it. The problem about dying for the country raised by Kurimoto Joun, the journalist quoted above, was solved with the establishment in 1869 of the monument later renamed Yasukuni jinja, a shrine dedicated to the proposition that Japan's soldiers did indeed die for the sake of the nation. Yasukuni thus played its own important part in the elaboration of the meaning of 'nation' in Meiji Japan, as Beatrice Trefalt demonstrates in her chapter in this volume. Some of the key strategies by which the state sought more generally to encourage a sense of national identity are well known: the formal levelling of society by abolition of the old class system; the implementation of conscription and universal education, through which a bigger section of the population than ever before was exposed to official dogma; the

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inscribing of nationalist orthodoxy into crucial texts like the constitution and the Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890; in fact, the invention or reproduction of 'a countless array of national symbols, rites, practices, and ideas, an entire system of meaning through which the people might imagine the nation' ,23 of which the most important is the monarchy itself. 24 Frank B. Tipton's chapter in this volume reminds us that such strategies on the part of Japan's rulers were broadly similar to those elsewhere, with primary schools in particular playing a significant role in spreading ideas of nation in many countries. Even the Imperial Rescript on Education, infamous in most accounts of Japanese nationalism, in a sense had its counterpart in the American Pledge of Allegiance. The ideal of sacrifice for the nation upheld by Yasukuni Shrine was unequivocally a male one. More broadly, nationalist ideology and nationalist practice were gendered from the start in Japan, as they were elsewhere. 25 Women and men were expected to participate differently in the national project. In fact, though there was no shortage of exhortations to women as to how they should serve the nation in their own supposedly distinctive way, the most important of the 'national' enterprises generally assumed a male subject, starting with conscription, proceeding to voting, for those wealthy enough, and culminating in actual participation in wars. In cases where women were encouraged to participate in the same national projects as men, as in universal education, the content differed, with primary schools being prime places for the inculcation of ideology about the proper behaviour and attitudes for each gender. As Nira Yuval-Davis has argued, moreover, gender plays a significant role in the construction of nation on the symbolic as well as the practical level. 26 In Japan, the idea of the family-state (kazoku kokka), a crucial tool in inculcating 'national' loyalty, particularly among the great majority of the population who did not belong to the former samurai class,27 was based on a heavily patriarchal model of the family, and therefore encouraged a gendered understanding of the nation-state itself. Gender symbolism continued, as Vera Mackie shows in this volume, it provided important metaphors for the changing political practices of 'TaishO democracy', metaphors that were useful both to establishment and to opposition figures. Carol Gluck has demonstrated conclusively that Meiji ideology was made and disseminated by a great variety of agents, both inside and outside of government. 28 Though the work of establishing the idea of the nation was thus widely shared, especially as newspapers and other publications began to proliferate, the state nevertheless remained 'the most powerful force shaping conceptions of nationhood' .29 It did so not only by the symbolic means outlined above, but also through the provision of the type of infrastructure without which many such measures would have been impossible. Central to all the government's nationalising projects, and a crucial indication of the connection between industrialisation and nationalism, was the establishment of advanced forms of communication and transport. The rapidity with which the new leaders embarked on the construction of railways and telegraphs in particular testifies to the importance in their eyes of establishing a national reach, by means of which government could not only foster industrial development, but also convey its various instructions to remote parts of the

Rethinking nation and nationalism in Japan

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country, if necessary also conveying soldiers to ensure compliance, and at the same time gather information on the regions for its own purposes. 30 Local protests against the new conscription system and other government initiatives in the early 1870s provide a good example of the importance of effective communication systems for the new Meiji government, or rather the difficulties produced by a lack of such systems. Many of the uprisings were based on rumours and local misinterpretations of the new policies. It was said, for example, that Westerners were now to govern Japan directly, that the government intended to offer the young daughters of the farming class to the Westerners, that the conscription system aimed literally to collect people and extract their blood as a form of tax with which to pay back foreign loans. 31 In the early 1870s, the government had no nation-wide system of barracks or primary schools; newspapers were few and those that did exist were certainly not geared to the lower levels of literacy. Thus, the government had no choice but to rely on local officials to dispel rumours and explain policies, perhaps rewarding those who did so effectively as a means of ensuring their future services. Or it could send officials from the metropolis to distant prefectures, a dubious measure given the speed with which uprisings spread and the fact that locals were not always inclined to listen to officials from distant Tokyo. By the end of Meiji, on the other hand, a complex system of schools and barracks was in place, newspapers circulated quite widely, and the national government could communicate directly with a fair proportion of its people. Protests against conscription and other early Meiji policies were substantial local affairs. One protest in Oita prefecture in December 1872 was said to have involved 40,000 rebels; 60 houses were destroyed and 45 officials wounded in this case. 32 In another protest, rebels started fires in 130 villages in the FukuokaHakata region, burning down 527 buildings including the village heads' offices, schools, temples, private residences of officials and farm-houses, as well as pulling down telegraph poles. Soldiers finally forced them back from the gates of the castle at gunpoint. 33 In another case, however, it was soldiers themselves who created the disturbance. 34 Protest could take other forms as well. Married men were exempted from conscription; one newspaper reported in mid-1874 on a failed attempt to use this provision when the younger brother of a priest became engaged to the daughter of a priest in a neighbouring village in order to avoid conscription. Unfortunately, the prospective bride was only 6 years old. When the reluctant conscript heard that the village head intended to report the case to the authorities, he hurried to become the adopted husband of a daughter from another temple instead. This attempt also failed, however, and the man ended up a soldier.35 On one level, such cases show only that some people did not want to become soldiers, or that villagers in some areas had a mistaken view of government policy, since so many of the uprisings appear to have been based on rumour and misunderstanding. On another level, they show that much work remained to be done before military service was accepted as the duty of all male subjects of the emperor - though the village head in the above example certainly appears to have been willing to enforce the principle, in an instance of intervention by a local notable on behalf of central authority that would become increasingly familiar in

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subsequent decades. Nor was opposition to conscription restricted to the period of the new system's implementation: the Chichibu Incident of 1884 shows farmers still unreconciled to this partkular national project, with calls for abolition of the conscription law taking their place alongside other demands. Overall, imposition of the 'national' framework required, in Tessa MorrisSuzuki's words, 'an important reworking' of the Japanese state's relationship with regional communities 'whose ties to the central government had often been extremely tenuous', as well as with frontier societies such as the Ainu. 36 Undeniably, identification with the nation did gain much ground during the Meiji period, as 'national' institutions extended their reach and governments sought to facilitate industrialisation and administrative unity. Before long, many regions were actively seeking to promote contact with the central government, anxious as they were to ensure that their own part of the country did not miss out on the concrete benefits that the Meiji government could dispense. By the late nineteenthcentury, as Karen Wigen observes, 'most provincial Japanese demonstrably wanted to be connected to the nation and the world'- especially with the prospect of improved roads, mass education and the development of industry at stake. 37 The very fact that the Meiji leaders continued to devote so much energy to the creation of a 'sense of nation', however, shows their agonised consciousness that the project remained, from their point of view, sadly incomplete. In twentiethcentury Japan, too, people were continually reminded of their membership of the nation, and of the rights and especially duties that entailed. The nation never became invisible, and to Japanese leaders, the ideology associated with it always seemed to require reinforcement and elaboration. But by the early twentiethcentury, at least the idea was a familiar one. The opposition politician Okuma Shigenobu may have been indulging in wishful thinking or practising his rhetorical skills when he asserted in 1906 that 'the Japanese now are all a loyal and patriotic (chiikun aikoku) people' .38 Nevertheless, as Gluck points out, he could do so only because such vocabulary was by now 'widely enough shared to be both immediately understood and unobjectionable' .39 For the first time, leaders and observers could assume that the majority of Japanese saw themselves as members of the nation in some sense, or at least in some circumstances. By the end of the Meiji period, then, there was little doubt, in the public arena at least, that the nation was an established fact. The two wars in which Japan had been involved had done much to enhance this notion, as did the international recognition brought by Japan's victories. Not only did victory over China in 1895 enhance the prestige of the military and emphasise overseas possessions; the process of fighting the war provided opportunities for depiction of the Chinese 'Other' and hence for defining the national 'Self' ,40 a process which continued in other conflicts. 41 After victory over Russia in 1905, it was widely asserted, Japan had at last joined the ranks of the great powers. And in the wake of the two victories, especially that over Russia, Meiji nationalism had itself become a model to be transferred if possible to less fortunate countries still struggling under the yoke of Western colonialism - the apparent unity and national feeling of the Japanese people were much envied by nationalists elsewhere, and considered to

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be a key to Japan's success. Meanwhile, in 1900, the scholar Nitobe Inazo had produced his famous Bushido: The Soul of Japan, first published in English and later translated into Japanese and a number of other languages. In it Nitobe attempted to explain the 'distinctive' nature of the Japanese people to the West, a task he took up again in 1912 with The Japanese Nation: Its Land, its People and its Life, and in fact continued to pursue until his death in 1933. Such works showed continuing anxiety about Japan's status vis-a-vis the powerful countries of the West, but no anxiety at all about Japan's claim to be a nation in its own right. Publicly at least, the unified nation was now to be taken for granted, and attention could tum instead to analysis of the 'unique' structure and characteristics held to be responsible for Japan's new status. 42 By the same token, state institutions were beginning to exhibit an awareness that they could not operate effectively without some degree of cooperation from the wider public. In other words, the 'nation' had emerged sufficiently to suggest a need for public support of government projects. A number of studies have documented the efforts of the army and the Home Ministry in the period after the Russo-Japanese War to develop channels of influence in the countryside particularly, and the use they made of Reservists' Associations, young men's associations (seinendan) and other existing groups for this purpose. 43 The increasing interplay between the elite and the 'nation' is highlighted by Charles Schencking's study in this volume of the imperial navy. Schencking describes an elite institution conscious, in the early twentieth-century, of the need to move beyond negotiations within official circles in order to get its own way, and to begin to court the public, in an effort to encourage widespread identification with its programmes and thus strengthen the case for naval expansion, always an expensive undertaking. If nationalism is fundamentally a way of thinking, talking and acting, then those members of the Japanese public who responded by going to the imperial naval pageants, touring ships and sending postcards with the specifications of naval vessels on them were participating in the discourse of the national interest - even if they were mostly conscious of having a day out, enjoying themselves and admiring the navy's latest acquisitions. Celebrating the nation did not always have to be a sombre experience in order to have its effect, and through its pageants and other means, the navy was, as Schencking remarks, 'both a beneficiary and a creator' of Meiji nationalism. Efforts to encourage the public to identify with military power, even in peacetime, became a standard feature in subsequent decades, with the anniversary of the Battle of Tsushima in 1905 celebrated until1945 as Navy Day, for instance, and that of the occupation of Mukden in the same year as Army Day. With its national holidays, pageants, public manoeuvres and special postcards, the military thus played its part in inserting the nation into popular culture.

RIVAL DISCOURSES OF NATIONALISM

It is nevertheless clear that from the beginning there was no single nationalist discourse in Japan, and that rival discourses competed relatively openly in

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the public arena. Even within state institutions themselves, there were always different ways of imagining the state and the political system, as shown by disagreements in the early Meiji period about whether or not the emperor should actually rule; by later disputes between advocates of the 'organ theory' of imperial rule, which implied that the emperor was a constitutional monarch, and those who adhered to absolutism; and later still by the proponents of party cabinets and those who advocated 'national unity' cabinets instead. Even the apparently sacred principle of dying for the emperor could be contested. While many political leaders and others in the first half of Meiji saw the great potential of the emperor as nationalist symbol, the journalist Kurimoto Joun, who wanted people to die for their country, did not particularly want them to die for the emperor. He seems to have believed that dying for an abstract 'kuni' (country) was more modem, and that to die for the emperor would only be an extension of feudalism. For him the existence of the emperor was neither significant in itself, nor central to Japanese nationalism. He wanted rather to see the development of a patriotic consciousness of the 'nation' as such. 44 Kenneth Pyle has shown that official orthodoxy by no means encompassed the range of nationalist positions among the articulate elite outside government in the decade from 1885 to 1895, though the 1890s did see the emergence of a more conservative, state-centred nationalism which, propagated by the government, gained considerable influence elsewhere as well. 45 Even after the 1890s, however, dissent remained, as is shown clearly at the time of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904--5. The prime minister at the time, Katsura Taro, placed great emphasis during the war upon 'national unity' (kyokoku itchi), arguing that this war differed from those of the past because it was everyone's war rather than a matter only for the warrior class (bus hi). According to Katsura, there was now no distinction between classes of people or between town and country: in a sense, all the people were soldiers. 46 In direct contrast, though, the radical socialist Kotoku Shusui insisted that war benefited only the ruling class and oppressed workers and peasants. 47 Thus, he rejected the suggestion that there was one 'nation' or one 'national interest', or that Japan's international status could adequately represent its 'national identity', while implicitly asserting the right of all classes to participation in the national community - but not through war, as Katsura wanted. The period between 1894 and 1945 in Japan was marked above all by the centrality to orthodox nationalist discourses of militarism - understood as an ongoing project of creating a society in which military values are dominant, and which exhibits a readiness to resort to military solutions to foreign and domestic problems- and by the entrenchment of an official, emperor-centred version of the national story. 1894 is an important watershed because it marks the beginning of Japan's 'first modem war'. 48 Throughout the years 1894-1945, wars also formed a growing part of the constructed history of Japan as a modem, vital nation. 49 In addition they provided a crucial store of national heroes to be exploited as exemplars in school texts, popular publications and elsewhere. From the humble bugler Kikuchi Kohei in 1894--5, who apparently died on

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the battlefield with the bugle still at his lips, to the 'three human bullets' who allegedly sacrificed themselves to break through an enemy position in Shanghai in 1932, to illustrious figures like General Nogi Maresuke and Admirals Togo Heihachiro and Yamamoto Gonnohyoe, military men, rivalled only by farmers, became the ideal types of the national character. Meanwhile, between the 1890s and 1945 the relationship between emperor and subject was elevated to become the defining relationship of nationalism, with the emperor's authority enshrined in the constitution, in other key documents, and in daily practice in the army, in schools and elsewhere. At the same time, the overarching concept of the 'family-state' elaborated the role of the subject as obedient child serving the emperor as father. Nevertheless, not all varieties of Japanese militarism between 1894 and 1945 were centred on militarism and the emperor; and even the emperor himself could still function as a flexible, multi-faceted symbol. In the Hibiya Riot of 1905, he was appropriated as the champion of the people against the government; and in more elite-level discourse as well, as Tessa Morris-Suzuki's comparison of Nishida Kitaro and Ueyama Shunpei demonstrates, the figure of the emperor could be shared by otherwise quite different conceptions of Japanese culture. 50 Moreover, important questions remain about the extent of penetration of official orthodoxies. Several studies of the late Meiji period conclude, for instance, that soldiers fighting the Russians in 1904-5 had only a rudimentary sense of nation, and that nationalism amongst civilians in provincial Japan during the war was not strong. 51 In the early 1930s, military leaders were not uniformly confident of popular support for the Manchurian Incident, and when full-scale war with China began in 1937, a national effort at 'spiritual mobilisation' was still felt to be necessary to overcome deficiencies in the people's attitudes. Identification with the nation or with the emperor thus was still not to be taken for granted, and nationalism remained fragile and vulnerable, at least in the eyes of many officials. The efforts still expended on inculcating official versions of nationalism through school texts, popular publications, and influence over village organisations and other associations demonstrate that governments certainly regarded their work in this area as incomplete. In short, the state remained unsatisfied that ideological orthodoxy had permeated society. In the 1920s, one kind of orthodoxy proclaimed that Japan's future lay not in military-centred expansion but in the promotion of international cooperation, at least with the major Western powers. Military considerations were often downplayed, and the army actually suffered the loss offour divisions in 1924. Different versions of the national interest continued to compete within official circles even in the 1930s, for all the growing emphasis on ideological conformity and expansionist nationalism. Some officials in that decade evinced little interest in overseas expansion, an enterprise that would inevitably be associated primarily with the army, focussing instead on a national glory that could be revealed in the domestic sphere - through reform of villages or a cleaner electoral practice, for example. 52 Ideologically speaking, the well-known emphasis on images of the alleged racial purity of the Japanese people in the inter-war period was balanced

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by an alternative emphasis on racial hybridity, which suggested that Japanese greatness was based on a capacity successfully to assimilate people of other cultures- through colonisation, for example. 53 In areas remote from the metropolis, too, complex nationalist positions could be taken, as is evident from a study of Okinawa on the eve of the Second World War, which shows the prominent cultural nationalist Yanagi Muneyoshi, among others, arguing against an official Japanese campaign for the use of standard Japanese in Okinawa, while many Okinawans took the opposite position. 54 Not all nationalist discourses, moreover, even addressed the state as their primary reference point. Important though state nationalism was in the inter-war period, an exclusive focus on it can blind us to the fact that the discourses of the national interest proved highly susceptible to appropriation and re-interpretation by other groups and individuals. Elise Tipton's study of Abe Isoo, in this volume, illustrates the complexities in understandings of nation through its analysis of an individual who was clearly committed to his own version of the national interest. He was a social reformer rather than a conservative, and his nationalism was not of the exclusionary variety, but was at least partly internationalist and universalistic. Particularly in the earlier part of his public life, he was not notably committed to state projects. Rather, he saw himself as working for the good of 'society', whether through campaigns to promote birth control or to improve conditions for workers. For Abe, the 'nation' consisted not just of a particular group of people inhabiting a specific place; rather, it was 'a social community in which all Japanese were entitled to equal social and economic justice'. Thus, could a moderate socialist and a Christian embrace nationalism in pre-war Japan. By the same token, the emphasis on hybridity mentioned above could exceed the bounds of the merely rhetorical. As Stewart Lone's chapter on the Japanese in pre-war Brazil shows, real life in Japanese communities outside the homeland could and did put cosmopolitan ideas into daily practice. Expatriate nationalism is often assumed to be even more hard-line than that in the homeland, and Japanese in Brazil have commonly been depicted as miserable and alienated expatriates pining for home. In Lone's analysis, however, the daily practices of the emigrants' lives - as seen in their attitudes to language, music and dance in particular - display a markedly flexible and positive understanding of what it meant to be Japanese in another land, as well as a definite willingness to interact with Brazilians. Many Japanese in Brazil, far from insisting on the exclusive maintenance of their own language as a marker of their national identity, advocated and promoted bilingualism. In the carnival, moreover, they mixed actively with other inhabitants of Brazil through music and dance. Consciousness of being Japanese, therefore, did not necessarily connote exclusivism and rigidity. On the other hand, nor did the flexibility of the Japanese in Brazil signal a loss of their sense of national identity. Stephen Large's study here of the right-wing revolutionaries who engaged in terrorism in the early 1930s provides another example of the appropriation and re-interpretation of nationalist discourses. The terrorists of the 'Blood-Pledge Corps' who resorted to assassination of leading figures in the business and

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political worlds claimed to speak on behalf of a quite different nation from that of bureaucrats and army officers. In fact, the terrorists on occasion explicitly rejected the idea that Japan should be ruled by the military. Like the early Abe Isoo, their leader, Inoue Nissho, clearly imagined a 'society' that was distinct from the Japanese state- a state which was so corrupt as to justify violent action to overthrow it. In Inoue's rhetoric, the 'nation' that mattered consisted of the poor and powerless, bound together by loyalty to the imperial house and by shared and uniquely Japanese values. The state, by contrast, unjustifiably placed the law above such religious and moral considerations. The ideas he expounded so forcefully to a packed courtroom at the trial of the terrorists resounded throughout contemporary media reports; here, as during the crisis over Japan's invasion of Manchuria in the same period, the media played a decisive role in emphasising and elaborating the discourses of 'nation'. The whole episode of the terrorist trials played its part, Large argues, in fostering an understanding of the nation that helped pave the way for further violence in the face of the dilemmas that confronted Japan later in the 1930s. Thus did the courtroom, as much as the battlefields of Japan's earlier wars against China and Russia, provide an arena in which ideas about nation could be given substance in the most dramatic way. If the courtroom housing the terrorist trials of the early 1930s provided one site of contest over the definition of nation, the new Diet building, heart of Japan's political process, provided another. Vera Mackie in her chapter in this volume focusses on the 1920s and early 1930s, a time when political groups representing women and male workers were fighting for greater participation in the political process, and thus for fuller membership of the 'nation'. Mackie traces the contests over who should participate in politics through the visual culture of the period, especially political cartoons and posters. The Diet building frequently appeared in such representations, functioning as a symbol of the entire political process and focussing attention on questions about inclusion in or exclusion from the national community, as well as questions about who could take a legitimate role in the management of the nation. Other symbols were equally powerful; in a reminder of the fundamental importance of gender in representations of the nation, Mackie shows that in visual culture, the body of an idealised woman was repeatedly used to convey notions of either purity or corruption in the political process. In the years between 1894 and 1945, discourses emphasising the importance of nation undoubtedly appealed to a wide variety of people and groups, their power enhanced by the great rises in literacy and expansion of the mass media that characterise this period. The discourses of national interest formed a unifying thread which ran through right and left wing and everything in between, as we have seen. Clearly, nationalism constituted a dynamic and powerful set of ideas and practices in the particular social, political, cultural and economic circumstances of those years. Eventually, it caused major crises for liberals, pacifists, socialists and even Communists, for the reality is that while concepts of nation may have differed, the effects of nationalism converged. Officials who were unconvinced of the desirability of military solutions to Japan's problems in 1932 or 1933 had

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changed their minds or fallen silent by the end of the decade. By the time fullscale war came in 1937, state-centred loyalties had overwhelmed the other allegiances of a moderate socialist like Abe Isoo - partly, Elise Tipton argues here, because war seemed to him to have the potential to resolve some of Japan's pressing social problems; but surely also because Japanese moderates had never really strayed far from the state's position anyway. Since the Manchurian Incident of 1931, most other moderate and progressive intellectuals and activists had trodden the same path towards acceptance of the priorities of a state that was increasingly influenced by military priorities. The 'conversions' (tenkif) through which large numbers of Communists rejected their former beliefs and embraced nationalism are only the best-known examples of this phenomenon. 55 Moreover, the state was by now thoroughly adept at facilitating the involvement of large numbers of ordinary Japanese people in activities which directly or indirectly supported its projects, as had been demonstrated, for example, in the Local Improvement Movement of the early twentieth-century, a number of campaigns in the 1920s, and the economic revitalisation campaign in rural areas in the 1930s. 56 Some of the efforts of officials were specifically aimed at everyday habits of buying and spending. Sheldon Garon, in his analysis here of savings campaigns, shows that Japanese elites worked hard to implant economic nationalism in the population from the Meiji period onwards, just as their counterparts sought to encourage household savings in Europe, North America and Australasia. Ordinary Japanese people did in fact save at impressive rates - as much because of patriotism as self-interest, Garon suggests. Consistent government rhetoric about the national interest and its connection with public saving thus in this case found its mark, with economic nationalism reaching its extreme during Second World War. Further, official rhetoric about savings continued after the end of war in 1945, and continued to be effective, in Garon's view. In this sense, an examination of economic nationalism reveals one important continuity between the pre-war and post-war periods. From 1937 onwards, the people were urged explicitly to encourage Japan's war effort in the 'National Spiritual Mobilisation' campaign. At the same time, the principles of the New Order in East Asia and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere enunciated a vision of Japan's role that was idealistic and internationalbut firmly expansionist and centred on military as well as economic power. As the war dragged on, more and heavier sacrifices were demanded, all, inevitably, in the name of the 'nation' which had by now become an overwhelming presence.

POST-WAR NATIONALISM In the post-war period, the Japanese state can scarcely be described as seriously endangered or threatened, though it had been consistently presented as such in standard narratives throughout the previous hundred years. Does this mean that nationalism was rendered unnecessary, and therefore naturally withered, outside some right-wing groups? On the evidence presented in this volume, it would be

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impossible to argue such a case. Theorists such as Michael Billig have shown convincingly that the point never comes in any nation where the idea of the nation is so established that it can do without routine maintenance or 'daily reproduction' -nationhood is always 'near the surface of contemporary life' ,57 and in a variety of ways is constantly presented to us, even in established, democratic countries. Though Billig refers exclusively to Western countries, the point certainly holds true for post-war Japan. Crucial changes have occurred in the discourses of Japanese nationalism since 1945, but nationalism has by no means gone away. Obvious political nationalism can never be politically innocent or taken for granted in post-war Japan, because of its wartime associations; but on the other hand, 'routinely familiar habits of language' and patterns of behaviour continually act as 'reminders of nationhood' .58 'Everyday nationalism' is a subject that calls for detailed investigation in the case of Japan. In addition, the essays collected here show at least three distinct discourses of more or less conscious nationalism in the post-war period: one centred on economic behaviour; one focussing on successive re-interpretations of the Second World War; and one dealing with ideas about Japanese ethnicity or cultural distinctiveness. At the same time, it must be recognised that while separate discourses of nationalism can be identified, the different elements do not exist independently. Rather, they 'interconnect, overlap, and resonate as well as collide, clash, and compete with each other' .59 The Occupation period saw a radical realignment of national discourses around the ideals of pacifism and democracy, partly because of pressure from the Allied powers but also as a natural reaction to the catastrophe of war and defeat. Japanese elites and Occupation authorities combined in a deliberate refashioning of the image of the emperor so that he would henceforth symbolise the new Japan. 60 The new constitution declared that Japan was pacifist, and a variety of other reforms in education and other fields underlined the point. Nationalism, now, could be linked explicitly with pacifism as it had earlier been linked with war; for some, Japan's new national destiny was apparently to exemplify pacifism to the world. 61 More broadly, to belong to the Japanese nation was now to be a matter of allegiance to a constitutional or civic ideal rather than of blood or innate loyalty. If older and more chauvinistic versions of nationalist discourses survived, they were not prominent in the public arena. Politically, overt nationalism quickly re-emerged after war and occupation. On the left, it manifested itself as hostility to the USA, demonstrated in the controversies over US bases, Okinawa, and the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty - though in 1960, 'nationalists' were to be found on both sides of the dispute over the treaty's renewal. At a general level, notably in the ruling party, the business world and the bureaucracy, nationalism was evident as an emphasis on the need for a strong economy at a time when Japan was once more weak and vulnerable. Thus, as Garon shows here, one thing that survived the disaster of war and defeat was the very concept of national strength itself, especially economic strength. From about 1960, the ruling elites came to espouse economic nationalism quite openly, as can be seen, for instance, in Prime

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Minister Ikeda Hayato's slogan of the early 1960s, 'Japan, the economic superpower' (keizai taikoku- Nihon). Such official attitudes were compounded both of confidence, based on Japan's remarkable economic performance, and of anxiety about the likely durability of such success,62 which was periodically threatened by unfavourable external events, including, in due course, the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Eventually, too, doubts about the costs of progress somewhat undermined the rhetoric of economic nationalism. In practice, the state's economic nationalism could take a number of forms, from encouragement of the Japanese people to support the nation through their private savings to an insistence on Japan's right to trade freely with all nations, unimpeded by political barriers thrown up by, for example, the Cold War. Japan's economic presence in Asia became a formidable one, while important economic and political partnerships were also formed or strengthened with the USA and Europe. In such a context, the urban 'salaryman' took on a new cultural significance at home. The two 'ideal types' of Japanese in the pre-war periodthe soldier and the farmer- were largely inaccessible from the 1960s at latest, with the discrediting of the military coupled with the decline in the importance of agriculture and the proportion of the population engaging in farming. The 'salaryman' was the prime contender to take over. At the same time, national economic goals were not a matter only for high government officials and businessmen, but apparently still required the participation of the mass of ordinary Japanese people. Exhortations to save 'for the good of the nation' continued after Japan's defeat in 1945, as Garon makes clear. The expectation that all the people should contribute to national economic strength through their 'private' behaviour thus remained. In Garon's view, the people continued to respond - 'economic nationalism not only continued, but came to define the post-war national mission', just as it was pressed into the service of post-war reconstruction in Britain, France, the Soviet Union and elsewhere. It is only in the most recent times, Garon suggests, that calls to save money for national as well as private purposes have begun to lose their force as far as the Japanese population is concerned- though thrift is still widely considered to be part of the 'national character', and savings promotions campaigns still shape economic thought and behaviour today. Neither the military nor the emperor could continue to function as central symbols of mainstream nationalism after Japan's defeat, though for some, the Showa emperor always remained a focus for feelings of national identity, as was demonstrated by the marked public reaction to his death in 1989 and the introspection it prompted. More broadly, however, Japan's experience of the Second World War could not simply be jettisoned, in concrete terms because some specific groups demanded recognition of and compensation for their suffering in the war, and, less tangibly, because national identity is inextricably related to memory. So the meaning of Japan's experience of war had somehow to be negotiated in the public arena. In the post-war period, one important set of issues concerning the nation, and specifically the 'national' past, has remained firmly centred on matters relating to war remembrance, and has stimulated much

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controversy: for example, the legality or otherwise of official visits to Yasukuni Shrine, compensation for 'comfort women' and so on. Beatrice Trefalt's essay in this volume addresses the issue of war commemoration in Japan from the Meiji period onwards, through an exploration of the changing public image of fallen soldiers, and with specific reference to the development of interpretations of the Second World War in the years since Japan's defeat. Trefalt first shows how the Yasukuni Shrine especially was used to help foster a sense of nationhood between 1869 and 1945, through its celebration of national sacrifice and direct links with the emperor. She then demonstrates how the Occupation authorities sought to control and manipulate war remembrance in a bid to change Japan's sense of nationhood. Finally, she traces the course of public re-interpretations of Japan's war experience in the post-war period through a study of a particular group of returning soldiers - those who had stayed hidden in the vicinity of wartime battlefields, alone or in small groups, instead of surrendering with other soldiers at war's end, either believing that the war was still going on, or fearing what would happen to them if they emerged, or both. The most famous of these 'stragglers' are Yokoi Shoichi, who returned from Guam in 1972, and Onoda Hiro, who returned from Lubang in the Philippines in 1974; but Yokoi and Onoda had been preceded by a number of others, and were to be followed by one more 'straggler' as well. Trefalt's analysis of media reaction to the return of these stragglers over the first thirty years after Japan's defeat shows the enormous difficulties involved in the public negotiation of discourses of the national past which could make sense of the actions of Japanese soldiers. Though civilian wartime life could be recalled as an experience of victimhood and suffering, it was a much more complicated matter to acknowledge the experience of soldiers - especially soldiers who turned up in 1960, or 1972, or 1974, long after the army for which they had fought was technically defunct, and long after the abandonment of the goals which had guided the nation in wartime, and which, alarmingly, had apparently continued to guide the stragglers during their long exile. Though the soldier had represented a powerful 'ideal type' in pre-war Japan, it was now, ironically, extremely difficult to include him in any national story from the vantage-point of the post-war period - especially if he survived the war, and even more if he had apparently continued to believe in it. Issues relating to war remembrance have generally focussed on the role of the state, which after all had been responsible for Japan's involvement in war in the first place. On the other hand, for most Japanese, the state itself no longer represents the guardian or the embodiment of national identity, a significant shift which defines a new stage in Japanese nationalism. Especially for the 1960s onwards, it is misleading to conclude that 'The underlying reality consistently was that the forces of nationalism were created and directed (though often with unintended consequences) by the governing elite' .63 For one thing, as Kosaku Yoshino has argued elsewhere, the marketplace has joined the state in taking a leading role in producing, reproducing, distributing and consuming ideas of national distinctiveness in post-war Japan. 64

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One strand of nationalism which has proved itself to be remarkably flexible, sometimes supporting state priorities and at other times distancing itself, is ethnic nationalism, or a conception of nation based primarily on ethnic identity rather than political structures or citizenship. Alongside recent celebrations of Japan as a 'great assimilator' ,65 which in themselves are highly reminiscent of the pre-war theories of hybridity mentioned above, notions of 'Japanese blood' and of the historical continuity of the Japanese people have persisted. 66 Various kinds of ethnic nationalism have accordingly retained considerable power in the post-war period, despite their notorious earlier association with pre-war imperialism and the wartime state. Though 'representations of the ethnic nation in Meiji and pre-war Japanese imperialism had ... [tended to serve] the ideological and economic interests of the state' ,67 this was not always the case after 1945. Those who adopted ethnic nationalism in the formative period of the 1950s in fact included a number of left-wing intellectuals, a point which is perhaps surprising in view of the more usual link between leftists and internationalism. This was not, however, a case of left-wingers changing their minds lightly. On the contrary, ethnic nationalism was consciously adopted by some leftist intellectuals as an anti-state ideology, as a way of imagining society as autonomous from the state, or an attempt to 'repossess the nation from the state'. 68 So it becomes clear that 'ethnic nationalism in contemporary Japan cannot be explained solely within the parameters of an iron triangle (LDP/big business/bureaucracy), nor completely within the domain of "right-wing" nationalism serving the interests of the state' .69 Ethnic nationalism thus shows itself to have moved from support of the state in some of its most extreme actions - war and overseas conquest - to a method of distancing society from that same state. Specifically, an emphasis on the nation as an ethnic community contrasts with the particular ideal of the nation promoted by the American occupation, which, as we have seen, encouraged a liberal, democratic nationalism that was essentially political rather than ethnic, as demonstrated in the post-war constitution and elsewhere. In fact, ethnic nationalism was seen by some left-wing intellectuals as 'an effective tool for criticizing, simultaneously, the capitalist postwar Japanese state and the "cultural colonialism" of US imperialism' .7° Such an approach competed with other, influential leftist and liberal formulations, however, including that of Maruyama Masao with his firm emphasis on civic nationalism. 71 The contrast between the two approaches to national identity, one based on ethnicity and one on political citizenship, reminds us that post-war nationalism, far from a monolithic entity, is a site of contest in which different definitions of nation compete for dominance. Ethnic nationalism in particular has also continued to show a marked capacity to cross boundaries in terms of political affiliations, exemplified by the case of the prominent right-wing activist Suzuki Kunio. In a 1994 book, Suzuki rather proudly revealed that he had been conducting a sustained and sympathetic correspondence with former members of the Japanese Red Army who had been in exile in North Korea since hijacking an aeroplane in 1970. Suzuki and the former left-wing terrorists expressed considerable sympathy for each other's political positions, finding their common ground in their shared commitment to the nation

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in the form of 'minzokushugi', or nationalism based on ethnic identity. Other differences, it seems, were secondary, and both parties to the correspondence declared that they could envisage a day when their shared commitment to the nation would find them fighting on the same side. 72 Ethnic nationalism could thus be used as a weapon against the post-war state. But ethnicity as a basis for national identity has nevertheless retained the capacity to serve the interests of the state, as we can readily see from the well-known case of Nihonjinron, or the 'theories of the Japanese' which were particularly prominent from the late 1960s to the 1980s within both academic and business circles, and which continue to be influential.13 The discourses of Nihonjinron typically emphasise the supposed uniqueness of Japanese culture, its apparent group orientation and lack of attention to individuality, and so on. Critiques of this approach to national identity have clearly established that Nihonjinron in practice often supports the state and the conservative elites - by, for example, emphasising social consensus and downplaying conflict and dissent. 74 At the same time, the case of Nihonjinron also demonstrates the diversity of participants in post-war nationalist discourses. Frank B. Tipton's comparative chapter in this volume reminds us that the issue of national 'essences' has figured significantly in nationalist discourses not just in Japan but in a number of other countries. In the American case, for example, there have been successive attempts to redefine what constitutes the American 'national character'. Kosaku Yoshino's contribution takes up the theme of Nihonjinron, arguing that its discourses are now transmitted not so much by academics as by other groups of 'cultural intermediaries'. Yoshino focusses here on the role of those involved in teaching English conversation in Japan, who in his view 'have become reproducers and transmitters of discourses of cultural difference and national identity', partly because of a perceived need for English conversation teachers to 'add culture' to their language-teaching skills in an attempt to produce Japanese citizens who can cope with globalisation. Through a study of manuals designed to enhance intercultural communication, Yoshino demonstrates that classes ostensibly seeking to improve language skills actually encourage standardised behaviour and thought patterns- the Japanese are like this, Americans behave like that, and so on - ultimately with the effect of promoting cultural nationalism. The activities of 'cultural intermediaries' of various kinds in spreading and endorsing nationalist discourses by no means constitute a new phenomenon: as we have seen, a variety of agents performed the same function in the Meiji period. Nevertheless, the diffusion of discourses among a wide variety of agents, in a context where state nationalism must necessarily be downplayed, is a striking feature in post-war Japan. Indeed, Harumi Befu has argued that the very discrediting of the usual nationalist symbols of emperor, flag, national anthem and so on, because of their wartime associations, stimulated the appearance of Nihonjinron in the first place.75 In practice, the different discourses of post-war nationalism in Japan are rarely distinct, and the same people can easily be imagined to participate in all of them. Economic nationalism, for example, has sometimes merged with cultural

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nationalism, so that in Nihonjinron, thrift becomes part of the supposed national character of the Japanese. The hero of economic nationalism - the post-war 'salaryman' -has in tum become one of the prime stereotypes of the Japanese national character, with his allegedly selfless devotion to the company, endless capacity for hard work, and so on. Conversely, explanations for the so-called post-war 'economic miracle' have often drawn on cultural stereotypes, so that the hard-working salaryman, rather than favourable international circumstances or government encouragement of industry, becomes the reason for economic success in the first place. And the ideas about nation that permeate everyday life and help to structure daily experience, if looked at closely, encapsulate and combine every kind of nationalist discourse. Interpretations of Japanese identity continue to be negotiated and renegotiated. The recent past remains a source of much contention. Calls for revision of supposedly negative attitudes to Japan's history have surfaced in a number of ways- in particular, controversial visits by Prime Ministers Nakasone Yasuhiro in 1985 and Koizumi Jun'ichiro in 2001 to Yasukuni Shrine, where the spirits of the war dead are enshrined; in the Ministry of Education's continuing unwillingness to sponsor teaching about Japan's war atrocities; and in more recent efforts not only to block the teaching of 'masochistic' history but to provide a 'correct' view to counterbalance it. At present, confidence in Japan's economic performance is waning. This new insecurity is caused not only by Japan's experience of international recession, but also by a vague yet definite anxiety prompted by the perceived rise of other nations in the Asian region, especially China. The nation, then, is still very much a crucial part of contemporary Japanese life. There is certainly no sign of its retreat despite all the discussion about regionalism and globalisation. Clearly, the discourses of nationalism in Japan will continue to evolve in response to changes in the internal and external environment. If we are to begin to understand the full complexity of nationalism in Japan today, we need to pay close attention both to the different strands in the discourses of the nation, and especially, to the many ways in which they interact with each other.

2

The politics of pragmatism and pageantry: selling a national navy at the elite and local level in Japan,

1890-1913

J. Charles Schencking

On a brisk autumn day in November 1913, Prime Minister Yamamoto Gonnohyoe looked out to sea and smiled. Assembled before the retired admiral-turnednational politician was one of the largest naval flotillas that would grace Tokyo Bay in Yamamoto's lifetime. The vessels, the pride and joy of the Imperial Japanese Navy which by then included the world's most powerful and technologically advanced battleship, the Kongo, had gathered for the most impressive Grand Manoeuvre of the fleet since Japan's victory celebration after defeating the Russians in the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. Assembled both to showcase the newly arrived Kongo and to 'launch' the prime minister's massive 350 million yen naval expansion bill, which was scheduled for introduction in the next session of the Diet, the nationalistic naval pageant was, as one Tokyo asahi (Tokyo Morning Sun) reporter asserted, a truly magnificent spectacle. 1 Just as impressive as the warships at sea, however, was the assemblage of politicians, businessmen and imperial dignitaries sharing the main reviewing stand with the prime minister as well as the thousands of citizens who gathered at other places along the shore to view the navy's vessels. While the collection at sea illustrated the navy's might, technological prowess and military evolution, the groups gathered on shore, particularly those on the reviewing stand, revealed something that was just as impressive as the display at sea, if not directly responsible for it- the navy's political influence. This Grand Manoeuvre of the Fleet illustrated, perhaps better than any other event, the important interplay between power, pageantry, politics and nationalism that both contributed to and reflected the rise of the modern Japanese navy. Just as in Germany, Britain and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, naval expansion and nationalism became intimately interconnected in Japan in the second half of the Meiji period. Apart from serving as an influential agent and protector of empire and nation, the Japanese navy also became a mobile symbol of national progress and power, one which instilled

22 J. Charles Schencking national pride and demonstrated to the world Japan's 'modem emergence'. Conversely, navy leaders were quick to comprehend that the rhetoric of nationalism, national defence and empire was an ideal vehicle by which to enthuse the public and encourage and in some cases compel elite-level politicians and bureaucrats to support the expensive proposition of naval expansion. This chapter examines the navy's political machinations at the elite and local level in Japan and demonstrates that navy officials not only expended considerable effort in forging important pragmatic alliances with other elite groups but also undertook and excelled in creating rich, varied and vivid nationalistic propaganda and displays that succeeded remarkably well in selling the cause of naval expansion to citizens throughout Japan. Within Japanese historiography, little has been written on the navy's early political development. Historians have, for the most part, focused on the navy's military power and events at sea rather than political and budgetary issues on shore. This is not surprising given that militarily impressive warships and naval engagements still captivate people's attention today as much as they did 90 years ago. 2 Some scholars, such as Tsunoda Jun, have claimed that the navy was an apolitical service in its early years and that it 'engaged in politics to a very limited extent' .3 Others who have focused on the political aspects of the navy have directed much attention to the turbulent, post-navallimitation treaty period of the mid- to late 1930s.4 Within the field of global or trans-national naval history, however, the politics, bureaucracy and economics behind naval development have begun to receive greater attention. Proponents of a 'new school' of naval history, most prominently John Sumida, David Rosenberg and John Hattendorf, have excelled in illustrating the point that navies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whether they flew the Union Jack or the naval ensign of the United States, evolved into remarkably complex and extremely expensive organs of state.5 Though the point is often overlooked by military historians interested in battles or military hardware, navy ministries required vast amounts of annual funding to purchase, construct and maintain warships, land-based infrastructure, naval institutions and personnel. To fund such programmes, admirals in navies around the globe, but particularly those in countries with newly emerging navies, found it necessary to implement imaginative and persuasive means of ensuring political and public support for naval development. In this endeavour, Japan was no exception. On the contrary, as a result of the early financial weakness of the young Meiji state, Japan's admirals were required to invest as much if not more time and effort in political affairs as they did in military matters at sea in order to supplement their meagre force, which in 1870 comprised 14 dissimilar and outdated vessels with a combined displacement of 12,352 tonnes, manned by 1593 personnel and 171 officers. 6 The lack of any naval tradition in Japan and the intense rivalry over appropriations that developed between army and navy made such political efforts even more imperative. Indeed, admirals and other navy bureaucrats in Tokyo soon perceived, at least after initial setbacks in Japan's early parliamentary sessions, that mastering politics, or more

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specifically the politics of appropriations and public persuasion, would go a long way to determining how fast and how fully Japan would be able to assemble a modem navy.

THE NAVY AND THE EARLY DIET SESSIONS In the years before Japan opened a parliament in 1890, leaders of the navy rarely,

if ever, wielded as much political power or enjoyed as much popular support as those who controlled the Japanese army. As a consequence of this and of the fact that forging a modem blue-water navy was a far more expensive and laborious task than fielding an army, the navy failed to develop as quickly or as thoroughly as its leaders hoped or planned. Although the navy began to obtain greater funding as a result of elite-level bargaining and imperial patronage after members of the Satsuma faction came to dominate the high-level positions in this service in the mid- to late 1880s, naval funding also generally fell short of that provided for the army. With the advent of a parliament in Japan in 1890, many politicians, bureaucrats and military officials quickly comprehended the budgetary influence that the new institution might have over appropriations. 7 Ironically, however, while certain farsighted individuals in the army prepared for greater political involvement in matters related to military budgets, throughout much of the first three Diet sessions, the navy exhibited a general disregard for legislative political consultation on the issue of naval expansion. As an institution that had begun to grow richer through elite-level persuasion, Satsuma connections and imperial patronage in the late 1880s, the navy was slow at first to respond to the opportunity presented by the opening of a parliamentary system. At no time was this more apparent than during the second Diet session, which ran from November to December 1891. While Navy Minister Kabayama Sukenori took great pains to convince the fiscally conservative Prime Minister Matsukata Masayoshi and his fellow cabinet ministers that the navy's requests for expansion were necessary, he expended little or no effort on gaining allies in the Diet or persuading representatives of the necessity to support naval expansion. 8 This was unfortunate for the navy. The hot-tempered and strong-willed navy minister felt that matters of military policy transcended the realm of party politics and here, Kabayama's personality, Satsuma connections and institutional outlook in relation to political involvement in military affairs crippled the cabinet's attempts to secure support in parliament. If such opinions and personality traits had not caused enough damage to the navy's proposed agenda, Kabayama put salt in an open wound when, in response to the Diet Budget Committee's rejection of the government's naval expansion bill, he spoke before the entire house in late December 1891. Although Kabayama might have used the opportunity to persuade or lobby Diet politicians if he had been at all open to the idea of working with this new institution, the hardened Satsuma strongman instead contemptuously criticised Diet members for their

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rejection of the bill. Moreover, Kabayama's outright attack on the Diet, later referred to as his 'indignation speech', coupled with his endorsement of clanbased government, only strengthened the parliamentarians' position against the government and the navy. 9 Kabayama's contempt for party politics further weakened the image of the navy within both government and popular circles. Joining with parliamentarians such as Sugita Tei'ichi, Tsunoda Shinpei and Nakamura Yoroku, Japanese newspapers, moreover, escalated the anti-navy rhetoric one step further, with the Jiyii (Freedom), Kokumin shinbun (People's Newspaper) and Nippon (Japan) all publishing extensive articles on the evils of the navy's dismissive attitude towards legislative politics. In subsequent Diet sessions too, the issue of naval expansion resulted in further tensions between the cabinet and the parliament. 10 In response, certain politically astute naval officers led by former Navy Minister Saigo Tsugumichi, who had become leader of the Kokumin kyokai political party in the Diet, felt that the navy needed to rehabilitate its image both within the parliament and with the press if it were to expand beyond its present size and strength. Parliamentary politics aside, Saigo also recommended that the navy undertake highly visible reforms that would satisfy party politicians and illustrate to elected officials and the wider voting public that the navy understood the important role held by elected representatives with regard to national expenditures. To achieve this, Saigo suggested that the navy remove Kabayama as navy minister, which it quickly did with the appointment of Admiral Nire Kagenori in August 1892.U Nire, like Kabayama, was a Satsuma man who had served in the military and the navy ministry since the early 1870s, but whereas Kabayama was outspoken, intransigent and belligerent towards party involvement in military affairs, Nire was an unassuming, soft-spoken man whom Saigo hoped would not antagonise the Diet as his predecessor had done in the course of budget negotiations. 12 Though these reforms were an important first step in furthering the navy's position in parliament, they were not sufficient to eliminate opposition to the navy's proposed expansion plan. Claiming that 'a strong lever is required to effect reform in the navy. Such a lever is to be found with navy appropriations' ,13 ltagaki Taisuke, President of the Jiyiito political party, introduced a nine-point plan on 20 December 1892 and declared that the navy had to endorse the plan before his party would vote in favour of the proposed expansion programme. 14 When the navy minister refused to accept these conditions, deadlock ensued in the Diet and Ito Hirobumi asked the emperor to intervene and facilitate a deal so as to avoid a dissolution of the house. Several days later, Emperor Meiji accepted Ito's invitation and on 10 February promulgated Imperial Ordinance No.5, which directed the government to withhold 10 per cent from the salaries of civil and military officials and employees for 6 years. These funds, along with a 2.5 million yen donation from the Imperial Household over 6 years, were to be directed towards the construction of warships. 15 Once again, the successful passage of naval increases had been intimately connected with elite-level bargaining and imperial patronage. Believing that this was not a desirable or tenable situation over the long term, the cabinet and the

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navy initiated further reforms which they and other political and military officials believed would assist with the navy's future efforts to gain support in the Diet. To begin with, the navy replaced Navy Minister Nire with Saigo Tsugumichi. Clearly, Prime Minister Ito felt that Saigo, who had experience both as navy minister (1885-6, 1888-90) and as a leader of a political party, could help institute reforms that were acceptable to the parliament as well as the navy. Much to the delight of elected officials, Saigo assured representatives in March 1893 that he would use his tenure as navy minister to reform the navy in compliance with the desires of the Diet. !6 To assist with one aspect of these reforms, specifically the removal of Satsuma officers and officials believed by the parties to have achieved their respective positions via clear favouritism, Saigo tapped the resources of a young and energetic naval officer, Yamamoto Gonnohyoe, who in 1893 was just 41 years old. Saigo was aware that Yamamoto had urged reform of the navy as early as 1891, in order to improve the navy's fighting ability and political stature. 17 With the support of Saigo, Yamamoto initiated a round of personnel changes by which the young reformer 'retired' 97 officers, of whom 61 were line officers, including eight admirals who were to 'resign from active duty on official suggestion' .18 Along with these policies, the navy and government also undertook a series of high-profile reform measures certain to gain the attention of both the press and the parliament. The most important initiative was the creation of a high-profile cabinet-level committee to formulate an overall reform plan which would meet the requirements of the Diet. 19 Both the personnel reforms launched by Yamamoto and the administrative changes proposed by the Reform Committee were accepted by the government and the parties by December 1893, after which time the navy began their implementation. Yamamoto's personnel reforms established a strong foundation for the navy to develop as a national institution where promotion to the upper echelons of command was based on merit and ability rather than clan or personal favouritism. Moreover, through his reforms, Yamamoto gained considerable political experience and greater influence in the navy ministry, which contributed to his later success as navy minister from 1896 to 1906. Though the budgetary rewards earned between 1893 and 1895 in exchange for further reform were small, the navy gained valuable political experience that would be crucial to its later development. The initial conciliatory manoeuvres conducted by Saigo and to a lesser extent Yamamoto certainly helped foster an image of the navy as a political elite that was no longer above working with Japan's other elites, including the burgeoning political parties and the Diet. Over a short period of time, these reform-minded servicemen came to realise that the navy had interests to protect and organisational aims that could be best secured by working constructively within the system of parliamentary government, rather than continually challenging it. Indeed, over the next 20 years, the navy would master the art of legislative politics and public pageantry under the leadership of Yamamoto Gonnohyoe. In doing so, this service developed a strong base of support for naval expansion.

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Much to the delight of navy leaders, the question of navy finances did not again become a contentious political issue during the 1890s. For one, the navy's successes in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894--5 proved that its effectiveness had not been hindered by Satsuma influence and that naval forces were particularly important for Japan's security. Moreover, the resultant indemnity provided by the Treaty of Shimonoseki allowed the navy to expand without further burden on taxpayers. Rich times, however, did not translate into complacency within the increasingly politically aware navy. On the contrary, soon after the Sino-Japanese War concluded, the navy, under the leadership of Yamamoto who was appointed as navy minister in 1896, initiated a well-orchestrated campaign to broaden support for its expansion. Drawing upon techniques employed by foreign navies to gain support for budgetary increases and hoping to capitalise on the navy's well publicised victories in the war against China, naval leaders implemented a number of sophisticated policies geared towards expanding their service's base of support among politicians and the public alike.

WINNING SUPPORT FOR THE NAVY THROUGH PUBLICATIONS AND WAR

An important part of selling naval expansion at the elite level in Japan, Yamamoto concluded, was to develop a persuasive maritime or navalist ideology upon which a formal construction plan could be based. This was similar to what the naval strategist Alfred T. Mahan and Germany's Admiral Alfred von Tiipitz had done in the West, but Yamamoto wanted the Japanese navy to adopt a plan that was specifically tailored to Japan's own geographic and economic situation. 20 In this endeavour, the navy used the talents and efforts of Lieut-Commander SatO Tetsutaro. 21 SatO was, in many ways, an ideal person to research and write on Western navalist thought, naval politics and navy-parliament relations. For one, he was well versed in English and German. Moreover, SatO had also proven his ability as a pro-navy writer, having published earlier in the 1890s a pro-navy pamphlet, entitled Kokubo shisetsu (Personal Opinions on National Defence), that came to the attention of both Yamamoto and Chief of the Navy General Staff, Ito Yuko. On the basis of this work, his scholarly abilities and his enthusiasm for the navy, Ito approached SatO in 1899 and commissioned the young officer to write an official history of the navy for public distribution, in the belief that such a book would increase popular support for naval expansion at a time when armaments expansion was again becoming a politically sensitive issue. Once this project was complete, Sato began a two-year tour of Europe and America to study navalist thought, history and the propaganda techniques employed by foreign navies. Returning to Japan in 1902, he produced the first fruits of this project with the assistance of the Suikosha, an organisation of retired and active-duty naval officers which served as a pro-navy lobby in the government, similar in many ways to the American and German Navy Leagues though lacking, at least initially, support and membership from industrialists. 22 In the

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spring of that year, Sat6 published a monograph entitled Teikoku kokubo ron (On Imperial Defence). 23 Making extensive use of historical examples, he concluded that a strong navy was essential for the defence of any island nation and above all, Japan. Moreover, SatO clearly articulated the point that as the first line of defence for Japan, the navy was far more important to national security than the army, a fact which, he felt, compelled politicians to support expansion of the navy. 24 While doubtless many in the navy and the Suikosha endorsed Sato's conclusions and found his work both informative and interesting, to all intents and purposes, Sato was preaching to the converted. However, his 1902 study, like all of his future publications, also served a far more political purpose. The rapid publication of Teikoku kokubo ron coincided with the fierce budgetary dispute over military appropriations that erupted in 1902 and continued for much of 1903. 25 While Katsura Taro's government remained deadlocked with Diet politicians over the interconnected issues of naval expansion and land-tax reductions, Navy Minister Yamamoto sent copies of SatO's work to many Diet representatives, the genro (elder statesmen) and the imperial household in an attempt to illustrate the importance of the navy's expansionary requests. While it is not known to what extent, if any, SatO's book influenced either the president of the Seiyukai, Ito Hirobumi, or its rank-and-file members to accept an eventual budgetary compromise, Yamamoto's political manoeuvre was the first instance of many in which the navy minister's office used the power of the pen in an attempt to persuade Japan's leaders to support naval expansion. Publications for elite-level consumption were by no means the only tools employed by Yamamoto to build support for the navy. Yamamoto understood, like his counterpart in Germany, Tirpitz, the importance of building public solidarity behind expensive undertakings such as the construction of a 'national' fleet. In Yamamoto's pursuit of popular support, he was greatly assisted by the navy's stunning victories in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904--5, and quickly adapted them to suit post-war budgetary and political agendas. Victory at the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905 was the most celebrated and significant achievement in a war that had cost Japan considerable expense and which did not yield much in terms of spoils. Almost overnight, Admiral Togo Heihachiro, commander of the Japanese fleet at Tsushima, became a national hero to the Japanese, and naval leaders were quick to capitalise on his standing to further the aims and ambitions of their service. 26 Indeed, soon after hostilities ended and Japanese and Russian diplomats agreed to a peace settlement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the navy, with the complete support of the government, orchestrated a number of highly publicised victory celebrations to honour both Togo and the navy as a whole. These events, Yamamoto believed, would be grand and lavish occasions on which navy officials, politicians, journalists, industrialists and the public would celebrate the navy's past glories. More importantly, however, Yamamoto hoped that these celebrations and the pro-navy enthusiasm they created might also serve to guarantee future successes for the navy. In fact, the celebrations of 1905 far exceeded Yamamoto's expectations both in the public and elite-level enthusiasm for the navy that they fostered.

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Togo's first truly heroic welcome occurred at Yokohama on 23 October 1905. 27 For over a week prior to his arrival, navy administrators, local government officials led by the Governor of Kanagawa Prefecture, Sufu Kimihira, and the Mayor of Yokohama, Ichihara Morihiro, pro-navy volunteers and schoolchildren worked to transform the city into an appropriate host for a grandiose victory celebration for Togo and the fleet. On the day of the event itself, the navy carefully orchestrated a public relations coup the likes of which had not been seen in Japan since the victory celebrations after Japan's defeat of Chinese forces 10 years earlier. Beginning early in the morning, the navy escorted a long column of national and local politicians, dignitaries, journalists, star pupils and teachers from Yokohama's main railway station to the harbour through streets lined with school children and civilians waving Japanese naval ensigns. There, at the harbour wharf, the navy invited its special dignitaries to board the Yawata maru and the Manshii maru so that they could participate in the manoeuvre behind Togo and the emperor's flagships- participatory nationalism at its best. Mter the morning's exercises had concluded, the focus of the pageant returned to shore, and proceedings formally concluded with the emperor praising Togo and the navy for their accomplishments in the war against Russia. Though the emperor returned to Tokyo that afternoon, the tens of thousands of citizens who remained, witnessed an evening celebration of fireworks over the illuminated naval vessels that were still on display, including Russian ships captured in the war. Not to be outdone, the following day Tokyo hosted a naval festival that was equal to Yokohama's display of pageantry and assertion of political meaning, if not actually equal in scale to the Yokohama event. In what was heralded by Tokyo newspapers as 'Togo's Triumphal Return to Tokyo', Mayor Ozaki Yukio led foreign dignitaries, politicians, representatives from the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and Industry, reporters and officers in 27 carriages through the crowdlined streets of Tokyo to Ueno Park. There, after thunderous applause and shouts of 'banzai' for Togo and the navy, Ozaki thanked the victorious admiral for his service to the nation, much as the emperor had done the previous day. Ozaki's oration was quickly followed by speeches from navy officials and businessmen thanking Japan's citizens for supporting the navy and encouraging them to support even greater naval expansion in the future. In the afternoon, after the formal festivities at Ueno Park concluded, the dignitaries, including Baron Iwasaki Hisaya of Mitsubishi, were escorted by the navy to the Suikosha headquarters where they were greeted upon arrival by Navy Minister Yamamoto and Admiral Ito YUko. After a formal introduction and reception, the guests were invited to join other naval officers and members of the Navy Club in an extravagant banquet in honour of Togo and the victorious Japanese navy. Navy officials did not wait long to capitalise on the enthusiasm created by these nationalistic pageants. The week following Togo's return to Tokyo, Yamamoto alluded to a naval increase package he hoped to introduce in the next session of the Diet when he spoke before a meeting of the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and Industry. In a marked change from their response to the naval increases that had been proposed in the early sessions of the Diet, virtually all major

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newspapers wrote extensive articles in support of further expansion. The fiji shinpo (New Report on Current Events) supported expansion and in fact launched its own campaign to encourage Diet representatives to vote for a special one-off monetary bonus for Togo as a reward for his accomplishments at Tsushima. The following week the same editorial page asked readers to donate money for a 'blue-jacket entertainment fund' in order to show gratitude to the enlisted sailors who, under the leadership of Togo and other officers, had played no less important a part in Japan's victory over forces from imperial Russia. 28

MARKETING POST-WAR NAVAL EXPANSION Yamamoto, however, did not rely solely on the patriotic and nationalistic pronavy feelings that erupted among citizens during and after the Russo-Japanese War to assure smooth passage and widespread acceptance of future naval increases. In the years after 1905, the navy became more calculating and pragmatic in its requests and its dealings with Diet representatives. Aware of the precarious position of the Japanese economy in the immediate post-war years, Yamamoto introduced only modest requests in 1906 for naval construction and overseas purchases. The following year too, the navy asked for only small-scale increases as Yamamoto waited to base larger expansion requests in 1908 on the newly created Imperial Defence Policy of 1907 that had, with imperial sanction, calculated Japan's naval needs on the basis of a fleet that displaced roughly 500,000 tonnes, about twice as large as the navy stood in 1906. 29 Most importantly, however, Yamamoto and his hand-picked successor as navy minister, Saito Makoto, undertook more subtle, yet entirely effective means of selling the notion of fleet expansion to the nation and parliament. A critical part of the navy's public relations campaign in the post-war years was the manipulation of newspapers to encourage pro-navy agitation throughout the nation. From 1907 onwards, but particularly after 1910, the navy regularly used newspapers in an attempt to manipulate public opinion towards supporting naval expansion. Typically, it first provided Japanese newspapers with 'classified information' concerning the navy. The result was a stream of reports, attributed to 'anonymous naval officers', which more often than not claimed that Japan's naval force was at a dangerously low level. For instance, in early February 1907, the Mainichi denpo (Daily Telegram) provided a series of articles on the increasing age of Japan's fleet, suggesting that if expansion were not undertaken soon, the bulk of the navy would become obsolete by 1912. 30 Three years later, the Tokyo asahi published a similar series of articles arguing that Japan's real naval power had eroded and would continue to decrease at an alarming rate, if the navy were not allowed to add new vessels. Because of age and attrition the Japanese navy, the papers warned, would possess only 8 operational battleships and armoured cruisers in 1920. When compared to the United States' 26, Britain's 74 and Germany's 37 ships, Japan would be, by far, the weakest naval power. 31 The navies of the world, many popular newspapers warned, were increasing both in size and

30 J. Charles Schencking strength and this, they concluded, could endanger Japan if it did not keep pace. Japan was, the Chiio shinbun (Central Newspaper) reported in 1911 with figures provided by the navy, spending less on naval defence than England, America, Germany, France and Russia, a fact that its editors felt was dangerous for reasons of national security. 32 Moreover, with regard to firepower, as measured by the number of ten-inch guns on warships, echoed the Tokyo asahi, the Japanese navy was losing ground rapidly and held an advantage only over Austria and ltaly. 33 If navy officials were very discreet in covertly providing newspapers with detailed knowledge concerning the increasing age of Japan's warships, by comparison, they were blatant in their marketing of new vessels added to the fleet through domestic construction, in order to further the nation's enthusiasm for expansion. Ship launches in the post-war years took on an air of pageantry and formality akin to small-scale Grand Manoeuvres of the Fleet. At the launching of the warship Satsuma in November 1906 and the warship Kurama in October 1907, thousands of citizens, businessmen, reporters and politicians were invited to celebrate the twin national achievements of Japanese industry and naval strength. At the Satsuma's inauguration, Kanagawa Governor Sufu accompanied the emperor, the navy minister, local politicians and journalists from Yokohama to Yokosuka where he thanked the workers who had constructed the vessel, and its future sailors who lined the pristine decks adorned with bunting and Japanese flags. While the distinguished visitors received commemorative medallions made of the same material used in the manufacture of the vessel's hull, a policy employed on many subsequent launches, average citizens were given special commemorative cards with the vessel's image emblazoned on the front. Always aware of expenditures and the chance to use such occasions for political and budgetary purposes, the navy, on select editions, published the cost of the vessel and listed the annual operating expenses on the back of the cards, along with other statistics such as firepower, speed and displacement. Apart from festive and highly publicised warship launches, the navy further capitalised on the nation's memory of the Battle of Tsushima to reinforce its political initiatives. In 1906, the navy lobbied to make the anniversary of this most important battle a national holiday, and from that year onwards, 27 May was celebrated as Navy Day. On the battle's first anniversary in 1906, despite calls from newspapers such as the Jiji shinpo and the Tokyo asahi to hold another Grand Manoeuvre in honour of Togo, the navy staged a smaller, though no less political celebration. While thousands of citizens crowded the shores of both Yokohama and Tokyo to see their warships conduct small-scale exercises, the Suikosha invited over 2500 politicians, businessmen, reporters and imperial representatives into its grounds for a banquet in honour of Togo. To add national appeal and a further element of propaganda to the event, the navy issued commemorative postcards depicting the Battle of Tsushima to their guests and encouraged them to post these cards to all parts of Japan. For citizens desirous of obtaining a card but not invited to the official ceremony, the navy announced, amid much popular fanfare, that it would maintain the postal collection box for 3 days following the event, allowing ample time for average citizens to enter the

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Navy Club's premises, obtain the commemorative cards and post them to friends and relatives throughout Japan. 34 Visual displays and participatory pageants notwithstanding, the navy also continued to publish large quantities of pro-navy literature geared towards both a popular and an elite-level market. Again, as with the early publishing endeavours, Sat6 Tetsutaro played an active, though not exclusive, role. Although Sat6's publishing career had been placed on hold by the Russo-Japanese War, once hostilities ended the Lieut-Commander continued his efforts to formulate and articulate a navalist ideology (kaigii shugi) in Japan with renewed vigour. In 1908, Sato published a massive 900-page work drawn from his lectures at the Naval Staff College entitled Teikoku kokubiishi ron (On the History of Imperial Defence). Again extrapolating from hundreds of historical examples, particularly from England, which Sat6 believed most closely mirrored Japan's geographic situation, he illustrated the point that naval power was by far the most important aspect of national defence. 'Should the great powers of the world combine against us and approach these narrow shores with several million men, if, on that occasion, they are not able to transport these forces to our shores, then we are unassailable. Hence, we have no reason to fear an enemy army; it is an enemy navy we have to worry about'. 35 As Sat6's efforts continued throughout the late Meiji period, his works became more than just pro-navy tracts designed to champion the navy's expansionary agenda. Rather, clearly reflecting the mounting institutional and budgetary rivalry that had developed between the two military services after 1905, many of his later works increasingly incorporated a strong critique of the army for its continental aspirations. In his 1912 work, Kokubii sakugi (A Discussion of the National Defence Policy), Sato remarked, 'Our offensive stance vis-a-vis the continent is a tremendous mistake .... The military emergency on the continent [the Chinese Revolution of 1911] is a delusion'. 36 He went on to conclude: 'army strength to protect Japan's position in Manchuria is of secondary importance or even lower' .37 Only naval power could guarantee Japan's security; it was therefore incumbent upon Japanese politicians to implement a naval expansion programme. Sat6 also challenged elected politicians not swayed by the navy's earlier propaganda to look beyond what he saw as their narrow sectarian interests, encouraging them to endorse naval expansion on the grounds that it was the only means by which to safeguard the Japanese nation. As for the Diet representatives who responded with claims that the ambitious scope of the navy's expansion programme was too large for Japan's fragile economy, Sato warned that their short-sightedness endangered Japan. 'In our country today, individuals of the "financial circles" criticise the repletion of armaments ... [but] in short, there are no historical examples of a country that has ensured its good fortune by limiting its [naval] armaments'. While Sat6 understood the realities and competing claims of a bureaucratic state, commenting that 'educators want more [greater funding] for education, religious leaders for religion and army men for the army', he again asked Japan's politicians to unite, exercise their patriotic responsibility and support naval expansion. 38

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Works geared towards politicians and oligarchs aside, other navy officials also undertook to impress upon the reading public the importance of, and the need for naval expansion. After 1905, the navy produced its own written materials for a mass audience to espouse pro-navy themes. To supplement the journal Suikosha kiji (Suikosha News) the navy created the journal Kaigun (Navy). Through its vivid pictures and neatly-packaged articles expounding the importance of continued naval development, Kaigun, like its counterpart published by the Suikosha, served as a mouthpiece for naval expansion. The desire to reach a mass audience in late Meiji and early Taisho Japan also meant that the navy tapped into the expanding popular fiction market. Beginning with the war scare that erupted between Japan and the United States in 1907 and continuing up through the First World War, numerous war-fantasy fiction novels were written, published, translated into Japanese, purchased and read by Japanese people. One of the most popular and most poignant books of this genre was written by an active-duty navy officer, Mizuno Hironori, under the pen-name 'Kitahara Tetsuo'. In his 1913 work, Tsugi no issen (The Next Battle), Mizuno emphasised the importance of fleet expansion through a fictional account of war between the United States and Japan. Though his book may not have revealed this fact, Mizuno had only spent a small amount of time in the United States as a naval cadet in 1899. However, his experiences there, specifically the discrimination he witnessed in California against all 'Orientals', left a lasting impact on his thinking and future writing. Through his work, which is an interesting amalgam of highly detailed technical and naval discussions coupled with emotive and readable prose detailing tensions between Orientals and Occidentals, Mizuno engaged his readers with an imaginative yet depressing glimpse of a future Japanese-American war. Significantly for the navy, and perhaps betraying the real reason behind the publication of this book, his war fantasy ends with the defeat of Japan by the US navy because Japan's politicians had not supported the navy's requests for fleet expansion. 39 Mizuno's book was just one work within a much larger genre that had become increasingly popular in the late Meiji and early Taisho periods. 40 Other Japanese writers such as Morita Akatsuki also published accounts of future battles and works that depicted the growing weakness of Japan's navy when compared to the forces of other nations. In his 1911 work, Teikoku kaigun no kiki (Crisis of the Imperial Navy), published by the navy, Morita argued, with numerous charts and illustrations to back his claim, that the navy was at a critical moment, a juncture when the public and the politicians needed to unite to support naval growth. Echoing earlier newspaper reports, Morita repeatedly told his readers that Japan was losing ground so quickly, if placed alongside the world's other naval powers, that without increases, the fate of the empire was at stake. Three years later, in the wake of a naval scandal that left the question of expansion in political dispute, Morita published another work, Kokubi5 to kaigunjujitsu (National Defence and Naval Replenishment) that reiterated his earlier concerns.41 Along with these publications, other works written outside Japan added to the war scare genre of the late Meiji period. Rival translations that appeared in 1911

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of Homer Lea's work, The Valor of Ignorance, underscored the popularity of works depicting a future war between Japan and the United States. 42 Though Lea's book ended on a more positive note for Japan, these works, when placed alongside the other print propaganda that the navy was producing, served as a military wake-up call or a call to arms rather than merely as popular fiction written for entertainment purposes.

ELITE-LEVEL PRAGMATISM AND NAVY EXPANSION

Between 1906 and 1914, the Japanese navy's multifarious efforts to sell the idea of fleet expansion had begun to pay financial dividends. Unlike the army, which suffered a substantial reduction in funding after Prime Minister Saionji Kinmochi (January 1906-July 1908) introduced a programme of fiscal retrenchment, the navy's budget remained fairly stable throughout much of the period after the Russo-Japanese War. More importantly, when Saionji returned as prime minister between August 1911 and December 1912, the navy received an additional boost for its expansionary agenda. 43 Many factors motivated Saionji to accept the navy's carefully planned and packaged expansion plans, but Yamamoto's and Saito's politically-motivated efforts to increase national support for expansion certainly contributed. 44 While pressure from the press to expand the fleet may not have pushed Saionji to accept navy requests in and of itself, it clearly made the politics of naval expansion more acceptable to Japan's electorate- put otherwise, endorsement of naval expansion was now far less likely to result in popular protests or criticisms from Japan's financial circles, the press, the Chambers of Commerce or the public. In fact, Saionji's decision to expand the navy and reject the army's requests for funding to provide two new army divisions for deployment in Korea was widely praised by nearly all of Japan's metropolitan newspapers. 45 Public acceptance of navy expansion was just one factor that influenced Saionji's budgetary priorities. Apart from using newspapers, books and highprofile displays, the navy also actively campaigned to win over supporters amongst the Seiyukai, the most important political party in the Diet. Since the tum of the century, navy leaders such as Yamamoto and his successor as navy minister, Saito Makoto, had successfully sold many Seiyukai leaders on the idea that naval expansion was, in many ways, similar to the party's previously championed 'positive' or pro-industrial economic policy. The construction of warships in domestic yards, suggested the navy, could be useful in the same way that large-scale pork-barrel spending programmes had been useful between 1906 and 1908. This idea fell upon receptive ears as the Seiyukai had, since the Russo-Japanese War, actively fostered large-scale public works projects and the expansion of railway networks throughout the country in order to strengthen local support for the party. 46 To Seiyukai members representing regions with shipyards, naval expansion meant an influx of yen and jobs. On more than one occasion, navy leaders appealed to Seiyukai politicians on a bureaucratic and

34 J. Charles Schencking institutional level as well, claiming that the Choshu pro-army clique was the chief competitor for power and funding. Hence, as rising stars in the everchanging political firmament of the late Meiji period, navy leaders suggested forming an unofficial political alliance with the Seiyukai that would be mutually beneficial. By 1911, a number of pro-navy politicians had emerged from within the ranks of the Seiyukai. For example, Takekoshi Yosaburo, who had long been a strong advocate of southern advance or nanshin, actively campaigned within the Diet for navy increases. 47 While perhaps the most outspoken proponent, Takekoshi was scarcely the only Seiyukai politician to support naval increases. In 1910, all Diet members from the former domain of Satsuma, the geographical power-base of the Meiji navy, were members of the Seiyukai and all of them also worked on behalf of naval expansion within the party.48 By 1912, they had convinced even the most anti-military members of the Seiyukai to rethink the issue of naval expansion. Speaking in October 1912, in reference to the Seiyukai's rejection of the army's requests for expansion, the leading Seiyukai politician Hara Kei, who had, in 1902, condemned Ito's compromise with Katsura over naval expansion, declared, 'the majority of the Seiyukai opposed it [army expansion], not on principles as did the Kokuminto, but from the necessity to give preference to the recoupment [sic] of the navy' .49 With Seiyukai backing, Saionji could and did press for closer ties with the navy without fear that this would initiate a revolt within his own party as the naval expansion issue had done in 1902.50 Indeed, mutual cooperation gave the navy and the Seiyukai power and influence where they, respectively, wanted it most the navy with the Diet and the Seiyukai within the bureaucracy. Growing ties between the navy and the Seiyukai did, however, have their own political consequences. As one might expect, by the autumn of 1912 army leaders had grown increasingly disgruntled at Saionji's refusal to support their demands for a two-division increase. 51 Anger transformed into outright hostility and on 5 December 1912, Army Minister Uehara Yusaku resigned, thus precipitating the resignation of the whole cabinet and the beginning of the infamous Taisho Political Crisis. The 'crisis' resulted in 3 months of chaos and confusion at the national political level. First, the political parties directed much anger at General Katsura Taro for securing an Imperial Rescript that forced Admiral Saito Makoto to serve as navy minister in his new cabinet. Second, Katsura's action in proroguing the Diet in late January and early February resulted in widespread popular protests against his government. On the other hand, the crisis helped solidify the navy's ties with the Seiyukai. Throughout December, January and February, the navy backed calls by the political parties for the army to reverse its stance on the two-division question and for the new cabinet headed by Katsura to abide by the wishes of the Diet. More importantly, in an act of sheer political brilliance, Yamamoto approached the Seiyukai membership at a general meeting called by Saionji and informed those present that he would be willing to form a cabinet with Seiyukai members if, and only if, they would support an even larger naval expansion plan than the

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one most members had endorsed in 1911. Although some in the Seiyukai, such as Ozaki Yukio, voiced opposition on purely ideological grounds, most accepted this proposal. Accordingly, after Yamamoto had been selected by the genro to form a cabinet in February 1913, he invited the Seiyukai to propose members to his cabinet, the first cabinet in which a majority of the ministers were party politicians. Once Yamamoto felt secure with his new formal arrangement with the Seiyukai, the navy patriarch wasted no time in furthering his budgetary agenda. After less than a month in office, the prime minister requested and received Diet approval to supplement the navy's 1913 budget by 6 million yen. This was just a small fraction of the amount that navy leaders hoped to secure under what was, after all, the first cabinet headed by an admiral and the first led by a man from Satsuma since Matsukata Masayoshi's second cabinet from September 1896 to January 1898. With Yamamoto in power, backed by a strong majority in the Diet, navy leaders were optimistic that they could implement a massive multi-year expansion programme, the largest of its kind yet proposed in Japan, to finance the construction of an eight-eight battle fleet, or a fleet built around a core of 8 battleships and 8 battle cruisers. To guarantee passage of such an expensive undertaking, Yamamoto launched a two-part programme that he believed would secure both elite and local-level support, a programme that was, in many ways, a microcosm of the mix of pageantry and pragmatism that he had perfected over the previous 7 years. To begin with, Yamamoto followed through with his promise to support Seiyukai initiatives within the bureaucracy. Initially, Yamamoto cut military administrative costs by 14 million yen over the course of fiscal year 1913. He also moved to streamline the civilian bureaucracy and eliminated positions for close to 10,000 civil servants. This step, along with military retrenchment, trimmed administrative expenses by 33 million yen and won the prime minister considerable praise from business and financial sectors as well as from the Seiyukai. Yamamoto also backed the Seiyukai's initiative to reform the law governing the appointment of civil servants. 52 Finally, he supported the Seiyukai proposal to reform the ordinance regulating the appointment of service ministers, thereby allowing admirals or generals not on the active list to serve as navy or army minister. 53 Pragmatism aside, the navy also launched a massive public relations campaign in preparation for Yamamoto's announcement of the proposed naval expansion plan. This well-crafted campaign centred around a Grand Manoeuvre of the Fleet and the induction of the battleship Kongo, the largest afloat in the world at that time, which had just arrived from its British shipyard. To begin with, on 5 November 1913 the Kongo was officially welcomed by Navy Minister Saito, other dignitaries and thousands of Japanese citizens as it made its maiden entrance into the Yokosuka Navy Yard. 54 Apart from its size and firepower, another unique feature of the Kongo was the composition and geographic origins of its crew members, who, uncustomarily, were drawn from all four of the navy's major centres, Kure, Sasebo, Yokosuka and Maizuru. 55 As the vessel emerged from a dense layer of fog, a brass band on shore played the national anthem, after which the Kongo fired its massive guns in salute. Once Saito completed his

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welcoming speech, in which he expressed his desire for the navy to obtain sisterships for the Kongo, he, a handful of politicians and many more newspaper reporters boarded the vessel and welcomed its captain to Yokosuka. The following week, the Kongo took centre stage at the largest Grand Manoeuvre of the Fleet held in Japan's history, one which eclipsed all previous manoeuvres both in size and pageantry. Like all previous ones, this Grand Manoeuvre, which is described at the beginning of this chapter, was immensely popular. Such large-scale celebrations, however, were not conducted so often as to diminish their political and propaganda appeal. Rather, they were well timed to coincide with the navy's current budgetary agenda. Unlike the army which held regularly scheduled Autumn and Spring Manoeuvres each year, aside from the two grand manoeuvres that took place during and immediately after the Russo-Japanese War, each navy manoeuvre occurred directly before the navy introduced an expansion bill to the Diet. 56 The pageant of November 1913 was no exception. In all, 55 vessels of the Imperial Navy, including the Kongo, conducted military manoeuvres offYokosuka beginning on 10 NovemberY As with previous Grand Manoeuvres of the Fleet, the emperor attended, having been escorted from Tokyo to Yokosuka by train in the company of high-ranking navy officials and select cabinet ministers, including Seiyukai leader Hara Kei, as well as a number of local dignitaries. 58 Thousands of other political and business leaders, as well as journalists and star pupils from Kanagawa, were also special guests of the navy. As part of the fleet exercise, the emperor, in a well-publicised ceremony, bestowed upon Admiral Ito Yuko the Grand Cordon of the Chrysanthemum. Afterwards, as Emperor Meiji had done earlier, Emperor Taisho and other highranking guests participated in the manoeuvres on specially decorated and equipped vessels. For members of the public, the event was no less exciting. Tens of thousands of citizens gathered to glimpse what their taxes had paid for and to celebrate their truly national and awe-inspiring navy. Demand to witness the event was so great, in fact, that the navy chartered two trains adorned with naval ensigns to travel from Tokyo to Yokohama so as to make certain that all who wanted to witness the event from Tokyo could do so. There, amidst bunting, brass bands and schoolchildren waving Japanese flags, Japan's citizens applauded the fleet as well as Prime Minister Yamamoto when he concluded his address with reference to the naval expansion programme he would propose to the next Diet session. As Yamamoto looked out to sea and back to shore on that November day, clearly aware of the navy's political clout, public support and military strength, he indeed had reason to smile. Tapping into, fostering and channelling nationalism towards pro-navy ends had played a substantial part in bringing a smile to Yamamoto's face on that autumn day. For many people in Japan, the Imperial Navy by now served as a grandiose symbol of national progress, military strength and industrial and technological might. It was a fleet that inspired national pride. Moreover, the Japanese fleet was, in many ways, both a beneficiary and a creator of increased nationalism in

The politics of pragmatism and pageantry

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Meiji Japan. That the navy was so successful in fostering and eventually exploiting nationalism in its popular pro-navy pursuits, whether they were ship launches, publications, or manoeuvres of the fleet, is testament to how sophisticated this military institution became in the early twentieth-century. Indeed, its leaders, particularly Yamamoto Gonnohyoe, understood the importance of popular support, pageantry and above all else, nationalism, in selling their expensive requests to the public at large. This approach, coupled with the navy's willingness to work pragmatically with other political elites, guaranteed continued support as the navy amassed one the world's most impressive battle fleets, one which on the eve of the Washington Naval Conference in 1921 consumed nearly 33 per cent of Japan's overall budget.

3

Picturing political space in 1920s and 1930s Japan Vera Mackie

The formation of the modem nation-state involves the constitution of individuals as national subjects and the formation of new kinds of governance. 1 Although discourses of nationalism appear to be based on universalism, on principles of treating all citizens as equivalent, there are in fact various exclusions built into the practices of modem nation-states. Such exclusions, however, have been naturalised in various ways. Women and men, the working class and the bourgeoisie, and members of ethnic groups from outside the mainstream are constructed as different from each other, and these differences are often presented as being based on natural attributes. A major part of the history of modem political systems in the twentieth-century has been the attempts by members of marginalised groups to have their claims for inclusion in the national community recognised, along with the right to participate in the governance of the nation. Ghassan Hage refers to these two aspects of citizenship as 'national belonging' (those who are part of the national community) and 'governmental belonging' (those who are seen to have a 'natural' role in the management of the nation). 2 In this chapter, I will consider how contests over national belonging and governmental belonging were reflected in the visual culture of Japan in the 1920s and 1930s.

THE POLITICS OF VISUAL CULTURE

Historians interested in political cultures in other national contexts have gradually turned their attention to an expanded range of primary sources, not only polemical articles but also imaginative resources such as songs, poetry, fiction and visual arts. The study of the French Revolution, for example, has been enriched by the study of paintings, cartoons and political satire. 3 Lisa Tickner has analysed the visual representations of the British suffragettes, while Eric Hobsbawm was a pioneer in looking at European socialist iconography. 4 George Mosse has used visual culture and other artistic products in analysing the changing configurations of nationalism in Weimar and Nazi Germany, with a particular focus on masculinity, femininity and sexuality. 5 Several authors have considered the political posters of postrevolutionary Russia, and the analysis of visual materials has brought new perspectives to the study of the history of Australian feminism and Communism.6

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More recently, the methods of Foucauldian discourse analysis have been adapted to the study of visual materials, and Kress and van Leeuwen have adapted the methodologies of social semiotics and critical discourse analysis to the study of visual imagery. Kress and van Leeuwen see in images 'not only the aesthetic and expressive', but also 'structured social, political and communicative dimensions' .7 Such authors as Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock have developed interdisciplinary methodologies in order to address the kinds of questions feminists bring to the analysis of visual culture. 8 Most existing work on the politics of visual culture, however, has been carried out in a European or Anglophone context, with the exception of some studies of the posters of post-revolutionary China.9 These methodologies may be adapted to the study of the visual cultures of 1920s and 1930s Japan, and we may thus gain new insight into the political discourses of the period. 10 While much of the existing analysis of the visual culture of political movements has focused on the state-sponsored iconography of Communist movements, or the visual culture of nationalism, 11 I am also interested in what Donald and Donald have called the 'publicness' of cultural representations.'2 Oppositional political movements have attempted to produce an alternative 'public' which challenged mainstream discourses of national belonging. These oppositional movements necessarily drew on a common cultural stock of imagery and metaphor, but also tried to transform these conventions. The construction of new subjectivities in political movements is carried out through the use of metaphors which have shared meanings in a particular cultural context, and the creation of metaphors which attempt to transform those shared cultural meanings. These oppositional cultures need to be placed in the context of the visual cultures of mainstream nationalist culture, in order to demonstrate the ways in which they attempted to transform the conventions of such culture for political ends. At the same time, both nationalist and oppositional cultures drew on an international vocabulary of visual culture. 13 Visual representations from both official sources and alternative sources have been implicated in processes of inclusion and exclusion. As Peter Duus reminds us, political cartoons, for example, can function either as 'weapons of the weak', in challenging existing power structures, or as 'weapons of the strong' in reinforcing the status quo. 14

GENDER, CLASS AND NATION IN JAPAN, 1922-36 In the political system commonly referred to as 'Imperial Japan' (1890-1945) the major schisms were based on class and gender. By the time of the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution, the first Electoral Act, and the holding of the first national elections in 1890, the central government had extended control into the northern area of Hokkaido and as far south as the former Ryiikyu kingdom (present-day Okinawa). By 1895, Formosa (Taiwan) was a Japanese colony, and Korea was incorporated in 1910. The status of colonial subjects would thus also

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become an issue as the twentieth-century progressed. Japan's modernity was a colonial modernity, and as in other colonising nations 'few who were educated could escape interpellation as colonizing subjects' . 15 Japanese culture was imbued with the features of a colonial and imperial power, and the identity of Japanese people was the identity of imperial subjects - 'imperial' in the twin senses of serving an emperor, and being expected to provide support for an imperialist state. The provisions of the Meiji constitution allowed for cabinets to include bureaucrats and representatives of the army and navy, as well as elected politicians. The years from 1924 to 1932 are seen as the years when cabinets were predominantly formed along party lines. 16 In addition to the elected Lower House there was a House of Peers whose members had hereditary positions or were appointed by the emperor. The first elections had a limited franchise based on the amount of land tax paid, but from the 1890s to the 1920s, there were constant campaigns for the extension of suffrage to all adult males. This was eventually achieved with the Universal [Manhood] Suffrage ht of 1925, under the Kato Takaaki (1860-1926) Cabinet. The Act gave the vote to all men 25 years of age or over, 'except for those who, due to poverty, receive public or private assistance' .17 The Japanese title of the legislation, Fusen hi5, literally translates as 'Universal Suffrage Act', but in fact this universalism only included adult males. Men were the ones who had both national belonging and governmental belonging, while women's claims to national belonging were mediated through the family. The first election under universal manhood suffrage did not take place until 1928. The House was dissolved in January 1928 when the Tanaka Giichi (1863-1929) Cabinet could no longer maintain majority support, and an election was held on 20 February 1928. The new electorate of over 10 million voters was almost four times as large as in the previous election. The conservative Seiyiikai won 217 seats and the liberal Minseito 216, leaving the balance of power with the proletarian parties and smaller parties. 18 The fust election of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government under universal manhood suffrage was held in November 1929. As we shall see, these elections occasioned comment in the mainstream media and in the alternative public of the socialist press. In the years leading up to 1925, a range of left-wing political parties had been formed in order to seek the support of the working-class constituency. An underground Communist Party operated from 1922 to 1924, and was revived in 1926. As far as parliamentary politics were concerned, the Communists worked through the Rodo nomin tO (Labour-Farmer Party), but did not manage to elect any members in 1928. Other parties on the legal left were aligned with union federations from the right, left and centre of the union movement. Proletarian parties ran 81 candidates across the country in 1928, but won only 8 of the 466 seats. 19 The working-class movement was served by union publications and journals, and newspapers such as the Communist newspaper Sekki (Red Flag), and the Musansha shinbun (Proletarian News). Popular cultural representations of the 1920s, then, involved assertions of working-class power and ruling-class anxiety about the power of the working class.

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The Universal Manhood Suffrage Act was counterbalanced by the provisions of the Peace Preservation Law (Chian iji ho) of 1925. The precursor of the Peace Preservation Law was the Public Peace Police Law (Chian keisatsu hO) of 1900. This law restricted political activities on the part of public servants, and also severely restricted public political action by women. Article Five of this law prevented women from attending, speaking at, or holding political meetings, and from being members of political parties. The modification of Article Five in 1922 made possible the creation of associations with a specific focus on the attainment of women's suffrage. 20 When suffrage was granted to all adult males over the age of 25 in 1925, the removal of property qualifications for voting and standing for public office made it clear that women were being excluded from political participation on the grounds of sex alone. By 1925, Japan had well-established colonies in Formosa and Korea, and trading interests on the Chinese mainland. Korean and Taiwanese males resident in Japan were given the right to vote, although the same privileges were not extended to subjects in the colonies. Thus, the incorporation of colonial male subjects was seen to be more important than giving political rights to Japanese women. 21 With respect to popular cultural representations of parliamentary politics, however, I have so far found little evidence of a consciousness of problems related to ethnicity. Although women could, after the revision of Article Five of the Public Peace Police Law, attend public political meetings, they were still unable to join political parties, vote, or stand for public office. The League for the Attainment of Women's Political Rights (Fujin sanseiken kakutoku kisei domeikai), later known as the Women's Suffrage League (Fusen kakutoku domei), was created in 1924 under the leadership of Ichikawa Fusae (1893-1981). 22 The League issued the following manifesto, which set out its claims to political rights on the basis of universal values: Women, who form one half of the population of the country, have been left entirely outside of the field of political activity, classified along with males of less than 25 years of age and those who are recipients of relief or aid from State or private organizations. We women feel ourselves no longer compelled to explain the reasons why it is at once natural and necessary for us, who are both human beings and citizens, to participate in the administration of our country.... We women must concentrate our energies solely on one thing, namely, the acquisition of the right to take part in politics, and cooperate with one another regardless of any political, religious and other differences we may have. 23 Members of the League held public meetings, collected signatures for petitions, published a journal, and lobbied parliamentarians. In the 1930s, the Women's Suffrage League held annual suffrage conferences, supported by Christian, reformist, and socialist women's groups. 24 The All-Kansai Federation of Women's Organisations (Zen Kansai rengo fujin kai) submitted petitions to the Diet

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on women's suffrage in 1927, 1929, 1930 and 1931. 25 In other words, women claimed not only national belonging as subjects of the emperor, but also governmental belonging as citizens who aspired to participate in mainstream politics. Yosano Akiko's (1878-1924) women's suffrage song, composed on the occasion of a women's suffrage conference, reflected some prevailing ways of thinking about women and politics: Come, sisters, we are equal to anyone! It is time to challenge the old ways. The moment has come to seize our basic right; Stand strong, as the foundation stone of politics. Women, we are steadfast, honest and upright! Let us shoulder our duty as human beings, Be wise mothers and sisters to our people, And spread women's love throughout our land. Let us scrub away the age-old corruption Of a politics run by men and for men, And transform the wealth built from the sweat of our people Into a bright and happy future for all. Our labour, our love and our grace Over dissension and hatred must prevail; Wherever the power of women is found, The light of peace will dawn at last! 26 Yosano's call for women to 'scrub away the age-old corruption/Of a politics run by men and for men' reflected a gendered view of politics shared by the suffragists and many Christian reformers, whereby the masculine world of politics was seen as corrupt, while women's role was to purify this sphere. Members of the Japanese chapters of the Red Cross, the Young Men's Christian Association, the Young Women's Christian Association and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, with some Christian socialists, had, since the beginning of the twentieth-century, been involved in campaigns against the licensed prostitution system. Suffragists would also become interested in challenging corruption in the political system. In 1930 and 1931, bills for women's suffrage actually passed the Lower House, only to be blocked by the Upper House. Discussion of changes to the political system, however, was soon overtaken by the events surrounding the Manchurian crisis which began in September 1931, and a series of attempts by soldiers and civilians to carry out coups d'etat which challenged party government. The 1920s and 1930s thus provide a useful time-frame for considering the workings of class and gender in parliamentary politics, and for examining how debates around class and gender were reflected in the popular culture of the time. These years saw changes in the configurations of class politics in the parliament, modest improvements in women's access to the public spheres of political discussion, and the incorporation of colonial subjects resident in the metropolis.

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THE POLITICS OF SPACE

The notion of public space is crucial to these discussions. In this chapter, I will use the notion of space in both a literal and a metaphorical sense. The quintessential space of political discussion was the Diet building. Women were excluded from this space and from participation in the parliamentary process. At the time of the first Diet session in 1890, women were excluded from even observing political proceedings. This prohibition was rescinded, but women could not exercise the vote or stand for political office until after 1945. Until 1925, men without property were also excluded from parliamentary space. Political space may also be thought of in more metaphorical terms, as the possibility of participating in political discussions, through the medium of mainstream or alternative publications. Posters, artworks, theatre, film and other visual arts provided further ways of imagining alternative political futures. One of the features of the modem subject-citizen is the possibility of participating in public discussion of political issues as members of the national community, in what is variously called 'the public sphere' or 'civil society'. As we have seen, however, in early twentieth-century Japan this possibility was restricted by laws concerning publication and political assembly. In contrast to the official spaces of political discussion, cafes were seen to be the quintessential spaces of modernity, with one commentator giving them equal significance with the establishment of the Diet. 27 The cafes were the spaces for intellectual discussion, perhaps one of the 'alternative' public spaces of the 1920s. Cafes provided a gathering place for artists and writers, and were often depicted in the novels and paintings of the early twentieth-century. 28 The cafes were also sexualised spaces- the spaces of ero-guro-nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense). While the cafe represented the space of consumption, the factory was the space of routine and rationalised mass production. Although the classic proletarian worker was imagined as a male worker in heavy industry, the majority of factory workers were in fact women in textiles and light industry. For workers, streets mediated between the domestic space of the home and the space of the factory. Women could not enter public space without arousing anxiety about their presence. Women in public space aroused anxieties about the dichotomies between the respectable women whose proper place was the domestic space of the home, and the waitresses and prostitutes of the streets and cafes. Some feminists attempted to challenge these spatial and conceptual divisions when they visited the licensed districts where these supposedly less respectable women were working. 29 Christian reformers and suffragists who emphasised women's essential purity, on the other hand, actually reinforced the ideologies which distinguished between respectable and unrespectable women. As women were denied access to the quintessentially masculine space of the Diet, the streets were the place where they carried out demonstrations, where they stated their demands as strikers, where they collected signatures for petitions to the Diet, and where they sold their publications. Illustrations in the socialist press show women

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pasting posters on walls, handing out leaflets, marching in demonstrations, and speaking at rallies in the streets. 30 The streets were also the space where the posters of artists such as Yanase Masamu were displayed. These posters enjoined workers to buy proletarian newspapers, join demonstrations, support strikers in current disputes, or attend the performances of the workers' theatre troupes. 31 The streets were sometimes the spaces where resistance was crushed: the spaces of conflict between striking workers and the gangs employed by factory owners to suppress the activities of labour unions, and the spaces where the 'rice riots' of 1918 had occurred. 32 The streets were also the site for the performance of nationalist rituals, such as the processions of the emperor in the early Meiji period, as discussed by Takashi Fujitani. 33 Victories in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 were celebrated in the streets. Soldiers departing for the battlefront in the 1930s paraded through the streets, and were farewelled by the women of the patriotic organisations, in their white aprons and sashes. The women members of these organisations could venture into public space to farewell soldiers, to collect money and scrap metal for the war effort, and to invite other women to add a stitch to the patriotic waistbands to be given to departing soldiers. While suffragists and cafe workers were seen as dangerous and unruly figures when they left the home, the women of the patriotic organisations metaphorically took the home into the streets through their wearing of the white aprons which had formerly been associated with the kitchen. 34 The cafes, the streets and the factories were all contrasted with the space of the home. With the progressive nuclearisation of the family, and the creation of the ideal of the full-time housewife who provided domestic support for her husband's activities in the workplace, the domestic space came to take on new meanings. These new meanings involved a rethinking of the family itself, a rethinking of the living space allocated to the family, and a rethinking of the relationship between domestic space and public space. 35 Domestic space was seen as antithetical to the public spaces of political discussion. As we shall see below, women who aspired to gain access to the spaces of political discussion were relegated to the domestic sphere in various ways. One of the most significant public spaces of the 1930s was the Diet building. Even before the construction of the new Diet building, cartoons often depicted events in the debating chamber, including caricatures of current politicians. From 1890 to the 1930s, parliamentary sessions were carried out in a series of temporary wooden Diet buildings. The design of the modem Diet building was chosen through a national competition in 1919, and the construction used Japanese materials wherever possible. Construction commenced in 1920, with the building finally being completed in 1936. It is somewhat ironic, however, that the physical construction of the modem Diet building almost exactly covers the period of the rise and fall of party governments in imperial Japan. Documentation of the rebirth of the metropolis after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 included reports on the successive stages of the completion of the building which has been, since the 1930s, a distinctive feature of the Tokyo skyline. 36

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In the popular culture of the 1920s and 1930s, the Diet building was employed as a metonym for the whole political process. A poster issued by the Home Ministry in 1928 linked voting with enlightened political values. In the poster, one half of the building is bathed in light, with the caption, 'If you vote, there will be light'. The dark half of the poster bears the caption, 'If you throw away your vote, there will be darkness' (see Figure 3.1). 37 The use of metaphors of light and darkness for political knowledge, as seen in the poster from the Home Ministry, had a history which stretched back to the early Meiji period (Japan's 'Enlightenment') and even further back in European culture. 38 This and other posters also constructed the act of voting as an important part of the duties of the good citizen. Voting was not supposed to be a matter of securing self-interest or factional interest but was to be carried out for the good of the nation. Cartoons, as we shall see below, show the Diet building as the site of struggles based on class and gender; the Diet building as being overshadowed by dangerous forces; or access to the building being restricted in various ways. Restriction of physical access to the building is a metaphor for restricted access to political participation.

PICTURING PROLETARIAN POWER

In a cartoon by Yanase Masamu from the Rodo nomin shinbun (Labour-Farmer News) of 1 January 1928, the Diet building is overshadowed by a huge spider. 39

Figure 3.1 'Universal Suffrage', Naimusho poster, 1928. Source: Ohara Social Research Institute, Hosei University.

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A banner over the building laments the fact that membership of the Diet is still based on a limited suffrage.40 The spider wears a top hat, and thus clearly represents the male ruling class. Members of the working class are shown as a team of men, united in wielding a huge spear, aimed at the heart of the spider. The slogan which appears under the group of working-class men is 'Fight 1928 Together!' (see Figure 3.2), an injunction directed at farmer and labour parties to join forces for the first election to be held under universal manhood suffrage. As the left-wing parties were riven by factionalism, the unity of the working class against the ruling class is an invocation of an ideal rather than a description of reality. Indeed, it is likely that the failure to present a united front among proletarian parties lost some seats to the mainstream parties in 1928. 41 From the illustration, it also appears that class struggle is something which is carried out between groups of men. This cartoon should be read in conjunction with two other cartoons by Yanase from February 1928, in the weeks leading up to the first election held under universal manhood suffrage. In one, a worker is chained to a giant machinery wheel. He attempts to break free from his shackles. In the background a stream of people advances to the polling booth.42 In another, a crowd of people is imprisoned behind the gates of a factory labelled 'sweatshop' (sarashi kiijii). In this case, however, the gates of the factory threaten to break open. Each worker has an outstretched arm, and a clenched fist extended between the palings of the factory gate. A giant hand, representing working-class power, is close to breaking the gates open. The caption reads, 'Make election day a public holiday', and the

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. 7

~

Figure 3.2 'Fight 1928 Together!' Source: Ri5di5 ni5min shinbun, no. 30, 1 January

1928.

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47

suggestion of both cartoons is that because employers will not release workers to vote on election day - 20 February - workers are being prevented from exercising democratic rights. 43 The use of a giant hand to represent working-class power is a recurrent theme in Yanase's cartoons and illustrations in the socialist press. With different nuances, the hand may be a clenched fist which represents violent struggle, a hand which beckons or points the way forward, or may be linked with other hands in a gesture of solidarity. 44 The hand and the fist are part of a broader pattern of using the muscular bodies of male workers as a metaphor for workingclass power. The use of such imagery distinguishes the working class from the middle class, and suggests that political power may be gained through violent, revolutionary struggle if necessary. Political power, for the working class, is represented in embodied terms. The muscular bodies of the male workers are contrasted with the bodies of men of the capitalist class, who lack the musculature of the working class, and whose obesity represents excessive consumption. 45 Working-class solidarity is presented in positive terms in the socialist press, but is presented as more threatening in the popular press which ran cartoons by such artists as Kitazawa Rakuten (1876-1955). Cartoons in such publications as Tokyo Pakku (Tokyo Puck), Osaka Pakku (Osaka Puck) or Jiji manga (Topical Cartoons) also portray working-class power, but in these cases the viewer is not invited to identify with the power of the working class, but rather to feel threatened by it. 46 In a cartoon from 1925, a gigantic working-class figure, whose headband reads 'Universal Suffrage', sits astride the Diet building, the doors of which bear the words 'dissolution', referring to the dissolution of the parliament and the forthcoming election. Three small figures in the foreground appear confused, and are fighting over a banner bearing the words 'political power'. The three figures represent the three major political parties currently represented in the Diet: the Minseito; the Seiyukai; and the Seiyu honto (which had split from the Seiyukai). Their disarray represents the confusion created in the mainstream parties by the prospect of the extension of the suffrage to all adult males and the creation of political parties addressing themselves to the working class. 47 While the socialist press presents heroic working-class men who claim legitimacy to participate in the governance of the nation, their claims to legitimacy are undercut in the satirical press. A cartoon by Matsuyama Fumio from the Jiji manga of 1929 comments on the first election for the municipality of Tokyo under universal manhood suffrage. The muscular figure representing the working class in this cartoon has much in common with Yanase's working-class heroes. Here, however, the working-class man is seen as threatening, rather than a figure with whom readers are invited to identify. 48 The representations of working-class and bourgeois males may be seen as illustrating contests over different kinds of political legitimacy, and contests over different forms of masculinity. Femininity also became an issue with the claims of suffragists to enter the public spaces of political discussion.

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PICTURING WOMEN IN POLITICAL SPACE

The activities of the Christian reformers and the suffragists focused attention on the problematic position of the woman who ventured into public space. Women in public space were often seen as sexualised figures, whether they were prostitutes, cafe waitresses, the 'new women' of the 1910s or the 'modem girls' of the 1920s. In the cultures of Japanese modernity, particular attention was focused on the body of the 'modem girl', and the anxiety produced by this figure. 49 Contradictory understandings of the woman in public space were dramatised in a series of cartoons in the satirical magazine, Tokyo Pakku. The cover of one edition in 1928 showed a young woman in bobbed hair and colourful kimono faced by a sombrely-clad middle-aged woman from one of the reformist organisations. The caption asked 'Who is happier, the woman who loves the earth, or the woman who loves heaven?' 50 Another cartoon from 1923 depicts a suffragist at a public meeting. While the suffragist presents her speech, her husband and children wait at home. The suggestion is that her proper place is in the home, and that she is neglecting her duties by leaving home to discuss women's political rights. 51 An earlier cartoon by Kitazawa Rakuten from 1907 depicts a middle-class family suffering neglect while the 'mistress' engages in charitable activities outside the home. 52 Similar cartoons were used in the early twentieth-century in Britain, in order to discredit the claims of the Suffragettes. 53 A further anxiety is revealed in the fine print of a cartoon by Ogawa Jihei (1887-1925) from the fiji manga of 11 February 1923. Women from the 'Headquarters of the Women's Suffrage League' are praying for their desires: a diamond ring, an automobile, a young man, votes for women, and to make men bear the children! By placing the demand for the vote alongside such frivolous consumerist desires as a diamond ring, women's claims to governmental belonging are trivialised. 54 Several illustrations from the year 1930 showed women as dangerous, sexualised figures. In Ikeda Eiji's (1889-1950) cover for Tokyo Pakku, the 'faces' of the year 1930 were a modem girl in flimsy dress, a working man in cap and serge overalls, and a nouveau riche man in suit, overcoat and monocle. In another illustration, called 'The City', it is the corrupt city itself which is represented by a rouged woman in transparent dress and stockings. 55 Not only are women seen to be out of their proper place when they venture into the streets of the metropolis, but the disreputable woman can also function as a condensed symbol of all of the corruption of the modem city. Bills for limited women's suffrage passed the Lower House in 1930 and 1931, suggesting that in Japan, as in many European countries, it was thought that women might provide a further source of support for conservative governments. The bills, however, failed to pass the Upper House. Women were not successful in achieving full political rights in Japan before the end of the Second World War. Official discourse primarily constructed women as subjects who could be mobilised to support state policies, rather than citizens who had a right to participate in shaping those policies.

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A cartoon from March 1931 in Yomiuri Sandee manga (Yomiuri Sunday Cartoon) dramatises this and other current events. 56 Various groups in society are represented by the different tiers of a display of dolls, modelled on those displayed annually around the Dolls' Festival of 3 March. Usually these displays have a pair of dolls at the top representing the emperor and empress, with other tiers representing courtiers and servants in pre-modem dress. In this cartoon, the prime minister and his wife appear at the top. Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi (1870-1931), who has just been responsible for the bill for women's suffrage, is labelled 'Robot Prime Minister' .57 His wife, although her hair and kimono are based on the usual pattern for the empress doll, is a much more threatening figure. Her kimono is bared on one shoulder, indicating her readiness to fight. Her fan bears the words 'women's suffrage' .58 A lower tier of the display shows the three women who have recently been employed as the first 'air girls', or flight attendants. This was a topic which attracted media attention at the time. Other figures represent class politics. If we take the tiers of the doll display as a metaphorical representation of the national community, then the working class, the middle class, women and men all seem to have some degree of national belonging - they are not excluded from the display. Women's claims to governmental belonging, however, are undercut in this cartoon through the trivialisation of the 'first lady' and the 'air girls'. The 'air girls' reflect one conventional way of representing women - as decorative figures with little connection to the world of mainstream politics. Several other cartoons depicting the political process in the 1920s and 1930s also include female figures, but they are rarely shown as participants in the political process. Men are the political actors while the figures of women represent purity or corruption, thrift or profligacy.

PICTURING PURITY AND CORRUPTION From the time of the first election based on universal manhood suffrage, voting was described in terms of purity. Voters are enjoined in visual material to exercise their vote with care and to preserve the purity of the political process. Election posters for particular candidates invite voters to allocate their 'pure vote' (or 'clean vote') (kiyoki ippyo o) to the candidate in question. Purity is linked with nationalist values in posters which enjoin voters to exercise the vote for the sake of the nation (kuni no tame ni). Some of these posters use the image of Mount Fuji as symbol of both nation and purity. 59 Another poster from the Osaka municipality enjoins voters not to forget to vote or to waste their vote. The words 'Kuni no tame!!!' (For the nation!!!) are superimposed on a map of Japan and the eastern part of the Asian mainland. The map of Japan includes Sakhalien in the north and Okinawa in the south. The hi no maru (sun) from the Japanese national flag is superimposed on the map of Japan. 60 Because notions of purity and corruption also had gendered connotations, images of either a respectable woman or a whore could be used as allegories for political purity or corruption. Where women are represented in the politicised spaces of the

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streets or the parliament, it is often as allegories for purity, corruption or other values, rather than as individualised political agents. A cartoon by Kitazawa Rakuten in the fiji manga in March 1924 tells readers that a pure vote provides an entry ticket to the Land of Ideals (RisogO). A voter holds aloft a ballot paper and a woman beckons in front of the closed gates leading to the Land of Ideals. Another woman seems to lead the voter away from the gate of the land of ideals, and a large bag of money is also visible. 61 In this cartoon, then, women personify both purity and corruption and the male voter must choose which one to follow. In a 1927 cartoon in fiji manga, three politicians who have been involved in political scandals are shown as women with soiled faces: '0-Ken-san' represents the KenseitO member Wakatsuki Reijiro (1866-1949); 'O-Masa-san' represents theSeiyukai leader Tanaka Giichi; and '0-Moto-san' represents the Seiyu honto's Tokonami Takejiro (1867-1935). 62 Here, as in other national contexts, male politicians are shown in feminine dress when their legitimacy is brought under question. 63 In a striking cartoon by Yasumoto Ryoichi (1901-50) from 1930, the electoral process itself is represented by the body of a soiled woman. Diet members in suits surround a naked woman with scarred body bearing the word 'election'. The caption laments, 'It's a laughing matter that the very people who pollute the election propose to clean it up' .64 While the focus of the satire is the politicians who have engaged in corrupt electoral practices and purport to be able to clean up the process, the use of the body of a disreputable woman to represent this corruption uncannily reveals the gendered political discourses which continued to exclude women from the political process, even after some moderate political reform. Women could be the sexualised figures of the whore, the cafe waitress or the modem girl; or the puritanical reformists who challenged masculine sexual behaviour, censured the modem girls, or attempted to clean up the political system. They could not, however, enter public space without arousing anxiety about their presence. The naked woman surrounded by male Diet members in sombre suits is 'out of place' in an extreme sense. Neither the Bluestockings, who focused on women's bodily specificity in their arguments for women's liberation, nor the Christian reformers and suffragists, who emphasised women's essential purity, were able to challenge these dichotomies. 65 The notion that women could police men's behaviour appears in 1922. The main panel of a cartoon by Ogawa Jihei from fiji manga depicts the bad behaviour of parliamentarians in the debating chamber. A lower panel includes the suggestion that women should be employed as security guards to keep the men in line. 66 Given the gendered metaphors for aspects of the political process, it is unsurprising that marriage and romance could also be used as metaphors for political relationships. This was particularly so at election time, and this theme became apparent in cartoons in the early twentieth-century. 67 A Kitazawa Rakuten cartoon from 1908 depicts Prime Minister Katsura Taro (1848-1913) as an aging bride attempting to remarry the nation (or in other words to establish another government). In 1913, the inconclusive results of an election were depicted through a

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cartoon of a woman with two suitors. The English caption reads 'Miss Nation's Embarrassment: the poor girl cannot tell which is her truest lover'. The woman (Tamiko) represents the Japanese nation, and the two men attempting to woo her represent former Prime Minister Saionji Kinmochi ( 1849-1940) and the new Prime Minister Katsura. 68

Figure 3.3 'Do Not Go Astray', poster, Rikken minseitO political party, undated. Source: Ohara Social Research Institute, Hosei University.

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A cartoon from fiji manga in March 1928 comments on the inconclusive results of the first election based on universal manhood suffrage. The two party leaders are portrayed playing a game of Japanese chess. Seiyukai leader and Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi laments that he does not have enough chess pieces. The Seiyukai had gained 217 seats and the Minseito 216. A woman looks on in the background. She is not, however, a major actor in the scene. 69 Indeed, women were reduced to the status of observers while men engaged in the national ritual of voting in 1928. An undated poster for the Minseit6 represents two of the major political parties as husbands with very different kinds of wives. The Seiyukai husband scratches his head, as he worries about financial management. His wife wears a patterned kimono and a fur coat; and jewels sparkle on the hand which holds the leash of a tiny decorative pet dog. The caption suggests that this conspicuous consumption has been achieved through borrowings. The Minseit6 husband is neat and well-dressed. His wife wears a sombre kimono and haori (half-coat), and is accompanied by a young boy dressed for school. The caption points to the trappings of a well-ordered house, suggesting that the modest dress of the wife is matched by the order of the house.7° In a metaphor which will be familiar to the readers of today, the management of the nation is being compared to a well-run household (see Figure 3.3). The values of thrift and restraint embodied in the figures of the Minseito husband and wife suggest that in Japan, too, class difference was encoded in terms of dress and behaviour, as it had been in nineteenth-century Europe. In Europe, the sombre suit of the bourgeois male 'stood for a new political and social order, a new ethics founded on austerity and merit, work and the careful guardianship of money and property' .71 These were also the values aspired to by the bourgeois political parties in early twentieth-century Japan, but in the 1920s, the mainstream parties were at pains to distinguish themselves, not from an archaic aristocracy, but from the newly emergent proletarian political groupings.

CONCLUSION

Notions of appropriate masculine and feminine behaviour thus provided a series of metaphors for commentary on aspects of the political process. This commentary could be particularly powerful when focused on issues of purity and corruption. Class and gender also interacted in interesting ways. When workingclass males portrayed their class-based struggles in physical terms, they were questioning the masculinity of the middle-class politicians and bureaucrats. The middle-class male's claim to political power was based on abstract qualities of rationality and cultural capital. His presence in the debating chamber of the Diet, or in other public spaces, was seen as natural. The middle-class male's claims to rationality did not, however, prevent the ruling class from deploying force against the working class when necessary. A favourite way for cartoonists to ridicule

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53

male politicians was to feminise them in various ways which devalued their claims to political power. Women who made claims to political power were presented as having renounced their feminine duties of housework, childcare, the care of their husbands, and even the duty to bear children. A woman who ventured into public space was seen as being 'out of place', while the presence of men in public space was naturalised. Women in the streets and cafes were linked with the dangerous qualities of sexuality and physicality, unless they could claim purity through wearing the white aprons of the patriotic organisations, and legitimise their presence through support for the military. When the body of the woman was invoked, this devalued her potential claims to political legitimacy. The association of women with physicality, corruption and sexuality thus had two effects. These associations provided a set of metaphors which could be used against men who engaged in corrupt political practices, and the association between women and corruption also served to devalue women's own political claims. The arguments against women's suffrage could be quite successfully refuted in rational terms through appeals to universalist values. The cultural associations between women and corruption, however, were based on a more emotional response, and are revealed more fully in the products of the satirical magazines. In similar fashion, the logical arguments for suffrage for adult males were hard to refute, but cultural representations reinforced, rather than dispelled, ruling-class anxieties about the physical power of members of the working class, their massed presence in the streets, and their participation in the spheres of political discussion. As a postscript to this discussion of visual representations of political space in 1920s and 1930s Japan, it may be useful to consider an image of women and politics from the early post-war period, in the context of political reforms which enfranchised women. Restrictions on women's rights to vote and stand for public office were removed in amendments to the Electoral Law in late 1945, allowing women to vote and stand as candidates in the first post-war national elections in 1946 and 1947. The revised constitution, which became effective in 1947, affirmed the principle of equality between men and women. Women were finally granted not only national belonging, but also a measure of governmental belonging. Two postage stamps were issued in May 1947 in commemoration of the promulgation of the new constitution. 72 In the foreground of one stamp, we can see a woman holding a baby. She is dressed like a farming woman in Japanese dress with a scarf on her head. To the left of the frame, we can see the distinctive shape of the Diet building. Probably for reasons of graphic economy and clarity, the woman is shown in front of the building rather than inside the debating chamber. Nevertheless, the placing of the woman in the same frame as the Diet building suggests a new form of legitimacy - indeed, we could refer to this as governmental belonging. Her presence there is naturalised, there is no ridiculing of her claims to political legitimacy, and no emphasis on her sexuality. She is no longer seen as 'out of place'. By contrasting this visual representation with those of the 1920s and 1930s, we can see that discourses of gender, national belonging

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and governmental belonging are specific to particular times and places. Alternative ways of imagining these relationships are possible. The visual culture of 1920s and 1930s Japan had reflected, and helped to constitute, contests over national belonging and governmental belonging. This example of an official representation of women and politics from the 1940s helped to naturalise a new relationship between women and political space. Indeed, the Diet building itself was finally placed at the symbolic centre of the political process, a decade after the completion of the new building.

4

Substantiating the nation: terrorist trials as nationalist theatre in early Showa Japan Stephen S. Large

In a far-reaching analysis of leading theories of nationalism, Mark Beissinger comments perceptively, concerning Benedict Anderson's notion of 'imagined communities': 'nationalism is not simply about imagined communities; it is much more fundamentally a struggle for control over defining communities, and particularly a struggle for control over the imagination of community' .1 At stake is control of what Beissinger terms the 'substantiation of nations', or the complex 'process by which categories of nationhood take on meaning for large numbers of people and become potent frames for political action' - that is, how people come to 'behave the nation' in everyday life, as it were. 2 Historians have justifiably emphasised war and war-mobilisation as catalysts for this process in early ShOwa Japan- that is, the period from the beginning of the new emperor's reign in 1926 to the end of the war in 1945. However, 'nation' and 'nationalism' attained meaning for the Japanese in other contexts, too, which had little to do with the issue of war, as I will suggest in this analysis of the public Ketsumeidan Incident trial, and in so far as they influenced its outcome, the concurrent and similarly public 15 May Incident trials, in 1933 and 1934.3 The Ketsumeidan assassinations, master-minded by the self-styled Nichiren Buddhist priest Inoue NisshO (1886-1967), of former Finance Minister Inoue Junnosuke and the Director-General of Mitsui, Dan Takoma, on 9 February and 5 March 1932 respectively, and the brutal assassination of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi on 15 May that year, greatly shocked Japan amidst the crises provoked by the economic depression and the Manchurian Incident (September 1931). When the trials of the perpetrators began in 1933, the defendants were widely condemned as dangerous traitors to the nation. But by the time the trials ended - the last, in November 1934, when the Ketsumeidan verdict was handed down- and after all of the defendants in both the Ketsumeidan and 15 May Incident trials had been found guilty as charged and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, a great many Japanese had come to view them as heroic saviours of the nation and martyrs for the cause of national 'renovation' (kakushin).

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Their remarkably rapid public transformation from traitors to saviours was partly brought about, unwittingly perhaps, by sustained mass media coverage of the trials and, more importantly, by the ability of the defendants themselves to turn the trials into a kind of 'defining historical moment', in Beissinger's words, 'by which the hitherto inconceivable, impossible and ambiguous can come to be viewed by a large number of people as thinkable, necessary and transparent' in the substantiation of a nation. 4 Accordingly, in the long run, the trials proved to be as important as the notorious 'incidents' that had given rise to them in the first place. More specifically, what I will do here - for the most part using newspaper accounts which, I believe, significantly reflected and helped to shape public opinion - is to focus on the dramatic or theatrical aspects of the Ketsumeidan trial which made the proceedings a long-running public spectacle of nationalist protest on behalf of the 'nation', indeed, of the 'dispossessed' in Japan. Applying Victor Turner's concept, the Ketsumeidan trial may be seen as the climax of a critical 'social drama' in which a society endeavours to resolve a major conflict. 5 Similarly, it may be viewed as a popular political trial that, as Robert Hariman puts it, constitutes a 'major genre of public discourse ... by which a community defines itself' .6 For by their nature such public trials are virtual 'performances of the laws', wherein 'the many voices of the national theatre [are] brought together'. 7 Moreover, like any good play, they typically feature an intense 'fascination with character' 8 as revealed in the testimonies of the accused and other witnesses. In all these and other respects, the Ketsumeidan trial was highly theatrical. To reflect this, I have divided the chapter into three separate 'acts', followed by a conclusion.

ACT I: COURTROOM STRUGGLE Well before the presiding judge, Sakamaki Tei'ichiro, formally opened the Ketsumeidan trial on 28 June 1933 at the Tokyo District Court after a protracted pre-trial hearing, the newspapers had labelled Inoue Nissho and his followers as the 'Ketsumeidan', or 'Blood-Pledge Corps', to accentuate the sinister nature of their murderous conspiracy.9 In fact, there is no hard evidence of a 'blood pledge' and the members of the group had never called themselves the 'Ketsumeidan', but only the 'Inoue group', the 'lbaraki group' or other such vague designation. However, the term 'Ketsumeidan' stuck fast. On the recommendation of the prosecution, it was routinely used during the trial and historians have used it ever since. Inoue and his 13 co-defendants, including 4 members of the Ketsumeidan and an accomplice from rurallbaraki Prefecture where the Ketsumeidan originated in 1929, and 8 university students who subsequently joined the conspiracy, did not deny the crimes of murder and attempted murder with which they were charged. They freely confessed that at one stage they had planned to kill twenty of Japan's political and financial leaders, although the hit-list had ultimately been pared down to 10, including Prime Minister Inukai; former Prime Minister Wakatsuki

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Reijiro; Inoue Junnosuke; Dan Takuma; Ikeda Seihin, director of the Mitsui Bank; and such so-called 'liberals' at court as Prince Saionji Kinmochi and Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Makino Nobuaki, among others. The inclusion of Inukai, who was in fact assassinated as part of the 15 May Incident, on this list is important - the evidence shows that although the government persistently distinguished between the Ketsumeidan and 15 May 'Incidents' (jiken), as if they were completely unrelated, the two episodes were part of the same terrorist conspiracy. It would be more accurate to refer to them as the 'Ketsumeidan-15 May Incident' .10 The defendants made it clear straight away that their case rested solely on explaining why they had turned to terrorism and what they had hoped to achieve. When Judge Sakamaki ruled out any discussion of motive, reasoning that the court should be exclusively concerned with determining whether they had committed the crimes at hand, they immediately embarked upon a disruptive courtroom struggle (kohan tosif) which recalls a similar struggle waged by the defendants in the well-known Communist trial at the Tokyo District Court from 25 June 1931 to 29 October 1932. Before that trial, the defendants had threatened to go on a hunger strike if Miyagi Minoru, the presiding judge, did not agree to a list of demands, including in particular an open public trial. Miyagi agreed to all but one of the demands and allowed the defendants to explain, albeit within certain limits, their revolutionary opposition to the imperial state and the capitalist system, so that the general public would better understand the danger they posed to the existing order. Encouraged by demonstrations of support outside the court, the Communists seized upon this opportunity to attract more followers to their movement and on at least three occasions Miyagi cleared the courtroom of spectators, some of whom had applauded the defendants' testimonies. Moreover, Miyagi often admonished the defendants not to refer to the Emperor; Ichikawa ShOichi, for instance, was interrupted no less than 17 times on this account. Still, the Communists stubbornly persisted and to considerable effect: 'Never had the [Communist] party received so much publicity' .11 Despite frequent disruptions, however, Miyagi managed to retain overall control of the proceedings and in general 'the trial went along smoothly'. 12 Ultimately, the defendants were found guilty of violating the Peace Preservation Law of 1925-6 and received sentences ranging from life imprisonment to 10 years. Whereas the Communists had established a 'prison central executive committee' to orchestrate their courtroom struggle, the Ketsumeidan's effort, on the other hand, was more spontaneous, taking its cue primarily from Inoue NisshO. The Ketsumeidan defendants were also much more successful in bending the court to their will. To begin with, they and their lawyers repeatedly challenged the suitability of Bigo Toru, one of the two Associate Judges flanking Sakamaki on the bench, to hear the case. It was argued that when Bigo had served as an Associate Judge in the above-mentioned Communist trial, he had dealt too leniently with Communist revolutionaries who had threatened the kokutai (national polity). How could he possibly be objective in dealing with the Ketsumeidan, who had sought to defend the kokutai? 13

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But day after day in July 1933, the main target was unquestionably Sakamaki. According to the Tokyo asahi (Tokyo Morning Sun), on the 28th Inoue Nissho, speaking 'fiercely' and 'in a harsh tone of voice', defiantly denounced as 'unbearable' Sakamaki's continuing refusal to let the defendants explain their 'spiritual transformation' and motives for killing Inoue Junnosuke and Dan Takuma. He said that unless the court considered the character of the defendants, no justice could be done. When Sakamaki dismissed this denunciation, several of the defendants jumped up and shouted angrily at him, while others noisily rattled the tea-cups on the tables in front of them. At this point Sakamaki, frustrated that he had lost control of the proceedings, abruptly announced their indefinite suspension until further notice. 14 The next day, a headline in the Kyiishii nippo (Kyilshu Daily Report) read, 'Inoue Nissho Challenges the Presiding Judge; the Court Puts on a Pathetic Show' .15 Sakamaki took the unusual step of visiting Inoue at lchigaya Prison, on 16 August, to see if he could break the impasse. The Tokyo asahi reported their conversation, as revealed by a lawyer who was present. Sakamaki asked Inoue, 'For the sake of argument, what do you think would be the best way for me to conduct the trial?' After a long silence, Inoue replied that Sakamaki knew all about the law but knew nothing about '[matters of] the soul' and that he would continue to oppose Sakamaki. When Sakamaki then asked, 'Am I not qualified to deal with this case?', Inoue responded, 'Why didn't you resign your post when we lodged our denunciation? It was because you thought this rogue Inoue was a capricious fellow and you are a splendid fellow. You've come to see me today, but it's too late' .16 Completely worn down by the implacable Inoue, Sakamaki fell ill from a nervous disorder and eventually resigned, on 29 November 1933. A reporter asked him whether by resigning he had not in effect given the defendants a veto over who would preside over the court. Was this not a dangerous precedent? Sakamaki merely replied that he had been too ill to continue. The reporter suggested that by resigning, Sakamaki had impugned the dignity of the law. Sakamaki lamely replied, referring to the Ketsumeidan, 'when men do not acknowledge the law, it's hopeless' .1 7 It was not until 27 March 1934 that a new bench was appointed and the trial was re-convened by Sakamaki's successor, Judge Fujii Go'ichiro, who, in a scarcely-veiled criticism of Sakamaki, said, 'I lament the [recent] repression of the defendants'. He then announced that the court would now explore their motives, beginning with Inoue Nissh6. 18 Thus did the Ketsumeidan's courtroom struggle end in victory; at last, they could explain their motives to the court and through the media, to the entire nation. By then, popular interest in the Ketsumeidan trial had been whetted by the proceedings of the 15 May Incident trials, which included an army court-martial, from 25 July to 19 September 1933; a navy court-martial, from 24 July to 9 November 1933; and a separate trial for the civilians involved in the 15 May Incident, such as Tachibana Kosaburo, Okawa Shumei and Toyama Hidezo, a son of the doyen of the extremist nationalist movement, Toyama Mitsuru. This civilian trial, held at the Tokyo District Court, lasted from 26 September 1933 to 3 February 1934.

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In contrast to the early stages of the Ketsumeidan trial, the defendants in these trials were permitted to explain their motives for precipitating the 15 May Incident. In brief, they all testified, with great emotion, that they had acted out of patriotism, to bring down corrupt party government and install military rule to rescue Japan before it was too late from the destructive sectarian political conflicts and worsening social inequalities that had become all too apparent in the crisis of the Great Depression. As reported by the mass media, these themes, which foreshadowed the Ketsumeidan narratives to be discussed shortly, struck a chord with the public. To cite but one of many examples, on the day of the verdict in the army court-martial, a woman, aged 50, approached the bench from the spectators' gallery and tearfully implored the court to 'listen to the voice of the gods' and pardon the 11 young officers on trial. The presiding judge nodded in assent, saying 'I understand, I understand' (wakatta, wakatta) before he read the verdict - all of the defendants were found guilty of the crime of rebellion (hanranzai, as defined by the army penal code) and of breaching military discipline. However, given the sincerity of their patriotic motives, the court decided to give them what were, in the circumstances, very light sentences - 4 years' imprisonment. 19 In due course, the 10 navy defendants in the 15 May trial were found guilty of similar charges under the naval penal code and although their sentences were somewhat longer they, too, must be classed as light. To illustrate, Lieutenant Koga Kiyoshi, who at Inoue Nissho's urging had also spearheaded the planned second stage of the Ketsumeidan conspiracy, the murder of Inukai, received 15 years, as did Lieutenant Mikami Taku, one of the men who shot Inukai at the command of Lieutenant Yamagishi Hiroshi. Inukai's other assailant, Ensign Kuroiwa Isamu, received 13 years and Yamagishi, only 10 years. In the build-up to the conclusion of the civilian trial, such was the extent of popular interest in the result that a great crowd of people waited all night outside the courtroom to be admitted to the proceedings the next day. Some of these people may just have been curious, but judging from the newspapers, most were keen to see the defendants get offlightly. 20 This time, though, after all the defendants were found guilty of the crimes of murder, attempted murder or violation of the Explosives Control Law, some of them were dealt with more harshly. Tachibana, for instance, received life imprisonment and although Okawa had played only a peripheral role in the 15 May Incident, he was sentenced to 15 years. Four members of the Ketsumeidan who participated in the 15 May Incident received sentences ranging from 5 to 12 years. 21 Announcing the verdict, the judge stated that all the sentences would have been more severe had it not been for the patriotic motives of the defendants. Newspaper editorials reacted by criticising the disparity between the sentences meted out in the military and civilian trials, arguing that the military defendants had been treated far too leniently. But what most concerned the writers was the fact that public opinion had sympathised so strongly with the defendants in all the 15 May trials. This indicated, it was claimed, that the majority of the people clearly did not appreciate the profound threat to constitutional government that

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had been posed by the assassination of Prime Minister Inukai. Unless the people awakened to this threat, Japan might well succumb to the bane of 'fascism' .22 Whether 'fascism' later prevailed in Japan is debatable, but it is true that Inukai's was the last party cabinet in the pre-war period. Yet judicious editorials were one thing and the constant flow of daily reports on the trials, quite another. These editorials failed to acknowledge that by covering the 15 May trials and all their human drama in great detail, to feed public curiosity and boost sales, the newspapers had both expressed and aroused widespread public identification with the defendants' motives, if not with their terrorist methods. Because this was also true of newspaper coverage of the Ketsumeidan trial, the tide of public sympathy would inevitably extend to the Ketsumeidan defendants as, one by one, they narrated their motives, beginning in late March 1934.

ACT II: KETSUMEIDAN MOTIVES

Since Inoue Nissho's testimony, led by Judge Fujii's detailed questions over a period of about 3 weeks, set the tone for all the other Ketsumeidan narratives which followed, I have taken the liberty of greatly condensing it mainly in my own words based on what he said, to try to convey something of his character, which is so important in popular political trials, and how he skilfully influenced the court and many people who heard him testify or followed the trial in the newspapers. My concern here is with the motives of the Ketsumeidan, not the history of the Ketsumeidan conspiracy. 23 Inoue began by relating how, from an early age, he had sought the 'truth' about everything, how he had repeatedly suffered dark periods of deep depression and then how he had spent 10 reckless years in China, fighting on the Republican side in the Revolution and spying for Japanese military intelligence, before he returned in 1920 to his native village, Kawaba, in Gunma Prefecture, where he sought the peace of Nyorai, the Buddha, by chanting all day and into the night from the Lotus Sutra. Here is the drift of what he said next (again, as rendered for the most part in my own words): 'One day in 1923, when I was utterly exhausted from my constant praying, I heard a strange voice suddenly call out to me, "Omae wa sukuinushi da!" ["You are the saviour!"]. The space around me was filled with a radiant light and in my heart I felt everything in the universe was one. I was in a miraculous mental state I had never experienced before. For the first time, I had a sense of inner peace and of who I was. I believed that I was chosen to do something important to save my country, although I didn't know what, exactly. While I wrestled with this question, I decided to learn more about Saint Nichiren and his teachings by studying with Tanaka Chigaku, the great lay Nichiren preacher at the Kokuchukai [Pillar of the Nation Association] in Tokyo.

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'From Tanaka, I learned that the great life-force [daiseimei] of the universe was embodied in the three sacred imperial regalia bequeathed by the Sun Goddess to the imperial line. Realising that this made our priceless kokutai [national polity] unique in all the world, I resolved to defend the Emperor even if I was the last man alive. Tanaka also taught me that Nichiren seekers of the "truth" should always practise shakubuku [the aggressive confrontation of evil and wrong-doing]. Saint Nichiren sometimes translated this duty into the compassionate principle of "issetsu tasho" ["kill one to save the many"], and this was the principle we followed when we killed Inoue Junnosuke and Dan Tak:uma. [Note that Onuma ShO, who shot and killed Inoue Junnosuke, and Hishinuma Goro, who gunned down Dan Takuma, later testified in the same vein. They both thought they were instruments of Nyorai. Inoue continues:] We killed these men to save them from their own wicked greed and to save Japan from evil men like them. We were administering "Heaven's Punishment" by wielding the "Sword of Goma", to subjugate demons around us. 'But when I finished studying under Tanaka Chigak:u, I didn't know yet that being a "saviour" would one day lead me to direct action [i.e., terrorism]. Instead, I dedicated myself to building a mass evangelical movement to awaken the nation to the poisons of Western influence that infected Japan so greatly in the 1920s: decadent materialism, liberalism, individualism, Marxism, and the whole emphasis in Western thought on logic and reason which leads to false distinctions when, really, all things in the universe are one. So, it was to carry out this evangelical mission that in 1928 I gratefully accepted an invitation from the honourable Tanaka Mitsuaki, former Imperial Household Minister to Emperor Meiji, to serve as resident priest in a new temple, the RisshO Gokokudo [Temple to Establish Righteousness and Protect the Nation] which he had recently built at Oarai, on the coast not far from Mito, in lbaraki, to honour Emperor Meiji and Saint Nichiren. 'Nearby this small temple there was a museum Tanaka had erected to commemorate the Mito heroes of the Meiji Restoration [of 1868] who killed the evil Bakufu leader, Ii Naosuke, in the Sakuradamon Incident, in 1860. All of the fourteen or so pure-hearted young men I recruited from villages in the surrounding area grew up knowing that famous story and like myself, they later thought of themselves as martyrs of the coming Showa Restoration just like the Mito martyrs of the Meiji Restoration. 'Most of these young men were already devotees of the Lotus Sutra, but I gave them new Buddhist names and to strengthen their hearts for our mission, I often led them in fasting for days at a time, although few of them could hold out very long. Every day I lectured to them on the Lotus Sutra and taught them that the key to knowing what is right or wrong lies within us, that there is good in evil and evil in good, and that if you want to change society you have to begin by ridding yourself of selfish desires. 'Our main work was going out into the villages dressed in Buddhist robes, with our begging bowls, to recruit more followers. But in 1930 the villagers

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were too weighed down by poverty during the Depression to care about joining a spiritual enlightenment movement, so we didn't make much progress. The more we visited the villages in that comer of Ibaraki, the more we saw how bad things were. Many people were starving or sick with disease. Many farmers had lost their lands and become tenants of heartless landlords after the banks had foreclosed on loans. Village girls were often sold into prostitution rings in Mito. There was a desperate feeling of hopelessness everywhere. My disciples, who knew the scourge of poverty in their own families, and I were filled with rage. We asked ourselves, what had gone wrong? Who was responsible for all this misery? 'None of us had thought much about politics before, but the answer was obvious: the ruling elites -the corrupt political parties, their allies the zaibatsu, liberal advisors to the Emperor, and the gunbatsu [military cliques]. These elites had selfishly pursued wealth and power at the expense of ordinary folk in the villages and for that matter, the cities of Japan. The people's welfare meant nothing to them. All this made a mockery of benevolent imperial rule, as promised in the Meiji Restoration; the false "emperor-organ theory" held sway at the court; and the State, deadlocked under party government, lacked the moral authority and the political will to set things right. Japan, we saw, urgently needed a new Showa Restoration, to carry out national renovation. 'A group of young officers stationed at the Naval Air Training Base on the shores of Lake Kasumigaura, south of Oarai, burned with this same conviction. Led by Lieutenant Fujii Hitoshi, a brilliant man of great destructive power who later died in the Shanghai Incident of early 1932, these officers, including Lieutenants Koga, Mikami and Yamagishi, often visited our temple and we decided to work with them. A number of patriotic students from universities in Tokyo and Kyoto also joined up with us later, soon after I moved our operations to Tokyo in October 1930. 'My disciples and I never wavered in our commitment to a spiritual transformation of Japan, but now we pledged ourselves - and here I mean "ketsumei" in the sense of "to bind", not a "blood pledge" - to light the beacon fire for the coming Showa Restoration by killing well-known representatives of the ruling class. We never intended to spark a coup leading to military rule under the Emperor. That wild idea surfaced in the 15 May Incident, after my arrest, only because of Okawa ShUmei and others who had talked of a coup before, in the abortive "October Incident" of 1931. Back then, they also fantasised about co-ordinating a coup with a great military adventure in Manchuria, but I thought it made no sense to kill lots of Chinese when the real enemy of Japan was our own ruling elites. Of course, men like General Araki [Sadao, former Army Minister, whom Inoue knew personally] genuinely care about the welfare of the people. But this can't be said of most military leaders. So I promised myself that if a military coup ever took place, I would kill the top generals with my own hands. I hate the military cliques [gunbatsu]. Despite their beautiful words, they are obsessed with their own power and care nothing about renovation.

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'No, instead of a coup, we only wanted to strike a great shakubuku blow, to shock the ruling elites into reforming the nation and the people into demanding reform. We didn't think much about what renovation would entail, precisely. I was happy to leave that to renovationist thinkers like Gondo Seikyo, and Kita Ikki, whose faith in the Lotus Sutra glows as brightly as mine. But I do know this: at the very least, renovation has to mean ending party government, nationalising big industry to control the zaibatsu, giving all imperial lands to the poor, giving local communities more power to run their own affairs, and getting rid of the Military Police, the Thought Police and other instruments of state repression. We must abolish the bastions of privilege like the peerage and House of Peers. The Emperor should be liberated from the clutches of evil advisors, to play a more direct role in government. 'But to create a more egalitarian political and social order based on the welfare of the people will come to absolutely nothing unless we also revive the values of Japan's ancient past- the sacred Shinto myths of the Kojiki and Nihongi [eighth-century Japanese texts], the Buddhist truths that guided Nichiren and the other saints, the spirit of co-operation and mutual responsibility that once held village communities together, and above all, reverence for the kokutai and our illustrious Imperial House, because this means far more than obedience to secular law or to the state for its own sake. We need to rediscover all these things that made us Japanese, things that have been washed aside in the mad fascination with modem ways. Only then will Japan be empowered by the universal truth of the Lotus Sutra, the great life force of the universe, to perform its historic mission: to unify the world spiritually and achieve world peace. 'I am an itinerant revolutionary priest. Like Saint Nichiren, I was called to save Japan from wickedness and sin. I acted for the poor and the powerless. The Communists say they do, too. But the Communists want to tear down the imperial state, while I have tried to defend the kokutai and reform the state, to benefit all the poor, in the villages and the cities alike, including the hardworking people of the lower middle classes who fear losing what little they have. I do not expect clemency, but is what I have done really a crime? Maybe so, in the eyes of the law. But the laws of this court merely serve the ruling classes. If I am sentenced to death, I will gladly sacrifice myself for the sake of the nation. Tenno heika banzai! Namu Nihon Tenno heika!' [Long live His Majesty the Emperor! Homage to His Majesty the Emperor of Japan!] 24 This, then, is how Inoue justified the cold-blooded murders carried out by the Ketsumeidan. His self-portrayal as the 'saviour' of the poor and vulnerable in Japan was meant to give the story of his life an 'iconic centrality in the eyes of the community', which is a common purpose of most terrorist narratives. 25 Moreover, Inoue's narrative was melodramatic in the sense, defined by Peter Brooks, of 'an intense emotional and ethical drama based on the manichaestic

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struggle of good and evil' .26 Like melodramatic terrorist narratives elsewhere, it completely denied 'the hetereogeneity and fragmentation of modem societies'. 27 Yet, this very melodramatic quality is probably what made Inoue's story appealing to many Japanese who, although they may not have approved of his terrorist methods, were attracted to his call for a sweeping 'renovation' of Japan. The historian Kogawa Yukio rightly observes that the more they read about it in the press day after day, the more they interpreted Inoue's indictment of the established order as a compelling explanation of their own deprivations in the throes of the Depression. 28 Notwithstanding that by 1934 the economy had begun to recover under Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo's policies, memories of the Depression crisis were still sharply etched in people's minds. It is therefore scarcely surprising to read in the Tokyo nichi nichi shinbun (Tokyo Daily Newspaper) that by 28 August 1934, when Prosecutor Kiuchi Tsunenori (who had also led the prosecution in the civilian 15 May Incident trial) concluded his summation, tickets had to be distributed in advance to control the throngs clamouring for admission to the public spectators' gallery, and that desks in the courtroom were piled high with stacks of petitions from all over Japan demanding leniency. 29 By the end of the trial, 300,000 petitions had arrived. 30 Although totalling less than the 1.5 million signatures that had been sent in favouring leniency during the 15 May Incident trials, 31 the Ketsumeidan trial petitions signified strong popular support for the defendants. As with the 15 May Incident trials, many of these petitions were doubtless co-ordinated by such patriotic organisations as Okawa Shumei's Jinmukai, the Kenkokukai, and the Imperial Military Reserve Association. These groups likewise staged daily demonstrations of sympathy outside the court and at numerous Shinto shrines in Tokyo, typically waving placards proclaiming 'K6d6 ishin danko aki' (the Autumn of Decisive Action for an Imperial Way Restoration) and other nationalist slogans. Yet as David Sneider points out in his study of the 15 May Incident trials, 'Right-wing organisations may have played a key role, but the leniency movement succeeded and spread nationwide only because it had the support of a broader segment of the public'. 32 This was true of the Ketsumeidan trial, as well. Ordinary people who identified with the Ketsumeidan did not need the prodding of extremist groups. It is probable that a good many who signed pro-Ketsumeidan petitions had not supported the 15 May defendants because the latter had gone too far in advocating a military coup. What most of these petitioners wanted was comprehensive political and social reform, not military rule. The pressure of popular opinion on the Prosecutor, Kiuchi, was immense. Nonetheless, while conceding that the defendants' motives were 'reasonable', and that 'it is truly regrettable that they undertook methods which were mistaken', Kiuchi said, almost apologetically, that since they were clearly guilty as charged, it was his duty to demand the death penalty for Inoue, the two Ketsumeidan assassins Onuma and Hishinuma, and an elementary school teacher, Furu'uchi Eiji, who had been Inoue's right-hand man in the conspiracy. He demanded heavy sentences for the other defendants as well. 33

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Needless to say, when defence counsel summed up their case on 19 October, in a packed courtroom, they argued that while the defendants were guilty, they should be pardoned out of consideration of their patriotic motives, just as Sagoya Tomeo, who had fatally wounded Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi in 1930, had recently been pardoned and released from prison. 34 The press reported that soon after the court was adjourned that day, the team of defence counsel made a point of visiting the graves of Inoue Junnosuke and Dan Takuma to pay respect to their spirits, while relatives of the defendants prayed at Meiji Shrine for the deliverance of the Ketsumeidan. 35 In this way, too, the melodrama of the courtroom spread to the world outside and, I would suggest, into the imagination of many Japanese who read these reports.

ACT III: THE JUDGEMENT In 1967, long after the Ketsumeidan trial, Judge Fujii Goichiro stated that he still vividly remembered that when he read the final judgement (hanketsu), on 22 November 1934- in the 8lst session of the Ketsumeidan trial- he had struggled to remain calm amidst the tension pervading the courtroom and the streets outside. He knew that as the Emperor's chief representative on the bench, the eyes of Japan were upon him. 36 As expected, given the previous verdicts in the 15 May Incident trials, Fujii pronounced the defendants guilty as charged and detailed at great length the history of the Ketsumeidan conspiracy. But it is noteworthy that he devoted much of the judgement to the defendants' motives, as the evening edition of the Tokyo nichi nichi announced in its headline - 'The Full Story of the National Renovation Movement: Judge Fujii Patiently Explains the Ideas ofNissho and the Other Defendants' .37 This heavy emphasis on motives foreshadowed Fujii's conclusion, that in view of their patriotic idealism it had been decided not to impose the death penalty. Instead, Inoue, Onuma and Hishinuma were sentenced to life imprisonment, the school-teacher to 15 years. All the other defendants received lighter sentences than demanded by Kiuchi in October. 38 Significantly, however, despite denying that the release of Sagoya was a precedent for pardoning the defendants, after he finished reading the judgement Fujii pointedly advised them to mind their health while in prison, strongly implying that eventually they would be pardoned and released. Whereupon, journalists reported, the courtroom was filled with a great sigh of relief followed by unbridled rejoicing. 39 Four days later, when it was clear that neither the prosecution nor the defence would appeal against the verdict, the newspapers enthusiastically endorsed this decision, arguing that an appeal would have risked even greater social unrest than had already prevailed during the trial. They predicted that in any event the defendants were bound to be released through an amnesty sooner or later. 40 As it happened, they were all released in 1940, together with the 15 May Incident defendants who were still in gaol, as part of a general amnesty to promote national unity behind Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro's proclaimed New Order.

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Only one editorial that I have found so far, in the Tokyo asahi, sounded a somewhat different note in November 1934. Deploring the highly emotional atmosphere surrounding the trial, the writer expressed fear that many people would still see the sentence of life imprisonment for Inoue and the two killers as excessively harsh, especially given the recent pardon and release from prison of Sagoya Tomeo. The writer criticised the judgement for pandering to such feelings by paying too much attention to the defendants' motives, as if to excuse their crimes. It must not be forgotten, he continued, that the real martyrs were Inoue Junnosuke and Dan Takuma, not the defendants, whose ideals, however sincere, were but a 'wild delusion'. Still, society should now ponder the fact that these men had resorted to assassination mainly because the existing political system offered few effective means to work for the positive 'renovation' of Japan through peaceful, legal, change. 41

CONCLUSION The government fully understood the power of the theatre and films to influence public opinion, which is why in 1932 it prohibited any representations of the 15 May Incident on the stage and in movies made in Japan, to prevent Inukai's killers from being romanticised, as the Forty-Seven Ronin had been romanticised in earlier times. 42 Ironically, however, the government did not take into account that to give terrorists the stage of an open, public trial was to risk their turning the trial into the kind of nationalist theatre which, as we have seen in the Ketsumeidan and 15 May Incident trials, challenged the authority of the state, as represented by the court, in projecting an alternative vision of 'what Japan was or who the Japanese people were' .43 To reiterate, the terrorist trials thus constituted one 'defining historical moment', among many, in 'the struggle for control over the imagination of community' in early Showa Japan. The community imagined by the Ketsumeidan was not based on a secular conception of a nation ruled by law. As a defence lawyer in the 15 May trials once asked rhetorically, 'which is more important, the nation or the law?' He declared that the nation was more important and insisted that the accused should be acquitted because they had acted out of patriotic service to the nation. 44 The Ketsumeidan and their lawyers believed likewise. The Ketsumeidan's 'imagined community' was based in fact on an abstract religious conception of 'the people' in the sense of an ethnic nation bound together by loyalty to the 'kokutai' and the imperial house and by shared communitarian values inherited from an idealised historical tradition that was uniquely Japanese. 'The people', of course, primarily signified the poor and the powerless whom Inoue Nissh6 sought to 'save' from exploitation at the hands of the ruling elites. Kakushin (renovation) was the ultimate means to this end, although all along, Inoue's first concern was to dramatise the moral imperative of building a more egalitarian social and political order, by 'killing the few' (the representatives of the ruling classes) to 'save the many' (the people), in an

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extreme adaptation of the principle of issetsu tasho. The actual politics of kakushin would be left to other men later. This vision of Japan, and the Ketsumeidan's self-righteous, melodramatic condemnation of the ruling elites, clearly appealed to many Japanese who, thinking the unthinkable, came to see the Ketsumeidan as national 'saviours', not 'traitors'. Attracted by an ideology that was at once morally conservative and politically radical, these people were persuaded by the Ketsumeidan testimonies, and the earlier testimonies of the 15 May Incident defendants, to believe that what had seemed impossible was now possible, that kakushin could result in a more equitable redistribution of wealth and power in Japan. As one contemporary Japanese source put it, 'The exclamations of the Blood Brotherhood and May 15 defendants in the public courtroom promoted the reformist tendency of the general populace. Their words had a greater impact than their direct action and placed great pressure even on the ruling class' .45 In these respects, the Ketsumeidan trial, like the 15 May Incident trials, was 'an agent of change' 46 which significantly popularised and substantiated the Ketsumeidan's imagined community, although the comprehensive 'renovation' advocated by the Ketsumeidan never eventuated. Of course, other groups which claimed the mantle of Japanese nationalism had their own visions of Japan and some of these differed from the Ketsumeidan's. Yet the Ketsumeidan version of ethnic nationalism, with its repudiation of 'modem' ways, was essentially not so very different from, say, that of the Japan Romantic School, as portrayed by Kevin Doak. 47 How far the ideas of the Japan Romantic School came to the attention of the general public is perhaps questionable but the fact that the Ketsumeidan trial was front-page news ensured a wide audience whose everyday experience of vulnerability at the height of the Depression made them receptive to the Ketsumeidan's message of what was wrong with Japan and what should be done about it. More generally, this kind of interplay, of political events and a volatile public mood, is critical to understanding how 'categories of nationhood take on meaning for large numbers of people and become potent frames for political action' in different historical situations, in Beissinger's words. In closing, I will briefly summarise the main political repercussions of the Ketsumeidan trial. First, Amemiya Shoichi rightly suggests that while on the face of it the court upheld the law by finding the defendants guilty and sentencing them to penal servitude, the authority of the law was badly compromised and with it, the independence of the judicature (shihoken dokuritsu). This outcome was assured once Judge Sakamaki resigned, thereby allowing Judge Fujii to accept motives as evidence for the defence, and once Fujii, under the intensifying pressure of public opinion, reduced the sentences demanded by the prosecution and virtually promised the defendants that they would soon be pardoned and released. In short, Fujii's judgement vindicated the Ketsumeidan symbolically and effectively put the kokutai, which the Ketsumeidan had professed to defend, above the law. 48 Many Japanese commentators, like the journalist Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, agreed that the kokutai should supersede the law. By contrast, a minority, represented by

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Professor Minobe Tatsukichi, argued that 'Respect for the law in accordance with the constitution is more important than feelings of concern for the country', including the extra-legal concept of the kokutai. 49 But, to state my second point, time was on the side of the Kiyosawas, not the Minobes, in this debate, for together, the 15 May and Ketsumeidan Incident trials greatly stoked the fires of public hostility towards anyone whose ideas appeared to threaten the kokutai, as Minobe discovered to his misfortune when he and his 'emperor-organ theory', which held that the emperor was but one, albeit the highest, of many organs of the state, were widely condemned in 1935. In this highly coercive atmosphere, no major newspaper dared to defend Minobe. 50 Third, these trials may well have spurred further acts of terrorism in that extensive popular support of the defendants probably encouraged the participants in the abortive 'Heaven-sent Soldiers' Unit Incident' (Shinpeitaijiken, 1933), and more importantly, the young officers who carried out the unsuccessful army rebellion of 26 February 1936, to believe that they, too, could count on significant popular support. That this support did not materialise, at least not to the extent the young officers anticipated, was due less to any slackening of popular enthusiasm for the goal of 'renovation', which the young officers also advocated, than to widespread misgivings over supporting an attempted coup by elements of the army against a government appointed by the Emperor. As I have said, people who wanted 'renovation' did not necessarily want military rule; not all Japanese nationalists were militarists. Fourth, looking further ahead, during the war years from 1937 to 1945, Japanese who justified the mass slaughter of other Asians or atrocities inflicted on Allied prisoners of war evidently felt that such violence was legitimate if carried out in the name of higher moral values, for instance, a responsibility to 'renovate' Asia and save it from the West. This general notion sprang from many sources: a sense of racial superiority as fostered in the schools and the armed forces, the exigencies of battle, and so on. But it also arose from other 'moments of madness' which, as Beissinger writes, 'are critical elements in the substantiation of nations'; moments 'when the social world turns up-side down and that which was formerly anathema comes to be embraced as convention' .51 One such 'moment of madness' was the Ketsumeidan trial during which the defendants, playing to the gallery of public opinion, denied that their terrorism was a 'crime' and called themselves the 'instruments of Nyorai' who had killed for the greater good. Even though the Ketsumeidan themselves did not advocate military conquest overseas, by bending the Buddhist principle of issetsu tasho (killing the one to save the many) to justify terrorism, they helped to make it easier for others in the future to believe that killing the many would save the multitudes of a new Asia led by imperial Japan.

5

Between samurai and carnival: identity, language, music and dance among the Japanese expatriate community in 1930s Brazil Stewart Lone

On the eve of the Pacific War (1941-5), there were approximately 198,000 Japanese in Brazil; this was the largest body of expatriates resident outside of East Asia. In the 1990s, the descendants of these people and later migrants numbered over 1.3 million and constituted the largest overseas ethnic Japanese community in the world. 1 Despite its size, the history of this community in Brazil has been marginalised by the fascination on both sides of the Pacific with the Japanese in North America. As a result, the English-language library of histories on this subject virtually begins and ends with a 1943 work (the main focus of which was the Japanese in Peru, not Brazil) and a 1990s study by a scholar of Brazilian minorities with no understanding of the Japanese language. 2 This means that what we do know about the creation of this expatriate community is largely reliant on a handful of studies in Japanese. In these, the recurring theme is the shock and hardship of living outside Japan- migrants to Brazil are squeezed into the same box as those in North America and presented as victims of racism, repression and exploitation. The migrants themselves are described as literally and psychologically alien to their surroundings; as Handa Tomoo, a migrant Japanese historian writing in 1970 put it, 'Their bodies were in Brazil but their minds were always in Japan'. 3 Brazil itself, undergoing a period of radical political and cultural change in the 1930s, is used as no more than a theatrical backdrop for this tale of Japanese alienation. Such interpretations seem to be grounded in cultural nationalist assumptions common in Japanese-language writings from the 1970s to 1990s, and it may be that such assumptions are particularly strong in any discussion of relations between Japanese and non-Japanese. The basic aim of this chapter, however, is to dispute the level of alienation suffered by Japanese migrants to Brazil in the 1930s, and to suggest that they exhibited both a greater willingness to interact with Brazilians, and a more flexible interpretation of Japanese identity than has been suggested by more recent histories. The chapter is arranged in three parts.

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First, it summarises the origins and development of the Japanese community in Brazil up to the late 1930s. Second, it reconsiders the core question as far as Japanese historians are concerned- the link between expatriate identity and the Japanese language. Third, it assesses music and dance as arenas for the display of identity. Using the migrants' own newspapers and contemporary writings by Japanese observers, the chapter argues that Japanese were the beneficiaries of Brazil's culture of tolerance and its liberal attitudes on nationality and economic opportunity. In response, migrant leaders advocated the learning of Portuguese and had an ambivalent view of Japanese-language education. Moreover, they saw music and dance as places of cultural exchange, not cultural isolation. They consistently advocated internationalism over nationalism; as evidence of this, we look briefly at the reception they accorded high-profile 'Japanese' performers of music and dance who visited Brazil in the late 1930s. If we are to talk effectively about Japanese nationalism, we need to discuss it from unusual angles. It is accepted that a nation can exist beyond simple political borders, that nationalism is a state of mind rather than merely a state of terrain. No state, however, is understandable without relating what lies inside to what stands outside. In this sense, the study of expatriate nationalism allows us to play with all kinds of relationships; in this case, Japanese to Brazilian, Japanese migrants from one region with Japanese from another, and expatriate Japanese to the land and people of Japan proper. The Japanese in Brazil were obviously a minority; all around them were someone else's land and someone else's ideas of nation. So what did they do? Did they retreat into a fantasy world of nostalgia for a Japan which may never have existed outside of their imaginations? Did they lapse into self-pity, claiming to have been deceived into leaving Japan and subsequently cast adrift in debt and with broken dreams in a foreign land? Or did they break free from what critics of nationalism might describe as nationalism's own iron cage of unreason? In other words, did they voluntarily enter a different world and a different way of thinking and, if so, to what degree? In Brazil, they had that opportunity- one of the most important things in understanding the Japanese in Brazil is to know that Brazilian cultural 'nationalism' of the 1930s, far more than the Brazilian state, embraced diversity and fluidity. The study of expatriate Japanese in Brazil allows us to ask many questions and, because Brazil was and is so very different from North America, Europe or Australasia, to propose new and provocative answers. In this chapter, in general I focus only on two - the question of nationalism and its link first with language and second, with musical performance. This choice is influenced by the writings of Japanese authors in the 1990s. These works focus very firmly on the idea of expatriate Japanese-language schools as shrines of nationalism, and of language as identity. In addition, an innovative but ultimately misleading work by ethnomusicologist Hosokawa Shuhei, Sanba no kuni ni enka wa nagareru (Enka are sung in the land of samba) (1995), adds the idea of music and performance as a further and related stage for the performance of identity amongst the Japanese in Brazil. Before moving on to the main issues and the perspectives of recent Japanese authors, we need first to set our own stage. To do this, we must introduce the

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actors themselves. The first organised sailing of Japanese migrants from Kobe to the Brazilian port of Santos departed in April 1908. On board were nearly 800 Japanese men, women and a few children, contracted in family groups by the state of Sao Paulo, southern Brazil. Sao Paulo in the nineteenth-century had become the coffee basket to the world and, following the abolition of slavery in the 1880s, had recruited waves of foreign labour for its coffee plantations or fazendas. According to the Japanese emigration company literature, migrant workers in Brazil were promised a pleasant climate and friendly people (the company borrowed the characters for 'dance' and 'leisure' to spell out the first two syllables of 'Burajiru', that is, the Japanese pronunciation of 'Brazil'). They were also promised the chance to earn unimaginable wages through harvesting what was called 'the tree of gold' .4 After the first few years of some confusion, disappointment, and labour protest, migrants became more acclimatised to the realities of expatriate life and work. Their numbers increased rapidly in the 1920s and, between 1925 and 1930, there was a total of approximately 66,000 new arrivals. By this point, there were two broad streams- contract labour and settlers. Brazilian law allowed non-Brazilians to buy land and, already from the mid-1910s, Japanese used this freedom to create settlements or what were known as 'colonies' (shokuminchi). These were established both by Japanese land development concerns and by migrants already in Brazil. As these settlements expanded in size and number in the 1920s, the majority of Japanese came to reside in the region of Sao Paulo state known as Noroeste (Northwest), the booming frontier of agricultural production. There, they harvested coffee, rice and other food crops as well as cotton. Also by this point, however, there were well-established Japanese communities in the port of Santos as well as the rapidly growing metropolis of Sao Paulo City, known to some at the time as 'the Chicago of South America'. In these, one found Japanese schools, social and sports clubs, hotels and restaurants as well as other small businesses such as car-hire firms and furniture-makers, plus, in the state capital, Japaneselanguage newspapers and journals. The sudden growth of the Japanese presence in Brazil from the late 1920s unnerved a vocal minority, which took to repeating the same anti-Japanese rhetoric as had been overused earlier in North America and Australasia. In this discourse, the Japanese as a whole were viewed as carriers of socio-cultural infestation, or were regarded as fifth columnists in disguise, merely awaiting the order from their emperor to rise and take over the unsuspecting and ever-indulgent Brazilians. The noise generated by this minority came amid graver fears in Brazil about the impact of the great depression and the rise of fascism in Europe (Brazil had become host to large communities of Italian and German migrants from the mid- to late nineteenth-century). One result was a revised constitution in 1934 which limited but did not halt future immigration from all countries. After several years of internal political violence, there was also from 1937 a coup in office by the president, Getulio Vargas, following which he announced the so-called New State (Estado Novo). The central principle of the New State was unity and, to achieve this, laws were introduced in 1938 to ban schools run by immigrants

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entirely in a foreign language and to prevent rural settlements in which there was less than a 30 per cent Brazilian presence. Even as these laws were being introduced, however, leading Brazilian intellectuals such as the cultural historian Gilberto Freyre were insisting that the essence of Brazil was fluidity and flexibility rather than homogeneity and rigidity. 5 Consequently, immigrants in 1930s Brazil were on the one hand, pressured to assimilate with the mainstream of Brazilian society, but on the other, invited to join that mainstream by virtue of its unusual breadth. To put it another way, they were encouraged to be Brazilian in that to be Brazilian was not to replace one limited nationalism with another but to adopt a new and more open sense of identity. Japanese writers on this period have a much narrower perspective. Their general position is encapsulated in the statement quoted earlier from Handa Tomoo. Handa was himself a migrant to Brazil in 1917 and a leader among the expatriate Japanese artists of Sao Paulo in the 1930s. His history of the Japanese community in Brazil is the most detailed account in print and its influence is such that a 1993 work rewrites sections of it with barely any change in vocabulary or emphasis. 6 In Handa's view, the Japanese really did not fit in Brazil- he suggests that local Japanese businesses dealt primarily with other Japanese and, describing the loneliness of young men in the city, he insists that those who went to Brazilian bordellos went 'looking for enjoyment (asobi) where enjoyment was not to be found'. 7 A second major influence on Japanese historiography is the cultural anthropologist Maeyama Takashi. Maeyama went to Brazil as a graduate student at the University of Sao Paulo in 1961. His main concerns are religion and identity. In his many works since the 1970s, he has consistently argued that leaving Japan was a violent shock to the emigrants but that it was only through emigration that they first came to understand themselves as Japanese. In other words, the pain ofleaving and the ongoing pain of living outside Japan as an ethnic minority were the key to achieving a genuine sense of nationalism. Without probing further this dubious logic (which implies that all those who remained on the Japanese main islands had only an imperfect understanding of national identity), we should note Maeyama's particular focus on expatriate emperor-worship and education. Indeed, he insists that the Japanese migrant schools in Brazil were literal shrines of nationalism. As he put it in an early piece, reprinted without change in the mid-1990s: The center of emperor worship in any Japanese community in Brazil invariably was the 'Japanese school' .... It was not regarded as a language training school at all, as it is gradually becoming defined today, but as a place to make their children, youth, and even adults into 'Japanese' - that is, to be 'real human beings'. Those Japanese living in the same territory who did not participate in these activities [at the school] were regarded as somehow not 'Japanese' and consequently were not treated as members of the community. 8 The concept of the schools as shrines, and of language as identity, reappears both in Maeyama's later writings and in those of Mita Chiyoko, a frequent

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commentator on the Japanese in Brazil. A further point, which is accepted by Japanese authors without contest, is that migrants until the late 1930s were shortterm economic expatriates (dekasegi imin) whose intention was always to return to Japan. As for the Brazilians who lived and worked beside them in the provinces of Sao Paulo, they were, according to Maeyama, 'socially invisible' .9 Ultimately, this narrative of separateness, alienation and exploitation only reinforces a kind of siege ideology in which Japanese are safe only in Japan and, outside, are subject to abuse. As an historical interpretation, however, it conflicts directly with the reality of those who chose to live and work in Brazil, and with the views expressed in print at the time both by migrants and other Japanese observers. Consequently, it is time to look more at the migrants themselves. The belief of historians that language and schools were central to Japanese expatriate identity is predicated on this idea of an unquestioned sojourner mentality. Japanese settlers only remained in Brazil, so the argument goes, because it was more difficult than they anticipated to accumulate real savings. Japanese-language schooling, therefore, was vital if their children were to reassimilate once they ended what Maeyama has termed their existence as 'long-term dekasegi migrants'. As we have seen, Maeyama and others also insist that schools functioned literally as shrines in that ceremonies of emperor-worship, as well as meetings of other migrant civic groups and activities, were held on their premises. The most important of imperial ceremonies was the emperor's birthday. One of the first published accounts of this ceremony in Sao Paulo City, however, locates it in a public park and makes it very clear that the real heart of the matter, once the speeches and the singing of the Japanese and Brazilian anthems were out of the way, was the fun and games, the three-legged race, a beanbag race for ladies, a boat race, a baseball match and so on. While the relationship between sports and nationalism has recently been a growth area in scholarship, in Japan as elsewhere, it would be easy to argue that, on this occasion, participants enjoyed themselves and used the ceremony for their own ends rather than to celebrate a monarch or a country which had offered them no future except one of poverty or disappointment. 10 The existence of Japanese-run schools should not mislead us into thinking that there was a carefully thought-out curriculum of language and ideological training. The teachers at these schools were as often as not untrained volunteers and their principal activity was perhaps no more than keeping children gainfully occupied while their parents were at work. At the vast settlement ofTiete in 1934, for example, there were six schools for the settlement and the neighbouring urban population of 2350. Of these schools, one was accredited with the Brazilian government and had two Brazilian teachers conducting lessons in Portuguese. Of the others, one was under construction while each of the rest had just one or two teachers and a student body ranging from 38 to 89 pupils. That such migrant schools employed a Japanese-style curriculum is hardly surprising; the teachers knew nothing else and even those schools in the interior of Sao Paulo state which applied for a Brazilian teacher were unlikely to obtain one. In the view of one Japanese contemporary, this was because Brazilian teachers were interested only in locations which boasted a cinema and a dance floor but the simple reality is

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more likely to be that Brazilian teachers were in demand and they went to places where the need and the population were greatest. 11 One further point about the Japanese-run schools is that they were technically illegal well before the federal law of 1938 - as of 1921, Brazil had banned schools from teaching any foreign language to a child under the age of 10. The unlawful status of Japanese schools was openly acknowledged in print by Japanese observers and by Japanese migrants as early as the mid-1920s. What was equally acknowledged, however, is that Brazil was not a repressive society, nor was racism anything like as virulent (and violent) as it was in North America, or even Hawai'i where concerted pressure against Japanese schools had been applied from the beginning of the 1920s. Indeed, one of the recurring comments of Japanese observers and expatriates in Brazil was that tolerance and racial respect were genuine and widespread; this was one of the major incentives in emigrating to Brazil and one of the major reasons why Japanese chose to remain there. The idea that the closure of Japanese schools from the end of 1938 was an attack on migrant identity and spiritual freedom should not blind us (as it seems to blind Japanese historians) to the fact that there had been longstanding indulgence in Brazil towards these same institutions. Moreover, in contrast to the historians' claim that there was rapid forced assimilation from 1938, in fact there continued to be relative tolerance even after this time.I 2 The emphasis in 1990s histories on language as identity overlooks a major theme of discourse among Japanese migrants from the 1910s at least. This theme was taken up and maintained by the one group of emigrants whose very business was language and who were at the forefront of any discourse on identity - the expatriate newspapermen. As soon as the first Brazilian-Japanese papers emerged, they advocated the acquisition of Portuguese-language skills. As the Burajiru jihi5 (Brazil Review) migrant newspaper put it in 1917, the world is based on competition and the basis of success in global competition is language. To assist Japanese in Brazil, the Burajiru jihi5 and other newspapers printed examples of Portuguese conversation and advertised Portuguese-language dictionaries. This support for language-learning continued up to the Pacific War; when a children's journal, Kodomo no tomo (Children's Friend), appeared in the 1930s, it also included lessons in Portuguese grammar. The approach of the migrant press to language might be described as one of 'soft nationalism', that is, they recognised not only the value but also the logic (a logic emerging from their situation) of being at least bi-lingual. Within this 'soft nationalism', there was also a healthy dose of humour. In one of the first newspaper examples of Portuguese conversation, two Japanese discussed language-learning: 'Do you like to learn Portuguese?/1 love it and I don't think it is so difficult/What did you study when you were in Japan?/Everything I learned I have completely forgotten!' 13 This self-mockery persisted in cartoons from the 1930s, which showed young men more concerned with drink than militarism, and with the quintessential Japanese salaryman (already fully established) being mercilessly bullied by 'The Fascist Wife' clad in her swastika-motif kimono. 14 It is unfortunate that expatriate humour is also overlooked by Japanese historians, clashing as it does with their preferred image of quiet suffering.

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What about the view of the Japanese language in the migrant press? After all, the newspapers were written almost entirely in Japanese (some Portuguese reports began appearing from the late 1920s) and their commercial success was based on the size of the Japanese-language audience. The point at issue here was the extent and the location of Japanese-language learning. In the 1920s, the owner of one monthly journal, Ni5gyi5 no Burajiru (Agricultural Brazil), sought to eliminate Chinese characters and set the kana script horizontally and reading from left to right. Was this a kind of nationalism? Not in his view. Rather, he declared that his intention was to assist in the development of 'global Japanese people' (sekaiteki Nihonjin). 15 In the simplification and reduction of Japanese script, others went further. According to an influential study from 1925 by Professor Takaoka Kumao at Hokkaido Imperial University, the existence of Japanese-language schools in Brazil was counter-productive. He noted that German migrants to Brazil had arrived much earlier with what he termed an imperialistic and condescending view of Brazilian culture. As a consequence, they had created their own schools and insisted on maintaining the German language above all else. The result, however, was that German migrants were viewed quite reasonably with suspicion and resentment by Brazilians. Takaoka warned Japanese migrants to avoid the same trap. He suggested that the children of expatriates be taught only as much Japanese as they needed to communicate with relatives back in Japan. The Nippaku shinbun (Japan-Brazil Newspaper), the major rival to the Burajiru jihi5 in Sao Paulo, was in agreement, arguing that 'Japanese primary schools in Brazil should give first priority to Brazilian education and rank Japanese after this as one foreign language' .16 This 1925 article argued that Japanese values could be taught through Portuguese and that the language of instruction mattered less than the values being conveyed. In other words, language was not central to identity. From the rnid-1930s, the view was expressed that Portuguese should be emphasised in the schools and Japanese be taught at home. This was seen both as a logical division of educational labour and also a way to reduce any local criticism of Japanese nationalism in Brazil. One migrant press report, however, suggests a quite different problem. According to this, an English visitor to Brazil had been astonished to hear that Japanese migrants spoke Portuguese at home; in his eyes, no expatriate Briton would speak a 'foreign' language in his own house. This may have been a comment on the urban expatriates - at a meeting of Japanese teachers early in 1937, one of the points raised was the need for more Portuguese teaching in the provincial schools and more Japanese teaching in those of the towns and cities. 17 What this suggests is that it was not the case that use of the Japanese language was uncontested until 1938 and then shot down by a repressive Brazilian government. Instead, there had been changes and differing perspectives on language among the expatriates themselves for the previous 20 years. Overall, there was a strong argument for learning Portuguese in Brazil and this was accepted by some expatriate Japanese (not merely the Brazilian-born second generation). Their aim was cosmopolitanism over nationalism. We should

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also add here that the Brazilian law of 1938 did not eradicate public use or learning of the Japanese language. Indeed, there were new Japanese-language courses at the elite law schools of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in 1939 as interest in Japan grew, in part fuelled by the ongoing Japanese war in China. There was also more Brazilian interest in Japanese culture in general and, within this, a heightened interest in understanding Japan through its music. 18 This leads us to our next point of discussion. Along with language, music and dance are accepted as distinguishing marks of separate cultures. This is explicit in the title of Hosokawa Shuhei's study contrasting samba with enka. Hosokawa's interest is part of a wider ethnomusicology of modem Brazil, which has spawned a number of detailed and informative studies, among which Hermano Vianna, The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil (1999) is particularly impressive. Unfortunately, Hosokawa's chapters on the Japanese in Brazil to 1940 ignore every aspect of the dynamic musical development in Brazil itself in these years. In this, he seems to follow Maeyama's line on the social invisibility of Brazilians to Japanese expatriates. He focuses entirely on recorded music imported from Japan, lyrics created in Japanese by migrants, plus the performance by Japanese of music at almost exclusively Japanese gatherings such as meetings of migrant sports clubs or social gatherings at migrant restaurants. Having acknowledged the importance of samba to Brazil, he then omits any mention of the federal government's use of music to promote Brazilian nationalism in the 1930s through radio, records, and a new system of control over the samba schools and the carnival. Instead, Hosokawa's main argument appears to be that playing music with Japanese lyrics and listening to records imported from Japan were vital in maintaining a clear sense of nationalism among the expatriate community. This, however, is rather too limited a perspective to be persuasive. Hosokawa shows no interest in Brazilian music nor in any connection that Japanese migrants may have had with it. For example, it is to Vianna that we must tum to hear that the famous Japanese painter Fujita Tsuguharu (Leonard Fujita) visited Brazil in the early 1930s and was so impressed with the dynamic music of Rio that he created a samba band upon his return to Japan. 19 However, in its earliest years, the Burajiru jiho had encouraged Japanese in Brazil to learn about Brazilian music and dance, arguing that music and dance symbolised a society's core values. It contrasted Japanese and Western music, while it insisted that Japanese traditional music such as that produced by the samisen and shakuhachi had a unique emotional quality, it also claimed that the beauty of Western music was in achieving harmony from varying instruments and sounds. As Japanese coming to live in Brazil, migrants also had an interest in harmony or what we might call here cultural symphony. According to the Burajiru jiho, the way to achieve this symphony and to improve relations with, and understanding of, the Brazilian people was through music and dance. 20 The idea of social mixing through music and dance was epitomised by the carnival. So, let us ask a straightforward question about carnival, the most prominent event in the Brazilian cultural calendar as of the 1920s-1930s -were the Japanese

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migrants either observers of or participants in the carnival? The simple answer is yes on both counts. Reports of each year's carnival, its mood and activities, appeared in the migrant press at least from the mid-1920s down to 1940. In these accounts, there was always acknowledgement of some Japanese participation. One of the general trends noticed by the migrant press over the years, however, was for the carnival to recede from the street and move indoors to clubs and theatres, in response to continuing economic and political gloom which also led to smaller official subsidies for such things as carnival street illuminations. By 1937, one Japanese report suggested that it was only the 'Kuro-chan' (African-Brazilians) who still took to the street at carnival. Each year, however, there was among the Japanese a dance or 'baire' as they called it (that is, 'baile', the Iberian word for dance, and an obvious relation to the English term 'ballet'). The most noted of these was held at the Japan Club in Sao Paulo City and involved both Japanese and non-Japanese. Other 'baire' were also held by Japanese migrants wherever they were to be found. As for participation in the street, one must first acknowledge that the principle of carnival was chaos; to participate, therefore, required some understanding of the ground rules for chaos. Nonetheless, where there was a relatively large Japanese presence in the 1920sfor example, at the provincial town of Lins - local expatriates did involve themselves in the street celebrations, although their costumes were seen as rather drab compared to those of the Brazilians. In Sao Paulo City also there were Japanese in the 1920s and 1930s who adopted fancy dress and masks or paraded in cars or on trucks through the city; one example of this was a vehicle in 1935 carrying the waitresses from one of the leading Japanese restaurants. In that year, there were many Japanese women in kimono and Japanese footwear (geta) but the masterpiece of Japanese fancy dress was said to be 'the masked samurai'. Here, migrants adopted the quintessential symbol of Japanese nationality but merged it playfully with the multicultural Brazilian crowd. 21 In the early 1930s, the economic recession and political instability in Brazil tended either to dampen the energy of the carnival or to give it an underlying tension. Perhaps, the first inclusion of a Japanese subject in the Rio carnival may also have caused the migrants some discomfort- in February 1932, one of the Rio samba clubs, in line with the practice of using carnival to comment on current issues, entered a float dealing with the ongoing hostilities between China and Japan following the Manchurian Incident of September 1931. By 1935, however, the Burajiru jiho of 6 March could begin its report with the cry 'viva carnival' and praise its impact in bringing joy to all residents of the city. 22 What appears to be the first advertisement for carnival fancy dress in the migrant press comes in January 1937. The Sao Paulo company Ao Preco Fixo offered sailor suits for male and female as well as dinner jackets and other clothes for men. In the same year, the Casa Allema of Sao Paulo City, a regular advertiser in the Japanese-language press, promised a 'fantasia' of clothes for the carnival and all at bargain prices. The curious feature of this particular advertisement from a clothes shop owned by German immigrants was that while its graphic centre was a Japanese girl in traditional kimono and headdress and its text was all in

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Japanese, it actually appeared on the one page in the Nippaku shinbun filled by Portuguese-language reports. 23 In this mixing of ethnic and linguistic symbols, it was perhaps in tune with the eclectic spirit of carnival. One final point on Japanese and the carnival. In 1940, the economic and political depression continued to weigh on the enthusiasm and freedom of the festivities. There was even a conservative backlash among some Brazilians, perhaps influenced by the puritanism of European fascism, who argued that public intoxication was un-Catholic. In contrast, a Japanese migrant press report from 1940 chose to emphasise the idea that carnival was a day of racial equality, an equality which, it noted very deliberately, had been denied Japan at the Versailles Conference at the end of the Great War of 1914-18. For this reason, the report argued, carnival was a day for Japanese as much as anyone else. 24 From this, we might suggest that the music and dance of Brazilian carnival was seen, as the Burajiru jiho had argued years earlier, as a vehicle for Japanese and Brazilians to mix and for nationalisms once more to be superseded by internationalism. What of music performed by the Japanese in Brazil? On this, Hosokawa concerns himself almost entirely with music performed by migrant Japanese for other migrant Japanese. This is not the entire story and we need to look further. Virtually his sole comment beyond this narrow margin is on the performance of traditional music by expatriate women of the urban elite in Sao Paulo City. The wife of the consul-general, for example, arranged the first 'Japan Evening' of music and dance one Sunday in November 1936. The performers were Japanese city women and girls, the instruments included the sarnisen, koto and shakuhachi, and a commentary in Portuguese was provided by a non-Japanese female scholar of the subject. 25 Similar evenings of traditional Japanese music and dance continued to be presented in Sao Paulo City to full houses at least until the end of 1940. There were, however, other 'Japanese' performers of music or dance who attracted large and varied audiences in Brazil in the late 1930s. I wish to comment only on three of them as each illustrates a different sense of Japanese identity at this time. First was Kawakami Suzuko. She was a dancer whose publicity photograph made her look curiously like Rudolph Valentino as the Argentinian gaucho in his famous Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and whose distinction, according to her advertisement, was that she was the only one in Japan to use castanets. In fact, she was far more than this. On a visit to Brazil in 1937, she was welcomed as an expert in Spanish and other international dance whose fame had spread to Europe and North America. In her interpretation of Salome, seen as exceptionally demanding, she was described as equal to the great Isadora Duncan. As an artiste of international renown, she was treated to a reception in Sao Paulo by Japanese migrant women. She returned in mid-1938 with a two-hour programme of dances from Spain, the Middle East and elsewhere and, at her opening performance in Sao Paulo City, the audience was said to number about 800. She also promised to fulfil the expectations of her Japanese fans by touring the interior of the state. 26 A second performer was Hasegawa Toshiko. In November 1936, she visited Sao Paulo as a leading soprano of an Italian opera company engaged to play

Japanese expatriate community in 1930s Brazil 79 Madam Butterfly and La Boheme. She was then 25 years old. Born in California and trained in New York, she had made her debut earlier that year at Bologna. Although she explained she had been very lonely in Italy where there were so few Japanese, and had come to Brazil because she knew 'there were many Japanese here and so at least I could speak Japanese', in fact she had returned to Japan only briefly as a child, her speech was mixed with English and, as she confessed to a journalist from the Burajirujiho, she was unable to read any Japanese characters. In the migrant press reports of her visit, however, these deficiencies of language seemed of no consequence. She claimed her most fervent wish in Brazil was to enjoy Japanese food, and her greater ambition was to do something for Japan, a country she believed had the greatness to be one of the 'creators of the next global culture'. Hasegawa repeated her role as Madam Butterfly in Sao Paulo in mid1940, enjoying sellout performances in the metropolis and excellent reviews. At that time the migrant press described her affectionately as 'our dancing princess' (warera no maihime). Later in 1940, Hasegawa re-emphasised the links between herself and the Japanese migrant community by acceding to requests from expatriates to tour the interior of the state. 27 Our third high-profile visitor was welcomed as 'the dancing princess of the peninsula' (hanto no maihime). The term is revealing, for this was Ch'oe Songhi, a strikingly beautiful woman born in Korea (then part of the Japanese colonial empire). However, the text in the expatriate press and in her advertising stressed that she was 'a universal dancing talent to which Japan had given birth' (Nihon no unda sekai-teki budoka). In other words, her Korean identity, talent and impressive physique were all acknowledged but also subsumed within the idea of the wider Japanese 'nation'. After achieving some fame while studying and performing in New York, she had been invited to visit Argentina early in 1938. A trip to South America was announced for mid-1939, at which time she was described as 'the beauty of the peninsula', but it was mid-1940 when she actually performed in Rio and at the Municipal Theatre, Sao Paulo. There she enjoyed an effusive reception from an audience of 1500, and among those sending her bouquets were the Japanese consul-general and Kuroishi Seisaku, editor of the Burajiru jihi5. 28 What each of these women demonstrated was international achievement. In the reports of the Japanese migrant press in Brazil, the central issue was not that Kawakami dressed as a Spaniard, that Hasegawa was American-born, or that Ch' oe was Korean. What was emphasised was their ability and that this was, each in its different way, related to an aspect of Japanese identity. The image of Japan they portrayed collectively, however, was one of internationalism over nationalism. In this respect especially, they seemed to reinforce the position of opinion leaders among the Japanese migrants in Brazil. Rather than victims of racism and repression, these women symbolised high culture and high energy, and were respected both by migrants and Brazilians alike on the eve of the Pacific War. In reworking the Japanese historiography of expatriate misery and alienation, there are other areas we could easily have touched on. Athletics, for example, was an area for positive encounters between expatriate Japanese and native Brazilians.

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Similarly, there is the enthusiastic welcome given by Brazilians to a Japanese aircraft, the 'Nippon', on a round-the-world flight in 1939. Membership of the Catholic church might well be another relevant issue. However, it should now be apparent that the emphasis given to language, schools, and even music by a few influential writers satisfies only those who want to hear that all Japanese were miserable and abused outside of Japan. In Brazil, the vast majority of the nearly 198,000 Japanese who arrived between 1908 and 1940 stayed because they had freedoms and opportunities denied them in Japan. They acknowledged the generosity and openness of the people they encountered in Brazil. This did not mean that they lost or abandoned their Japanese identity. Instead, the journalists and writers who were their public voice, freed from the control of a central government or competition from universities and academies, advocated a fluid and flexible Japanese identity which could accommodate Japanese values being expressed in Portuguese, and which could throw a Japanese icon like the samurai into a pulsating carnival crowd. Brazil offered them opportunities for change and experimentation with identity. Compared to other societies, the restrictions on their freedom came late and were applied without an iron hand. Consequently, to describe Japanese migrants as victims or Brazilians as racist and repressive is no more accurate than describing all Japanese as samurai and all Brazilians as sambistas. The reality is a world away from such extremes.

6

In a house divided: the Japanese Christian socialist Abe Isoo Elise K. Tipton

The American Civil War metaphor of the nation as 'a house divided' might not immediately seem appropriate to apply to Japan in the early decades of the twentieth-century. Perhaps it is somewhat of an exaggeration since Japan was not being tom apart by a bloody civil war which many military historians regard as exhibiting characteristics of a total modem war. However, the metaphor is meant to evoke the image of a society being pulled apart by conflicting views of the ideal society or, more specifically, of the nature of the Japanese national polity in the modem world. In a very real sense, Japan of the 1920s and 1930s was rent by social and political divisions created by the modernisation process begun during the Meiji period (1868-1912). The 1930s are commonly viewed as a decade of aggressive nationalism, but just as imperialism is associated by theorists with periods of insecurity and uncertainty, so also may we see Japanese nationalism in the 1930s as an attempt to overcome the uncertainties and divisions about what was 'Japanese', resulting from decades of cultural borrowing and the transformation into an industrialised society. Debates over social issues reflect these uncertainties, the conflicting explanations for social problems, and the conflicting policies advocated for their solution. Cultural nationalists sought a return to communal values and buttressing of traditional institutions such as the family, but there were also revolutionaries who sought drastic changes to existing structures and institutions. On the ideological left, radicals believed that only a complete destruction of capitalism and the emperor-centred nation-state would solve problems of poverty and labour unrest. On the right, radicals also attacked the political and financial elites, but upheld the imperial institution. At the centre of such debates in both a literal and figurative sense was Abe Isoo (1865-1949), but as the string of adjectives in this chapter's subtitle suggests, it is difficult to fit him into the usual categories of prominent individuals who have figured in the conventional historiography of the pre-war and wartime period. Interestingly, the image of a house divided has also been used in a recent book by Carl Strikwerda to evoke the struggles among Catholics, socialists and Flemish nationalists in nineteenth-century Belgium. 1 Abe, however, resolved the apparent

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contradictions between and among Christianity, socialism and ethnic nationalism. Despite his open adherence to universalistic concepts and values intrinsic to Christianity and socialism, Abe remained consciously Japanese. Even after the outbreak of the China war in 1937, for example, Abe remained in the Diet and adjusted his positions on social issues to support the war effort. Through a case study of Abe, I would like to call for a rethinking of who was a nationalist in pre-war and wartime Japan and what being a Japanese nationalist might mean. The distinction made between state or political nationalists and cultural nationalists is often a useful analytical one, but the case of Abe, who fits neither category as they are usually defined, raises questions as to what other kinds of nationalism there might be. And while we usually think of Japanese nationalism as being particularistic and exclusionary, Abe's views of the Japanese nation accommodated internationalism and universalistic values. Theories of nation and nationalism are most concerned with their origins and genealogies, less with how they may be reconstituted or redefined over time. 2 This is despite the modernist view of the nation as a social and political construct. But Abe's case shows how an individual Japanese nationalist's relation to the Japanese national community and state changed over time, reflecting social, political and intellectual currents of different time periods, while also demonstrating certain consistencies. It reinforces Carol Gluck's findings on the creation of Japanese nationalist ideology during the late Meiji period 3 and extends them into the twentieth-century. Gluck demonstrated that Japanese nationalist ideology did not spring forth whole as a result of Meiji central government officials' efforts, but was rather the product of a process in which many, varied groups participated. Following Abe's career from the late Meiji period through the Second World War, we can see that the state and radical ultranationalists did not monopolise the process of 'invention' of the nation. Moderate socialists such as Abe also made a contribution. As we shall see, however, Abe's conception of the nation did not always replicate that of the state, although the differences did not require him to stand in complete opposition to the state either. Abe's concept of the nation needs further exploration because the usual distinctions between cultural and political nationalism may be somewhat misleading in this case. Certainly during the Second World War, Abe stood by the nation-state as we would expect of a political nationalist. His goals also fit John Hutchinson's definition of the political nationalist's modernist ideal of 'a civic polity of educated citizens united by common laws and mores like the polis of classical antiquity' .4 However, this definition does not adequately connote the social and moral dimensions of Abe's concept of the nation. Abe's nation was not just a political community based on a common territory, residency and citizenship rights; still less was it an ethno-cultural community. His nation was a social community in which all Japanese were entitled to equal social and economic justice. Embedded in this conceptualisation were the universalistic humanitarian values of Christianity and the reasons he was attracted to socialism. Abe's nation was thus also a moral community with the values of Christianity as

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its core. The state for Abe was an important means of achieving the distinctive moral community of the Japanese people, but the state remained a means, not an end. It is curious that Abe has not received much scholarly attention before this. His name crops up in numerous studies of social and political developments during the first four decades of the twentieth-century, 5 but he has received little concentrated attention. Moderate reformers such as Abe did not attract much attention in early post-war attempts to lay blame for wartime domestic and foreign policies6 or, alternatively, to praise the few open resisters who could be found. Except for Sheldon Garon's recent studies, this is part of a general neglect of the middle classes in the pre-war and wartime period. Perhaps this neglect may be due to liberals' having been overcome by militarists and ultranationalists during the 1930s. It may also derive from both Japanese and Western scholars' and intellectuals' critique of post-war Japanese democracy and the apparent weakness of civil society. If civil society seems weak in the post-war period, then it would seem to have been even weaker in the 1920s and especially the 1930s. Yet this ignores the fact that Abe was a leader and activist involved in a remarkably wide range of political as well as social fields. The respected intellectual journal Chiii5 ki5ron (Central Review) included him among the 100 most prominent individuals in Japan in 1932. He was frequently referred to as the 'father of Meiji socialism', having been one of the founders of the first socialist party in Japan, and during the 1920s was regarded as one of the 'elder statesmen of labour'. Like most of the early socialists, Abe was a Christian, but contrary to the assertions contained in some scholarly treatments ofMeiji Christians,7 he did not cease political activism after the Meiji period. A pre-election newspaper article on the 1928 general election, the first under universal male suffrage, described Abe as 'the foremost proletarian writer', and a post-election report makes clear that his successful candidacy had been expected. 8 Abe went on to be not only president of the Social Democratic Party (Shakai minshilto), but also the Social Masses Party (Shakai taishilto) in the 1920s and 1930s. Meanwhile, he was a leading figure in a wide range of social and moral reform areas. This was not only as a Waseda University professor writing for magazines and journals and delivering lectures to students and other intellectuals, but as an active participant in the formation and leadership of both practical and research associations for the realisation of his desired goals. His concern for women's liberation and equality led to support for concrete issues such as women's suffrage and women's divorce rights. His concern for the poor, particularly poor women, led to his promotion of birth control, efforts to abolish the licensed prostitution system, and support for labour unionism. In addition to being a leader in these serious social and political causes, Abe was 'the father ofWaseda baseball'. A bronze bust of Abe sits prominently in the forecourt of the Waseda central library. It commemorates none of his contributions to the fields mentioned above, but rather his founding of Waseda baseball and the baseball ground on which the library was built. How such a passion for

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baseball complemented his social and political pursuits will be suggested later in this chapter; how Abe harmonised his diverse activities and ideologies will be the major concern in this study.

ABE, THE JAPANESE CHRISTIAN We can begin to understand the intertwining of universalistic and nationalistic values underlying Abe's views by examining the form of Christianity which appealed to him and to other Meiji converts. As Irwin Scheiner has emphasised, it was Protestant Christian missionaries who most actively proselytised in Meiji Japan, in contrast to the Catholic missionaries of the sixteenth-century. Protestant missionaries aimed at spiritual salvation for the individual but put much of their practical effort into education and social reform. Consequently, their form of Christianity appealed to Japanese of the displaced samurai class such as Abe. Its stress on individualism and secular activities gave samurai who missed out on positions in Meiji governments the sense of being able to continue to play a leading role in Japanese society. Abe was born into a samurai family in Fukuoka, the second son of a martial arts teacher. His family felt the economic strains following the declassing of the samurai after the Meiji Restoration, and Abe attributed his leaning towards socialism to this impoverishment. As he later wrote, 'there was a sudden change and I was plummeted down from a life of relative ease to one of poverty' .9 He explained that because of this impoverishment, he had a strong sympathy for the poor and could never forget the problems of poverty. 10 Instilled with a samurai ethos and educated in Confucianism, Abe and other samurai converts to Christianity found the activism and moralism encouraged by Protestantism compatible with· their upbringing. Moreover, Protestant Christianity appealed to both their nationalism and their elitism through its association with modernisation. Being a Western religion, Christianity by definition was modern, and by promoting modernisation Christians would be helping to advance the Japanese nation. Abe recalled in his autobiography that since all 'civilised countries' at the time were Christian, he believed that Christianity constituted the basis of their power and that it was therefore necessary to import it into Japan to make Japan a civilised country like the United States and European countries. 11 Such an interpretation of Christianity infused the education provided at Doshisha University, which Abe entered in 1879 and where he converted to Christianity before graduating in 1884. Private universities such as Doshisha, Waseda and KeiO offered philosophical and career alternatives to the conservative bureaucratic path leading from the new imperial university in Tokyo. Abe entered Doshisha as a great Christian evangelisation movement was beginning, characterised by the emergence of a native clergy who took over leadership in the church from foreign missionaries and whose zeal attracted widespread attention from both governmental and intellectual elites. 12

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The atmosphere at Doshisha University stimulated independence and social reformist activism among its students, a direct legacy of its founder, Niijima Jo. In becoming a Christian, Niijima had sought to serve both God and the nation, for he believed that a strong nation depended on the individual cultivated by Christian morality. 13 Defending the patriotism of Christian commitment and the indef!endence of Japanese Christians from foreign control, he explained that: the reason I established a private university was not to give our nation to foreigners, but instead to truly cultivate businessmen, politicians, literary men, all people who will be activists, love truth and freedom, respect morality and the true principle, and, therefore, devote themselves to our nation Japan. And by these principles, they will strengthen the independence of Japan .... 14 Consequently, he exhorted every graduating class to work for reforms and to be willing to die 'for the sake of our nation'. Doshisha was training future leaders of Japan, those who should 'dare to take the responsibility of managing the world' . 15 However, Niijima's commitment to the Japanese nation did not entail commitment to the government, 16 another important aspect of the Doshisha ethos which led many graduates, including Abe, into oppositional movements. Writing of his conversion to Christianity at Doshisha, Abe noted that he entered the university with the aim of becoming a navy officer, but abandoned that goal during his second year. Due to Niijima's influence, he and the other students at Doshisha thought that being a government official was 'a disgrace' .17

ABE, THE MEIJI CHRISTIAN SOCIALIST

Abe thus came out of Doshisha a socially active Christian and after a short time at home and then again at Doshisha, he proceeded to a post as a clergyman in the Okayama church. There he also became involved in charity projects and social work, such as helping Ishii JITji to establish a children's hospital. Then, in 1891 he went to the United States for study at Hartford Theological Seminary in Connecticut. There he became a socialist after reading Edward Bellamy's famous novel Looking Backward 2000-I 887 ( 1888) about an imaginary state capitalist society of the future. From his recollection of the excitement accompanying this second conversion, we can see the appropriateness of Tatsuo Arima's characterisation of 'Christianity and Marxism as the two intellectually popular heterodoxies' of modem Japan. 18 Although it was not actually Marxian socialism to which Abe was attracted, he delighted in wearing a red necktie to flaunt his socialism, just like other socialist students at the seminary. 19 In such displays of rebellion we can infer the attraction to earnest young theological students of radical social and political ideas without any sense of incompatibility with their Christian beliefs.

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In fact, what drew Abe to socialism was the concept of human love, which formed the core of his religious beliefs. He had gone to Hartford to do research first on the historical value of the Bible and second on social problems. After a visit to New York City where he had seen numerous social-work projects being undertaken, he read Bellamy's novel. The novelist's ability to point out the contradictions in modem society remained in Abe's memory even decades later. Abe suddenly realised that poverty was like a disastrous fire - a fire-fighting system was necessary to stop the fire, but could not prevent another one in the long term. Similarly, social work was a necessary emergency measure for halting poverty, but could not be relied upon to prevent it in the long term. He concluded that because poverty resulted from the present economic organisation of society, socialist reconstruction would bring about a fundamental resolution of the problem of poverty. However, he approached socialism from a spiritual perspective and with the goal of improving spiritual life - economics and the material life were no more than a means to that spiritual goal. 20 The compatibility between Christianity and socialism in Abe's eyes continued and was reinforced by association with Unitarianism upon his return to Japan. The Unitarian Church in Tokyo became the meeting place for Meiji socialists, who formed the Society for the Study of Socialism (Shakaishugi kenkyukai) in 1898. Five out of the six founders of the Socialist Party in 1901 were Unitarians like Abe. The Unitarian Church in Japan had been founded by A. M. Knapp in 1887, but it eventually rejected evangelism and as its teachings were absorbed into the socialist movement, it ceased activities as a church organisation. Its emphasis on humanitarianism drew attention to the terrible working conditions in Japan, attracting Japanese who were interested in social problems. These teachings dovetailed with Abe's socialism because they focused on social evils rather than personal sin. Moreover, Unitarians often took radical positions on social questions and expected governments to work actively to rectify social ills and to ensure human rights. 21 This conjunction between Christianity and socialism during the late Meiji period has been criticised by both contemporaries and historians. The nonChristian socialist, later anarchist, Kotoku Shusui, complained that 'in Japan socialism is regarded merely as a special product of Christianity, or as its appendage. People even go to the extreme of believing that "socialist" is synonymous with "Christian'" .22 This association led historian of Japanese socialist thought, John Crump, to suggest that Meiji socialists were not authentic socialists or that they did not understand what socialism really was. For example, Crump says that there was 'a great deal of chance involved in the ideas from abroad which found their way to Japan in the Meiji era - and just as much of the hit and miss as well in the books which happened to get translated'. He goes on to interpret the lack of influence of William Morris' utopian socialist novel News from Nowhere as an indication of 'the stony soil' offered by Meiji Japan for 'the implantation of genuinely socialist ideas' .23 In contradiction to Crump's generalisation, Abe did list Morris' book as one which shaped his ideas, 24 but more importantly, what Crump overlooked

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is the nature of Christian socialism in the West. His implied criticism of the Japanese adoption of Western ideas during the Meiji period neglects the fact that there was equal confusion in the West, at least in Britain and the United States, about the meaning of socialism and still more about the meaning of 'Christian socialism'. 'Socialists' in the nineteenth-century aimed at an almost bewildering array of ideal societies based on a wide variety of values - communitarian, collectivist, co-operativist, pluralist. Some favoured legal, non-revolutionary and parliamentary means while others believed that only illegal, revolutionary means could be effective in eliminating existing social evils. Some looked positively to the state to achieve their goal while others adamantly rejected state intervention. Socialism therefore did not necessarily mean the 'materialist' socialism of Marx and Engels, but also referred to the diverse 'utopian socialist' visions of Europeans such as Claude St Simon, Ferdinand Lassalle and Charles Fourier and of Americans such as Henry George, Robert Owen and Edward Bellamy. Peter Jones, in his study of the Christian socialist revival of late Victorian England, refers to: that period of confusion during the early 1880s when Fabians, Marxists, Radical-Liberals, Anarchists, and so on had not yet sorted themselves out, when the SDF [the German Social Democratic Party] was emerging out of the 'Democratic Federation' and the Fabians were still feeling their way toward collectivism ... 25 If the term 'socialism' was this diffuse, still more enigmatic was the label

'Christian socialism', even though this was a term of self-description among the late Victorian reformers. Their 'socialism' also encompassed a variety of opinions and visions ranging from associationist/co-operative ideals to full state collectivisation. In addition, their 'Christianity' was similarly diverse in theological underpinnings; some Christian socialist organisations, such as the British Christian Socialist Society, 'avoided theology altogether'. 26 As a study of mid-nineteenth-century Christian socialists in England argued, 'the relationship of their political to their theological ideas is much less straightforward than general surveys have suggested' .27 Many of these descriptions of socialism and Christian socialism in the United States and Britain apply also to Christian socialists in Meiji Japan, as epitomised by Abe Isoo. In particular, the lack of an obvious connection between theological and political or social ideas becomes clear when we examine Abe's arguments supporting birth control. In fact, Abe's main writings in the Meiji period, as well as later, promoted birth control from a Neo-Malthusian rather than a religious point of view. In other words, Abe assumed that having many children - i.e., overpopulation- was the cause of poverty for families and that practice of birth control would not only improve life for individuals and families but also solve society's problems of crime and the existence of 'useless', unproductive workers created by poverty. 28 His concern for the poor manifested a humanitarianism, which one can ascribe to Christian brotherly love, but it is striking that

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Abe did not present even such vague religious arguments. Instead, he tried to provide a rationale for birth control by using what were regarded as 'scientific' arguments. Abe did try to counter objections to birth control as being immoral and unnatural,29 and it may be that he couched his arguments in non-Christian terms for a non-Christian audience. Nevertheless, the explanation for this lack of religious content may also be found in an understanding of the form of Christianity which appealed to Abe and other Meiji converts, as discussed in the previous section. The emphasis on secular reforms in that form of Christianity supported Abe's desire to bring about a lasting solution to 'the social problem'. Its humanitarianism gave his socialism a spiritual and moral focus. But in addition, according to Obama Toshie writing about Abe in the 1950s, Abe's socialism was a 'Japanese socialism' (Nihonteki shakaishugi) which tried to build a 'kingdom of heaven on earth' .30 Obama entitled his article about Abe 'The Ideals of Abe lsoo' ('Abe lsoo no risci'), but as he himself argued, Abe's views for improving society were very much grounded in the conditions of Japanese society.

ABE, THE SOCIAL DEMOCRAT AND SOCIAL REFORMER

This grounding in actual conditions is evident in Abe's views and activities during subsequent decades of the twentieth-century. Although he is often described as an idealist, Abe's participation in political and social life went beyond the pulpit and the lecture room. As his interest in problems of poverty and women's inequality deepened, he wrote widely on these issues and became involved in numerous organisations and campaigns to achieve concrete goals. The social democratic movement and moderate labour groups drew on his prestige as one of the 'elder statesmen' of socialism to give their organisations a sense of continuity with a Japanese tradition of socialism and labour unionism dating back to the Meiji period. When passage of a universal male suffrage law in 1925 made possible the emergence of proletarian parties, the social democrats turned to Abe to head their new party, and his election to the Diet in 1928 inaugurated more than a decade of activity in parliamentary politics. George Totten has distinguished generational differences between the 'veteran socialists', including Abe, who were active before the First World War, and the new generation who became socialists after the war. 31 This differentiation highlights certain continuities in Abe's views derived from his Meiji upbringing as an ex-samurai convert to Christianity, devoted to making Japan a 'civilised country' based on Christian values of morality and social justice. Humanitarianism remained a major source of his later activities to bring about a solution to 'the social problem'. It stimulated his involvement in a number of campaigns to alleviate problems resulting from poverty. These included the movement to abolish the licensed prostitution system, the labour union movement, the birth control movement, and the campaign to repeal the anti-abortion law.

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According to Abe, poverty drove women from poor families into prostitution, while lack of knowledge and access to safe methods of contraception meant that poor families had more children than they could properly feed and educate. Parents as well as children suffered from the resulting malnutrition, and the mother's health deteriorated from too many and too frequent pregnancies. Although Abe strongly preferred contraception as the means of limiting the number of children in a family, he worked for repeal of the law prohibiting abortion because many poor women resorted to dangerous methods of illegal abortion. And while social security provided by the government was one way to alleviate poverty, he believed that another was for workers and farmers to improve their situations themselves by forming unions. Christian views of morality and sexuality remained another constant underlying his views on various social reform issues. He promoted marriage based on love, arguing that individuals should have the freedom to choose their own partners. After marriage, however, he insisted on monogamy, so he opposed the 'corrupt' concepts of free love, meaning 'free divorce' or multiple relationships, that flowed into Japan during the 1910s. 32 Consequently, although blaming poverty as a cause of prostitution, he at the same time regarded prostitution as morally corrupt, or in his words, 'sewage'. 33 And although he participated in the anti-war movement during the Russo-Japanese War, his split with the anarchists led by Kotoku Shusui demonstrated a fundamental commitment to reformism and parliamentary means which remained evident throughout his long public career. Abe's labour activities, for example, centred on the moderate Japan General Federation of Labour (Nihon rOdo sOdomei or SOdomei for short) in collaboration with its leader and his close friend Suzuki Bunji. Meanwhile, his long career in the Diet indicates his belief in the efficacy of parliamentary methods to achieve change. We may attribute this reformism to his embrace of the Meiji goal of making Japan equal to the Western powers, though this did not preclude criticism of governmental institutions and policies. Abe's critique of Marxian socialism marks him as a Meiji socialist, but it also reveals a belief in the positive role that the state could play in improving society. He often worked in pressure groups to bring about legislation in the Diet and to make representations to relevant government authorities to win their support for reforms. We can see this desire to enlist state intervention in his founding of a Fabian society in 1922. I have not yet discovered any details about this society, but we can assume a general similarity with Fabianism in England, which envisioned a redistribution of wealth through extensive state measures. The Fabians' top-down vision of change led by a technocratic elite would also have appealed to Abe's ex-samurai/Doshisha Christian desires to play a leading role in Japan's social transformation. More evidence is available to reveal Abe's belief that the government should act to correct economic and social injustices in the specific case of the licensed prostitution system. Abe's involvement in the movement to abolish licensed prostitution began in 1900, but stepped up with the founding of the Purity

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Association (Kakuseikai) in 1911. Shimada Saburo was the Kakuseikai's first president. Abe was initially vice-president, but later became president and remained the head of the association until its dissolution in early 1945. While the founding members saw religious education as a way to improve society, they also argued that the institutional structure of licensed prostitution had to be destroyed. In their view, the system amounted to official approval of 'slavery', a sign of Japan's continued cultural and social backwardness. Consequently, in addition to putting out the monthly journal Kakusei (Purity) and other publications and holding public lectures, the association pushed for legislation in the Diet to abolish the licensed prostitution system and lobbied government bureaucrats to support their goal. 34 Besides aiming at abolition of the licensed prostitution system, the association sought to advance chastity and morality among men and women. It presented abolition of licensed prostitution as a benefit to society as a whole because it would prevent evil from spreading and would thus improve the public mind. 35 Writing in the inaugural issue of Kakusei, Abe blamed the licensed prostitution system for being the primary cause of moral corruption. By treating women as a commodity and chastity as something which could be bought with money, it created a lack of mutual respect between men and women, he believed. The existence of the system perpetuated these attitudes of gender inequality by conveying to young people the government's support for immorality and the slavery of women. 36 Abe did not expect that prostitution could be completely eradicated. He agreed with those who opposed abolition of the licensed prostitution system that abolition would probably drive prostitution underground and increase unlicensed prostitution, but he argued that the removal of licensed brothels from public view would at least eliminate the impression of official approval given to young people. Abe seemed to take for granted the government's role as a moral regulator. In another Kakusei article, he criticised the government for contradictions in its control of morals (jiiki torishimari). On the one hand, he wrote, the police placed restrictions and other controls on young delinquents, but on the other hand, government leaders included geisha, whom Abe referred to as 'the source of moral corruption', in official celebrations such as the opening of the TaishO Exposition in 1913. Moreover, when it came to licensed prostitution, he accused the government of only being interested in controlling syphilis and other venereal diseases when it should be working at spiritual hygiene (seishinjo no eisei) and moral control as well. 37 In promoting birth control during the early 1920s, however, he was conscious of government officials' hostility. In 1922, immigration officials initially denied the American birth control leader Margaret Sanger an entry visa to conduct a lecture tour sponsored by the Kaizo publishing house. She was allowed to enter only after agreeing not to lecture on birth control in public. Ironically, media coverage actually stimulated widespread discussion of birth control, which in tum, contributed to changes in attitude not only among the public, but among government officials as well. 38 Discussion of actual methods of birth control,

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however, remained taboo. Abe was well aware of such censorship restrictions and advised against challenging the limits of police toleration. 39 In the 1920s, Abe became very active in promoting birth control. With Baron Ishimoto Keikichi and Ishimoto's wife Shizue, who was to become one of the most prominent pioneers of birth control in pre-war Japan, Abe formed the Japan Birth Control Research Association (Nihon sanji chOsetsu kenkyiikai). He also joined Yamamoto Senji in giving lectures to workers in the Kansai region. Throughout the remainder of the 1920s and into the early 1930s he continued to write and give public lectures advocating birth control, using a variety of different arguments. Reflecting the increasing influence and popularity of Western concepts of democracy and individualism, Abe further developed his emphasis on women's liberation and marriage based on love. Espousing a new morality of love and marriage, he attempted to counter arguments that artificial contraception opposed principles of nature and that sex without the purpose of having children reduced it to an act of the lower animals. On the contrary, he argued, the purpose of marriage was twofold - love between husband and wife; and maintaining posterity through having children. He dubbed birth control by abstinence as asceticism based on an 'outdated morality'. Those with 'progressive ideas' would consider it cruel and unreasonable to demand suppression of sexual desires. 40 Birth control, he argued, would enable couples in love to satisfy their sexual desires because they could marry early, but without having children before they could adequately care for them or before they themselves were physically mature enough. This would have the added advantage of making prostitution unnecessary, he optimistically assumed. Keeping in mind the health of both mother and children, he further argued that using birth control to space children would ensure full recovery of the mother's body between pregnancies and as a result, would also ensure the birth of healthier babies. In his arguments for birth control, Abe constantly returned to the 'social problem' of poverty. Since each child meant that a family had less to spend per person, a poor person's life might be threatened by malnutrition due to growing up in a large family. Financially then, the family as well as individuals would benefit by limiting the number of children to what it could afford. Birth control was therefore put forth as the basis for relieving poverty in both the countryside and cities. Abe further argued that, given the current situation of economic depression with a surplus of workers, practising birth control and thereby limiting the number of workers would put the working class in a better position vis-a-vis capitalists to obtain wage increases. 41 While stressing birth control's benefits for individuals and families, Abe also emphasised gains for society as a whole. We can see in these arguments both his Neo-Malthusian assumptions and the attraction of eugenicist ideas at this time. Unchecked population growth in Abe's eyes would not only create greater poverty and strain the nation's resources, but also weaken the Japanese population physically and lead to more social problems because inadequately educated and under-nourished children would become unemployed and useless, if not

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prone to criminal behaviour. As he noted, a society has diseases as individuals do, including poverty, crime, deformity and inadequate education. Birth control, by alleviating the financial hardships of families, would help to prevent such social diseases. 42 Abe pointed out that besides helping to solve such domestic social problems, birth control would contribute to international peace. He observed that emigration of surplus population to the United States had created friction in Japanese-American relations in the past and was no longer possible after passage of the restrictive US Immigration Act of 1924. Abe argued that emigration to the Asian continent would provoke conflict there too. Moreover, he pointed out that it was expensive and that policies encouraging it had so far produced little response among poor Japanese in any case. 43 We may interpret Abe's arguments about society as a whole to be a continuation of his nation-building concerns and an indication of his developing conception of the nation. Although during the 1920s and early 1930s, Abe's 'nationalism' appears less visible, we can see it underlying his promotion of a new morality and social progressivism, but with the vocabulary of Taisho liberalism. In this period we can read 'society' to mean 'nation' for Abe, reaffirming Anthony Smith's observation that 'if nationalism's a form of politics, ... it is also a form of culture and society, perhaps even more importantly so' .44 There are many kinds of nationalism, including the cultural, political, religious, racial and linguistic. It was during the 1920s and early 1930s that Abe's conception of the nation as a social community in which all Japanese were entitled to social and economic justice became evident. The prospects of achieving such a community received a degree of support during the 1920s when the social democratic movement was making some political as well as social advances. Abe thrilled to his election as a Social Democratic Party candidate in the 1928 election, an achievement made possible by universal male suffrage: Until the Universal Manhood Suffrage was enforced, I did not think of running for a seat in the Diet. Today I have been elected on account of the Universal Suffrage. [That] such a poor man as myself has been elected is in a large measure due to the support the newspapers gave me. 45 Abe took pride in the clean campaign run by proletarian party candidates in this election which had been conducted, in his words, 'according to the baseball spirit', meaning fairly and without personal criticism of opponents. 46 Earlier Abe had said that if government were run like baseball, problems of corruption would disappear. Labour had also made some gains with amendment of the 1911 Factory Law and passage of other labour laws during the 1920s. This legislation did not legalise unions, but improved conditions of labour so that they were closer to standards set by the International Labour Organization.

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These gains would have been perceived by Abe as promising signs that socialism might be achieved in Japan as he believed it was being achieved in Europe. Inspired by a survey of socialist party members in parliaments throughout Europe, Abe in 1924 optimistically predicted that socialists would soon gain a majority in some European countries and then realise their goals. He stated that feudalism had been overtaken by capitalism, which would next be overtaken by 'labourism' - 'it is a natural course of social progression' .47 Seeing the socialist movement as 'the general trend of the world' which it would be 'fruitless' to prevent, he insisted that he and other members of the Society for Disseminating Scientific Ideas (Kagaku shiso fukyukai) had a duty to guide the movement. 48 Here again are echoes of Meiji civilising goals, based on a progressive, linear view of historical development and the perceived necessity to advance scientific thinking in order to modernise Japan. With hindsight we can see how ill-founded Abe's optimism was, especially with regard to radical socialism. While state policies tolerated moderate reformism, repression of radical leftist ideas and organisations intensified in reaction to even the modest success of the proletarian parties in 1928. The proletarian parties had garnered about half a million votes or five per cent of the votes cast. The mass round-ups of Communist Party members and sympathisers in 1928 and 1929 marked the beginning of the systematic suppression which definitively destroyed Communism as an organised movement by the end of 1933. The wave of defections which followed the conversions (tenkiS) in mid-1933 of Central Committee leaders, Nabeyama Sadachika and Sano Manabu, reflected the rising tide of nationalism after the Japanese takeover of Manchuria in 1931-2.

ABE, THE CHRISTIAN NATIONAL SOCIALIST

Abe was not immune to the demands for national support for Japan's expansion on the Asian continent and, in fact, at the same time saw the social and economic consequences of war as the achievement of his long-pursued goals. After war with China began in 1937, Abe became a political nationalist aligned with the state more clearly than at any other time in his public career. In addition to remaining in the Diet as head of the Social Masses Party, he made a broadcast to the United States explaining the Japanese point of view on the 'China Incident'. Nevertheless, he resisted moves within the party to merge with the ultranationalistic Eastern Association (Tohokai) on grounds that it was fascist. 49 This stance contributed to positive post-war assessments of his idealism. With Suzuki Bunji of the moderate labour organisation Sodomei, he also resisted the movement towards dissolution of all parties which culminated during the New Order Movement in 1940. Like Suzuki, Abe preferred to maintain an autonomous labour-based party. Nevertheless, this did not mean opposition to the war or to the state's efforts to produce national unity and increase efficiency for the war. On the contrary, after passage of the National General Mobilisation Law (Kokumin sodoin ho) in 1938,

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Abe viewed the increased government control over the economy as a splendid way to resolve problems of unemployment (rippa na kaiketsu). He tried to impress upon Kakusei readers the 'absolute' necessity for all citizens (kokumin) to unite and act to reach the government's savings target of 800 million yen in one year. Beyond this, he exhorted all citizens, regardless of class or occupation, to offer their lives 'for the sake of the nation' (kokka no tame ni). 50 In issues of Kakusei during 1940, Abe reiterated even more strongly his support for greater state control of the economy. In the August issue, he specifically called for government control of the production, distribution and price of rice, as an example of how more thorough state intervention would prevent a deterioration of the people's standard of living. 5 1 The following month he pointed out that state control of the economy would bring happiness to the whole nation by eliminating competition and differences in material life. He cited Germany as his model for the benefits of thorough state control. There, he believed, state control had eliminated unemployment and starvation. Abe now explicitly supported a gradual transformation into German-style national socialism, using the term 'kokumin shakaishugi'. As he said, control of material life by the state was something he had been advocating 'for ages' (mukashi kara) as the way to eliminate poverty. 52 Similarly, his split from the Social Masses Party in 1940 and attempt to form a separate party was not meant to undermine the state's war efforts. Rather, it was intended that the separate party would work to increase co-operation among labour, management and the state. To this end Abe led the Social Democratic faction out of the party in 1940 and attempted to form the Kinro kokurninto (usually translated as Nationalist Labour Party, but literally, Party of Industriously Working Citizens). Use of the word 'kokumin' (citizen) was intended to emphasise the party's support for the nation-state, and the party platform reiterated its support for the 'holy war' in Asia and development of the 'national race' (kokumin minzoku). Nevertheless, the Home Ministry banned the party on the grounds that it was socialist and being based on the working classes, would 'instigate class struggle' .53 Although no longer involved in Diet politics after this, Abe continued to support the New Order in a round of lectures in various parts of the country in late October 1940. On the invitation of the Railway Bureau in Niigata Prefecture, he made a speech on the New Order to more than 500 people. He insisted to his audience on the primacy of the public interest and the importance of co-operating with a 'great spirit' of sincerity and willingness to sacrifice themselves to serve the emperor for the sake of establishing the New Order. Abe went on to make more speeches at various girls' and boys' high schools, emphasising the necessity of cultivating public morality. He also gave a church sermon and addressed the mayor of Shibata and over 180 other dignitaries on 'the spiritual aspects of the New Order'. The writer reporting on this tour, albeit in Kakusei, noted how impressed all these large audiences were. 54 More concern with the nation's morals problems paralleled Abe's increased support for the state's foreign policies during the mid-1930s. Although during the early 1930s he had continued to work actively outside the Diet for women's

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suffrage, repeal of the anti-abortion law, and birth control, during the mid-1930s he became more zealous in efforts to purify the public morals of the nation. Then, during the war, his patriotism led to a dramatic reversal of his position on birth control to support the government's pro-natalist policies. In addition to stepped-up efforts to abolish the licensed prostitution system, Abe and other Kakuseikai members had been alarmed by the spread of cafes in Tokyo after the Kanto earthquake of 1923, and elsewhere throughout the country. 55 Because cafe waitresses increasingly offered erotic service ('era' sabisu) to customers and frequently engaged in prostitution after hours, the Kakuseikai welcomed the enforcement of a ban on students entering cafes and restrictions imposed on cafes and waitresses initially in Osaka and Tokyo in 1928 and 1929, and nationwide during the 1930s. Each issue of Kakusei reported on the progress of the crackdown on what society members regarded as a source of moral corruption. When the war brought further repression of cafes and waitresses, Abe saw this as a great opportunity to make 'a clean sweep' of public morality. When supporting greater state control of the economy during the war to deal with the 'material problem', Abe placed equal stress on the importance of the 'spiritual problem'. To Abe, this involved the government's responsibility to improve both the people's physical health and their morals. More specifically, he warned against the harmfulness of alcohol and syphilis to the nation's health, but also linked them to the social and moral problems (the 'man-woman' problem!danjo mandai) of licensed prostitution. In 1942 when Japan was making spectacular advances throughout South-East Asia, Abe took up the relationship between the population problem and the 'man-woman problem'. He pointed out that the population problem had changed with the war, from one of limiting population growth to promoting it. The war, he wrote, would bring difficulties and many deaths, but would be like a 'spring cleaning of human society'. The countries of the world would be put in order, and as part of this, there would be an end to problems of moral corruption and of improper relations between men and women (jusho no danjo kankei). This would come about because Japan's expansion into the South Pacific would open the possibility of free migration to places like Australia, which was 20 times larger than Japan, but with only a population the size of Tokyo's. He concluded that emigration and war casualties would eliminate the problem of unemployment at home, enabling men and women to marry early, have more children, and at the same time remove the necessity for prostitutes. From this he drew hope for the future coming out of the present war. 56 Abe's argument does not seem well reasoned to us, but it shows how a dedicated social reformer made his positions compatible with his nationalism. In fact, he believed that the war would facilitate achievement of his long-term goals of ending the moral corruption of prostitution and resolving the 'social problem' of poverty. There is also a kind of consistency underlying the reversal in his view on birth control. He had promoted birth control for poor workers because having many children made them poor, but the war in his view would solve problems of

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unemployment and poverty, making birth control unnecessary. The war, then, was finally bringing about the state control of the economy which he had been advocating for so long as the means to eliminating poverty.

CONCLUSION

Anthony Smith reminds us that 'in all ages, most people have had multiple identities'. 57 This was true of Abe, but as his case shows, multiple identities need not necessarily be seen as conflicting or incompatible by the people themselves. Nearing the end of his life, Abe the Japanese Christian therefore re-emerged very clearly, but in fact neither his nationalism nor his Christianity had ever been questioned. He also remained a committed socialist. In a different way from past assessments of him as a Christian socialist idealist who stood apart from the state, he did indeed remain an idealist who continued to be true to his principles. Abe's example shows us how Japanese holding to ideologies outside the mainstream - Christianity and socialism in his case - could accommodate and adapt them to their own concept of the nation and nationalism. Through this accommodation and adaptation they participated in the discourse of nationalism. As in Abe's case, this could extend to support for the state's wartime policies because such activists and thinkers could envision the war as an opportunity for achieving their individual agendas. From the retrospective perspective of a lost war, this may appear weak, contradictory and merely opportunistic. But from Abe's perspective, it was entirely consistent with the campaigns he had been waging for more than four decades.

7

Saving for 'My Own Good and the Good of the Nation': economic nationalism in modern Japan Sheldon Garon

Few today question the centrality of nation and nationalism in the development of the Japanese economy since the late nineteenth-century. As several excellent studies demonstrate, Japanese policymakers and economic thinkers have tended to reject the principal tenets of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Locke. Like other Asians and also continental Europeans, Japanese have generally been sceptical of the doctrines of laissez-faire and comparative advantage. They have been equally critical of the Anglo-American conviction that the ideal economy is one in which the individual freely pursues self-interest and maximises his or her material well-being. Beginning in the late nineteenth-century, Japanese leaders and economists gravitated towards the nation-centred ideas of Germany's 'historical school', notably those of Friedrich List. List's influential treatise, The National System of Political Economy (1841), first appeared in Japanese in 1889. 1 What most impressed Japanese of this period was the German school's contention that an economy would be better off if the state advanced the interests of the nation as a whole - rather than those of individuals. Indeed, in the case of later developing nations (and the German states at the time he wrote), List favoured the protection of native industries over policies that opened an economy to lower-priced consumer imports. In the short run, the individual would have to sacrifice his or her interests as a consumer, so that the nation might develop its productive capacity - in List's opinion, the real measure of national prosperity and independence. 2 Embracing these tenets in the late nineteenth-century, the Japanese regime became - in Chalmers Johnson's now-classic formulation- a 'developmental state', energetically promoting various policies and structures aimed at enhancing the 'nation's industrial competitiveness'. 3 Not surprisingly, political scientists and journalists have had a large hand in writing the history of economic nationalism in Japan, relating the evolution of the ideology to Japan's present-day political economy. Where not so long ago Johnson invoked economic nationalism to explain Japan's post-war 'economic miracle', observers now cite

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this nation-centred mentality as the source of Japan's seeming inability to adapt to the increasingly borderless world of global capitalism. Richard Samuels offers the most rigorous analysis of Japanese economic nationalism to date. Coining the phrase 'technonationalism', he discusses the historical evolution of a concept of national interest that links Japan's economic development to national security. In his analysis, technonationalist policies have long aimed at nurturing, diffusing, and indigenising technology so as to 'make a nation rich and strong'. Samuels further suggests that Japanese rulers, as far back as the Tokugawa shoguns, tirelessly inculcated economic nationalism in their people. They fostered a sense of Japan's vulnerability that 'helps to mobilise millions of people each day'. The Japanese people, he continues, 'have been exhorted to make sacrifices to enhance national security in a hostile world' .4 Samuels' observations prompt us to extend the focus of our analyses of economic nationalism beyond policy-makers and economic elites. This chapter seeks to gauge the extent to which the elites implanted economic nationalism in the Japanese people from the Meiji period to the recent past, and thereby shaped economic behaviour. How did leaders 'sell' such nationalism, and in what ways did ordinary people understand official messages? To answer these questions, I offer the history of the Japanese state's efforts to encourage household savings. Hortatory savings campaigns and other promotional activities formed a mainstay in Japanese governance from the late nineteenthcentury to the recent past. The nation's ability to amass and invest high levels of popular savings, note many scholars, played a central role in modem Japan's impressive economic growth, both before and after Second World War. Yet, as economists are also quick to observe, people save for a variety of reasons - most of which are related to self-interest. Among motivations, patriotism would seemingly rank far below those connected with personal advantage. The chapter explores this complex relationship, arguing that appeals to nationalism- while coexisting with other motivations -have been more important in shaping long-term economic behaviour in Japan than most economists surmise. At the same time, I endeavour to place the Japanese story of savings-promotion in a comparative context. Although Western observers tend to regard Japan as 'unique', the Japanese government was hardly alone in encouraging thrift during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. States in Europe, North America and Australasia similarly instituted savings campaigns, postal savings systems and school savings programmes. Many did so, in part, to strengthen their nations in war and peace. This chapter thus compares and contrasts Japanese economic nationalism with some of its Western variants.

'AN INSTRUMENT OF THE NATIONAL ECONOMY' Modem Japan's economic nationalism was not the inevitable response of a 'latedeveloping' economy, as scholars commonly assume. Rather, state-centred economic policies gradually emerged in the decades following the Meiji Restoration

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of 1868, after Japanese officials experimented with alternative approaches. These policies, moreover, evolved as the result of conscious choices made by Japanese leaders in a world where other late developers made very different choices. When the new Meiji regime commenced to promote popular saving, the needs of the nation-state played surprisingly little role. In 1875, the Japanese established the now-famous postal savings system, which aimed at attracting the small savings of the people. Initially, the system's architects did not envision postal savings as a vital means of accumulating capital to strengthen the nation. They created no mechanism for the strategic investment of postal savings deposits in the state's developmental projects; the money saved in postal accounts was conservatively deposited in the First National Bank. On the contrary, officials primarily spoke of encouraging saving among the 'humble folk' in terms of moral betterment and social welfare. 5 Argued the Home Ministry in 1874, 'It is an obligation of government to encourage the poor to set aside what they can save. Their assets may thus be preserved, themselves protected from misfortune, and their habits improved'. 6 If such language calls to mind Victorian Britain, this was hardly a coincidence. Japanese officials explicitly modelled their postal savings system on Britain's Post Office Savings Bank, instituted in 1861 as the first of its kind in the world. By encouraging habits of thrift in the working classes, British reformers had similarly identified postal savings with the mission of cultivating a sober, self-reliant and non-revolutionary populace. 7 Although the regime's early promotion of saving was unexpectedly weak in economic nationalism, political decisions over the next three decades would foster the statist and nationalist approach that is more familiar to students of twentieth-century Japanese history. The most monumental of these choices was the government's decision to eschew all foreign borrowing between 1873 and 1897. 8 In so doing, Japan broke with other late-developing countries in Europe, North America, Australasia and the non-Western world. Depriving itself of foreign capital, the Japanese state became singularly aggressive in mobilising the savings of the entire nation. The powerful oligarch Okubo Toshimichi summed up the Meiji leadership's fear of foreign borrowing in the starkest of terms in 1873, when he opposed the prosecution of a costly war against Korea. English warships in Asia, he warned, were 'poised for any emergency, keeping a silent, vigilant watch, and ready to jump at a moment's notice'. He continued: However, our country has been largely dependent on England for its foreign loans. If our country becomes involved in an unexpected misfortune, causing our stores to be depleted and our people reduced to poverty, our inability to repay our debts to England will become England's pretext for interfering in our internal affairs which would lead to baneful consequences beyond description. 9 Japanese leaders became well aware of what happened to non-Western countries that could not repay their loans. In the world of late-nineteenth-century imperialism, Europeans intervened in and sometimes occupied insolvent nations - the

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°

cases of Egypt, Mexico and China being among the better known. 1 Future generations of Japanese officials would continue to regard the large-scale extraction of savings from their own people as a sound alternative to the perils of foreign borrowing. Growing expenditures further convinced top officials of the need for a system of state finance based on popular savings. Even Maejima Hisoka, the founder of Japanese postal savings and erstwhile champion of cultivating thrift Victorianstyle, changed his tune. In 1879, Maejima instructed postmasters that postal savings should be considered an 'instrument of the national economy' (kokka keizai no yogu), the funds to be used to fight inflation and 'supply capital for industry and trade' .11 For postal savings to become a viable instrument of state finance, however, the government required a more effective mechanism to invest the deposits. In 1884, Finance Minister Matsukata introduced such a mechanism, which has persisted with few changes to this day. He placed the management of all postal deposits under the control of the Ministry of Finance. The following year the ministry placed the funds under the management of the newly created Deposit Bureau (Yokinkyoku, later Yokinbu). Henceforth, the Ministry of Finance would control the investment of postal savings with absolute discretion, unhindered by rules of any sort. Japan's economic statism was for the most part homegrown, but not entirely. The inspiration for the Deposit Bureau appears to have come from France and its Caisse des Depots (Bank of Deposits). When the French government instituted postal savings in 1881, the Caisse des Depots managed its deposits, as well as those of all private savings banks, channelling small savings into strategic investments in the nation's economic development. 12 Japan's Ministry of Finance bureaucrats likewise employed the expanding assets of the postal savings system in pursuit of national goals. The Deposit Bureau played a major role in industrial development at home and in the empire. Much of this investment was channelled through the government's 'special banks'- notably the Hypothec Bank (Nihon kangyo ginko, established 1896) and later the Industrial Bank of Japan (Nihon kogyo ginko, established 1900). Both were modelled on special banks of the French state. The Hypothec Bank advanced credit to the agricultural sector, and both banks made low-interest loans to modem industries. 13 Postal savings also proved a valuable source of finance for Japan's military and imperial expansion. Deposit Bureau funds were used to purchase government bonds for Japan's several wars, beginning with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5. After 1901, the Deposit Bureau invested significant sums in the development and administration of the new colonies of Taiwan and Korea and later in the South Manchurian Railway. Perhaps the most arbitrary use of the funds occurred in 1917 and 1918, when the government tapped the people's savings to redeem the infamous 'Nishihara loans'. In an effort to strengthen Japan's political influence in China, the government - acting through the businessman Nishihara Kamezo arranged for the state's special banks to extend the huge sum of 145 million yen to Duan Qirui's fledgling regime in Beijing. After Chinese officials spent most of

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the money for their own political purposes, embarrassed Japanese leaders milked the Deposit Bureau to repay the special banks. 14 There emerged a distinctive relationship between savings-promotion and the national interest (as defined by the state). The more the state encouraged smallscale saving among the people, the more money poured into postal savings and programmes of national strengthening, and the greater the control that central bureaucrats exerted over finance within the overall economy. Indeed, deposits in postal savings soared from 741,000 yen in 1880, to 24,733,000 yen in 1900 and 201,243,000 yen in 1912. 15 By the 1930s, the Japanese postal system exceeded every one of its Western counterparts in both aggregate deposits and the number of depositors. 16

THE FORMATION OF POPULAR ECONOMIC NATIONALISM

The Home Ministry's influential Inoue Tomoichi declared in 1904 that the encouragement of popular thrift was key to advancing Japan's 'national strength' (kokuryoku). 17 But how would officials persuade the people to save? Should the appeal be to self-interest, community interest or national interest? In the early stages, the authorities were content to appeal to self-interest. The challenge was to convince the people to entrust their savings to the strange new post offices and banks. Payment of high interest, rather than appeals to national interest, proved successful in attracting postal deposits during the 1870s and 1880s. As public confidence in financial institutions grew, savings-promotion officials increasingly invoked nationalism. According to Shimomura Hiroshi, then the head of postal savings operations, during both the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5 and Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, 'patriotic feelings' played a major role in the sharp rise in postal savings. Yet as the war with Russia drew to a close, Shimomura worried that saving would decline as the patriotic fervour of wartime subsided. 18 If the people did not boost their saving, officials warned, Japan's very existence as a new world power would be in jeopardy. Japan approached a crossroads following its surprising victory over Russia in 1905. The country had joined the ranks of the 'first-rate powers' (itti5-koku), but it could scarcely afford to be one. Japan emerged from the war with, for the first time, a significant foreign debt, and its people were already heavily taxed. For their country to remain a power, Japanese leaders somehow had to extract greater savings from the people to finance their costly new commitments to strengthening the military, developing and administering new dominions and industrialising the economy. These urgent national needs prompted the government to launch the first nationwide savings campaign in conjunction with the Local Improvement Campaign (1906-18). 19 Directed by the Home Ministry, the Local Improvement Campaign aimed primarily at motivating rural Japanese to save. It did so indirectly by mobilising local leaders and communal organisations. These included associations of young men, young women and military reservists, and agricultural co-operatives.

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The government also centralised control over village hotokusha ('repaying virtue societies'), which combined the functions of religious confraternities, credit societies and savings groups. Speaking to the local notables and postmasters, central officials highlighted the importance of saving for the national good. The bureaucrats would harangue their audiences with cross-national statistics demonstrating Japan's weakness vis-a-vis its Western rivals - as measured by various indices of 'national strength'. Not only did Japan suffer higher rates of death, suicide, divorce and imprisonment, but in 1908-9 Japanese saved per capita only 5 yen, compared to 172 yen in both the United States and Germany, and 110 yen in Britain. 20 The government codified the relationship between national strength and popular sacrifice in the widely disseminated Imperial Rescript on Diligence and Thrift (1908), or Boshin Rescript. To assure the 'growing prosperity of Our Empire' and 'to participate in the blessings of its [the world's] civilization', the emperor instructed his subjects to be 'frugal in the management of their households, ... to abide by simplicity and avoid ostentation, and to inure themselves to arduous toil without yielding to any degree of indulgence'. 21 As Home Minister Hirata Tosuke explained to a meeting of hotokusha and agricultural co-operative leaders, the Rescript sought to marshal Japan's human resources to redress the nation's 'paucity of capital' and thereby develop its exports: We're poor in capital. Consequently our interest rates are high. If one asks how we will obtain capital, enrich the nation, and put our homes in order, the answer is, first and foremost, Diligence. Second, we must spend money on that which is useful, while cutting back on useless expenditures. That's, of course, Thrift. Put Diligence and Thrift together, and we'll achieve prosperity for the State and safeguard the well-being of the home. 22 There is ample evidence that such messages of economic nationalism reached down, at least, to the level of local leadership. A typical local-improvement plan from a village in Miyazaki Prefecture in 1906 declared: 'Unless we are victorious in this peacetime economic waifare [with the Western powers], it will make no difference whether or not we have trained a million brave soldiers' .23 Any number of local functionaries proclaimed their commitment to encouraging saving as a national mission. Gushed one village mayor, 'if producers' co-operatives could be established in all12,000 towns and villages throughout the country and we could together encourage saving, why, we would surely generate 200 to 300 million yen a year.... To put it grandly, I believe we're contributing to the rapid build-up of national wealth ... .' 24 And in the 'Saving Song', distributed by one postmaster in Gunma Prefecture in 1901, lyrics boasted of the meteoric gains in postal savings deposits: Yet if you compare those figures to England or America, Or to Germany, Belgium or Holland The civilised countries, that is,

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We're way behind, And we've got to keep going- no slacking off. If we really work at saving, We'll catch up, And the day'll come when we'll surpass them alJ.25 Although nationalism fired up local intermediaries, bureaucratic elites were less confident that explanations of the national economy would inspire ordinary villagers to save. The Home Ministry's Inoue Tomoichi preferred promotional efforts based on 'communalism among the people' (shi5min kyi5di5shugi). 26 By this, he meant encouragement by local 'savings associations', which officials ordered to be established nationwide. Some 1,262,000 Japanese belonged to such associations by 1914. The rapid expansion of savings associations, more than any other factor, accounts for the surge in postal saving among lower-income Japanese following the Russo-Japanese War. 27 Savings association members were required to tender regular deposits to the association representative, who deposited the money in the member's individual account. However, members' contributions sometimes remained within the community, placed either in mutual assistance pools or in the general village fund. The savings association made thrift an act that advanced the good of the community. Hamlets vied with each other for the honour of collectively saving the most, and they often received official commendations. Moreover, members who did not regularly save faced the wrath of local notables and neighbours, not the distant state. 28 In short, the state had established an effective mechanism that motivated people to save more and consume less than they would have on their own. Inducements to save for the community and for the nation necessarily co-existed.

'DILIGENCE AND THRIFT: IT'S FOR MY OWN GOOD AND THE GOOD OF THE NATION'

Japan's economic boom during First World War relieved pressures to reduce consumption in order to save for national needs. Soaring incomes meant that household savings rose, tax revenues increased, and it became easier to retire foreign debt. However, when a post-war recession set in during 1920, the government again launched drives to mobilise savings and preach frugality. Led by the Home Ministry, the bureaucracy initially revived the late-Meiji-era messages of economic nationalism and austerity. In 1919, the Campaign to Foster National Strength (Minryoku kan 'yo undO) attempted to cultivate in the people a 'sound sense of the State' while demanding a 'spirit of sacrifice' for the good of the national economy. 29 In 1922, the Home Ministry campaigned for 'restraint in consumption'. Officials attributed post-war inflation and the nation's trade deficits to the people's newly acquired habits of 'luxury and self-indulgence'. While the Japanese remained big spenders, charged the bureaucrats, Western nations were

104 Sheldon Garon fostering their strength for the 'coming peacetime economic war' .30 As officials soon discovered, such nationalistic and anti-consumption propaganda played poorly among urban Japanese who avidly partook of the new consumer culture in department stores, the cinema and media. Over the course of the 1920s, however, bureaucrats found themselves adapting messages of economic nationalism to urban, as well as rural, audiences. In addition, Japanese officials were influenced by new models of savings campaigns that had appeared in the West during First World War. Although the bureaucrats surveyed savings campaigns in several of the warring nations, they were most taken with the National (War) Savings Movement launched in Britain in 1916. This is ironic, because in the past the British state had generally promoted thrift not in terms of the national interest, but as an individual virtue and a source of social stability. But British thinking leapfrogged Japanese economic nationalism in the course of First World War. British officials now looked upon the nation's small savings as indispensable to financing the war effort. They further regarded the act of saving as the patriotic duty of all citizens - on a par with military service. 31 Even after the war ended in 1918, the National Savings organisation continued in peacetime for the purposes of raising national finance for economic recovery and cultivating 'wise spending' in the people. 32 For the first time, also, the British and other Western governments turned to techniques of mass propaganda to encourage saving - including posters and advertisements. In 1924, the Japanese government launched the Campaign to Encourage Diligence and Thrift, self-consciously emulating the British National Savings Movement structure - from a central campaign committee, down to local committees and a women's auxiliary body. Besides relying extensively on the print media, the campaign distributed a series of evocative savings campaign posters, which in their modernism appear targeted at the urban populace. Several posters vividly appealed to economic nationalism. One exhorted Japanese to save more by means of a bar graph that portrayed Japan dead last in total national wealth vis-a-vis the western powers (see Figure 7.1). Other posters depicted Japan's rising trade deficits and foreign debt, suggesting that more saving and less consumption would reduce both. 33 Economic nationalism was further reshaped by the inter-war contest between austerity campaigns and the proponents of greater consumption. The latter camp included several women's leaders, notably Hani Motoko, the liberal editor of the housewives' magazine Fujin no tomo (Lady's Companion). Other prominent critics advocated 'cultured living' (bunka seikatsu), by which they meant an enhanced consumer life. In the early 1920s, such publicists ridiculed the Home Ministry's old-fashioned moral suasion drives which exhorted Japanese to individual sacrifice in the name of national strength. To truly augment national strength, they insisted, Japan needed to improve consumption levels for its entire people. 34 By the mid-1920s, the proponents of improved consumption found common ground with the forces of economic nationalism. Increasingly, women's groups and other champions of 'daily life improvement' participated in bureaucratic savings campaigns over the next several decades, in war and peace. These

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Figure 7.1 'Let's All Work Together: Diligence and Thrift Is Number One!', 1925. Source: Naimusho shakaikyoku shakaibu, Kinken shorei undo gaikyo, Tokyo: Shakaikyoku shakaibu, 1927.

groups were not necessarily led by single-minded nationalists, and they did succeed in persuading state officials to appeal to people's self-interest to save. A poster in 1925 summed up the inter-war consensus: 'Diligence and Thrift: It's for My Own Good and the Good of the Nation' (Figure 7.2). Amid the slow economic growth of the 1920s, advocates of material betterment also came to recognise the limits to expanding consumption. Instead many began to emphasise the need to 'rationalise' consumption - that is, to encourage people to avoid 'wasteful' expenditures and thereby increase household monies for both saving and some additional consumption. Both Hani Motoko and the leading housewives' magazine, Shufu no tomo (Housewife's Friend), aggressively promoted

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Figure 7.2 'Diligence and Thrift: It's for My Own Good and the Good of the Nation', 1925. Source: NaimushO shakaikyoku shakaibu, Kinken shOrei undo gaikyo, Tokyo: Shakaikyoku shakaibu, 1927.

household account books to teach women how to manage consumption and boost saving. In late 1929, aiming to deflate the economy to expand the nation's exports and return to the gold standard, the new government of Hamaguchi Osachi mounted a pervasive Campaign for Retrenchment in the Private and Public Economies. Many women's groups, conservative and progressive, assisted the campaign in promoting saving and economising among the populace. 35 Nevertheless, the state occasionally sponsored campaigns in which the 'good of the nation' openly conflicted with the interests of households. In 1930-1, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry launched a drive to convince people to buy Japanese products (kokusan aiyi5 undo), while discouraging the consumption of imports. Although some women's groups participated in this campaign, women

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were generally unenthusiastic. The nation's housewives embraced messages that encouraged saving and wise spending, but they did not appreciate exhortations to buy Japanese goods that were often more expensive and of lower quality than imports. Nor did leading women's organisations favour the government's higher tariffs, which raised the prices of imported commodities. 36 Within the government itself, some agencies worried about sending mixed messages. The Ministry of Education's Social Education Bureau, for instance, was charged with instructing youth and women in methods of 'scientific' and 'rational' consumption so as to 'improve daily life'. As the bureau chief publicly acknowledged, it would be 'overly rigid to tell the people that they must always buy Japanese goods. Some foreign goods are much cheaper and more durable'. To press the buy-Japanese campaign too rigidly, he warned, would expose the 'contradictions' with other campaigns designed to promote economising and saving. In such cases, economic nationalism had its limits. 37

THE WARTIME SAVINGS CAMPAIGN

As in the other belligerent nations, economic nationalism in Japan reached its extreme during Second World War. In the end, the demands of the nation-state led the Japanese people to sacrifice their consumer interests so severely that they saved at the expense of food, clothing and shelter. From 1938 to 1945, the government conducted ongoing 'national savings' campaigns. 38 The nation's capacity to sacrifice and save was touted as Japan's secret weapon. If the regime could persuade the entire nation to save large portions of income, it would be able to contain wartime inflation and channel savings to war finance through the Bank of Japan and the Ministry of Finance's Deposit Bureau. Indeed, no other belligerent succeeded in extracting as high a level of savings from its people. By 1944, Japanese households were saving approximately 40 per cent of disposal income. 39 Nationalism, of course, played an enormous role in the appeals to save. The earliest campaigns in 1938 were appropriately named the 'National Spiritual Mobilisation Savings Patriotism Week' and 'Economic Warfare Week'. Those who saved were patriots, serving both the emperor and the nation as a collective entity (see Figure 7.3), whereas those who consumed at pre-war levels were abetting the Allies. 'Luxury is the Enemy' (zeitaku wa teki da) became one of the government's most compelling slogans. Nevertheless, wartime authorities remained dubious that patriotism alone would motivate the masses to save huge amounts. Taking no chances, they introduced an additional element of compulsion. Savings associations were extended to nearly every neighbourhood, workplace and school. As the costs of war soared, association members were expected to save larger and larger portions of income. If they did not, they faced the wrath of neighbours, and associations were known to cut off the wartime rations of those who saved too little. At the same time and more surprisingly, as in the inter-war era, the state continued to appeal to self-interest, besides nationalism. Fearing that households

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Figure 7.3 'Savings Patriotism', 1941. Note the appeal to workers, whom officials often accused of unpatriotically squandering their wages. Source: Poster XD-B 62, Communications Museum, Tokyo.

would refuse to contribute to national savings by hoarding or spending, officials took pains to make saving attractive. The government reminded the people that savings remained theirs, unlike taxes. Among the various incentives offered to encourage thrift, nearly all interest gains on money saved through savings associations became tax-exempt. As late as 1944, Postal Savings Bureau advertising urged Japanese to buy annuities not only to boost national savings, but also to prepare for old age or the educational expenses of their children. While generally embracing saving as a patriotic act, non-governmental groups and magazines went further than the state to communicate the positive benefits of war saving for individuals and families. Influential women's leaders urged followers to save in order to 'improve' and 'rationalise' daily life. The leading

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housewives' magazine, Shufu no tomo, presented the savings campaign as an opportunity for the clever housewife to 'make money'. In a series of articles from 1938 to 1940, the magazine diverged considerably from the state's exhortations to sacrifice individual interests for the sake of the nation. Whereas the government desired most people to finance the war by saving at low interest in the postal savings system, one businessman counselled readers to seek the highest rate of return. 'Postal savings is the primary school of saving', he wrote derisively. 40 As the war with China raged in 1939, another investment columnist regularly advised housewives to speculate in real estate and/or engage in 'Failure-free Ways of Making Money on Stocks' .41 Once Japan embarked upon war with the Western powers in December 1941, however, nationalism soon supplanted self-interest as the primary appeal to save. Few could any longer argue that the mounting extraction of household savings resulted in the improvement of people's lives. Japanese were told to sacrifice consumption and save nearly everything to finance the last-ditch 'decisive battle' (kessen). The campaigns were apparently successful in raising popular consciousness of personal saving as a national imperative. In one survey of 'people's savings psychology', an impressive 64 per cent of respondents could enumerate the national savings target for 1944. 42 Although officials had feared the masses would tum their backs on the nation-state in favour of rampant hoarding or selfcentred consumption, the Japanese people proved willing to give the regime more and more of their savings. Despite raising the annual national savings target more than four-fold between 1941 and 1945, the wartime state managed to exceed its goals each time until the bitter end. In most people's minds, national saving had become tantamount to national survival.

NATIONAL SAVING AND 'NATIONAL SALVATION' By most accounts, Japan's crushing defeat in 1945 - followed by the Allied Occupation -undermined the foundations of pre-surrender 'ultra-nationalism'. In the words of John Dower, 'the state had become discredited and sorely wounded well before Japan surrendered, and popular receptiveness to a new start and new society became a major wartime legacy on which post-war change could be built' .43 Indeed, the immediate post-war years witnessed an outpouring of popular criticism directed against the elites and ideologies that had led the country to war. Left-wing thought and movements rose up to challenge conservative governments, and a proliferation of 'decadent' literature confronted the old orthodoxy. Yet let us be clear about which aspects of the state and nationalism became discredited, and which persisted into the post-war era. The Japanese public may have repudiated the military, but few rejected the state itself as the guardian of the nation's collective interests. In Japan's darkest hour, economic nationalism not only continued, but came to define the post-war national mission. Although the wartime savings campaigns had sapped their physical strength and the ensuing inflation had reduced their life savings to very little, most Japanese accepted the

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need for post-war savings campaigns to achieve national recovery and growth. In November 1946, just one year after defeat, the Ministry of Finance and Bank of Japan launched a 3-year drive, which they christened the National Salvation Savings Campaign (kyiikoku chochiku undo). Not even in war had officials so explicitly linked saving to 'national salvation'. Indeed, Ministry of Finance officials unabashedly maintained the drumbeat of economic nationalism. Vice-Minister Ikeda Hayato starkly summed up the government's case in a savings-promotion lecture in 1947. Speaking in Hiroshima, a city that had suffered unparallelled destruction from the last bout of national mobilisation, the future prime minister declared that only if the people submitted to 'lives of austerity' would 'our country exist in the future'. Ikeda thereupon mapped out the relationship between household saving and export-led development which Japanese would hear repeated over the next several decades: for the eighty million Japanese people to live and, in the future, live in a splendid cultural nation ... , the one and only path lies in the promotion of trade .... We will therefore work for the increased export of manufactured goods .... We will import as many raw materials as possible and then make as much money as we can processing them. Drawing on this income, we will import food and other commodities in short supply at home. Ikeda acknowledged the difficulties Japanese manufacturers faced in competing in world markets, given the enormous wartime losses suffered from aerial bombardment and the shipping of existing plant as reparations to Asian and Pacific nations. The one solution to this bind, he concluded, was for the people to save all of their unspent income, which the government and banks would then invest in industry. 44 At times it seemed as if the post-war state was simply waging the war by other means. As Finance Minister Kurusu Takeo put it in 1947, the problem with the wartime savings campaigns was their ends, not the means. Whereas savings had been spent unproductively on the military, current deposits would be invested in the national economy. 'The importance of accumulating capital has not in the least changed from wartime to the present', he concluded. 45 In a confidential memorandum in 1946, Finance Ministry officials proposed that national savings drives continue, albeit with new slogans. No longer would the campaigns exhort people to save 'for victory' or to 'wage war till we win'. Now saving would be encouraged on behalf of 'economic recovery' and 'revival of the realm' .46 Campaign posters appealed to Japanese housewives with slogans such as 'A Splendid Japan Comes from Everyone's Efforts'. The National Salvation campaigns were followed by others with equally nationalistic names, such as the drives to achieve 'economic independence' (1950-2). 'Now more than ever, save for the sake ofthe country's position', entreated one campaign in 1955. 47 The Japanese were hardly unique in maintaining economic nationalism and austerity drives well into the post-war era. Ministry of Finance pronouncements referred repeatedly to Soviet, French, Belgian and Dutch campaigns to subdue inflation and

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amass savings for reconstruction. Once again, Japanese officials were most inspired by Britain, where as the result of post-war savings campaigns 'the money and material saved by leading lives of austerity can be applied, in full, to economic recovery'. 48 Supported by the Conservative and Labour parties alike, the British government retained the elaborate wartime structure of the 'National Savings Movement' until 1978. In 1945, the public was urged to 'Keep on Saving' for the post-war needs of reconstruction, industrial development and Cold War defence. British officials -much like their Japanese counterparts - explained that, as an 'island nation', the United Kingdom depended on increasing exports and on financing its export industries through the savings of the people. 'Export and Thrive', instructed British savings campaign posters in the early post-war years (see Figure 7.4). 49 Let us return to the Japanese story. We would have expected such nationalism from the bureaucrats. More surprising was the support for the National Salvation campaigns and subsequent savings drives from non-governmental groups on the left or in the 'progressive' camp. Although the Communist Party opposed the post-war

Figure 7.4 British Poster: 'Export and Thrive, Save for Prosperity', 1946. Source: 'National Savings Committee: Posters,' NSC 5/199, Public Record Office, London.

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government's savings campaigns, the early post-war leadership of the Japan Socialist Party embraced the cause of austerity and savings-promotion. The cabinet of Katayama Tetsu, Japan's first socialist prime minister, aggressively continued the National Salvation Savings campaigns. Katayama himself observed that 'the beautiful customs of diligence, thrift and saving have long been fostered as a part of our national character' .50 To Japanese social democrats, savings campaigns offered a means of fighting inflation and investing the savings of rich and poor alike in the nation's recovery, in industrial expansion and in full employment. In Europe, as well, left-wing ruling parties- from British Labour to Eastern European Communistsran sweeping national savings campaigns. Saving for the nation meant elevating the social good over private consumption, or what one Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain called 'that easy-going get-rich-quick attitude to life' .51 Like Japanese social democrats, leading women's groups rushed to encourage saving as a national mission. As before 1945, such organisations and housewives' magazines spoke of how thrift advanced both households and the status of the housewife herself, yet they did not neglect nationalist arguments, as well. At the grass roots, women continued to participate in the officially-supported savings associations, which generally based themselves on the local women's associations (fujinkai). Even the wartime name, 'national savings association', persisted until 1963. These women's associations coalesced into the National Federation of Regional Women's Organisations (Zen chifuren). Claiming nearly 8 million members by the early 1960s, the federation provided the footsoldiers in the savings campaigns of the next several decades. 52 Although Zen chifuren was known for its conservatism and nationalism, influential progressive women's leaders promoted economic nationalism no less enthusiastically. Led by Oku Mumeo, a pre-war feminist with socialist leanings, the Housewives' Association (Shufuren) regularly participated in official savings campaigns to 'bring prosperity to our lives and to the nation's economy' .53 In the 1950s, Oku called on her members to 'work hard to create national power'. If housewives did not save and 'thoroughly eliminate waste in daily life', Japan would not be able to overcome its economic dependence on the United States and achieve neutrality in the Cold War. 54 Echoing the austerity rhetoric of wartime, Oku urged: 'In place of consumption, strive for a life filled with imagination and resourcefulness. Unless the clever housewife maintains her household, this country will not rise' .55 Whether motivated by self-interest or nationalism or both, the Japanese people responded to savings drives as their leaders had hoped. Savings began to rise in the late 1940s, and by the early 1950s they were generating levels of capital that Japan could not have obtained easily or cheaply from abroad. The Ministry of Finance not only continued to manage the vast pool of postal savings, but expanded it into the Fiscal Investment and Loan Plan in 1953. Investing in strategic industries, this plan 'became the single most important financial instrument for Japan's economic development', judges Chalmers Johnson. 56 To co-ordinate post-war savings campaigns on a permanent basis, the state established the Central Council for Savings Promotion in 1952. The organisation exists to this day. Besides working through

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the media and civic groups, the Central Council aggressively encouraged thrift by means of 'children's banks' in the nation's schools.

THRIFT AS NATIONAL CHARACTER

Japan became more prosperous in the late 1950s, and consumption levels steadily rose. However, this did not mean the death of economic nationalism. Not until the late 1960s did Japan enjoy sustained international trade surpluses. In 1957, an acute balance of payments deficit prompted the government to launch a sweeping campaign to 'Promote Exports and Conserve Foreign Exchange'. The populace was harangued to save in order to finance export industries and to cut back on purchases of foreign goods. Again in the early 1960s, campaigns urged Japanese to 'economise' because their 'over-consumption' allegedly resulted in the excess in imports (see Figure 7.5). The state further stoked popular anxieties over national vulnerability in the wake of Japan's first 'Oil Shock' in 1973--4. As the prices of imported oil and most other commodities soared, Japanese goods

Figure 7.5 'The Economy as Linked to the Kitchen', 1962. A pamphlet for housewives suggests that household savings benefit the nation primarily by financing industrial production (centre). Although some production results in 'individual consumption' (lower right), a significant portion is shipped abroad to remedy Japan's trade deficit. The sinister Western tycoon (upper left) personifies foreign countries, which send 2 trillion yen in goods to Japan, whereas Japanese exports total only 1.5 trillion yen. Source: Chochiku zokyo chilo iinkai, Yasashii keizai no hanashi, Tokyo: Chochiku zokyo chilo iinkai, 1962, in Chochiku kankei panfuretto, vol. 1, Okurasho bunko, Ministry of Finance, Japan.

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became dear in world markets, and the 'economic miracle' seemed at an end. The government and private groups thereupon mounted new campaigns aimed at getting people to save in order to fight inflation. The people responded by saving at their highest levels in the post-war era (23 per cent of disposable income), and the export-driven economy quickly recovered. 57 But what of the 1980s and 1990s? Unquestionably, economic nationalism is on the wane as a means of motivating Japanese to save. People today are far more likely to save because of personal and family needs, particularly those related to old age. Any government that mounted a 'national salvation' savings campaign would be ridiculed without mercy. If anything, since the financial crisis of 1997 the government has encouraged the nation to consume its way out of recession. 58 Nonetheless, economic nationalism continues to influence the savings habits of the Japanese people, albeit in subtler forms. Decades of nationalistic savings campaigns in the schools, media and neighbourhoods have left their mark. The government may currently promote consumption, but it does so tepidly. At the same time, officials communicate more familiar messages that value thrift for its contributions to the national economy. Ample savings permit families to assist the country's rapidly ageing population in lieu of a costlier welfare state. These savings also temper the full impact of the Japanese government's record budget deficits in recent years. 59 Moreover, since the 1970s, officials and the media have often presented thrift as a distinctive Japanese trait- an essential part of national identity that may be discarded at the country's peril. In opinion surveys done every 4 years by postal savings authorities, a majority of respondents have consistently agreed with the statement, 'The Japanese are said to be a frugal people who love saving, and that's an admirable thing' .60 Thrift also functions as a defence mechanism for Japanese to define themselves in contrast to the otherwise successful, but wildly extravagant, Americans. 61 Most Japanese continue to believe that their savings benefit the nation in a hostile world. Such attitudes no doubt owe something to pre-war and earlier post-war savings campaigns, which hammered home Japan's unfavourable trade balances and the imperative to export more. As late as 1987, according to one poll, fully 30 per cent of respondents thought that Japan still suffered trade deficits vis-a-vis the United States -when in fact Japan had piled up enormous surpluses. 62 And in the latest postal savings opinion survey cited above, a significant minority (29 per cent) in 1997 stated their agreement with the wartime slogan, 'Luxury is the Enemy' (zeitaku wa teki da). To most Westerners, such sentiments appear inscrutable or the products of an unchanging Oriental mind. This chapter analyses instead how modem economic nationalism has been formed and reshaped over the past 130 years. Although we tend to interpret Japanese nationalism as a homegrown response to the outside world, foreign influences in fact interacted with indigenous developments in its formation. European economic nationalism profoundly influenced Japanese policy and popular thinking from the late nineteenth-century until the 1950s. And, as it did, the Japanese state and outside groups developed the persuasive savings-promotion efforts that continue to shape economic thought and behaviour to this day.

8

War, commemoration and national identity in modern Japan,1868-1975 Beatrice Trefalt

In recent work on Japanese history, much emphasis has been placed on the continuities linking pre-war, wartime and post-war Japan. It is a well-established idea that August 1945 does not indicate a definitive break in politics or social structure, even if two of the major legal documents that support the state structure, the constitution and the Civil Code, were radically changed under the Allied Occupation which ensued. Nor were the Occupation's attempts to change what it saw as a 'culture of militarism' always successful. Despite the numerous continuities between pre-1945 and post-1945 Japan, however, it cannot be denied that, in a symbolic sense, the defeat of August 1945 was indeed a watershed, at least in retrospect. And this is particularly the case where ideas about the 'nation' are concerned- the nation in the sense of Benedict Anderson's 'imagined community' .1 Negotiations over the interpretation of the war, and the interpretation of the pre-1945 nation, continue to shape interpretations of Japan as a state and the identity of its citizens. While the war is certainly not the only issue prompting such a process of negotiation and re-interpretation, it is nevertheless an important one, as indicated by the continuing debates over war-related issues in education, for example, or the contents of museums. 2 This chapter explores the place of war in constructions of national identity in Japan, with emphasis on the ways in which Second World War has been remembered in the latter half of the twentiethcentury, and with particular focus on issues of commemoration. The 'imagined community' is a prerequisite of warfare- without a sense of nation, the sacrifice of the lives of citizens, both demanded by modem war, and wholly unavoidable in it, could not be justified. The 'imagination' that provides the framework of the community as a nation is the same imagination that forces citizens, with more or less genuine enthusiasm, to respond to demands that the nation be defended. And it is certainly also an intrinsic part of the process of modern wars that, when the war is finished, be it in victory or defeat, the nation symbolically acknowledges the sacrifice made by those who responded to those demands. The nation builds memorials, and raises flags regularly, perhaps at yearly intervals, to the memory of those who died defending the community of their imagination. The public recognition and

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celebration of fallen soldiers thus becomes, as Anderson and others have shown, an integral part of the maintenance of the idea of the imagined community. 3 Nation and the commemoration of war are, in other words, inextricably linked. Here, the links between war, commemoration and national identity in Japan are explored, but with particular reference to contests over the commemoration of Japan's fallen soldiers. The public image of fallen soldiers in Japan is ambiguous, it is argued, because of pragmatic constraints surrounding commemoration, constraints imposed and developed in conjunction with the negotiation of an acceptable version of the war and of the defeat in the years that followed. The ambiguity of the fallen soldier has important implications for the negotiation of the memory of the war, and its place in national identity. Arguments featuring in this process of negotiation are strongly polarised and are characterised by much bitterness and hostility, whether related to issues of compensation to non-Japanese victims of the war, the contents of secondaryschool textbooks, or the debates surrounding demands for apologies for Japan's war-time conduct. But such arguments have not appeared overnight, nor have they remained unchanged since the defeat; nor have memories of the war or their place in national identity developed in a linear and predictable pattern. This chapter charts the history of war commemoration in Japan from the Meiji Restoration onwards, with the aim of placing the ambiguity surrounding 'fallen soldiers' in a historical context. Ultimately, it seeks to trace the development of interpretations of Second World War in post-war Japan. It considers, first, the establishment of commemorative monuments to fallen soldiers, and particularly the Yasukuni Shrine, in the period between 1868 and 1945. It then explores the significance of Occupation reforms in shaping the processes of commemoration in the period between 1945 and 1952, and the legacies left by these reforms, showing that the place of fallen soldiers in public memory and public commemoration is the subject of complex and as yet unresolved negotiations. Finally, this chapter explores the place of the fallen soldier in the formative period for collective memories of the Second World War, that is, between the defeat in 1945 and the coming-of-age of the true post-war generation, in the early 1970s. In order to do so, it concentrates on a particularly intriguing set of 'fallen soldiers'. Believed to be dead and recorded as such by the Japanese government, these soldiers had, in fact, been hiding for years in the jungles surrounding former battlefields, particularly in the South-West Pacific area. They were either unwilling to believe that the war had ended, or unaware of its end and convinced that they would be killed if found, either by their own army or that of the enemy. The very unexpected return of these living 'fallen soldiers' took place at regular intervals until 1960, then, after a long period of silence, again in the early 1970s. The timing of their repatriation, as well as the increasing levels of sensation caused by their return, affords significant insight into the negotiation of the meaning of the war and of national identity in the first 30 years following Japan's defeat. 4

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COMMEMORATING THE WAR DEAD, 1868-1945 There has been no dearth of writing, in recent years, on national commemoration and especially on war monuments and their significance. In particular, the significance of monuments to the Great War of 1914--18 in the European, Australian and New Zealand cultural landscapes has been the subject of much attention. 5 While scholars such as Jay Winter have emphasised the significance of war memorials as sites of bereavement and mourning, others have stressed the importance of the broader national and cultural symbolism inherent in the project of war commemoration, of war monuments as national projects, and of the appropriation of fallen soldiers into national discourses. 6 This is not to deny that commemoration also signifies loss, mourning and sadness, both privately and in public discourses, and that a bereaved person or family's understanding of a monument, or of the rituals that surround it, might have little to do with the maintenance of patriarchy or the promotion of nationalism. However, the importance of public recognition of a loved one's death, which, as we will see, is at the centre of the debates surrounding commemoration in Japan, supports the idea that there is much more to commemoration than mourning and the expression of sadness alone. The public recognition of the sacrifice of the 'fallen soldiers' formulates their death as a national one, as much defined by the nation as the venture of war itself had been. And the state, by acknowledging the death of its citizens as soldiers, performs a ritual through which it reinforces the threads that bind the 'imagined community' of the nation. In other words, the project of commemoration at a public and national level provides a space for the mourning of citizens of the nation, rather than of private individuals, and as such it is intimately tied in with the definition and the reinforcement of ideas of nation and national identity. In this sense, it is important to distinguish private or personal mourning from public mourning - the difficulties in providing a space for public mourning of the war dead in Japan do not mean that people have failed to mourn and commemorate their lost ones at all. The establishment and development of the Yasukuni Shrine in Japan serves well to illustrate the ties between commemoration and nation. Yasukuni was conceived of and designated as the resting-place of martyrs for the nation in the vigorous nation-building decades following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, decades which, as Tessa Morris-Suzuki has argued, defined not only Japan's national boundaries, but also its national character. 7 In fact, the first national commemoration of people killed in war took place before the Meiji Restoration, in 1862, some years after the arrival of US Commodore Matthew Perry alerted various sections of Japanese society to the necessity of unifying the nation in the face of outside threat. This initial service for the war dead, which took place in Kyoto on 24 December 1862, commemorated members of the sonno ji5i (revere the emperor, expel the barbarians) faction who had died at the hands of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The names of the dead were placed on a roll of honour, in order, no doubt, to appease anti-government factions. A year later, the first permanent shrine for 'national martyrs' was built in Kyoto, followed by other domains, Choshu in particular, where the authorities erected such shrines throughout their

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territories. When the Tokyo Shrine to the War Dead, which was to become Yasukuni Shrine a few years later, was erected in 1869, it was dedicated to all those who had died for the nation since 1853, the year of Perry's arrival, as 'kokuji junnansha' (martyrs for the nation). 8 After the Meiji Restoration, the number of shrines celebrating the loyalty of those who had fallen for emperor and nation grew exponentially. The leaders of the new Meiji government consciously aimed to foster a sense of nationhood and national identity revolving around the emperor. The shrines were part of the new symbolism they adopted, and as such were significant stops in the itinerary of the emperor's tours of Japan in the 1870s and 1880s. They were also publicly funded, and from 1872 onwards were designated as 'beppaku kanpeisha' (extraordinary government shrines), a label which gave them the second-highest ranking of importance, just under Ise Shrine. It was in 1879, 10 years after it was first built, that the shrine commemorating national martyrs in Tokyo was given the name of Yasukuni ('Peaceful Country'). In that year, it was also placed under the direct control of the Ministries of the Army and the Navy. 9 The development of the Yasukuni Shrine as a central commemorative instrument for the new Japanese nation closely followed the involvement of Japan in wars against China in 1894-5, and Russia in 1904-5. Not only were soldiers who died in the service of the nation during those wars enshrined at Yasukuni, but the shrine also became central to the celebration of Japan's victories and to the dissemination of information about the progress of the wars. During the Sino-Japanese War, for example, prayers for the victory of the Japanese forces were held on the twentieth of each month, while the museum that was attached to the shrine in 1882 had on display guns, uniforms and other paraphernalia of the Japanese army, as well as materials taken from the Chinese army. 10 Similar rituals and displays took place during the Russo-Japanese War. The relevance of commemoration for the creation or strengthening of ties within the imagined community of the nation is also exemplified by the erection in Taiwan, in 1900, of a government shrine to the war dead at which the people of Taiwan were expected to pay their respects. 11 When Japanese aggression on the continent and public jingoism at home again intensified in the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s, Yasukuni took on increasing significance in the daily life and the consciousness of the public. In 1932, for example, the day of the Yasukuni festival was declared a national holiday, and attendance at the shrine was officially encouraged for schoolchildren and their teachers. 12 In the same year, Fujo shinbun (Women's and Girls' Newspaper) reported that the empress, who had already been setting an example by donating artificial limbs and eyes to the army and the navy, sending parcels to soldiers in Manchuria, and visiting injured soldiers in hospitals, had also personally visited the Yasukuni Shrine. 13 The resting-place of those who died fighting for the nation symbolised ideals of sacrifice and loyalty, ideals which were reinforced for Japanese subjects with each visit. But such ideals were also strongly linked to discourses of national identity.' 4 Soldiers in general were meant to embody the essence of Japanese identity and pride, and those who had died in the service of the nation had died

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supposedly protecting what was true and good and represented by the nation a universal discourse on the war dead in any country. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, both propaganda and education were increasingly informed by mythical interpretations of the origins of the Japanese nation, and by stress on the spiritual values declared to be inherent in the Japanese identity. 15 These lofty ideals translated into daily exhortations to willing sacrifice and loyalty to the nation, as in any other country engaged in a war of these proportions. Such discourses were disseminated and encouraged through the Yasukuni Shrine as well- the Japanese nation was held to be preordained to win, due to its mystic origins, and so soldiers were given 'positive incentives for death' by being told during their military training that 'they would become gods of the fatherland and would be worshiped in the Yasukuni Shrine' .16 The image of Japanese soldiers shouting 'Let's meet at Yasukuni' before throwing themselves into the fray is one of the more enduring images of the Pacific War in Western writing as well. 17 The connection between national identity and the war dead in pre-war Japan was thus a profound one. Crucially, this connection had as a medium the religious institution of shrines to the war dead, symbolised, at the national level, by the Yasukuni Shrine itself. There was, then, a deeply integrated triangular relationship among the nation, the fallen soldiers, and the space of commemoration provided by the shrine, or, in other words, among nation, religion and fallen soldiers. Although this was, as we have seen, a relatively recent phenomenon in a national sense, in the 80-odd years of its existence it had nevertheless acquired a considerable degree of legitimacy. And it is the inextricable link among nation, religion and the fallen soldiers that, in the post-war years, would be at the centre of the complex negotiation surrounding commemoration of the war.

OCCUPATION REFORMS AND THEIR LEGACIES Defeat in war shook the very foundations of the Japanese nation, both literally and figuratively. In the early months of the Occupation, the symbols that had supported the pre-war and wartime state, including that of the emperor, had an uncertain lifespan. And if the imperial institution was protected partly for the sake of expediency, the threat of the indictment of the person of the emperor was nevertheless used by the Allied authorities in order to convince reluctant Japanese leaders to accept a ready-made replacement for another central symbol of the nation, the constitution. Others, most recently John Dower, have considered the impact of the defeat on the Japanese nation in detail. 18 Here it is important to note that the Occupation's policies regarding war monuments and the commemoration of fallen soldiers were integral to an unprecedented effort to interpret the recent past for the Japanese population. The Occupation Forces' translation of the meaning of the defeat hinged on the idea that a group of expansionist, fanatic militarists had hijacked the pre-war Japanese government and hoodwinked both the population and the emperor; this emperor had been, at heart, a pacifist, and fundamentally well-disposed towards a democratic, liberal state. The fanatic

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militarists had forced the Japanese nation into a 'valley of darkness' of such irrational scope that defeat had been, and always would have been, inevitable. 19 The initial aims of the Occupation, that is, the demilitarisation and democratisation of Japan, were to be achieved through education and other measures, with the fundamental objective of precluding the possibility of similarly disastrous aggression in the future. 20 A number of early Occupation policies were predicated on this understanding, from the plans for the dismantling of industrial combines to the purge of 'militarists', from land reform to education reform, from censorship to the War Crimes Trials. These early aims, as well as their partial abandonment in the so-called 'reverse course' in 1947-8, have left the Japanese nation with deeply divisive legacies, such as, for example, the continued presence of the same emperor on the throne until1989; the 'pacifist' Article 9 of the constitution; the selectiveness of the issues brought to the War Crimes Trials of 1946-8 (for example, the exclusion from the proceedings of issues relating to Asian 'comfort women', or to the research on biological warfare conducted by the infamous 'Unit 731'). 21 Nor should these legacies be attributed solely to the Occupation forces. In the case of policies regarding the commemoration of fallen soldiers, the initially severe guidelines of the Occupation forces were strongly supported by part of the population and thus survived beyond the relaxation of the policies of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). In other words, SCAP's aims, where commemoration was concerned, resonated with the beliefs of part of the Japanese population. The Occupation's policies regarding war monuments and the commemoration of fallen soldiers reveal a strong consciousness of the power of commemoration, and of the links between the recognition of fallen soldiers and the promotion of the imagined community of the nation. 22 Responsibility for managing war monuments and commemoration fell to the General Headquarters' Civil Information and Education Section (CIE), headed by William K. Bunce. CIE's policies were supported by the idea that 'the commemoration of the war dead in the past had been subverted by militarists and ultranationalists to provide religious sanction for the program of national aggrandizement' .23 Fundamentally, CIE considered the commemoration of fallen soldiers or war dead as legitimate rituals of the state, but commemoration nevertheless had to be controlled and moulded slowly into something that would be harmless. The connection with religion made war commemoration dangerous, particularly as religion itself had formerly been controlled by the state. Therefore, a two-sided approach was necessary - the connection between religion and the state had to be severed once and for all, and until that was done, any connection between the commemoration of fallen soldiers and the government had to be discouraged. Two sides of the triangle that linked nation (in its formal representation of the state), religion and fallen soldiers were eliminated, leaving only the link between religion and fallen soldiers. The prohibition by CIE of state participation in rituals of commemoration in the early years of the Occupation seems to be at odds with its recognition of the fundamental legitimacy of state commemoration of the war dead. It must be remembered, however, that in the early months of the Occupation, it was by no

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means a foregone conclusion that the project of the Occupation would be successful, and that the Allied authorities would be able to root out the militarism that had permeated Japanese society until very recently. As a result, as William Woodard has shown, CIE instructions to the Japanese government at the beginning of 1946 were very severe, and prevented any government participation whatsoever in services connected to the war dead. The CIE would thus be able to nip in the bud any possibility of subversion of these rituals for the purpose of resistance to Occupation policies. CIE informed the Japanese government on 16 January 1946 that any governmental sponsorship of, or official connection with, funerals, memorial services and other ceremonies commemorating the war dead, or militarists or ultranationalists (including those who had fought for the wartime state in its armed forces) was prohibited. Nor could any memorial services take place in state-owned buildings or institutions, including schools and town halls. In June 1946 this directive was repeated with more severity, partly because it had not always been obeyed, but also because demands for official and state presence in the commemoration ceremonies had dramatically increased. Such pressure was due to the great influx of remains of fallen soldiers, repatriated together with demobilised soldiers of the Japanese Army from overseas around that time. Repeated directives forbade both the presentation of remains to bereaved families in public ceremonies and official involvement in any aspect of these occasions. 24 CIE's rigorous insistence on the comprehensive avoidance of government sponsorship of memorials to the war dead is explained by the strong conviction among CIE personnel of 'the existence of organised pressure in favour of paying special honours to the war dead, which suggested that certain Japanese were still trying to promote the idea that the military class had made a special contribution to Japan's welfare' .25 The connection between commemoration and 'nationalistic fervour' was, then, consciously recognised within CIE, as was the symbolic power of monuments and statues. According to Woodard, the removal, relocation, or alteration of monuments and statues took place as part of a programme that lasted about a year and a half between 1946 and 1948, in which the Japanese government participated much more willingly than CIE had expected, often removing monuments to which CIE did not actually have an objection. More than 5000 monuments were removed in the process, nearly 900 were relocated, and roughly the same number were given face-lifts. 26 Ultimately, however, as mentioned above, CIE considered that the commemoration of fallen soldiers was a legitimate function of the state. And once its fears regarding the revival of militaristic tendencies had abated, and Occupation policies had shifted in accordance with the so-called 'reverse course', many of the initially harsh policies of CIE regarding commemoration were relaxed. In September 1951, CIE gave notice to the Japanese government that it was lifting its ban on official participation in ceremonies for the war dead and fallen soldiers 'in view of the changed internal situation due to the establishment of democratic institutions and also of the sentiments of many a bereaved family' .27 On 2 May 1952, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Matthew

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Ridgeway, together with American Ambassador Robert D. Murphy, attended a state-sponsored funeral service for the war dead, at which the emperor was also present. 28 Although the severity of Occupation policies regarding official participation in the commemoration of the war dead declined rapidly, such policies were combined with a policy of separation of state and religion, a policy that naturally affected the status of the Yasukuni Shrine, and so is at the basis of post-war controversies over the commemoration of the war dead. The Occupation's Shinto Directive of 15 December 1945 prevented state funding of religion, and gave most shrines the titles of the state-owned land on which they stood, but this did not affect shrines commemorating fallen soldiers immediately, due to CIE's indecision about the true nature of such shrines. If, as some believed, they were inherently militaristic, then they should be destroyed; but if they were legitimate religious institutions, which had merely been subverted and misused by militarists for their own ends, then privatisation according to the Shinto Directive would suffice to make such subversions difficult in the future. The conclusion that was reached at CIE was the latter: shrines commemorating the war dead were legitimate, as long as they were private, and not state-funded, institutions. 29 Yasukuni, and other shrines commemorating war, were removed from the aegis of the state; the separation of church and state had already been encoded in the new constitution. In the initial years of the Occupation, then, two of the links in the triangle of state, commemoration, and religion were severed. The links between state and commemoration were cut with the Occupation's early policy of suppressing state participation in funerals. The links between religion and state were cut with the Shinto Directive and the privatisation of commemorative shrines. The only link remaining was the one that connected commemoration of fallen soldiers and the shrines dedicated to them. As we have seen, the link between the commemoration of fallen soldiers and the state was repaired once the Occupation forces gained confidence in the success of their mission, and so allowed the state to perform rituals acknowledging the deaths of its citizens in war. But by then, it was not only the new constitution that demanded that these rituals be purely secular: by the time General Ridgeway took part in a commemorative ceremony attended by the emperor, the pressure to keep religion out of commemoration was corning more from within than from outside Japan. The threat of agitation on the part of Japanese Buddhist and Christian organisations confirmed, in Bunce's understanding, the wisdom of distancing war commemoration from Shinto. 30 The problem, of course, resided in the religious nature of pre-war and wartime commemoration of those who had died in battle. The families of fallen soldiers regarded the Yasukuni Shrine as the repository of the memory of their loved ones, as many people still do. But this as well as all other commemorative shrines was now a private institution, unfunded by the state. Prime ministers and other politicians could visit such memorials only in a private capacity, not as representatives of the nation. The fallen soldiers themselves had not died at the front as private individuals, but their deaths could now only be remembered at Yasukuni in a

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private capacity. As a result, the Association of Bereaved Families (Zen Nippon izokukai) started lobbying the government either to have Yasukuni's status restored to that of a national monument, or to have an alternative monument erected in which fallen soldiers could be officially commemorated by the nation as a whole. The result, after years of discussion, was the erection of a new memorial at Chidorigafuchi in Tokyo, modelled on a Western-type 'Tomb of the Unknown Soldier', and unveiled on 28 March 1959. 31 This monument, however, failed to satisfy the demands of the Association of Bereaved Families for a number ofreasons. First, where the Yasukuni Shrine performed its commemorative function partly by keeping a record of the names of soldiers who had died in the line of duty, the Chidorigafuchi memorial is much less personal - its symbolism rests on the representation of all the dead through the unidentified remains interred in each of the sections of the hexagonal grave (a section each for Japan proper, Manchuria, China, the Philippines, South-East Asia and the Pacific). Indeed, the parliamentary decision to erect a tomb at Chidorigafuchi, taken on 11 December 1953, was based on the recognition that a proportion of repatriated remains could not be identified and thus could not be returned to families, hence the 'namelessness' of the commemoration at Chidorigafuchi. But Yasukuni's history made it symbolically more powerful, as indicated by the fact that in 1954 there was a strong demand from representatives of the public to have the Chidorigafuchi memorial placed within the grounds of the Yasukuni Shrine. The Bureau of Repatriate and Veteran Welfare, a section of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, ultimately rejected this demand in December 1956, on 'practical and ideological grounds'- because Yasukuni was now a private corporation. 32 The proper way to commemorate Japan's fallen soldiers remains an unresolved issue to this day. Since 1956, the Association of Bereaved Families has lobbied the government to sponsor the regular festivals held at Yasukuni. The strong ties of the Association with the Liberal Democratic Party produced intermittent proposals to have Yasukuni returned to the aegis of the state during the 1950s and 1960s. 33 Each such proposal was contested either by religious organisations, on the grounds that a return ofYasukuni to the state would conflict with the freedom of religious beliefs advocated in the constitution, or by left-wing parties or individuals for whom a state-run Yasukuni Shrine would indicate the return of pre-war and wartime militaristic tendencies. 34 By 1975, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party had to abandon the proposal to have Yasukuni revert to the state, but its redirected reform proposals, which aimed to make official visits to Yasukuni permissible, were greeted with the same outrage, both from within Japan, and from countries such as Korea and China. The Association of Bereaved Families still lobbies the government regarding the status ofYasukuni. The antiYasukuni movement is still strong. The implications of the impossibility of commemorating fallen soldiers officially are enormous. As we have seen, the fallen soldiers are in a commemorative limbo - Yasukuni, which continues for the Association of Bereaved Families, but also other veterans' associations, to perform the function of a commemorative

124 Beatrice Trefalt monument, is not a national monument in the sense that representatives of the nation cannot visit the shrine in an official capacity, and that the shrine cannot be funded publicly. The alternative memorial at Chidorigafuchi does provide a space where some members of the community feel that they can commemorate their dead, as the writer of a letter to the Asahi shinbun makes clear: I am annoyed at the national policy allowing people who have died in battle to be easily made over into gods, and I am irate when I see that this is being used for political purposes. But at the Chidorigafuchi Cemetery for the war dead I am able to bring my hands together respectfully in prayer. 35 But for others, the memorial at Chidorigafuchi fails to commemorate fallen soldiers as appropriately as Yasuk:uni does. Indeed, the writer of another letter to the Asahi proposes that 'religious sectarianism' be transcended by building 'a memorial to the unknown soldier in the Imperial Palace Plaza, a symbol befitting peaceful Japan'. 36 The writer does not refer to the existence of the memorial at Chidorigafuchi, making one wonder whether he is aware of its existence. Indeed, Ishikawa ltsuko prefaces her book on Chidorigafuchi with a poem which alludes to the small place the memorial occupies in the consciousness of the Japanese population: Have you been to Chidorigafuchi? Aah, that place with the boats ... No, not that one. Have you been to Chidorigafuchi? Well, yes I have been to the Bushido Museum... No, that's Ushigafuchi. To tell the truth, I only went there yesterday. It's famous for its cherry trees. Yes, it was February, and thunder was rumbling And under that cold tunnel of cherry trees I met a white-haired old woman, leaning on her cane, staggering along ... 37 As a result of Chidorigafuchi's ambiguous symbolism and of its failure to replace Yasukuni as a widely accepted and uncontroversial space of commemoration for fallen soldiers, it seems to many people that the nation cannot acknowledge those who died in its service during the Second World War. For obvious reasons, this is unsatisfactory to those who lost a member of their family. If the imagined community of the nation were to take part in the mourning of those who died in the service of this same community, some sense could be made of the loss experienced by bereaved families. On the other side, those who oppose the reversion ofYasukuni to the state imagine the community of the nation to be so radically different from its previous incarnation that to celebrate those who died for the wartime nation amounts to a denial of their own, different, national identity. For this side, the imagined community is defined by its mission to promote pacifism, a desire for peace born of the terrible experiences brought about

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by a now despised and scorned nation, a nation which met its end with the defeat in 1945. The symbolic watershed of 1945 is extremely significant, but the continuities remain- bereaved families still mourn their loss, veterans still mourn their comrades, those maimed in the war still suffer. These continuities are, when recognised, shocking and surprising to many of the post-war generation. Kawaichi Koji, for example, who was a child at the time of the defeat, relates his shock at seeing a maimed veteran begging on a street in Osaka in 1985. For Kawaichi, the realisation that other passers-by either failed to notice the veteran, or ignored him pointedly, was almost more shocking than the actual presence of the veteran at alPS The nation's inability to mourn its fallen soldiers obviously has repercussions for the negotiation of national identity. Kato Norihiro sees the nation as having a 'fractured psyche', as Tessa Morris-Suzuki explains, because it can only commemorate the 'pure' victims of the war, those who died as victims of the atom bombs or the fire-bombings, but not the 'impure' deaths of those associated with Japan's aggression, who include not only war criminals but also common soldiers. 39 Nitta Mitsuko has shown that members of veterans' associations feel that although their comrades died for the nation (kuni no tame), the post-war nation does not acknowledge its debt to them. The deaths of their comrades, which could so easily have been their own fate, are called 'private deaths' (shishi), or even worse, 'useless deaths' (muda shi). 4 Cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori, in his controversial manga Sensoron, describes a decadent society, decadent partly because the youth of Japan has forgotten the sacrifices of their grandfathers. Kobayashi echoes Kato's notion of a fractured national psyche when he draws the deep gulf that separates those who lived through the war, and those who were born later, and are not interested in their forbears' experiences.41 For the members of the right-wing Liberal Education League, and for those who belong to the Society for Textbook Reform, the history of 'shame' that is taught to secondary-school students has serious implications for the creation of a national identity. A worried Namikawa Eita points to statistics showing that students overwhelmingly answered 'no' to the question of whether they would defend their country if it were attacked, indicating in his view a dangerous lack of loyalty or affection for the nation. 42 Although the argument is one step removed, the central concern is the same - the remembrance of the war is somehow connected to ideas of national identity. The inability to commemorate fallen soldiers is part and parcel of this inability to remember the war 'correctly' and, in the eyes of participants in the textbook reform movement, has the potential to dissolve the little bit of national identity and pride that Japan has left. Such arguments are, of course, deeply divisive ones, and they are rejected by those who espouse a radically opposed view of national identity, one that is predicated on a complete change in national identity in the post-war period. There are many examples of such explications of the place of the war in national identity, including the well-known views of historians such as Ienaga Saburo. For Ienaga, the experience of the war should serve to promote peace, and the function of his writing, and his battles in the Japanese courts against the Ministry

°

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of Education's control over the content of textbooks, comes from his self-confessed need to 'probe the meaning of the war', to consider the question of 'how contemporary Japanese can prevent a reoccurrence of this kind of disaster', and to 'reach the core of the war and its lessons for the Japanese people' .43 Ienaga is representative of a post-war movement that also considered the significance of the atomic bombings of 6 and 9 August 1945 within the redefinition of ideas of national identity. As Lisa Yoneyama has shown, Oe Kenzaburo, for example, attempted in the 1960s to 'foster a new and self-critical nationalism by securing the historical experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as parts of Japan's collective memory'. But where Ienaga strongly focuses on the suffering imposed on neighbouring countries, the peace movement emerging out of the experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki often excluded the experiences of non-Japanese victims of the war. 44 In any case, the commemoration of those involved in Japan's wartime aggression can hardly fit comfortably within a movement that emphasises the breaks from the past, and the new direction taken by the Japanese nation since the war. YUi Daizaburo, for example, opposes any national and public commemoration of Japan's fallen soldiers on the grounds that if the 'souls of those who died an untimely and violent death' are to be cared for by the state, then all of those who died in the war should be equally commemorated. In YUi's view, the Japanese were not the only ones to die 'an untimely and violent death' during the war, and every visit to Yasukuni supports discrimination against non-Japanese. 45 In that sense, then, the commemoration of fallen Japanese soldiers supports a selfcentred and unreconstructed view of the nation. Those who upheld the wartime nation, whether enthusiastically or not, cannot fit within the discourse of 'Japan as messenger of peace', unless they define the deaths of their comrades as 'useless deaths'. In other words, the deaths of soldiers fighting for the wartime nation could only be useful, in this view, if that nation still existed in a recognisable form, and it is precisely the necessity to make the post-war nation different from its wartime counterpart that is at the heart of the writings of scholars such as Ienaga and YUi. Although such polarised views regarding the place of fallen soldiers in the identity of the nation have their origin in the conditions of the immediate postwar period, it would be rash to assume that their development to the impasse evident in the 1990s, described above, has followed a linear course through successive generations. It was not until the 1970s that a true post-war generation, one that had only known peace and prosperity, reached adulthood, and even then, the experience of the war, or the experience of bereavement in the war, was still prominent in the consciousness of a great part of the Japanese population. If, as we have seen above, veterans complain of insensitivity and lack of interest on the part of younger Japanese, if others feel that Yasukuni is out of bounds and Chidorigafuchi ignored, and if social critics such as Kato talk of a 'fractured psyche' centring around the inability to commemorate fallen soldiers, then it is worthwhile to consider exactly when it was that such a fracture, to borrow Kato's term, occurred.

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A PARTICULAR TYPE OF 'FALLEN SOLDIER': STRAGGLERS, 1950-75

The beginning of an answer to this question can be found by following the return to post-war Japan of some of its 'living war dead'- soldiers who were apparently unaware that the war had ended, and who were found hiding in the jungles of what had been the outer rim of the Japanese empire, particularly in Indonesia, New Guinea, the Philippines, and the Mariana Islands. These 'hold-outs' or 'stragglers' have certainly become encrusted in Western as well as Japanese popular memory and any number of people still vividly remember hearing of the return of the most famous such straggler, former lieutenant Onoda Hiro, from Lubang in the Philippines in 1974. Onoda was, in fact, the penultimate such repatriate in a long line of stragglers extending back to 1950, when such a group of 'hold-outs' was first designated as different from earlier repatriates. The line would end, a few months after Onoda's return, when the last repatriate, Nakamura Teruo, was found in Indonesia, and was repatriated to Taiwan, where he had joined the Japanese Imperial Army in 1944. An analysis of the impact of these soldiers' return to their homeland is enlightening for a number of reasons. First, their ambiguous identity as soldiers, but also as victims of the wartime state and of their own delusions, reveals the complexity of the conceptual negotiations surrounding their integration into the post-war nation. These returnees were undoubtedly soldiers, and until they were found, had been believed to be fallen soldiers. The degree to which they could fit into any discursive framework regarding the war depended very much on the time of their return. Second, the lapse of time, both between the war itself and the return of these soldiers, and between each of the delayed returns, permits an overview of the development of discursive frameworks into which these soldiers could be integrated. As the temporal distance from the war grew, so did the distance between the mentality of the soldier and that of the people who welcomed him back. The characterisation of these soldiers on their return also affords glimpses of changing ideas of national identity, and of the perceived position of the war in that identity. Finally, the notion of these soldiers as 'living war dead' also affords further clarification of the problem of commemoration of the war in the post-war period. Although many other Japanese citizens returned from overseas, particularly the USSR, in the second half of the 1950s, the soldiers who were found in the jungles of the South-West Pacific were defined particularly by their 'wartime' ideology- their refusal to consider the possibility of a Japanese defeat, or their fear of a possible court-martial for desertion, as well as their identity as 'living war dead', or later, 'living fossil', rather than as 'repatriate' (hikiagesha), the term used for those who had come back from China. Stragglers, then, were as ambiguous as fallen soldiers, and for many of the same reasons. As such, they provide a valuable opportunity to explore discourses surrounding fallen soldiers over a period of time. Stragglers returned to Japan in groups ranging from 2 to 20 in 1950, 1951, 1952, 1955, 1956 and 1960. In 1954, Shimada Shoichi, a straggler on the island

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of Lubang in the Philippines, was killed in a shoot-out with local police, and in 1959, further shooting incidents on Lubang provoked searches for the elusive Onoda Hiro and his comrade Kozuka Kinshichi. In 1972, Yokoi ShOichi returned from Guam, and Kozuka Kinshichi was shot and killed by police on Lubang. In the spring of 1974, Onoda was convinced to surrender on Lubang, and in December, Nakamura Teruo was discovered on the island of Morotai in Indonesia. According to Nakamura's wishes he was repatriated directly to Taiwan, the place of his birth. There were obviously individual differences in the situations of the stragglers, their personalities, their hiding-places, their survival skills, their interpretation of the silence of the battlefield, and their manipulation of or by the media on their return. Their own individual stories, however, were not the most important factor influencing reactions in Japan to their reappearance. Much more critical was the timing of their return from the battlefields. The press was greatly interested in the return of the stragglers and produced much material about them. Articles on the stragglers are useful not only because they expose the mind-frame of the reporters and editors who measured the newsworthiness of particular stories, but also because they contain snippets of the reactions of the public to stragglers through letters to the editor, street interviews and other items. The extent to which the stragglers in the 1970s became media sensations is explained, in part, by the changing nature of the written media, which became more analytical and wide-ranging between the 1950s and the early 1970s. A further reason, however, is the very different impact of the later stragglers on a population which was becoming sharply divided between those 'who knew the war', and those of the younger generation who did not. It is hardly surprising to note that the public reactions to stragglers changed enormously in the 30 years over which they returned from the war, a time period in which a post-war generation came of age in peace and in relative prosperity, and in which the nation changed from a battered and impoverished one to a 'miracle' of economic growth. There were, certainly, some constant features in what made the stragglers interesting during all those years: newspapers were always fascinated, for example, with the exotic jungle diets of the stragglers, or their many other feats of survival against the odds. But their significance as soldiers, and the ambiguity of their identity, was negotiated very differently over the years, and went through several distinct shifts. For example, between 1950 and 1952, the last years of the occupation, the returning stragglers were almost universally portrayed in the Japanese press as dangerous, hardly Japanese at all, and hardly even human. Their 'otherness' was constantly emphasised. Stragglers who had made it back from New Guinea in 1950 were referred to as 'Tarzans', indicating admiration at their survival but also a very marked sense of their difference from other Japanese people.46 In 1951, the return from the island of Anatahan of a group of stragglers that had, for 6 out of the 7 years of its isolation, included one woman, several of whose successive 'husbands' had mysteriously died on Anatahan, became for the media an opportunity to explore a fantastic story of wild passion, treachery and murder. 47 The one journalist who ventured into that most famous lair of stragglers, Lubang Island, in 1952, described his heavily protected foray into the jungle in a

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language reminiscent of the hunt for a wild and unpredictable animal. 48 In the same year, a would-be rescuer from Japan initially hailed the stragglers in English rather than Japanese. 49 In the early 1950s, then, it was the exoticity of the stragglers that made them newsworthy. The war was hardly mentioned - these stragglers were not lost soldiers, but wild jungle men. Early attitudes to stragglers were influenced both by the presence of the Occupation forces and the prevailing censorship, and by remnants of the harsh and negative public attitudes towards returned soldiers that had been evident in the early years of the Occupation. These negative attitudes were fostered partly by Occupation propaganda on, for example, the atrocities committed by Japanese troops in the Philippines, but also by the perceived corruption of those soldiers who were looting army stores immediately after the defeat, when the rest of the population was on the verge of starvation, and by the fact that many demobilised and repatriated soldiers were forced by poverty into criminal activities. 5° The initial exoticisation of the stragglers goes further, however, revealing a great degree of unwillingness to embrace these particular repatriates as human beings, let alone Japanese citizens. Indeed, one of a group of stragglers repatriated from Guam in 1951later reminisced about the difficulties he faced in finding employment after his return, recalling that he was rejected more than once as 'a southern loony' (nanpo boke). 51 Over the next few years, however, this diffidence towards the stragglers would transform into a much warmer welcome. Such a transformation echoed the change in attitude towards war commemoration mentioned above, with greater pressure to have the government recognise the importance ofYasukuni as the central commemorative place for fallen soldiers. There are other indications of a change of attitude- from 1953 onwards, as Yoshida Yutaka has shown, popular demands to have war criminals pardoned and released, and to speed up the delayed repatriation process of Japanese citizens held in the USSR and China, increased dramatically. 52 Pressure from the Association of Bereaved Families compelled the Ministry of Health and Welfare's Bureau of Repatriate Welfare to begin lengthy searches for the remains of Japanese soldiers who had died on wartime battlefields. 53 Occasionally such searches for the remains of dead soldiers also turned up stragglers. Three groups of stragglers were found and repatriated in the mid-1950s. In April1955, four soldiers who had been found hiding in New Guinea nearly a year earlier returned home. In February 1956, nine soldiers were repatriated from Morotai in Indonesia, having been found and rounded up by Indonesian soldiers in the last days of 1955. Then, in November 1956, four soldiers who had spent the last 11 years hiding in the highlands of Mindoro in the Philippines were repatriated. But if some stragglers had found themselves labelled as 'southern loonies' only a few years before, attitudes had, by the mid-1950s, changed dramatically. Those who returned in 1955 and 1956 were hailed as 'living spirits of the war dead', and their spirit of patriotism, comradeship, and the courage and stoicism apparently instilled in them by their military training was praised. 54 In the public imagination, the stragglers had become soldiers, and interestingly there was little that was

130 Beatrice Trefalt perceived as problematic or ambiguous about them. That they were viewed very positively, at least by some sections of the population, is clear from the press descriptions of offers of marriage and adoption sent to the stragglers, and of letters of congratulations and praise. 55 The contrast between the reception of the stragglers in the early and the mid-1950s shows an acceptance, in the middle of the decade, of the Japanese soldier as part of the national experience, in contrast to the earlier years when even the language used to address the stragglers directly might be a foreign one. This tum-around in attitudes illuminates an atmosphere in which the 'fracture' of the national psyche had not yet occurred. And the relative comfort with the presence of issues relating to the war in the public sphere is also suggested by the unprecedented boom in the publication of war memoirs in the mid-1950s, a boom which helped to foster such an atmosphere of comfort and, at the same time, profited by it. 56 This was also the time when the Association of Bereaved Families started active negotiations with the newly-born Liberal Democratic Party to have Yasukuni returned to the aegis of the state, as mentioned earlier. And with the plans at that time to have a monument erected at Chidorigafuchi also came letters to newspaper editors proposing that it be dedicated not to 'unknown victims', but to 'martyrs of the nation' .57 This was an atmosphere that was permeated by personal remembrance, present both within the memoirs of ex-soldiers and amongst those who lobbied for state control of the religious commemoration of fallen soldiers. And while the stragglers who returned from the jungles of the South-West Pacific at that time reminded individuals at home, perhaps personally, of the horrors of war, at the public level, they had become reminders of the spirit of self-sacrifice, of patriotism, and of comradeship with which the war was then associated. In the public forum of the written media, at least, there was little challenge to the view that gave the war a tinge of the 'good old days'. But the returning stragglers also allowed bereaved families to learn about or imagine the deaths of those they had lost, either by reading about the stragglers in the newspapers, or by writing to them directly. Significantly, there is no indication that it was considered politically incorrect to ask the stragglers publicly, and tearfully, for information about the whereabouts or the manner of death of a husband or a son, and so to mourn one's fallen relative in the public realm as well. 58 Public attitudes to stragglers in 1959 and 1960, when Lubang was searched again and Guam yielded 2 soldiers, reveal that another shift had occurred in the place of the war in national identity. In January 1959, reports of a shoot-out between stragglers, assumed to be Kozuka Kinshichi and Onoda Hiro, and Lubang police, brought the problem of stragglers to the forefront of Japanese popular consciousness. Demands were made in Japan for the return of the apparently endangered Lubang stragglers, whose repatriation was now constructed as the rescue of compatriots. The campaign mounted by the families of the stragglers to have the government take action on their behalf gained widespread popular support. The degree to which the Lubang stragglers were embraced by the nation might have owed much to the fact that, in the event, they continued to

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remain at large; nevertheless, the popular movement to save them culminated in the adoption of a parliamentary resolution, in February 1959, stressing that it was the Japanese government's duty to do everything in its power to repatriate these 2 Japanese citizens. Not only were the stragglers now embraced as Japanese citizens; they were also consciously identified as fellow human beings, rather than as 'Tarzans' or wild animals, highlighting, again, a shift in attitudes to their identity. In May 1960, two stragglers, Ito Masashi and Minagawa Bunzo, were found on Guam, where they had been hiding since July 1944 when the Allies recovered the island. The press tellingly commented at the time that 'it was entirely contrary to expectation' that the 2 stragglers (who had been given a haircut and new clothes by the American army) proved to be neither 'gorillas' nor other wild beasts. 59 The insistence on the stragglers' 'humanity', as opposed to the 'otherness' that had apparently characterised their counterparts in the early 1950s, went hand-in-hand with the construction of the Lubang stragglers, a year earlier, as fellow citizens. It was commonality that was emphasised now, rather than difference. And because stragglers were now accepted as fellow citizens and fellow humans, there was no public doubt that their integration into Japanese society would be successful, to the extent that hospitalisation, for the Guam stragglers, was not even considered until it became undeniable that 16 years on the edge of survival in the jungle had left them physically and mentally exhausted. 60 Although the stragglers were integrated into the nation in 1959 and 1960 with little difficulty, at least on the symbolic level, there is also evidence that not all sections of the population viewed them in the same way. On the one hand, the returned stragglers were met in their hometowns by enormous crowds, bearing placards addressed to them as soldiers and thanking them for their patriotism, a welcome that was only rarely noted in the press, and that was viewed disparagingly if it was. 61 On the other hand, letters to newspapers provide examples of discourses in which the rescue of stragglers and their integration into the nation were constructed as gestures of goodwill and peace. In such discourses, the stragglers' identity as soldiers was ignored, or rather, their identity as soldiers turned them into victims of the tragedy of the war. Their experiences, therefore, became as 'useless' as the deaths of their comrades- a view that opposed the discourses of the placards held up in the welcoming hometowns, which turned the stragglers' ordeal into an expression of patriotism. If this was the beginning of a 'fracture' in the national psyche which still has repercussions today, then it is particularly noteworthy that the letters to the editor equating the soldiers with victims (and so denying them their status as patriots) came mostly from students, and thus represented a generation with only limited personal experience of the war. In the decade of the 1950s, then, there were distinct shifts in the public image of the stragglers. During the occupation they were seen as misfits, in the middle of the decade as heroes, and finally, by the end of the decade, overwhelmingly as victims. The parallel between attitudes to the stragglers and attitudes towards the commemoration of the war dead is not difficult to find. Domestic support for occupation policies regarding the private status ofYasukuni, present in the early

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1950s as we have seen, had to contend, by the middle of the decade, with increasing demands that Yasukuni be returned to the aegis of the state. By the late 1950s, growing concerns over security (culminating in the US-Japan Security Treaty crisis in 1960) had fostered a pacifist discourse that had redefined national identity. Just as it called attention away from the stragglers' identity as soldiers and transformed them into victims, this pacifist discourse provoked strong reactions against proposals to redirect state support to Yasukuni, and ultimately forced the Liberal Democratic Party to abandon legislative proposals to that effect. The psychological fracture within the Japanese population, which had not been evident in the mid-1950s, was now visible. Reactions to the return of the last stragglers in the 1970s unequivocally attest to the existence of a fully developed 'fracture of the psyche' at the national level. Yokoi, repatriated from Guam in 1972, Onoda, convinced to surrender on Lubang in 1974, and Nakamura, repatriated to Taiwan from Morotai early in 1975, all provoked extremely ambivalent reactions in Japan. The difficulty inherent in embracing them as soldiers was expressed constantly - any spontaneous feelings of admiration for their survival were immediately confused for, and condemned as, feelings of admiration for militarism and as such were quickly and consciously suppressed. 62 It was objectionable, in the public sphere at least, to make these stragglers into heroes. They were to be seen as victims, and their significance as that of messengers, coming out of the past to remind Japan of its mission of peace. 63 In the analyses of what it was that had kept the stragglers in the jungle for so long, many observers found an opportunity to distance themselves from the wartime nation, even if, and perhaps especially if, they had themselves been soldiers. Not a few veterans publicly displayed a sense of pride in saying that they had been 'bad soldiers', meaning that they had remained sceptical of wartime propaganda, and so had resisted full inclusion in the wartime nation at the time. 64 At the public level, the ambiguous significance of these returning soldiers was resolved, albeit unsatisfactorily, by identifying them as credulous victims of the wartime nation. While the return of the stragglers provoked exploration of the significance of soldiers generally, it also very importantly prompted reflection on the nature of the present, and on the identity of the post-war nation. The stragglers, as representative of the wartime nation, became the yardstick of post-war distance from the war. But although the progress Japan had made since the war was recognised, it was also problematic. There was widespread agreement that the direction that the Japanese nation had taken was not the right one- Japan had become a shallow, superficial community, directed by materialist concerns such as leisure and consumerism. If wartime was condemned for its militarism, it was nevertheless recognised as a time when 'people at least believed in something' and had been prepared to be selfless. Such discourses were a thinly-veiled condemnation of the 'younger generation', those who 'didn't know the war', and who were wont, as a result, to refer to the stragglers either as 'crumbly, worn out old men' ,65 or as beings so different from contemporary Japanese that they should not come back at all, but should hide in the jungle until they died. 66

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It was only with the return of the last straggler that Japan's wartime identity as an aggressor had to be publicly confronted- though this confrontation was shortlived. Nakamura Teruo (also known, after his return to Taiwan, as Li Kuang-hwei) had joined the Japanese Imperial Army in Taiwan as a Special Volunteer Soldier (tokubetsu shiganhei). When he was found, he vehemently declined offers of hospitalisation- and hospitality- in Japan. He did, however, continue to fascinate Japanese readers with his insistence that he considered himself a loyal citizen of the Japanese empire, and with his ambiguous responses to questions that attempted to determine whether he had been conscripted by force or had volunteered. 67 Reporting on this particular straggler could be, and was, subverted by those who considered that the discourses of peace and pacifism were meaningless without acknowledgement of the legacies of imperialism and aggression for the countries around Japan. Ultimately and despite these efforts, however, Nakamura disappeared from the news, and from public memory, much faster than the two earlier Japanese stragglers. The place of the war in national identity was evidently not one that could be shared with other nations. This has continued to be a feature of war commemoration, which is seen to be exclusively a Japanese concern, as exemplified by the refusal to include non-Japanese victims in the planned 'War Dead Peace Memorial Hall', now recreated as the 'Showa Hall' .6s The public image of the two stragglers who died 'on the job', so to speak, on Lubang in 1954 and 1972 respectively in shoot-outs with Filipino police, was even more ambiguous than that of the successfully repatriated stragglers. Shimada ShOichi, who died in 1954, disappeared from the news very quickly, as attention focused on the rescue of the two remaining stragglers, Kozuka Kinshichi and Onoda Hiro. Similarly, when Kozuka was killed in 1972, searches for Onoda quickly eclipsed the debates on whether Kozuka's death should be considered a 'death in battle' (senshi). Shimada and Kozuka also disappeared from public memory, prompting author Wakaichi Koji to make Kozuka the subject of a book in an attempt to remind the public of his existence. In Onoda's predominance in the news and in public memory, Wakaichi sees continuities with wartime attitudes Onoda, after all, was a graduate of the famed Nakano school for intelligence officers, whereas Kozuka (and Shimada as well) had been mere privates. 69 While this may indeed be part of the explanation, Shimada and Kozuka's undefined status, either as 'proper' war dead, or at least as interesting repatriates, made difficult their inclusion into existing discursive frameworks, even such ambiguous ones as those surrounding Yokoi and Onoda at the time of their return. In conclusion, public reactions to the return of the stragglers, the living 'fallen soldiers', illuminate the tensions that accompany the presence of the war in concepts of Japanese national identity, and provide a means to trace the development of polarised views of the war in recent years. The return of Japan's sovereignty in 1952 signalled the beginning of a period in which personal experience of the war was integrated into the experience of the nation - the experiences of stragglers resonated not only with those who had been on battlefields, but also with those who had lost someone there. By the beginning of the 1960s, however, the

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straggler was to be integrated into the wider community not as a soldier, but as a citizen, showing the beginning of a fracture in the public understanding of the place of the war in the national experience. The transformation of the straggler into a victim parallels an understanding of the deaths of 'fallen soldiers' as 'useless' rather than as acts of patriotic self-sacrifice for which the nation should be thankful. And by the time the last stragglers returned, this fracture in attitudes was fully established- the returning soldier could only be presented as a victim, even if his demeanour was seen as evidence of a certain dignity that the Japan of the 1970s had lost. Current concerns about the place of the war in national identity, manifested for example in the debates about treatment of the war in school textbooks, or in the immensely popular publications of controversial cartoonist Kobayashi, have as their core argument the idea that the war has not assumed its rightful place in the national identity. The conclusions that are drawn from this are not always logical, nor are they helpful in resolving the issue of how to interpret the war. Kobayashi, for example, argues that there is a Western conspiracy to keep Japan servile. The Society for Textbook Reform bases its arguments on the unreliability of evidence of the wartime state's guilt in enslaving comfort women, and on the part-denial of atrocities committed by the Japanese Army. But it could indeed be argued, as Kat6 Norihiro does, that the impossibility of commemorating the war dead is at the centre of the problem. And if the position of the fallen soldiers in national memory is ambiguous, then so is the position of many Japanese citizens, including those soldiers who did come back, and those families who are still mourning their lost ones. The war in national identity, then, exists in the same kind of limbo as do the 'fallen soldiers' themselves. The acceptance of soldiers as soldiers, as aggressors rather than solely as victims, and indeed as integral parts of both the wartime and the post-war nation, might go some way towards producing a less fractured national identity. Such an acceptance does not have to be seen as a return to militarism or fascism, but it is part of the process of making sense of the whole experience of the war - and, as Kato has argued, the experience of the war outside of Japan as well. 70 If the 'aggressive' past represented by soldiers were recognised and confronted, this might indeed provide better foundations for a commemorative space for all victims of this aggression.

9

English and nationalism in Japan: the role of the intercultural-communication industry Kosaku Yoshino

It has almost become a truism to say that nationalism and globalisation are in

some ways closely inter-related. Many writers on globalisation have pointed out that awareness of cultural differences and of national identity can become even stronger in the process of globalisation. Nonetheless, not many writers, especially those in literary cultural studies, have inquired into social processes whereby particular social groups engage in particular activities which are themselves a response to globalisation and at the same time a stimulus to cultural nationalism. Drawing on the Japanese experience, this chapter looks into a social process that links globalisation and nationalism. Given their multifaceted nature, any sociological discussion of these phenomena should have a focus. In this chapter, I focus on one of the key dimensions of ongoing processes of globalisation - the promotion of the use of English as an international language. Additionally, I focus on a selected aspect of nationalism, inquiring into a process integral to cultural nationalism by which national cultural identity is reinvented, maintained and promoted in contemporary Japanese society. The issue of the English language is becoming noticeably significant in the increasingly globalised world. One of the main characteristics of the contemporary phase of the debate is that it is engaged actively not merely in former British colonies such as Malaysia and India but also in countries like Japan and Germany, where there is a dominant national language and where English has never been a common language among most of the population. Currently, in Japan, there is an ongoing debate about the English language. On the one hand, there are people who assert that educated Japanese should acquire a 'working knowledge' of English as a means of international communication. Included among them is the advisory group for the former Prime Minister, Obuchi Keizo, which recommended that English be used as the second official language in Japan in order to cope with globalisation. This recommendation encouraged educators, businessmen, publishers and other groups in their enthusiasm for learning and teaching of

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practical English - enthusiasm which had already been strong long before the recommendation was made. On the other side stand critics of the 'domination of English'. This group comprises critics of English-language 'imperialism', linguistic nationalists, promoters of Japanese as an international language, and proponents of multilingualism. In reality, these groups often overlap. Some argue that, by learning English, the Japanese adopt Anglo-Saxon views of the world willy-nilly, and eventually internalise them. 1 Others, like Tsuda Yukio, argue further that it is necessary to liberate the Japanese from the domination of English, as this leads to unfair power games in which the Japanese are made to negotiate with Americans in English. 2 Being a linguistic nationalist, Tsuda calls for 'the protection of the beautiful culture' of Japan in the present English-dominant environment. Suzuki Takao, on the other hand, is more concerned with what he calls Japan's linguistic 'sovereignty' in international society and is a proponent of the more expanded use of Japanese as an international language in various international arenas. 3 In contrast, Oishi Shun'ichi takes an anti-essentialist position and asserts linguistic pluralism as an important element of the world order. 4 Here I will refrain from engagement in these ideological debates. Rather, I wish to draw attention to a more practical context in which the use of English is associated with the enhancement of cultural nationalism.

THE LACK OF ENGLISH-SPEAKING FACILITY AND THE INTERNATIONAL 'HELPING INDUSTRY'

Some personal observations from my experience of a flight from Tokyo to Kuala Lumpur on Japan Airlines (JAL) may first be noted in order to illustrate the thrust of my argument. Boarding an international flight usually signifies passage from national to international realm. But, flying JAL, one is often made to feel even more part of Japan's national society. Here, attention may be drawn to the way in which a JAL flight is a 'national' experience or, to be more exact, acts as a 'nationalising' experience. An international flight is supposed to be a typical site where English is used as a practical means of communication. But English is not really spoken by most of JAL's passengers - who are Japanese. Most flight attendants are not good speakers of English, either. Japanese tourists' inability to understand and use English has attracted some attention internationally, and this has caused tourist authorities in some countries to provide special linguistic assistance for Japanese tourists. When arriving at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, for example, one is impressed to find that all the major signs have become trilingual, that is, in Malay, English and Japanese. Signs like 'check-in counter', 'boarding gate' and 'baggage reclaim' are all in Japanese, too. This confirms that Malaysia is truly a multi-lingual society. But it reveals more about the inability of most Japanese to use English in real, practical situations. In fact, their poor English is often a subject of comment and even mockery in the rest of Asia, especially in Singapore, where English is the lingua franca. Within Japan,

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too, it is now officially recognised as a cause of serious concern. For example, when the Japanese media reported an international comparison of Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) scores, stating that the average Japanese score is very low, even lower than that of North Koreans, it attracted considerable attention. 5 Today, the importance of English as an international language is being talked about with renewed enthusiasm. The recommendation by former Prime Minister Obuchi's advisory group that English be the second official language in Japan, mentioned above, may be understood in this light. Although, as suggested earlier, this sort of enthusiasm for a practical command of English among the general population may invite nationalistic reaction among certain small elite circles, English remains, for the majority of Japanese, something mostly irrelevant to their everyday life. By the statement that a JAL flight has a 'nationalising' effect, it is not meant that the absence of fluent English on the flight makes it appear more national than international. Nor is it meant that use of English invites some kind of nationalistic response. Rather, the flight may be regarded as one typical site where Japanese ways of doing things are reaffirmed and promoted - consciously or unconsciously. Here is an illustration of this point. It is a hassle for any non-English-speaking Japanese tourist to fill out a disembarkation card or immigration form in English. It becomes a nightmare when there are four different forms to fill out as required by the Malaysian authorities and when instructions are only in Malay and English (as of August 2000). Even an apparently straightforward item such as one's own name can create difficulties. This is where in-flight video presentations are listened to attentively. The video tells you which order to write your name in, in a quite unnecessarily prescriptive manner. It states: 'Write your name in the space provided. Be sure to write your family name first and then your first name'. Nikko Taro, not Taro Nikko. 6 How to place Japanese personal names in order in English is a highly controversial issue. Until fairly recently, Japanese personal names in English have generally followed the Western custom, with the given name first, except among Japanologists who have, for several decades now, adopted the Japanese custom of putting the family name first. There have been debates about this in various circles including among experts on the Japanese language, writers of English textbooks and journalists. There are various pros and cons, and a consensus remains elusive. On JAL 723, however, there was no choice. It was virtually imperative, and many followed what was suggested in the in-flight video presentation. One tends to follow such suggestions faithfully, precisely because one does not want to run into unnecessary troubles at a passport control point in a foreign country. This is symbolic of what the intercultural-communication industry can do to people when they venture into unfamiliar surroundings. It is a kind of helping industry that is supposed to help people in practical situations of international communication. One point raised in this chapter is that, by trying to be helpful, this industry, knowingly or unknowingly, tends to impose particular ways of doing things on those who require tips or suggestions in situations unfamiliar to them. The in-flight video presentation illustrated above is intended to provide

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helpful suggestions, not commands, but can work as an imperative where one lacks sufficient knowledge, information or experience regarding appropriate behaviour in the given situation. There are two types of industries associated with the English language in Japan. One has to do with English as a school subject and subject for entrance examinations. This may be called the school-English industry. Various agents associated with school curriculum and entrance exams such as juku (cram schools), yobiko (prep schools) and study-guide publishers are involved in this industry. Even the Eiken (Test of Practical English Skills) may be said to be part of this industry, given that secondary school students are either forced or strongly urged to take the test as a way of measuring their scholastic achievement on a national scale. In this way, Eiken plays the same role as mock exams administered by yobiko. From the viewpoint of this industry, English is a domestic affair and has little to do with communication with non-Japanese speakers. On the whole, the school-English industry reinforces the inability to use English as a practical means of communication. The second type is designed for people interested in using English as a means of international communication. For the majority of Japanese people, there is a distinction between Eikaiwa (English conversation) and Eigo (English). Eigo is something one studies at school; Eikaiwa is something one learns outside of school or after school. Institutionally, too, there is a separate industry for the latter. This may be called the English-conversation industry. 'English conversation' has been a flourishing business in Japan for a long time. It specialises in teaching practical skills such as the use of conversational phrases with proper pronunciation, accent and intonation by providing learners with opportunities to practise spoken English. Since English conversation usually means interaction with nonJapanese speakers, it requires more than mere linguistic skills such as speaking or listening. This industry also teaches the skills of communicating in international settings, including practical matters such as how to make a hotel booking, how to rent a car, and so on. Furthermore, there is an increasing emphasis on intercultural communication - an emphasis on learning not just linguistic skills but also culture and behaviour associated with language use. What is characteristic of the English-conversation industry today is that it transforms abstract theories of cultural difference into practical information and practical skills to be put to use in dealing with cultural differences, real or imaginary, in international settings. Globalisation has brought about the transformation, to a large extent, of the English-conversation industry into the intercultural-communication industry. In contrast to Eikaiwa (English conversation), ibunka komyiinikeshon (intercultural communication) sounds much more sophisticated. Many language teachers thus become reproducers and transmitters of discourses of cultural difference and national identity. It is this connection between the English language and the politics of cultural difference that is the subject matter of this chapter. In fact, it is increasingly in the realm of the English-conversation industry that discourses on Japanese cultural and behavioural distinctiveness, namely Nihonjinron, are reproduced and transmitted.

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INTERCULTURAL-COMMUNICATION MANUALS

'Nihonjinron', which literally means 'discussions of the Japanese', refers to discourses on the distinctiveness of Japanese culture, society and national character. 'Thinking elites' of various occupations, such as academics, journalists, critics, writers and businessmen, have participated in the discourses. In the past, it was academics amongst all elites who most systematically discussed the distinctiveness of Japanese culture and society. As Peter Dale remarked with reference to Nihonjinron, academics are 'proxy spokesmen for the inarticulate soul of the national essence' .7 Academic Nihonjinron flourished and reached their peak in the 1970s and early 1980s, but the impact of Nihonjinron has lingered on in society. In fact, because it took time for academics' discourses to be diffused among other social groups, it was from the mid-1980s onwards that the effects of Nihonjinron became strongly felt among wider sections of the population. 8 In order for Nihonjinron to be consumed by large sections of the population, such studies have to be reproduced and distributed for the mass market. What interests us here is the process by which Nihonjinron became 'mass consumption goods', to borrow Harumi Befu's vocabulary. 9 Among a number of channels through which academics' discourses of Nihonjinron were popularised and transmitted to wider sections of the population, it is particularly instructive to examine the English-conversation industry or its variant, the intercultural-communication industry. Japanese companies were among the prominent social groups that played a major role in popularising Nihonjinron. This is understandable given the fact that businessmen were active consumers of Nihonjinron. In my field research conducted in the mid-1980s, I found that businessmen were one social group actively receptive to Nihonjinron, 10 large portions of which dealt with characteristics of Japanese society and culture as manifested in management, employment practices and industrial relations, and thus were relevant to Japanese 'company men' in the 1980s. Furthermore, the subject of cultural differences was immediately relevant to internationally active businessmen. What deserves our attention is that businessmen- or, to be more precise, the staff of big-business companies - did not remain passive consumers of Nihonjinron but became active reproducers. In fact, they devised what may be called cross-cultural handbooks to popularise Nihonjinron. Cross-cultural handbooks reproduce and present 'theories' of Japanese society and culture in a way accessible to 'ordinary' readers. Texts are presented in a dual-language format (in plain Japanese and English), indicating that they are intended as a practical resource for anybody who would like to explain things Japanese in English in international settings. The handbooks deal with distinctive characteristics of Japanese culture and society manifested, for example, as mentioned above, in business and management practices, or company men's everyday lifestyle. Nippon: The Land and its People by Nippon Steel Corporation is the epitome and the most widely available of such cross-cultural handbooks. 11 This book contains a wide range of topics commonly dealt with in Nihonjinron such as the allegedly non-logical, non-verbal and non-assertive mode of communication

140 Kosaku Yoshino as well as the supposed group-orientation, 'interpersonalism' (kanjinshugi) and the vertical society of the Japanese. In fact, these are amongst the most important theoretical pillars of the model of Japanese society as depicted in Nihonjinron. Also, many of the discourses of Nihonjinron attributed these linguistic-communicative and social characteristics of the Japanese to their traditional way of life, maintaining that the Japanese, being originally agriculturalists or rice cultivators, have developed and sustained a highly communal way of life over a long period of time. That such popular themes are included in this handbook comes as no surprise. The book is in many ways Japanese company men's reproduction of academics' Nihonjinron, as is shown by its list of source materials, which cites many of the typical Nihonjinron writings such as those by Nakane Chie, Doi Takeo and so on. 12 Similarly, Mitsubishi Corporation produced a dual-language Japanese Business Glossary with the intention of introducing 'unique Japanese business practices and expressions in a light but informative form'. 13 In the same vein, Nissho Iwai Corporation produced a handbook entitled Skills in Cross-Cultural Negotiation, a handy guide for Japanese businessmen coping with cultural differences in international business contacts. 14 There are a number of other similar publications by top Japanese companies, such as Toshiba's Practical CrossCultural Dialogs. 15 A major characteristic of these handbooks is that ideas of Japanese uniqueness are popularised in such a manner as to facilitate their use in practical contexts of cross-cultural interaction in which the Japanese are expected to explain things Japanese to the non-Japanese. It was not long before other media including major publishers got into the act of parlaying Nihonjinron into crosscultural handbooks. Today, books-on-Japan sections in major bookshops in and out of Japan are well stocked with this type of publication. For example, Gakken's Japan as it is is another very comprehensive handbook of this kind, comparable to Nippon Steel's Nippon: The Land and its People in its expansive listing of Japanese characteristics. 16 Other manuals are intended for even more practical purposes: Nihonjinron are transformed into sets of English dialogues for practical use in situations of international communication. While such manuals are, in fact, often sold as materials for learning English conversation, they combine English conversation learning with explications of cultural difference. Nippon Steel's Talking about Japan epitomises this particular genre. Texts are presented in the form of dialogues between an American, who asks various questions about Japan, and a Japanese businessman, who explains the characteristics of Japanese culture and society. The same Nihonjinron themes are repeated in these dialogues. For example, the classic Nihonjinron propositions on group orientation and vertical society, as theorised by Nakane Chie, are presented in the following conversational text: Mr J. (American): There's something else I've found interesting, and a little puzzling. Whenever a Japanese working for a company introduces himself, he always includes the name of his company, though he probably won't say anything about his work. Americans will more often say what they do. Like, 'I'm in finance,' or 'I'm a mechanical engineer.'

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MrS. (Japanese): Hmmm. That's another aspect of the Japanese groupism we talked about the other dayP The proposition about climate and rice cultivation as historical causes of the group-oriented culture of the Japanese, so often discussed in Nihonjinron, also becomes a conversational skit. MrS.: On the average, we Japanese spend more time working at our jobs than you Americans. Mr J.: But why? Why do the Japanese work so hard? They've become famous for it throughout the world. MrS.: Well, there are a number of reasons. One is that the Japanese people have been paddy-field rice farmers for more than 2000 years. The country is mountainous and the amount of farm land is limited so the individual farmers had only very small plots .... Also, since rice doesn't grow naturally in the Japanese climate, those who didn't work hard got poor harvests and those who took good care of their rice got good ones. This is quite different from places like Southeast Asia where they can raise two or three crops a year, and don't have to work very hard to do it. 18

'NEW INTELLECTUALS' IN THE GLOBALISING SOCIETY Sociologists have from time to time shown an interest in the social category of people who reproduce, popularise and disseminate intellectuals' ideas for a broader audience. For example, using the marketplace metaphor, Edward Shils divided intellectuals into 'productive intellectuals' (who produce intellectual works), 'reproductive intellectuals' (who interpret and transmit intellectual works) and 'consumer intellectuals' (who read and concern themselves receptively with such works). 19 From a slightly different angle, S. N. Eisenstadt introduced the notion of 'secondary intellectuals'. One of his main interests lay in the occupational role of transmitting traditions to wider sections of the population. Secondary intellectuals are defined in terms of their occupational roles as teachers, civil servants, journalists, or those engaged in popular entertainment. 20 'It may well be', Eisenstadt says, that 'it is they, through their activities in teaching, entertainment, and communications, who serve as channels of institutionalization, and even as possible creators of new types of symbols of cultural orientations, of traditions, and of collective and cultural identity' .21 The notion of 'reproductive' or secondary intellectuals is of particular importance for our case. They are the category of people who interpret academics' theories of Japanese society and culture in the light of their own first-hand experience, rephrase them in laymen's language and transmit them to wider sections of the population. In fact, this is one of the important channels through which academics' Nihonjinron were diffused to a wider audience. It may even be said that the spread of Nihonjinron ideas has actually depended on the activities of reproductive or secondary intellectuals.

142 Kosaku Yoshino In a more contemporary context, Pierre Bourdieu employed the notion of 'new intellectuals' to refer to a type of new middle class which mediates between 'classic' intellectuals and the masses. 22 This is a group of people who play an increasingly important role as transmitters of and intermediaries for the popularisation of ideas formerly monopolised by intellectuals. Mike Featherstone takes special note of this group in his study of contemporary consumer society. He says that new intellectuals 'are the perfect audience and transmitters, intermediaries for the new intellectual popularization' .23 This category of people, which Featherstone refers to as 'cultural intermediaries', is engaged in providing symbolic goods and services such as marketing, advertising and public relations, television producing and presenting, social work and counselling. Such occupational groups play a crucial role in contemporary consumer society. In the contemporary Japanese context, there have been several important occupational groups of 'new intellectuals' acting as 'cultural intermediaries' and popularising ideas of Japanese distinctiveness first put forward by intellectuals. We saw that businessmen were one key group in this respect. Others playing a similar role include interpreters, cross-cultural counsellors, international social workers, overseas volunteers, people working in tourist industries, and the like. These people have an active interest in intercultural communication. They are not mere consumers of discourses of cultural difference but play a more active role as reproducers, transmitters and popularisers of these discourses in contemporary society. People in these various occupational settings reproduce and consume Nihonjinron in ways that suit their own everyday practical environments. The result is a variety of cross-cultural manuals, written by various types of cultural intermediaries, intended as practical guides by various occupational groups. With the advent of globalisation and a heightened interest in cultural differences, intercultural-communication manuals are a logical extension of ordinary English-conversation textbooks. Hence, the increase in a new type of Englishconversational material, namely the manuals illustrated earlier. Likewise, ordinary English-conversation textbooks themselves tend to incorporate crosscultural materials. In the teaching of English, we quite often see discussions of 'comparative culture' (hikaku bunka) being added to teaching of traditional linguistic skills. Against this background, teachers of English conversation are keen to 'upgrade' their own status from instructors who only teach linguistic skills to 'new intellectuals' who engage in cross-cultural discourses. Feeling a need to add 'culture' to skills, English teachers often engage in Nihonjinron discourses. In this way, many English instructors have become reproducers and transmitters of discourses of cultural difference. Significantly, Nihonjinron classics continue to be consumed uncritically in the sphere of English teaching. At least among social scientists, criticism of Nihonjinron became noticeable in the 1980s, and many have become cautious about the manner in which they discuss characteristics of Japanese society and culture. Today, Japanese uniqueness is downplayed among such intellectuals; rather, the stress has shifted to the commonality between the Japanese and non-Japanese. Whereas the majority of intellectuals have thus ceased to be diffusers of discourses of Japanese

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peculiarities, other groups such as English teachers are playing an interesting role as 'new intellectuals' who reproduce Nihonjinron.

THE MANUALS' 'IMPERATIVE ADVICE' Conversational manuals illustrated earlier reveal the kind of power involved in cross-cultural advice about how to speak and behave, and even think, in international settings. Users of intercultural-communication manuals often try to learn model sentences by heart, by which process they are likely uncritically to absorb the ideas and assumptions inherent in the text- in this case, those of Nihonjinron. This is particularly true when users' command of English is not good enough to re-make sentences. Consequently, when speaking in English, their expressions tend to be limited and thus patterned. This is where we finally return to where we began - our JAL international flight where very little English is likely to be heard or spoken. It may be recalled that passengers followed the in-flight video advice about how to fill in immigration forms. What was intended as a mere helpful tip resulted in obedient behaviour on the part of many passengers. What the intercultural-communication industry often does is to pattern one's behaviour by providing what, to someone who cannot handle English well, works as imperative advice. This is an oxymoron in that advice is not supposed to be compulsory but, in a situation where one has neither knowledge nor control, one has nothing else to do but obey the advice: hence 'imperative'. The power of manuals may be contrasted with that of school textbooks. School textbooks are a chief means of ideological transmission in state-initiated nationalism. By contrast, cross-cultural manuals such as the ones discussed above are one tool of reproduction of national identity in market-oriented cultural nationalism. Unlike school textbooks imposed by a strong state (such as Japan's pre-war and wartime state), manuals as such do not have any overtly compulsory power. Nonetheless, manuals potentially have the power to elicit obedient responses from their users precisely because users tum to manuals when they require help and therefore depend on the manual's advice. In the end, it is easy for them to conform to suggestions made in manuals. Here we are indebted to Norbert Elias for assuring us of the sociological significance of the study of manuals. Elias pioneered a sociological enquiry into manuals. In The Civilizing Process, he examined manner books and etiquette manuals which medieval court elites used to acquire proper manners and etiquette so as to survive in power struggles at court. Elias then related this study of manuals to his other study of state-building. 24 It may be said that the cross-cultural manuals discussed earlier in this essay are intended to be used in what Elias called the 'civilising process'. In the particular kind of civilising process that takes place in contemporary Japan, many people are expected to acquire the manners, behaviours, abilities and ideas appropriate to and required of 'internationalised persons' in the increasingly globalised world. In fact, those 'cultural intermediaries' who produced cross-cultural handbooks and intercultural-communication manuals

144 Kosaku Yoshino claimed to have the aim of promoting the emergence of large numbers of internationally-minded Japanese with both the ability to use English as a practical means of communication and good knowledge of Japanese culture and society. This reflects the intermediaries' cultural relativistic thinking that as a nation the Japanese have to participate in international society not just as passive recipients of Western values but as equal partners. An extract from Nippon Steel Corporation's Nippon: The Land and its People illustrates such thinking: The Japanese are not good at explaining themselves or expounding their opinions. Geographical and historical factors have long kept Japan an isolated nation and the people have felt no need to explain themselves to the 'outside world'. Even after the country was opened up, we still had very little to say about ourselves. Compared with the torrent of knowledge and information that poured into Japan, the amount that flowed out was negligible. Mutual understanding among the community of nations is based on the principles of self-expression and mutual tolerance. Japan has now earned a position among the advanced countries of the world and must begin reflecting its new status in its international activities .... From now on, it will be imperative for the Japanese to take every possible opportunity to assist people everywhere to obtain a broader and deeper understanding of Japan. 25 It can thus be inferred that the status of a kokusaijin (globalised citizen) may be achieved by acquiring the ability to explain things Japanese in English. This is where the English-conversation industry becomes interested in incorporating the subject of cultural difference as an 'added value'. Many editors of cross-cultural manuals naturally claim to have the aim of improving intercultural communication between the Japanese and non-Japanese. For example, the General Manager of the Corporate Communications Office of Mitsubishi Corporation says that his firm's manual is intended to 'help smooth the way for better international communication' .26 Also, the editor of Nissho lwai's Skills in Cross-Cultural Negotiation says that that company's handbook has been published in the hope of providing 'some hints for reducing "cultural frictions" that the Japanese are now undergoing [with non-Japanese]' .27 The authenticity of their declared intentions is difficult to gauge. What results, however, is an ironic situation in which the stated desire to improve intercultural communication tends, in fact, to promote cultural nationalism. The reason is to be found in the underlying assumption, widely held among elites, that the peculiarities of Japanese patterns of thought and behaviour render intercultural communication difficult. Thus, it is felt that conscious recognition of Japanese peculiarities is the first step towards better intercultural understanding when dealing with non-Japanese. Ethnicity is often understood as 'the process by which "their" difference is used to enhance the sense of "us" for the purposes of organization or identification' .28

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However, in the Japanese discourses on 'us' (Japanese culture) and 'them' (foreign civilisations), it is not 'their' differences but 'our' differences that have been actively used for the enhancement of 'our' national identity. I would call this type of thinking 'ethnoperipherism' (as opposed to ethnocentrism). 29 It may largely be explained in terms of Japanese elites' long-standing perception of Japan as being on the 'periphery' in relation to the 'central' civilisations (first that of China, then of the West generally, and recently of the USA specifically). National identity for Japan has thus been characteristically constructed through emphasis on the differences between its 'particularistic' culture and the 'central' or 'universal' civilisations. In our own case study, the use of Americans as the 'significant others' in intercultural-communication manuals is one of the latest examples of this, and is further promoting ethnoperipherist discourses. The popularisation of Nihonjinron in cross-cultural handbooks and intercultural-communication manuals has, in fact, had the effect of emphasising Japanese 'differences' vis-a-vis the rest of the world. These activities, designed to facilitate intercultural communication, often have the consequence of sensitising the Japanese excessively to their differences from others, real or imaginary, and thereby creating another kind of obstacle to social interaction between Japanese and non-Japanese. 30

CONCLUDING REMARKS Many scholars have remarked that attempts to transcend the nation through globalisation often result in emphasis on differences and particularism. For example, Immanuel Wallerstein says that modem nationalism possesses both the urge for homogenisation and universality on the one hand, and an attachment to particularity on the other. 31 Roland Robertson extends this argument, identifying the essence of global capitalism in the demand for and universal supply of particularistic differences. The development of diversified micro-markets targeting national, ethnic, racial, gender and class differences is thus a key feature of the global economy. 32 National differences comprise one of the most prominent particularisms in the age of modernity. In the increasingly globalised world, nationalism unfolds in the context of supply of and demand for differences among national cultures. In this chapter, I have drawn attention to one of the concrete sites in which this is taking place. By focusing on the English-conversation industry, in which discourses of cultural difference are marketed as practical resources, I have illustrated a Japanese case in which cultural nationalism may arise in response to the desire to cope with globalisation.

10 Japanese nationalism in comparative perspective Frank B. Tipton

What is a nation, and what is nationalism? There are many answers, as seen in Sandra Wilson's survey. And as Wilson emphasises, one thing that studies of nationalism have in common is their failure to consider the Japanese case. Viewed from the perspective of any of these theories alone, Japan appears as an exotic outlier, or as a counter-example. 1 However, the chapters in this collection allow us to look over the range of experience of the Japanese nation and of Japanese nationalism across the entire past century and a half, and they reveal numerous points of contact with the experiences of nationalisms elsewhere in the world. Nationalism itself has undergone substantial changes, and the value of the Japanese comparison is that it brings these changes into sharper relief. The first section in this chapter looks at the definition of a nation and compares Japan with Europe and the United States. The conclusion, which may surprise those not familiar with the Japanese case, is that Japan was a far better candidate to become a modem nation than virtually any other contender in the middle decades of the nineteenth-century. However, as the second section argues, Japanese nationhood changed, from a state-centred instrument of a modernising elite in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to an identity contested among leaders who aimed to mobilise larger masses of people in the 1920s and 1930s, and finally to a diffuse debate over the 'essence' of Japanese culture in the decades after the Second World War. Again surprisingly, the same changes can be tracked in Europe and the United States, from a state-building nationalism, to a populist radical nationalism, and finally to a cultural nationalism whose content remains under dispute. The third section argues that the changes in nationalism in all countries have arisen from an expansion of the public sphere. Rising numbers of fully literate individuals and successive revolutions in communications technologies create new markets for ideas and provide the means for purveyors of ideas to reach those markets. From being a movement of small numbers of elite individuals, nationalism became radicalised as new groups claiming to speak for the whole people emerged. Yet the continued expansion of the public sphere has allowed the proliferation of competing definitions of the nation. There is a logic here, but it does not tend in any particular direction. The elite project of nation-building created a reading public, which opened opportunities for radical nationalists but

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did not guarantee their success. The continued rising levels of education and easier access to the public sphere appear to make both nation-building and radical nationalisms impossible, but they do not guarantee either rationality in public discourse or consensus on the definition of the nation.

DEFINING THE NATION

The standard definition of the 'nation' emerged out of the eighteenth-century German Enlightenment and the experiences of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Herder, Schlegel and others wrestled with the definition of the nation. The levee en masse (mass mobilisation) demonstrated the power of the nation in arms. Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation, with its call to individuals to unite in the devouring flame of a higher patriotism, became the model for the response of other nations threatened by the French example and by French power. For nationalists, a nation came to be conceived as geographically contiguous, ruled by a single central government, possessing a single common language, sharing a common uniform culture, and looking back on a common history. 2 Many students of nationalism have accepted these arguments. Anthony Smith designates the rootedness, connectedness, and sense of place that formed the basis for these new nations as the ethnie. Josep Llobera traces the origins of current western European nations to the Middle Ages. 'A variety of historical elements, cultural and political ... combined over the medieval millennium to leave an imprint, albeit at times an unconscious one, on the collective mentality of the different western European peoples'. 3 Japan in fact lies closer to this ideal than any of the European nations, and the comparison with Japan shows how tenuous are claims of a pre-existing ethnie or unconscious memories of medieval experience. Compared to Germany, Japan is geographically more clearly defined. In the nineteenth-century, which portions of the German cultural realm were to be included in a German national state was the most difficult question confronting those who wanted a unified Germany. Compared to France or Italy, Japan is more linguistically uniform. Well into the nineteenth-century large fractions of the populations of France and what became Italy spoke mutually incomprehensible languages. Compared to any of the European nations, Japan possessed a far greater degree of cultural uniformity. Whereas in Europe, 'regions' often possessed their own separate identities that frequently formed the base for violent opposition to national governments, in Japan regional variations in culture were precisely that and no more. Similarly, all of Japan could look back on a single shared history in a way impossible in any European nation. Far from being unconscious, in Europe separate regional identities survived decades of attempted repression and still pose significant political challenges today. A striking fact about Japan in comparison to Europe and the United States is the common elite culture and the tradition of an accepted centralised government. Daimyo and samurai throughout Japan shared a habitus- common observances,

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customs and practices - and they deferred to central authority. In the late sixteenth-century, the only major period when a central authority was lacking, a series of wars among contending claimants resulted in the re-establishment of an unquestioned central power that lasted for the next 250 years. In contrast, in the United States, settler societies with a common British origin divided into two very different cultures and into a number of regional governments that did not accept the right of the central government to rule over them. Although they spoke the same language, the slave-owning southern planters and the industrial and commercial elite of the northern states saw themselves as essentially different. In both southern and northern states, many believed they possessed the right to leave the federal union if they wished. The struggles over slavery and states' rights culminated in the Civil War, which ended only 2 years before the Meiji Restoration of 1868. In Europe, the aristocracy shared a habitus - but their culture was one shared across what later became nations, not within them. That culture was French. Frederick the Great of Prussia spoke and wrote French better than German, and lectured to his own royal academy on the 'barbarous' qualities of the German language. In 1887, the General Association for the German Language, devoted to 'healing the degeneration and crippling' of the national language, named as its first Honorary Member Heinrich Stephan, who as Postmaster-General had Germanized 760 words used by the postal service, including replacing 'Telephon' with 'Fernsprecher' and 'poste restante' with 'postlagernd' .4 In a further contrast to Japan, the European aristocracy did not regard the rule of central governments as legitimate. Norbert Elias identified the processes of state formation in Europe, but the comparison with Japan shows how difficult it was for a European prince to subdue his neighbours and to institutionalise power through regularised administration. European rulers attempted to 'civilise' the aristocracy through the imposition of rules or ritual and etiquette, but always needed to play off factions and provinces against one another to hold power. 5 Daimyo of course did not always passively accept the rule of the shogunal government, but they did accept the idea that there should be a central government. In Europe, every extension of royal central power was opposed on principle by the aristocracy as a violation of their natural rights. Paradoxically, the opposition of European aristocracies to the power of centralised royal governments became one of the sources of both nationalism and democracy. Aristocrats claimed to be acting in the name of 'the nation' and 'the people' to protect their 'liberties.' In both cases, the words referred to themselves, as the constituted body of those whose inherited or purchased position gave them the right to certain specific privileges. A 'liberty' might be the right to force peasants to work a certain number of days on the aristocrat's land, or it might be a tax exemption paid for by the members of an urban community, for instance. It was the possession of this specific liberty that set its owners both apart from and above the common masses and gave them the right to consider themselves part of the true people, the privileged members of the nation. First in Britain, and then in France, the terms 'nation' and 'people' were broadened to include the previously

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despised masses, and the idea of 'liberty' became the abstract notion of the enjoyment of all the rights available to members of this new broader community. Liah Greenfeld argues that this transformation was as much or more a question of altered psychological outlook as it was a question of social or political transformation. 6

CHANGES IN NATIONHOOD This is not to say that Japan did not change. It did. But so too did the emerging European and American nations. There are many 'nationalisms' and they differ in their specific content, but they share common features. These commonalities are both structural and developmental. European, American and Japanese nationalisms emerged during the nineteenth-century as the result of a conscious welding of selected and sometimes very disparate cultural elements into a shared identity. Nationalists consistently claimed that their definition of the national community and the national culture was a natural outgrowth of a long continuous history. Philosophically this could mean that a pre-existing national idea was in the process of realising itself historically. Friedrich Meinecke's study of the German national state published in 1907 was possibly the culmination of this approach, and remains influential today. 7 In the United States, where the 'national' history was obviously short, a 'manifest destiny' to expand and rule the continent was derived from earlier beliefs held by the Puritans that their settlement of these new lands embodied an eternal divine plan. 8 Comparative historians have repeatedly proven the essentialist claims of nationalists and nationalist historians to be objectively false. 9 It would take a bold historian, or a bold philosopher, to claim explicitly, as did Meinecke, that a national state embodied an ideal form that emerged in stages when the time was ripe. However, historically the process of creating a new identity succeeded repeatedly. The result in each case was the emergence of a new sort of 'imagined community,' in Benedict Anderson's phrase. The national imagined community extends beyond the face-to-face community of everyday experience. Members of a national community share an ability to picture themselves belonging with and feeling a bond to every other member of their nation. These other members of the nation include millions of individuals with whom one will never come into direct contact, but they do not include those outside. For these limited, sovereign communities millions have been willing 'not so much to kill, as willingly to die' .10 The means by which the transformation of local and class identities into a national identity was accomplished were the same everywhere. The imagined communities of the late nineteenth-century depended on new means of communication. Anderson originally emphasised the early development of 'printcapitalism' in creating the shared language of the elite, and then pointed to the later use of censuses, maps and museums to define the size, extent and shared culture of the nation.l 1 In order to experience the new community, however, its members needed to be able to read, and the vast majority could not. States

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Table 10.1 Primary school enrolments in Europe, the United States and Japan, 1870-1920, compared to population between ages 5 and 14 (millions)

Britain France Germany USA Japan

1870

1880

1890

1900

1910

1920

1.4 (6.0) 4.5 (6.4) na

3.3 (6.8) 5.0 (6.5) na

4.3 (7.4) 5.6 (6.8) na

7.5 (9.5) 1.3 (na)

9.8 (12.4) 2.3 (7.7)

12.5 (14.5) 3.1 (8.8)

5.4 (7.6) 5.5 (6.4) 9.0 (12.2) 15.0 (16.8) 4.7 (9.6)

6.1 (8.1) 5.7 (6.7) 10.3 (15.2) 16.9 (18.8) 6.3 (11.6)

5.8 (8.0) 4.6 (6.4) 8.8 (10.2) 18.9 (21.8) 7.7 (12.8)

Source: B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics, New York: Macmillan and Stockton Press, 3 vols, 1992-5. Enrolments are given in the first line, and population figures in parentheses in the second line. Census years are the nearest available.

striving to become nations therefore introduced systems of mass education. This project required an immense investment extending over several decades. As Table 10.1 shows, by the early twentieth-century most children in North-West Europe, the United States and Japan were receiving several years of primary education. The ruling elites intended that what children learned in the schools would determine their view of the world, of their nation, of their nation's place in the world, and of their place in the nation. Schools became the vehicles for the selection and transmission of certain elements of existing culture, and of a certain standard interpretation of the nation's history. Where languages differed, the imposition of a standard language of instruction became one of the schools' primary functions. Children were then punished for speaking their own languages. 12 In addition, the image of the nation embodied in the school curricula was class-based and gendered. The elites wanted economic development at the national level, with new, larger units of production linked by new transportation networks. Local communities had to be broken down, and a new division between public and private had to be imposed in place of the older family-centred units of production. Workers and women were crucial to the new nation, but subordinate. Women were, or were supposed to be, confined to the roles of wife and mother, creators of a safe haven from the struggles of the public realm. Workers were, or were supposed to be, men who played the role of fathers in the home while accepting the fatherly powers of their employers in the workplace. 13 Separate schools and curricula for workers and the elite, and for girls and boys, worked to mould women and men into the desired patterns. The project, and the force deployed to enforce it, were open and explicit. Norms were imposed that defined 'membership of a homogenous social body' but that also allowed 'classification, hierarchization and the distribution of rank' .14 In the German states, for example, the division between the elite Gymnasium and the basic Volksschule for the masses dates from the early nineteenth-century; girls' and boys' curricula were

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distinct, and separate secondary schools for girls only appeared late in the century. 15 The means and frequently the content of education were disputed within the elite, because it was the very definition of the nation that was at stake. The French education minister could claim proudly that he knew at any hour of the day what every schoolchild in France was studying. But the reason for extreme centralisation was the danger posed by divisions within the French nation, between monarchists and republicans, between secularists and devout Catholics, and between the central state and regional communities. Whether 'peasants' could be 'civilised' and made into 'Frenchmen' remained an issue for educational authorities. 16 In Britain the 11 + examinations that sent 20 per cent of children to elite 'grammar' schools were only formalised in 1944, after two decades of intense debate. Psychologist Cyril Burt, a believer in the genetic inheritance of intelligence, campaigned for the tests and for separate schools as an imperative for 'warding off the ultimate decline and fall that has overtaken each of the great civilizations of the past .... It is essential in the interests of the children themselves and of the nation as a whole, that those who possess the highest ability- the cleverest of the clever - should be identified as accurately as possible' .17 In the United States, decentralised control and the importance of equality as part of the national self-image meant that in most states separate elite-track schools on the British and German pattern did not emerge. However, the problem of educating girls remained, and the adoption of 'co-education' typically rested on the argument that national values could be better preserved if girls and boys were educated in the same classrooms, except for woodworking or metalworking 'shop' courses for boys and 'home economics' courses for girls. In addition, Peter Steams argues that the integration of several million migrants, and the perceived need to 'civilise' them in order to transform them into Americans, posed the same sorts of problems for American elites as the integration of peasants into the French 'nation' posed for elites in France. 18 At a higher level, new courses in 'Western Civilisation' introduced after the First World War aimed to spread this civilising project to the rapidly increasing numbers of first-generation university students, including the first wave of migrants and minorities. 19 In Japan, the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education embodied the centralising and homogenising intentions of the Meiji elite. 'Ye, Our subjects, be filial to your parents ... pursue learning and cultivate arts ... should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State'. The memorised words of the Rescript taught all children that the 'broad and everlasting' foundation of the empire was the unity of subjects 'from generation to generation' in support of the imperial throne 'coeval with heaven and earth' .20 Taxes imposed to pay for the new schools sometimes had to be collected by force. For girls, the schools inculcated the ideal of woman as 'good wife, wise mother,' with additional lessons in refined etiquette in secondary schools intended for middle-class girls. As in Germany, women were prohibited not only from voting but also from belonging to political organisations. The ban on political activity placed women in the same category as

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military personnel, teachers, and shrine and temple officers, thus reserving their energies to serve the state by supporting their families. 21 Every Monday morning, about 16 hours after Japanese schoolchildren finished bowing to their school's framed copy of the Imperial Rescript, children in schools in California began reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Such practices constitute a kind of social technology, and like other technologies they were exported. Japanese educators drew on the parallel campaigns of political and educational elites in Britain and the United States to enforce their preferred model on to the family patterns of the lower classes. The phrase 'good wife, wise mother,' was actually imported from the United States. 22 The new style of mass education inculcating a new national identity was taken up in Thailand under Chulalongkorn (reigned 1868-1910), and by other national governments in Asia when they became independent. 23 Chulalongkorn intended to promulgate a decree modelled on the Meiji Imperial Rescript, but died before he could do so. The Thai system nevertheless conformed to the pattern of centralising nationalist states, with a single curriculum, Central Thai as the only language of instruction, and the teaching of a myth of a single Thai people and a single Thai royal dynasty extending back into the misty past. 24 However, nationalism escaped the control of the elites that had brought it into being. Divisions emerged within those elites. Competing groups justified their preferred policies in the name of the new nation. Schencking's study of the Japanese navy in this volume has striking parallels with the public relations campaigns of the German navy under Alfred Tirpitz and the British navy under John Fisher. 25 Wealthy farmers in various countries agitated for tariffs to protect them from increasing international competition. Industrialists preferred tariffs for themselves, and within industry, divisions also emerged between large-scale producers who might have international connections, and small local manufacturers. The tariffs adopted in Germany in 1879, in the United States in 1890, and in France in 1892, and the unsuccessful campaign for tariffs in Britain in the 1890s, all reflected these struggles. In Japan, the government's adoption of the gold standard in 1896 was opposed by industrialists who believed the declining value of Japan's silver-based currency had acted in place of tariffs, which Japan was prohibited from imposing under the unequal trade treaties signed in the 1850s. Also, new movements emerged, outside of the elite. The nationalism of the state-building elites of the late nineteenth-century - of a Bismarck, of the Meiji oligarchs, of the British establishment, of the so-called 'two hundred families' that were believed to hold power in France, of the white Protestant oligarchy of the North-Eastern United States - was intended to mobilise the masses and to make them feel as if they belonged to the new nation. It was not intended that the masses should actively participate in politics. Decision-making was to remain in the hands of a small select group. All nations eventually reached a point when this was no longer adequate. In country after country, the old narrow elites were attacked by new leaders who appealed directly to the masses and offered them the opportunity to participate directly in the nation's political life. The masses, the

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men and women who had been educated in the national school system, responded by joining new political parties and their ancillary organisations, marching in their rallies, voting for their candidates, and placing their trust in these new leaders. Central governments generally were able to contain these challenges when they came from the left. The organised working class, especially when socialist in orientation, challenged both nationalist myths and the ownership of private property. State officials and property-owners, but also many ordinary people, therefore regarded them as essentially illegitimate. In Japan, as Elise Tipton notes in this volume, the government banned the first socialist party hours after its formation. The Peace Police Law of 1900 outlawed labour unions and strikes, and the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 identified attacks on a vaguely defined 'national essence' (kokutai) as grounds for prosecution. Left-wing parties emerged in the 1920s but were crushed by waves of arrests, and the surviving groups marginalised. Workers' parties in Germany, France and Britain became large but did not rule. In Germany, the Socialists, the largest party in the Reichstag in 1912, were blocked from power under the imperial constitution. After the First World War, Socialists headed coalition governments in the early 1920s but were then isolated. In Britain, the general strike of 1926 was defeated, and in France the Popular Front government of 1936 failed to implement its socialist programmes. Labour historians have detailed the repression of the American left. Justin Goldstein argues that the suppression of American labour unions between 1873 and 1937 was more severe than in any other country. The connivance of local courts and police forces with private armies raised by employers added a dimension of direct brutality and violence generally missing in other countries. 26 Challenges from the right posed more complex problems. Ernst Nolte identified the period from the late 1890s through the Second World War as the age of fascism. 27 Often labelled 'hyper-nationalist,' what all the fascist movements possessed in common was a claim to represent the 'whole' nation in a way that the existing systems did not. When in opposition they insisted that existing governments had betrayed the nation. When in power they insisted that only an inspired dictator could adequately represent the nation's interests. Both in and out of power they appealed to groups of people who believed that their interests had not been recognised by the elite groups that controlled the nation's politics. It was easy for such movements to appeal to women and men who had absorbed a belief in the national community while in school. These included artisans and small manufacturers, shopkeepers, and especially farmers, but hyper-nationalists could appeal to workers as well, and here they posed serious competition to workers' parties. 28 In Germany, a new populist radical right emerged in the 1890s, and its leaders frequently opposed the government. This radical right has been blamed by subsequent historians for pressuring the government into the First World War, for the weaknesses of the Weimar Republic, for the rise of Hitler and Nazism, and for the Second World War and the Holocaust. Japan seems different because there was no fascist party and no charismatic leader; but the appeals and projects of Japan's

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radical nationalists resembled those of their European counterparts. Kita Ikki authored a 'plan for the reconstruction of Japan' that envisaged a military coup, a new regime based on a direct relationship between the emperor and the people, the confiscation of large personal fortunes, redistribution of land to tenant farmers, and expansion on the Asian mainland. Japan's radical nationalists did not gain power as the Nazis did in Germany. However, they did influence the policies of the elites. Kita was executed in 1937 for his part in an attempted coup, but his ideas became very popular among army officers. 29 As Stephen Large demonstrates in this volume, radical nationalist appeals could embarrass respectable members of the elite. Their influence on public debate precluded moderation and helped the army, the faction within the elite that could claim it represented the purest expression of the nation because it was closest to the imperial throne, to dictate policy. When the expansionist elements within the military gained control of policy Japan lurched first into an expanding conflict in China, and then into the Pacific War. The United States did not fall victim to a radical nationalist movement or to an expansionist faction within the elite. Nevertheless, the elections of 1932 and 1936 have been described as a 'revolution.' The Democratic Party mobilised large numbers of previous non-voters, especially southern farmers and northern industrial workers, and changed the political landscape for a generation. Franklin Roosevelt was certainly a charismatic leader, and there are additional parallels with the campaigns of Nazi Germany in the deployment of nationalist rhetoric and symbols in the New Deal. General Hugh Johnson headed the National Recovery Administration, established to administer the central programmes of the New Deal. He designed its blue eagle symbol, and said 'those who are not with us are against us, and the way to show you are a part of this great army of the New Deal is to insist on this symbol of solidarity' .30 Finally, nationalism in Europe, the United States and Japan has not been the same since the Second World War as before. The debates over the 'essence' of Japanese identity analysed here by Kosaku Yoshino parallel disputes over the definition of the German, French, American and British national identities. In the Japanese case, the discourses of 'Nihonjinron' revolve around a central core, in that most participants argue that there is some key aspect of Japanese culture that is inaccessible to outsiders. 31 However, the Japanese debate resembles the other cases in that there are numerous and contradictory definitions of the national identity. In contrast to the late nineteenth-century, or to the 1920s and 1930s, there is no authoritative picture of the nation to which either elites or counterelites can appeal. Indeed, it would be extremely difficult to identify elite groups in any of these countries that would approximate the position and role of the small groups of men who controlled political and intellectual life in the late nineteenthcentury.32 What to celebrate and what to mourn, what should be commemorated and how it should be done, became contentious, as Beatrice Trefalt shows in this volume in the case of Japanese survivors of the war. The interpretation of the nation's past changed substantially over time. Significantly as well, the terms of these debates were set by the mass media, not by government spokesmen or educational leaders.

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In the American case, in the past 60 years well over one hundred major works have been published that offer definitions of the American national character, and the study of these studies of national character has itself become a separate topic. 33 Through the 1950s, the older state-building nationalism persisted. Many works propagated the ideas that 'the American' was a 'new man' in world history, that there was a single American 'national character' forged on the frontier, and that America's 'destiny' was to play a role on the 'world stage' .34 In the 1960s and 1970s, new interpretations highlighted negative or neglected aspects of the national identity, such as racism and the need for whites to define themselves as superior to blacks, violence and the need to conquer the aboriginal peoples on the frontier, or sexism and the need to hold on to a superior male identity. 35 Recent works reflect current political divisions. From the left, critical views of the American identity continue to reject the claim of American exceptionalism and emphasise the ongoing influence of racism in America's social life. 36 From the right, triumphalist interpretations define the American identity, for instance, as a combination of perspectives arising from diverse migrant experiences, as a culture that places faith in the individual but demands high moral commitment to the community and therefore accommodates change effectively, or as a capitalist frontier society continually engaged in a process of 'creative destruction,' a culture that deliberately chooses to have no tradition and therefore embodies modernity itself. 37 As in the Japanese and European cases, the point is not whether any of these middle- or perhaps upper-middle-brow works is accurate, but rather that they need to compete in a very crowded marketplace, and that each therefore needs to define the national essence differently from its competitors.

EXPANSION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE It appears therefore that what it is to be a 'nation' and what it is to possess a

'national identity' or to constitute a 'nationalism' have themselves changed over the past two centuries, and Japan has shared in these changes along with Europe and the United States. This development has not always been obvious. Each national historiography tends to see 'its' national subject as unique. The study of Japan shows that these separate definitions are inadequate. All national histories are unique - but only in a trivial sense. All fit into a general pattern - but the pattern has changed over time. Can we use the Japanese comparison to identify the conditions for the emergence of any nationalism? Many of the nation-building projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been responses to threats, whether economic, political or cultural. In developing national states, an elite selects among pre-existing cultural elements. These elements are fused into a canonical interpretation of the nation's history. The national elite emerges from traditional society- in Meiji Japan the leaders were former samurai, in Germany members of the Prussian aristocracy, in the United States the successors of Puritan religious

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leaders. In Thailand, Chulalongkom relied on his numerous brothers and halfbrothers. The values of the elites continued to reflect their origins. But the mass of people must be able to absorb the selected elements of culture and learn the received history. As argued above, this implies education. The national project also means communication systems and the development of industry, the basis of military power - 'rich country, strong army', as Meiji leaders put it. The state in Japan, Europe and the United States provided subsidies for infrastructure, tariffs for protection, and uniform institutional and legal structures. The efforts of the elite tD create a new national community paralleled the emergence of a new national economy, and therefore created the conditions for the emergence of a new mass society. With the rise of an official national ideology, public voices were professionalised. Given the importance of education in the nationalist project, this is particularly clearly seen in the case of educational leaders. It is also true of party political leaders. The contemporary German sociologist Max Weber noted the movement from a politics centred on personal relationships among 'notables' to one revolving around competition among party 'machines.' He believed the generation of notables to have been more qualified and more principled than the 'demagogic' leaders of 'machines', he regretted that politicians now lived 'from' politics rather than 'for' politics, and he regretted the need to 'woo' the masses to obtain their votes. 38 Another effect of mass education was the creation of a market for newspapers. We should extend Anderson's notion of 'print-capitalism' to include the entrepreneurs who created and extended their chains of newspapers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. William Randolph Hearst moved from the San Francisco Examiner in the 1880s to the New York Journal in the 1890s and control of a national chain. In Great Britain, William Maxwell Aitken (Lord Beaverbook), already knighted for his government service, took over the Daily Express in 1916 and made it the most widely-read daily newspaper in the world. In Weimar Germany, industrialists Hugo Stinnes and Alfred Hugenberg both formed influential chains of newspapers. ShOriki Matsutaro became president of the Yomiuri shinbun in 1924 and survived in competition with the Osaka-based Mainichi and Asahi to make it the largest newspaper in Tokyo and eventually in Japan.39 The new mass media were overwhelmingly conservative and patriotic, and they played a crucial role in the dissemination of the official national ideology. 'Jingoism' was a phenomenon of the so-called 'yellow' press in Britain, and Hearst's papers have been blamed for the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898. However, the media also provided access for new voices that competed for attention, including those advocating extreme forms of nationalism. The undoubted patriotism of hyper-nationalists gave them a claim to legitimacy even when they opposed the political establishment. The German nationalist Hugenberg's newspapers gave valuable recognition to Hitler and the Nazi Party, and Large's examination here of the trials of political terrorists in the 1930s in Japan recalls similar reporting of trials of right-wing assassins in Weimar Germany.

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In addition to new political voices, the new media also provided the avenue for expression of a non-political mass culture. Newspapers, magazines and popular novels all required sensation to boost sales. Hearst pioneered the use of banner headlines and lavish illustrations. ShOriki introduced the first women's page and the first column offering personal advice in Japan, and the Yomiuri sponsored one of the first professional baseball teams (the Giants). Their search for sensation led the media to highlight the shocking, the exotic, and above all the new. National elites found this deeply troubling. 'The journalist belongs to a sort of pariah caste', said Weber. The media also depended on advertising. Advertisers hoped to reach consumers who might purchase their products or potential customers seeking entertainment - reading, film, music, clothing, food, drink. The content of stories in the media and the products and services offered for sale through advertisements existed in a symbiosis. Anything reported as new and currently fashionable could be packaged and sold, and then reported on again. The many industries that arose from popular culture were dedicated to fostering consumption. Popular culture therefore was diametrically opposed to the moral restraint and self-. sacrifice demanded by both official and extremist hyper-nationalism. Hence, the concern of official custodians of national culture with expressions of popular culture and attempts to control and repress them, combined with 'an ongoing, managerial process of persuading or teaching the masses to internalize appropriate values', in Sheldon Garon's phrase. 40 There are ironies here. In Japan, we also see the state using images drawn from popular culture for its own campaigns to encourage thrift and reduce consumption, for example in Garon's analysis in this volume of savings campaigns. The 1920s added radio to the print media, and the 1950s added television. Tables 10.2 and 10.3 illustrate their explosive growth. Radio provided a new means of mobilisation for those political leaders who recognised its potential. Roosevelt and Hitler were masters of radio, Roosevelt with his fatherly, low-key, intimate 'fireside chats' and Hitler with his shrill, bombastic speeches backed by masses of supporters shouting their approval. States regulated the electronic Table 10.2 Radios in use or licensed, 1920--70 (thousands) 1920s USA

(in 1922) 60

Britain France Germany

(in 1925) 125 na (in 1924) 9

Japan

na

1940

1930

1950

1960

1970

13,750

28,500

41,000

50,000

62,000

3,091 (in 1933) 1,368 3,238

8,951 5,089 9,598

779

5,668

11,876 6,889 w 9,493 E 3,489 7,593

4,535 10,981 15,892 5,574 11,802

2,301 5,087 19,622 5,985 57,000

Source: Mitchell, International Historical Statistics. USA figures are estimates of sets in use; others are totals for licences or subscribers. Television licences included radio licences after 1946 in Britain and after 1960 in France. Figures for Germany after 1950 give West Germany in the top line and East Germany below.

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Table 10.3 Televisions in use or licensed, 1940-88 (thousands)

1940s

1950

1960

1970

1980

1988

3,900

46,000

60,000

80,000

10,470 1,902 4,635

15,883 10,968 16,675

18,667 na 23,749

(in 1986) 87,000 19,396 na 23,742

USA

(in 1946) 8

Britain France West Germany East Germany Japan

(in 1947) 15 na na

344 4 (in 1952) 2

na

(in 1954)

4

1,035

4,499

5,731

6,233

na

(in 1955) 166

6,860

22,883

29,140 (62,976)

72,000

Source: Mitchell, International Historical Statistics. USA figures are estimates of sets in use; others are totals for licences or subscribers. The figures for Japan in 1980 show the number of licences in italics and the number in use within parentheses; the 1988 figure is sets in use.

Table 10.4 Weighted average of years of education per person aged 15-64, 1820-1992

1820 1870 1913 1950 1992

USA

Germany

France

Britain

Japan

1.75 3.92 7.86 11.27 18.04

na na 8.37 10.40 12.17

na na 6.99 9.58 15.96

2.00 4.44 8.82 10.60 14.09

1.50 1.50 5.36 9.11 14.87

Source: Angus Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy 1820-1992, Paris: OECD, 1995, p. 37. Primary education is given a weight of 1, secondary 1.4 and higher 2, based on evidence of relative earnings associated with different levels of education.

media even more strictly than they did the print media. However, usage escaped control. Licensing requirements either broke down or were abandoned. Commercial radio and television broadcasters emerged to compete with state broadcasters where they did not exist from the beginning. Sh6riki of the Yomiuri became one of the pioneers of commercial television in Japan. Further, as in the case of print media, content escaped control, partly because of the sheer volume of material required and partly because of the need to appeal to the audience. Television is notorious among practitioners as a 'carnivorous' medium with a voracious appetite for new material. Listeners and viewers were already experienced readers, and if the material presented did not appeal to their tastes, they would not listen or watch. As Table 10.4 shows, the audience for the new mass media was far better educated than previous generations, and the levels of education continued to increase. These figures, produced by economists, are also interesting in giving greater weight to secondary and tertiary education, based on evidence that increased education leads to substantially higher income. The audience was not only more highly educated, it also was far more affluent, and as hours worked per week declined, leisure time increased.

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The effects of the expansion of mass media and rising education on nationalism were mediated through the public sphere. National communities depend on the existence of a public sphere, but one of a particular type. In the conception developed by Jtirgen Habermas, participation in the public sphere depends on the willingness of individuals from diverse backgrounds to put aside their particular identities and engage in strictly rational discussion and debate - 'private people coming together in public.' Habermas argues that within such a public sphere individuals reasoning in universal terms can in principle reach agreement. 41 Nations claim that all citizens can and must participate in the public sphere, and the actions of national states vastly increased the number of persons capable of participation. However, the claim to rationality is undermined by the propagation of myths about the nation through the schools, and the claim to universalism by the exclusion of non-citizens by definition and by the unwillingness of elites to allow the majority of citizens to exercise their theoretical rights. 42 Habermas identified the public sphere historically with the rise of the middle class in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and argued that the 'bourgeois' public sphere declined during the later nineteenth-century. Critics have questioned his privileging of the role of the bourgeoisie, but as feminists in particular have pointed out, the number of participants in public life was limited. In the middle and later nineteenth-century, the voices in the public sphere were those of individual elite persons, almost all male. Average levels of education conceal the fact that a few were very highly educated and most had no formal schooling at all. The histories of public discussion in the nineteenth-century are therefore histories of individuals and their ideas. The struggles among Bakumatsu and early Meiji leaders in Japan, the debates between industrial entrepreneurs and government officials in Prussia in the 1840s, the conflicts between Abolitionists and pro-slavery spokespersons in the United States in the 1850s, or the competition among leaders of French and British political parties in the 1860s and 1870s were all confined to small groups of privileged persons. The number of voices in the public sphere gradually increased. As educational levels rose and the media expanded, previously suppressed groups made themselves heard. Workers demanded the right to collective agitation. Farmers demanded protection. The gendered public realm came under attack from feminists. Hyper-nationalists attacked the ruling elites. In this period virtually the entire population possessed a basic primary education, but few had the advantages of advanced education, affluence and leisure. Oppressed and neglected, members of various disadvantaged groups gave their allegiance to new mass parties on both left and right as in Europe, to existing parties that broadened their appeal as in the United States, or to elements within the elite that promised to fulfill hyper-nationalist programmes, as in Japan. Elites claimed these new voices were illegitimate. In Weber's terms, the new groups were led by unprincipled demagogues who merely wooed the masses. The new leaders and movements responded by 'unmasking' the particular interests lying behind the claim of elite groups to represent the general national interest. Over time this reduced the credibility of even the most revered and insulated of 'national'

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institutions. The members of the United States Supreme Court, for example, are today commonly expected to represent the political views of the particular presidents who nominated them. In Habermas' terms, the claims of new leaders and new movements represented the special pleading of particular interests. Neither the leaders of new movements nor their supporters entered the public realm as 'abstract' individuals, and they therefore could not logically represent themselves as 'the' public.43 Historically, however, the significant fact was the access of previously excluded or unheard groups to the means to be heard, noticed and discussed. The media provided such access even when censored and even when they did not wish to. Newspaper stories of arrests, protests or strikes meant that someone had been arrested, or was protesting or striking, a subtext that survived even the most negative twist given to the reports. Oppositional media might appear with stories or words blanked out, spaces often easily filled by their readers. Non-political media such as magazines for farmers or for women touched continually on public issues and the definition of the nation simply by identifying areas of common concern to their readers. In the post-war period, the number of voices in the public sphere has continued to proliferate, and all have worked to undermine the possibility of a single national identity. The clearest cases are ethnic groupings that insist on their identity being recognised and respected. 44 These campaigns bear a striking resemblance to those of nineteenth-century state-building nationalists. Their languages must be created as well as discovered, their histories are often essentialist myths, and the movements' leaders feel the same need to educate and civilise the members of their communities as did the national elites of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Britain, such 'cultural nationalisms' have been developed and deployed by Irish, Scottish and Welsh nationalists. 45 In a parallel fashion, new identities have been formed by migrant groups such as South Asians and West Indians. In the 1950s, Cyril Burt could assume that there was a British 'nation' embodying a single 'civilisation' that had to be defended by separating the genetically superior students from the less able. As elsewhere such claims have become increasingly less plausible. The political impact of both separatist nationalisms and migrant groupings has fluctuated, but it is clear that many residents of Britain question the extent to which they belong to a single British nation. 46 Finally, the public sphere is saturated with messages emanating from the popular culture industries. As argued above, even when it is ostensibly non-political, popular culture does have a political effect. In addition, the line between frivolous popular culture and serious discussion of public issues has blurred. Political parties must advertise. Many media figures have leveraged their recognition factor into political careers. All movements across the spectrum from radical feminists to the racist new right exploit popular culture's modes of expression, especially graphic art and music, to sell their message. The result, from an individual perspective, is a fragmented identity. The expanded public realm of popular culture, and the expanded number of voices

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competing for attention, almost guarantee of themselves that this should be so. Works claiming to define the essence of Japaneseness, or the German, French or American national character, compete not only with each other, but also with many other claims on an individual's attention. Post-war Japanese, and the postwar members of many other national communities, hold multiple identities. Membership in the national community is certainly one such identity, but it is not the only one, and it may not be the most important one for any given individual. This is not a completely new phenomenon, as the case of Abe Isoo outlined in this volume by Elise Tipton demonstrates, but it is more common in an increasingly well-educated and affluent world. Ken'ichi Ohmae among Japanese authors, and many others elsewhere, have argued that the process of globalisation has caused the old national states, and the old national identities, to dissolve. 47 A student by day may find himself a cafe patron by night, a baseball player on weekends, and a country tourist in his holidays. Another student may as a reader of popular fiction lose herself in foreign lands or other centuries. Both will shop for clothes and other objects to enhance these different identities. This is perfectly healthy and comfortable for the individual, but it is not what 'nationalists' want. The partial, fragmentary and episodic attachments characteristic of the changing fashions of popular culture are a source of great worry for nationalist ideologues with their demand for the individual's total and undivided loyalty to the nation and the state. These concerns emerge particularly clearly in interpretations of expatriate cultures, as we see in Stewart Lone's study here of the Japanese community in Brazil. The same problems were posed for Chinese nationalists by Chinese communities located outside of China. They waged, as Prasenjit Duara expresses it, 'an uphill battle against dispersion and division, deracination and deculturation, localization and globalization among the Chinese overseas' .48 Explicit attempts to control public discourse continue. In the Japanese case we can point to the national savings campaigns analysed by Garon. In the late 1980s, government advisers asserted that Japanese should be satisfied with fewer material comforts, that an 'age of culture' was to follow the 'age of economics'. Their efforts to define and reinforce a timeless, ahistorical Japanese essence have been identified as attempts to contain social divisions in an age of high mass consumption.49 We can see implicit modes of control as well, 'surveillance ... organized as a multiple, automatic, and anonymous power'. 5 From such a perspective education and the mass media contribute to a system of internalised controls that work to prevent perception of and opposition to the existing system. Yoshino shows that, in contemporary language instruction, English pattern sentences tell Japanese what they are or should be like. Similarly, the construction of women as consumers places popular culture in support of a national tradition in which women are subordinate. 51 However, compared to the first period of nationalist consolidation, or to the era of extreme nationalism, these efforts are not successful. Attempts to control public discourse are competing and conflicting, as are all of the appeals in the mass media. This can be seen in the contradiction between the Japanese government's calls for savings and sacrifice on the one hand, and the consumption made

°

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possible by affluence on the other. Although intentionally manipulative, advertising must seek to convince its audience. Therefore women, as the crucial audience, are empowered by virtue of their choice to purchase or not. Garon demonstrates the necessity of appealing to women's desires in national savings campaigns. Alternatively and more optimistically, we might suggest that the mass media and mass culture offer individuals greater access to an extended public sphere. Democratisation, for instance in South Korea, suggests that state-building nationalism must give way to something else; the collapse of the Milosevic regime in Yugoslavia suggests that radical nationalism is also inherently unstable in the contemporary world. There is no guide and no guarantee, but a richer understanding of the history and the processes of nationalism requires the integration of the Japanese case into our analyses.

Notes

1 Rethinking nation and nationalism in Japan *I am indebted to Emeritus Professor ItO Takashi of the Faculty of Letters, University of Tokyo, and Emeritus Professor William G. Beasley of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, whose willingness to share their insights into Japanese nationalism with me has greatly enriched this chapter. I would also like to thank Ms I wane Shibuya for her assistance in reading some difficult materials. 1 Anthony D. Smith, National Identity, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, p. 43. 2 Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, revised edn, 1991. 3 Yael Tamir, 'The Enigma of Nationalism', World Politics, vol. 47, no. 3, April 1995. 4 Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985, p. 121. 5 Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism, London: Sage, 1995, p. 19. 6 Miroslav Hroch, 'Real and Constructed: The Nature of the Nation', in John A. Hall (ed.), The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 92. 7 The phrase is used by Carol Gluck in Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. 8 John Plamenatz, 'Two Types of Nationalism', in Eugene Kamenka (ed.), Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1975, pp. 23-4. 9 Craig Calhoun, Nationalism, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997, p. 11. 10 Billig, Banal Nationalism, pp. 5-7; Rogers Brubaker, 'Myths and Misconceptions in the Study of Nationalism', in Hall (ed.), The State ofthe Nation, pp. 276-8. 11 Calhoun, Nationalism, pp. 21-2; Umut Ozkmmh, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000, pp. 229-30. 12 Ozkmmh, Theories of Nationalism, pp. 4, 229-30. 13 Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, pp. 7-9. 14 Cited in P. A. Narasimha Murthy, The Rise of Modern Nationalism in Japan: A Historical Study of the Role of Education in the Making of Modem Japan, New Delhi: Ashajanak Publications, 1973, p. 149. 15 Calhoun, Nationalism, p. 49. 16 Marius B. Jansen, 'Oi Kentaro: Radicalism and Chauvinism', Far Eastern Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 3, May 1952, pp. 305-16; F. G. Notehelfer, Kotoku Shiisui: Portrait of a Japanese Radical, London: Cambridge University Press, 1971, pp. 55, 82-7. 17 Miwa Kimitada, Chihoshugi no kenkyii, Tokyo: Nansosha, 1975, pp. 27-9. 18 Quoted ibid., p. 31.

164 Notes 19 Tsurumaki Takao, 'MinshU undo to shakai ishiki', in Asao Naohiro etal. (eds), lwanami ki5za: Nihon tsiishi, vol. 16, Kindai 1, Tokyo: Iwanami, 2000, pp. 232-4. 20 Quoted in Murthy, Rise of Modern Nationalism in Japan, p. 130. 21 Takashi Fujitani, 'Meiji Era (1868-1912)', in James L. Huffman (ed.), Modern Japan: An Encyclopedia of History, Culture, and Nationalism, New York: Garland, 1998, p. 147. 22 D. C. Ho1tom, Modern Japan and Shinto Nationalism: A Study of Present-Day Trends in Japanese Religions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943, p. 67. 23 Fujitani, 'Meiji Era', p. 148. 24 Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy; James L. Huffman, 'Introduction', in Huffman (ed.), Modern Japan, xi-xii. 25 Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, London: Sage, 1997. 26 Ibid., ch. 3. 27 Murthy, Rise of Modern Nationalism in Japan, p. 141. 28 Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths. 29 Mark Beissenger, 'Nationalisms that Bark and Nationalisms that Bite: Ernest Gellner and the Substantiation of Nations', in Hall (ed.), The State of the Nation, p. 180. 30 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan: From the Seventeenth to the Twenty-first Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 73-4; Yamane Nobuhiro, 'Mapping the Nation-State: Construction of the Telegraph Network in Meiji Japan', paper presented at Biennial Conference of the Japanese Studies Association of Australia, Sydney, June 2001. 31 Tsurumaki, 'MinshU undo', pp. 232-4. 32 Yiibin Hi5chi shinbun, no. 32, January 1873. 33 Yiibin Hi5chi shinbun, no. 88, 14 July 1873. 34 Yiibin Hi5chi shinbun, no. 233, 8 January 1874. 35 Nichi nichi shinbun, 26 July 1874, quoted in Okitsu Kaname, Meiji shinbun kotohajime: 'bunmei kaika' no jiinarizumu, Tokyo: TaishU:kan shoten, 1997, p. 219. 36 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation, Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998, p. 10. 37 Karen Wigen, 'Constructing Shinano: The Invention of a Neo-Traditional Regime', in Stephen Vlastos (ed.), Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, p. 239. 38 Quoted in Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths, p. 35. 39 Ibid. 40 Donald Keene, 'The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5 and its Cultural Effects in Japan', in Donald H. Shively (ed.), Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971, pp. 121-75. 41 Sandra Wilson, The Manchurian Crisis and Japanese Society, 1931-33, London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 225-6. 42 On this point see Delmer Brown, Nationalism in Japan: An Introductory Historical Analysis, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955, pp. 168-9. 43 See especially Richard J. Smethurst, A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism: The Army and the Rural Community, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. 44 Miwa, Chihi5shugi no kenkyii, pp. 32, 35. 45 Kenneth B. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural identity, 1885-1895, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969. 46 Katsura Taro, Katsura Taro jiden, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1993, pp. 331-2. See also Tokutorni Iichiro (Soho), Seijika toshite no Katsura ki5, Tokyo, 1913, p. 144. 47 See, for example, Ippeisotsu [Kotoku ShU:sui], 'Sensoronsha ni tsugu', Heimin shinbun, 7 July 1903, in Kotoku ShU:sui zenshU henshU iinkai (ed.), Ki5toku Shiisui zenshii, vol.4, Tokyo:Meijibunken, 1968,pp. 298-300. 48 The phrase is used by Stewart Lone, in Japan's First Modern War: Army and Society in the Conflict with China, 1894-95, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994.

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49 Sandra Wilson, 'The Past in the Present: War in Narratives of Modernity in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s', in Elise K. Tipton and John Clark (eds), Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s, Sydney and Honolulu: Australian Humanities Research Foundation and University of Hawai'i Press, 2000, pp. 170-84. 50 Shumpei Okamoto, 'The Emperor and the Crowd: The Historical Significance of the Hibiya Riot', in Tetsuo Najita and J. Victor Koschmann (eds), Conflict in Modern Japanese History: The Neglected Tradition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, pp. 272-3; Tessa Morris-Suzuki, 'The Invention and Reinvention of "Japanese Culture" ', Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 54, no. 3, August 1995, pp. 759-80. 51 For example, Iizuka Kazuyuki, 'Nisshin, Nichiro senso to noson shakai', in Iguchi Kazuki (ed.), Nisshin, Nichiro sensa (Kindai Nihon no kiseki 3), Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1994, pp. 143-4, 147; Stewart Lone, 'Region and Nation in Wartime Japan, 1904-05', paper presented to Asian Studies Association of Australia Conference, University of New South Wales, September-October 1998. 52 Wilson, The Manchurian Crisis and Japanese Society, ch. 4. 53 Morris-Suzuki, Re-Inventing Japan, ch. 5. 54 Hugh Clarke, 'The Great Dialect Debate: The State and Language Policy in Okinawa', in Elise K. Tipton (ed.), Society and the State in Interwar Japan, London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 193-217. 55 See Wilson, The Manchurian Crisis and Japanese Society, ch. 5. 56 See especially Kenneth B. Pyle, 'The Technology of Japanese Nationalism: The Local Improvement Movement, 1900-1918', Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 33, November 1973, pp. 51-65; Kerry Smith, A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression, and Rural Revitalization, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001. 57 Billig, Banal Nationalism, p. 93. 58 Ibid. 59 Brian J. McVeigh, 'Postwar Nationalisms of Japan: The Management and Mysticism of Identity', New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, June 2000, p. 25. 60 Stephen S. Large, Emperor Hirohito and Showa Japan: A Political Biography, London: Routledge, 1992, ch. 6; Yoshida Yutaka, ShOwa tenno no shiisenshi, Tokyo, 1992. 61 J. A. A. Stockwin, The Japanese Socialist Party and Neutralism, London: Melbourne University Press, 1968. 62 Noguchi YUichiro, Nihon no keizai nashonarizumu, Tokyo: Daiyamondosha, 1976, pp. 6-8. 63 Huffman, 'Introduction', x. 64 Kosaku Yoshino, 'Rethinking Theories of Nationalism: Japan's Nationalism in a Marketplace Perspective', in Kosaku Yoshino (ed.), Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism: Asian Experiences, Honolulu: University ofHawai'i Press, 1999, pp. 8-28. 65 KOichi Iwabuchi, 'Pure Impurity: Japan's Genius for Hybridism', Communal/Plural, vol. 6,no. 1, 1998,pp. 71-85. 66 Kosaku Yoshino, 'The Discourse on Blood and Racial Identity in Contemporary Japan', in Frank Dikotter (ed.), The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, London: Hurst, 1997, pp. 199-211. 67 Curtis Anderson Gayle, 'Progressive Representations of the Nation: Early Post-War Japan and Beyond', Social Science Japan Journal, vol. 4, no. 1, p. 11. Kevin Doak shows that ethnic nationalism could be used to differentiate nation from state even in the 1930s: see Kevin M. Doak, Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. 68 Kevin M. Doak, 'What is a Nation and Who Belongs? National Narratives and the Ethnic Imagination in Twentieth-Century Japan', American Historical Review, vol. 102, no. 2, April 1997, p. 292. 69 Gayle, 'Progressive Representations of the Nation', pp. 14-15.

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70 Doak, 'What is a Nation?', p. 303. 71 Gayle, 'Progressive Representations of the Nation', pp. 6-8. 72 Suzuki Kunio, 90nendai no nashonarizumu: atarashii kyosei no jidai o mukaete, Nagareyama-shi, Chiba-ken: Nagasaki shuppan, 1994, ch. 4. 73 See Kosaku Yoshino, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan: A Sociological Enquiry, London: Routledge, 1992. 74 Ross Mouer and Yoshio Sugimoto, Images of Japanese Society: A Study in the Social Construction of Reality, London: KPI, 1986, pp. 169-81. 75 Harurni Befu, 'Symbols of Nationalism and Nihonjin Ron', in R. Goodman and K. Refsing (eds), Ideology and Practice in Modem Japan, London: Routledge, 1992, pp. 26-46.

2 The politics of pragmatism and pageantry: selling a national navy at the elite and local level in Japan, 1890-1913 *I would like to thank the British Academy for the generous funding they provided me as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge during the 1999/2000 academic year. During this period I conducted research for this chapter. 1 Tokyo asahi, 10 November 1913, p. 1. 2 Hayashi Katsunari, Nihon gunji gijitsu shi, Tokyo: Haruki shob5, 1972; Chihaya Masataka, Nihon kaigun no senryaku hasso, Tokyo: Purejidentosha, 1982; Kaigunsh5 daijin kanb5 (ed.), Kaigun gunbi enkaku, Tokyo: Kaigun daijin kanb5, 1934. In English, see Paul S. Dull, A Battle History of the Japanese Navy, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1979; Ito Masanori, transl. Roger Pineau and Andrew Y. Kuroda, The End of the Imperial Japanese Navy, New York: W.W. Norton, 1962. 3 Tsunoda Jun, 'Nihon kaigun sandai no rekishi', Jiyii, vol. II, no. 1, January 1969, p. 90. 4 See Asada Sadao, 'The Japanese Navy and the United States, 1931-1941 ',in Dorothy Borg and Okamoto Shumpei (eds), Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations, 1931-1941, New York: Columbia University Press, 1973, pp. 225-59; Stephen Pelz, The Race to Pearl Harbor: The Failure of the Second London Naval Conference and the Onset of World War II, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974; Kobayashi Tatsuo, 'The London Naval Treaty, 1930', in James W. Morley (ed.), Japan Erupts: The London Naval Conference and the Manchurian Incident, I928-1932, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984, pp. 11-117; Hatano Sumio, 'Showa kaigun no nanshinron', Rekishi to jinbutsu, December 1984, pp. 277-85; Goto Ken'ichi, 'Kaigun nanshinron to Indoneshia mondai', Ajia yii, vol. 31, July 1984; Hatano Sumio and Asada Sadao, 'The Japanese Decision to Move South (1939-1941)', in Robert Boyce and Edmond Robertson (eds), Paths to War: New Essays on the Origins of the Second World War, New York: StMartin's Press, 1989, pp. 383-407; Tsunoda Jun, 'The Navy's Role in the Southern Strategy', in James W. Morley (ed.), The Fateful Choice: Japan's Advance into Southeast Asia, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, pp. 241-96. 5 David A. Rosenberg and John T. Sumida, 'Machines, Men, Manufacturing, Management and Money: The Study of Navies as Complex Organizations and the Transformation of Twentieth Century Naval History', in John Hattendorf (ed.), Doing Naval History, Naval War College Historical Monograph Series, 13, June 1994, p. 35. 6 Figures taken from Kaigunsh5, Yamamoto Gonnohyoe to kaigun, Tokyo: Hara shob5, 1966, pp. 400-l; Ogawa Gotar5, Conscription System in Japan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921, pp. 16-17; Statistics Bureau, Historical Statistics of Japan, vol. 5, Tokyo: Japan Statistical Association, 1989, p. 527. 7 Stewart Lone, Army, Empire, and Politics in Meiji Japan: The Three Careers of General Katsura Taro, London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 23.

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8 While serving as vice navy minister under Kawamura Sumiyoshi (1883-5) and Saigo Tsugumichi (1885-90) and as navy minister himself from 1890, Kabayama gained a reputation as a hard-working, shrewd bargainer, one who successfully furthered navy interests in the government and Satsuma factionalism within the navy. Military historian Matsushita Yoshio wrote that Kabayama was one of the most skilled bureaucratic leaders in the early Meiji navy: Matsushita Yoshio, Nihon gunbatsu no ki5bo, vol. 1, Tokyo: Jinbutsu oraisha, 1967, pp. 161-5. For a discussion of Kabayama's Satsuma favouritism within the navy, see David Evans, 'The Satsuma Faction and Professionalism in the Japanese Naval Officer Corps of the Meiji Period, 1868-1912', unpublished PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1978, pp. 121-62. 9 The text of Kabayama's speech can be found in Teikoku gikai, Dai Nihon teikoku gikaishi, vol. 1, Tokyo, 1926, pp. 1491-2. The Dai Nihon teikoku gikaishi volumes provide complete transcripts of each parliament during the Meiji and Taisho period. See also Otsu Jun'ichiro, Dai Nihon kenseishi, vol. III, Tokyo: Hobunkan, 1927-8, pp. 630-8. In his work Nihon gunsei to seiji (Tokyo: Kuroshio shuppan, 1960), Matsushita Yoshio states that his speech was delivered on 27 November. The famous 'indignation speech', however, took place on 22 December 1891. For representatives' remarks criticising Kabayama, see Dai Nihon teikoku gikaishi, vol. I, pp. 1492-5. 10 Debates presented in Dai Nihon teikoku gikaishi, vol. I, pp. 1636-58. 11 Uchida Kenzo (ed.), Nihon gikai shiroku, vol. 1, Tokyo: Dai'ichi hOki shuppan, 1990, p. 125. 12 Matsushita, Nihon gunbatsu no kobo, vol. I, pp. 187-9. 13 Kokkai, 24 December 1892, p. 1. Almost a year earlier, in the aftermath ofKabayama's speech before the Diet, ltagaki had declared at his party's headquarters in Tokyo that his 'party would force the navy to reform its practices before it would support any future naval increases'. See Japan Weekly Mail, 2 January 1892. The other major party, the KaishintO, supported this position. See plank seven of the KaishintO election manifesto, printed in its entirety in Japan Weekly Mail, 2 January 1892, p. 4. 14 The extensive bill is printed in its entirety in Dai Nihon teikoku gikaishi, vol. II, pp. 616--19. The main points can be summarised as follows: 1. The separation of command and administration within the navy; 2. Discontinuing the practice of appointing naval officers to civil posts in the Navy Department; 3. Limiting the number of officers above the rank of Lieutenant; 4. Reform of officer education; 5. Amendment of the present system of naval stations; 6. Creation of a reserve squadron; 7. Greater supervision over the purchase of articles for use on war vessels; 8. Abolition of the paymasters and the Naval Medical College; 9. Reducing the expenditures appropriated for the War College. 15 Rescript printed in Dai Nihon teikoku gikaishi, vol. II, p. 879; and Otsu, Dai Nihon kenseishi, vol. III, pp. 831-3. 16 Ikeda Kiyoshi, Nihon no kaigun, vol. 1, Tokyo: Isseido, 1967, p. 113. 17 Ko Hakushaku Yamamoto kaigun taisho denki hensankai, Yamamoto Gonnohyoe den, vol. 1, Tokyo: Ko Hakushaku Yamamoto kaigun taisho denki hensankai, 1938, pp. 330-1. The overall reforms are detailed on pp. 330-47. 18 For a partial list of the officers removed from active duty and their new positions, see Japan Mail, 26 May 1893, p. 254. 19 Shunbo Ko tsuishokai, Ito Hirobumi den, vol. III, Tokyo: ShunbO Ko tsuishokai, 1940-1, pp. 904-6. 20 Eckart Kehr (ed.), transl. and introduced by Pauline R. Anderson and Eugene N. Anderson, Battleship Building and Party Politics in Germany, I894-I90I, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973, pp. 73-95. 21 For a brief description of Lieut-Commander Sam Tetsutaro, see David Evans and Mark Peattie, Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887-194I, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1997, pp. 133-6. 22 For information on the Suikosha, see US National Archives, Records of the Chief of Naval Operations, Record Group 38, Office of Naval Intelligence, Registers 1886--1923. File# E-7-d 07-180, 'Suikosha, or Naval Club of Japan'.

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Notes

23 Sat6 Tetsutaro, Teikoku kokubO ron, Tokyo: Suikosha, 1902. 24 Discussed in Boeicho boei kenshiijo senshishitsu, Kaigun gunsenbi, vol. 1, Tokyo: Asagumo shinbunsha, 1969, p. 102. 25 Lone, Army, Empire, and Politics in Meiji Japan, pp. 95-8. 26 Even to Japanese living overseas, Togo had become a hero. See John J. Stephan, Hawaii Under the Rising Sun, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984, p. 16. In this work, Stephan points out that until just before World War II, a popular brand of sake brewed in Hilo bore the name Togo Masamune. A portrait of the admiral adorned the label. 27 The description is based on information gathered from various Tokyo newspapers such as the Tokyo asahi, Jiji shinpo, Niroku shinbun and Chilo shinbun which all covered Togo's celebrations with extensive detail during the week of 23 October 1905. 28 See Jiji shinpo, 27 and 30 October eQitions, 1905, on the blue-jacket entertainment fund. 29 See document 'KokubO shoyo heiryokuryo', in Boeicho boei kenshiijo senshishitsu, Dai hon'ei kaigunbu, rengo kontai, 2 vols, Tokyo: Asagumo shinbunsha, 1975, vol. 1, pp. 116-20. 30 Tokyo mainichi, 6 February-9 February 1907. 31 Tokyo asahi, 30 April 1910. The paper reached these numbers by using the formula that the operation life of a battleship or armoured cruiser was approximately 12 to 15 years. 32 Chilo shinbun, 4 January 1911. 33 Tokyo asahi, 7 March 1911. 34 See Jiji shinpo, 28 May 1906. The Tokyo asahi and Chilo shinbun also reported extensively on this event. 35 Sat6 Tetsutaro, Teikoku kokubOshi ron, reprinted edition, vol. 1, Tokyo: Hara shobo, 1979, p. 144. Quoted in Evans and Peattie, Kaigun, p. 138. 36 Sat6 Tetsutaro, Kokubi5 sakugi, unpublished manuscript, n.p., 1912, pp. 19-20. 37 Ibid., pp. 26-7. 38 Ibid., p. 36. 39 Kitahara Tetsuo (Mizuno Hironori), Tsugi no issen, Tokyo: Kaneo bunendo, 1913. 40 Mark R. Peattie, 'Forecasting a Pacific War, 1912-1933: The Idea of Conditional Japanese Victory', in James White, Michio Umegaki and Thomas Havens (eds), The Ambivalence of Nationalism, New York: University Press of America, 1990, pp. 119-20. Also ShOichi Saeki, 'Images of the United States as a Hypothetical Enemy', in Akira Iriye (ed.), Mutual Images: Essays in American-Japanese Relations, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975, pp. 101-8. See also Stephan, Hawaii Under the Rising Sun, pp. 56-9. 41 Morita Akatsuki, Teikoku kaigun no kiki, Tokyo: Teikoku kaigun no kiki hakkojo, 1912; and Morita Akatsuki, Kokubi5 to kaigunjujitsu, Tokyo: Teikoku kaigun no kiki hakkojo, 1914. 42 Homer Lea's original work was published by Harper & Brothers in 1909. The two rival Japanese translations were: Mochizuki Kotara, Nichi-Bei hissen ron and Ike Kyokichi, Nichi-Bei senso. For details see Saeki, 'Images of the United States as a Hypothetical Enemy', p. 102. For a short biography of Homer Lea, see Stephan, Hawaii Under the Rising Sun, pp. 56-7. 43 See Saionji Kinmochi den, vol. III, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1993, pp. 123-6. For exact budgetary figures that document the increases in naval spending, see Sorifu teikoku kyoku, Nihon teikoku tokei nenkan, no. 43, 1924, pp. 508-9. 44 Saionji's acceptance of naval expansion surprised many in Japan's ruling and business elite, particularly within the army. Moreover, historians have puzzled over why Saionji ultimately favoured the navy. For instance, writing in 1967, Tetsuo Najita stated that Saionji's acceptance of the navy programme 'was contrary to the cabinet's retrenchment programme and defied explanation': Tetsuo Najita, Hara Kei in the Politics of Compromise, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967, p. 96. Saionji's policy deci-

Notes

45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

169

sion is also discussed in Lesley Connors, The Emperor's Adviser: Saionji Kinmochi and Pre-War Japanese Politics, London: Croom Helm, 1987, pp. 38-9. See editorials from the Tokyo asahi, Chiio shinbun, Niroku shinbun, fiji shinpo and others. Najita, Hara Kei in the Politics of Compromise, pp. 62-9. Takekoshi had strongly criticised the cabinet of Katsura Taro in 1910 for not accepting the navy's requests for an increase in funding: Miyako shinbun, 10 August 1910. Robert Scalapino, Democracy and the Party Movement in Prewar Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962, p. 191. fiji shinpo, 1 October 1912. Also Japan Weekly Mail, 5 October 1912, p. 577. In 1902, Ito Hirobumi accepted the navy's expansion plan and told the followers of his party to go along with his endorsement. This led to stem condemnation from members of his party such as Hara Kei who felt he had betrayed the spirit of party politics. See Hara Kei'ichiro (ed.), Hara Kei nikki, 18 December 1901, vol. 1, Tokyo: Fukumura shuppan, 1965-7, p. 374; Najita, Hara Kei in the Politics of Compromise, pp. 9-10. Saionji Kinmochi den, vol. III, pp. 128-32. Hayashi Shigeru and Tsugi Kiyoaki (eds), Nihon naikaku shiroku, vol. II, Tokyo: Dai'ichi hoki shuppan, 1981, pp. 180-1. Ibid., pp. 177-9. fiji shinpo, 6 November 1913, p. 1. The Tokyo asahi and Japan Times also covered this event in detail. For technical specifics concerning the Kongo, which was designed by the distinguished British naval architect Sir George Thurston, see Evans and Peattie, Kaigun, pp. 160-3. The dates of the grand manoeuvres of the fleet were printed in Japan Weekly Mail, 16 November 1912, p. 570. For extended coverage of these events, see articles in Tokyo asahi, fiji shinpo, Chiio shinbun, Tokyo nichi nichi, Japan Times between 10 and 13 November 1913. A complete list of those cabinet ministers who accompanied Emperor Taisho is as follows: Prime Minister Yamamoto Gonnohyoe, Navy Minister Saito Makoto, Foreign Minister Makino Nobuaki, Army Minister Kusunose Yukihiko, Home Minister Hara Kei, and Vice Navy Minister Takarabe Takeshi.

3 Picturing political space in 1920s and 1930s Japan

2

3 4

5

I wish to express my thanks to Ellen Gardner Nakamura who provided research assistance in locating some of the cartoons discussed and to the staff of the Ohara Social Research Institute, Hosei University, for assistance with illustrations and for permission to reproduce the illustrations in this chapter. Thanks to the participants in the colloquium on 'Nation and Nationalism in Modem Japan', Perth, September 2001, who provided stimulating comments on an early version of this paper. Research for this chapter was completed as part of a larger project on the politics of visual culture in modem Japan, funded by the Curtin University Small Grants Scheme and the Australian Research Council Large Grants Scheme. Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, Sydney: Pluto Press, 1998, p. 51. Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992; Lynn Hunt (ed.), Eroticism and the Body Politic, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907-1914, London: Chatto & Windus, 1987; Eric Hobsbawm, 'Man and Woman: Images on the Left', in his Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour, London, 1984, pp. 83-102. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe, Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1985.

170 Notes 6 Stephen White, The Bolshevik Poster, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988; Matthew Cullerne Bown and Brandon Taylor (eds), Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State, I917-I992, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993; Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997; Susan Magarey et al. (eds), Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the I890s, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993; Joy Damousi, Women Come Rally: Socialism, Communism and Gender in Australia, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994. 7 Griselda Pollock, 'Feminism/Foucault - Surveillance/Sexuality', in Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (eds), Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994, pp. 1-41; Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 18. 8 Linda Nochlin, Representing Women, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999, pp. 7-33; Griselda Pollock (ed.), Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 3-21. 9 Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald (eds), Picturing Power in the People's Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. 10 For some attempts to consider the politics of visual culture in early twentieth-century Japan, see Vera Mackie, 'Liberation and Light: The Language of Opposition in Imperial Japan', East Asian History, vol. XX, no. 9, 1995, pp. 99-115; Elise K. Tipton and John Clark (eds), Being Modem in Japan: Culture and Society from the I9IOs to the I930s, Sydney and Honolulu: Australian Humanities Research Foundation and the University of Hawai'i Press, 2000; Miriam Silverberg, 'Advertising Every Body', in Susan Leigh Foster (ed.), Choreographing History, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 129-48; special issue of Japan Forum on visuality in twentiethcentury Japan, vol. 11, no. 1, 1999; Peter Duus, 'Presidential Address: Weapons of the Weak, Weapons of the Strong- The Development of the Japanese Political Cartoon', Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 60, no. 4, November 2001, pp. 965-97. See also Jackie Menzies (ed.), Modem Boy, Modem Girl: Modernity in Japanese Art, I900-I935, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998; James Fraser, Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast, Japanese Modem: Graphic Design Between the Wars, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996. 11 Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality. 12 James Donald and Stephanie Donald, 'The Publicness of Cinema', in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (eds), Re-Inventing Film Studies, London: Edward Arnold, 2000, pp. 114-29. 13 See, for example, Nagata Isshii's book on the proletarian arts movement, which includes reproductions of the posters of Soviet Russia, the cartoons of George Grosz, the murals of Diego Rivera, and the paintings of Kathe Kollwitz, alongside local Japanese artists. Nagata Isshii, Puroretaria kaiga ron, Tokyo: Tenjinsha, 1930, reprinted 1991. Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901-77) brought back illustrations by George Grosz from Berlin to Japan in 1923, and these were said to have influenced the artist Yanase Masamu (1900-45), who contributed graphic art to both the socialist press and more commercial publications. James Fraser, 'Introduction', in Fraser, Japanese Modem, p. 14. Other cartoons of the 1920s and 1930s show the influence of Grosz. 14 Duus, 'Weapons of the Weak, Weapons of the Strong', p. 989. 15 On colonial modernity, see Tani E. Barlow, 'Introduction: On "Colonial Modernity" ', in Tani E. Barlow (ed.), Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, Durham: Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 1-20; on 'interpellation as colonising subjects', see Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender and the Cultures of Travel, Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, p. 8. 16 Takafusa Nakamura, transl. by Edwin Whenmouth, A History of ShOwa Japan I926-I989, Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1998, p. 33.

Notes

171

17 Ibid., p. 40. 18 Ibid., pp. 49-50. 19 Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, p. 200. 20 Campaigns leading up to the modification of Article Five are discussed in Tajima Hide, Hitosuji no michi: fujin kaihli no tatakai gojiinen, Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 1968, pp. 56-61; Sharon Nolte, 'Women's Rights and Society's Needs: Japan's 1931 Suffrage Bill', Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 28, 1986, pp. 695-705; Sheldon Garon, 'Women's Groups and the Japanese State: Contending Approaches to Political Integration, 1890-1945', Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 1993, pp. 16-19. 21 Tachi Kaoru, 'Women's Suffrage and the State', in Vera Mackie (ed.), Feminism and the State in Modem Japan, Melbourne: Japanese Studies Centre, 1995, pp. 16-30. 22 The Association's monthly journal Fusen (Women's Suffrage) appeared from 1927, and had a print run of around 2000 copies. On the history of the pre-war campaign for women's suffrage, see Kodama Katsuko, Fujin sanseiken undo shoshi, Tokyo: Domesu shuppan, 1981. On Ichikawa, see Ichikawa Fusae, Jiden: senzen hen, Tokyo: Shinjuku shobO, 1981; Dee Ann Vavich, 'The Japanese Women's Movement: Ichikawa Fusae, Pioneer in Women's Suffrage', Monumenta Nipponica, vol. XXII, nos 3--4, 1967, pp. 402-36; Patricia Murray, 'Ichikawa Fusae and the Lonely Red Carpet', Japan Interpreter, vol. 10, no. 2, Autumn 1975, pp. 171-89. 23 Katayama Sen, 'The Political Position of Women', Japanese Women, vol. 2, no. 6, November 1939, p. 2, cited in Sachiko Kaneko, 'The Struggle for Legal Rights and Reforms: A Historical View', in Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow and Atsuko Kameda (eds), Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future, New York: The Feminist Press, 1995, p. 7. English slightly altered from original by Kaneko. 24 Nolte, 'Women's Rights and Society's Needs', pp. 692, 697-9. 25 Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 133. 26 Yosano Akiko, 'Fusen no uta', in Ichikawa, Jiden, pp. 220-1; translated by Jolisa Gracewood in Mackie (ed.), Feminism and the State, p. 27. 27 Murobushi Koshin (Takanobu), 'Kafe shakaigaku', Chilo kiiron, September 1929, pp. 189-90, paraphrased in Elise K. Tipton, 'The Cafe: Contested Space of Modernity in Interwar Japan', in Tipton and Clark (eds), Being Modem in Japan, p. 119. 28 Mariko Inoue, 'The Gaze of the Cafe Waitress: From Selling Eroticism to Constructing Autonomy', U.S.-lapan Women's Journal, English Supplement, no. 15, 1998, pp. 86-9. 29 On these incidents, see Horiba Kiyoko, Seito no jidai, Tokyo: Iwanarni shoten, 1988, pp. 112-13; Ide Fumiko, Seito no onnatachi, Tokyo: Kaien shobo, 1975, p. 87; Vera Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan: Gender, Labour and Activism, 1900-1937, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 30 Mackie, 'Liberation and Light'. 31 Posters were first used for advertising in Japan in the 1870s. James Fraser argues that poster design in Japan entered a new modernist stage after the Great KantO Earthquake of 1923. On posters, see James Fraser, 'Posters', in Fraser, Japanese Modem, p. 49; on proletarian theatre, see Matsumoto Katsuhira, Nihon shakai shugi engeki shi: Meiji Taishli hen, Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1975. 32 See the descriptions of the 'street war' which accompanied the Toyo Muslin strike of 1930: Suzuki Yiiko, Jokii to rodo sogi, Tokyo: Renga shobO, 1989; Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy, pp. 243-5. On the rice riots, see Michael Lewis, Rioters and Citizens: Mass Protest in Imperial Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. 33 Fujitani Takashi, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modem Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

172 Notes 34 Fujii Tadatoshi, Kokubii fujinkai: hinomaru to kappogi, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1985; Sandra Wilson, 'Mobilising Women in Inter-war Japan: The National Defence Women's Association and the Manchurian Crisis', Gender and History, vol. 7, no. 2, Summer 1995, pp. 295-314. 35 Jordan Sand, 'At Home in the Meiji Period', in Stephen Vlastos (ed.), Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, p. 192. 36 On the history of the Diet building, including several plans from the 1880s which did not eventuate, the temporary buildings which housed sessions of the Imperial Diet from 1890 to the 1930s, and the new building which was completed in 1936, see Inagaki Eizo, Nihon no kindai kenchiku: sono seiritsu katei, vol. 1, Tokyo: Kashima shuppankai, 1979, pp. 94--100; Nihon kenchiku gakkai (ed.), Nihon no kenchiku, vol. 3, Tokyo: Shikenchikusha, 1987, p. 20; Jonathan M. Reynolds, 'Japan's Imperial Diet Building: Debates over Construction of a National Identity', Art Journal, Fall 1996, pp. 38-47. On the progress of the new Diet building, see Asahi gurafu, 31 August 1927; Asahi gurafu, 19 February 1930; Fujiwara Yoshichika (ed.), Me de miru Showa zenshi, Tokyo: Yomiuri shinbunsha, 1993, p. 93. 37 Poster held in the collection of the Ohara Social Research Institute. 38 Mackie, 'Liberation and Light'. 39 Rodo nomin shinbun, no. 30, 1 January 1928; reproduced in Yanase Masamu, Yanase Masamu gashil, Tokyo, 1930, p. 77. See also Mochizuki Katsura's (1887-1975) cartoon, 'Bourgeois Nation-State' ('Burujua kokka') from the magazine Manbun manga of 5 November 1922. This cartoon also represents the bourgeoisie as a top-hatted spider at the centre of a web which ensnares the working class. It is reproduced in Shimizu Isao (ed.), Kindai Nihon manga hyakusen, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1997, p. 159. 40 January 1928 was after the enactment of the Universal Manhood Suffrage Act but just before the first election held under universal manhood suffrage. 41 Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy, p. 201. 42 Musansha shinbun, no. 133, 12 February 1928; reproduced in Yanase, Yanase Masamu gashil, p. 86. 43 Musansha shinbun, no. 129, 5 February 1928; reproduced ibid., p. 83. 44 See Yanase's well-known poster for the Musansha shinbun, where a hand seems to reach out from the flat surface of the poster, attempting to link hands with the viewer of the poster and the potential reader of the Proletarian News. Yanase Masamu, 'Hold hands with 50,000 readers: read the Proletarian Newspaper, friend of the people', 1928, reproduced in Menzies (ed.), Modem Boy, Modem Girl, p. 102. For a detailed discussion of this poster, see Vera Mackie, 'Modem Selves and Modem Spaces', in Tipton and Clark (eds), Being Modem in Japan, pp. 185-99. 45 See also Joy Damousi's discussion of socialist iconography in Australia: Damousi, Women Come Rally, pp. 164--9. 46 Tokyo Pakku, Osaka Pakku and Jiji manga were magazines primarily made up of satirical cartoons. Cartoon supplements were also attached to weekend editions of the metropolitan newspapers. Tokyo Pakku had several incarnations, appearing fortnightly from 1905 and then moving to one every 10 days in 1907; reviving in 1912, 1919 and 1928. Osaka Pakku appeared from 1906. Jiji manga was established in 1929. The Yomiuri newspaper established its Sunday cartoon supplement in 1930. Shimizu Isao, Mangano rekishi, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1991, pp. 28-31. 47 Jiji manga, 6 July 1925, reproduced in Shimizu Isao (ed.), Manga zasshi hakubutsukan, vol. 6, Tokyo: Kokusho kankokai, 1986-7. 48 Jiji manga, April 1929, reproduced ibid., vol. 11. 49 Miriam Silverberg, 'The Modem Girl as Militant', in Gail Lee Bernstein (ed.), Recreating Japanese Women: I600-I945, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 239-66; Mackie, 'Modem Selves and Modem Spaces'.

Notes

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50 See Yasumoto Ry6ichi, 'Who is Happier?', cover of Tokyo Pakku, vol. 17, no. 6, 1928; reproduced in Menzies (ed.), Modern Boy, Modern Girl, pp. 104-5. 51 fiji manga, 25 March 1923, reproduced in Manga zasshi hakubutsukan, vol. 6, p. 63. 52 Tokyo Pakku, 1 September 1907, reproduced in Manga zasshi hakubutsukan, vol. 5, p. 56. See also Kitazawa Rakuten's cartoon from Tokyo Pakku, 10 June 1911, where he contrasts 'the woman who has awakened to women's rights' with 'the woman who has awakened to women's duties'. The woman who has awakened to women's rights holds a book in her hand while the woman who has awakened to her duties is engaged in needlework. This cartoon is reproduced in Shimizu, Kindai Nihon manga hyakusen, p. 129. 53 Tickner, The Spectacle of Women. 54 fiji manga, 11 February 1923, reproduced in Manga zasshi hakubutsukan, vol. 6, p. 61. 55 Ikeda Eiji, 'Same Faces Again for the Year 1930', Cover of Tokyo Pakku, vol. 19, no. 1, 1930; Okamoto Toki [Miura Toshi], 'The City', Tokyo Pakku, vol. 19, no. 3, 1930, reproduced in Menzies (ed.), Modern Boy, Modern Girl, pp. 104-5. 56 Yomiuri Sandee manga, 1 March 1931, reproduced in Manga zasshi hakubutsukan, vol. 12, p. 1. 57 Hamaguchi had been shot by a right-wing terrorist in November 1930, and his health suffered throughout the subsequent months. The Hamaguchi Cabinet resigned in April 1931, and Hamaguchi died in August 1931. It thus seems that there are several meanings to be gained from this illustration. The 'Robot Prime Minister' image alone would probably simply reflect the threat to the legitimacy of the Hamaguchi Cabinet due to his failing health. However, coupled with the image of the rather militant wife of Hamaguchi in the cartoon, there also seems to be a suggestion that Hamaguchi had been emasculated by his association with the cause of women's suffrage. 58 It is possible that this figure was also designed to remind readers of the legendary Empress Jingu (201-69), said to have led an expedition to Korea. Images of Empress Jingu had seen a revival in the early Meiji period, when she provided one of the rare examples of a militant woman in Japanese history. Rebecca Copeland, Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000, p. 238, note 33; Elizabeth Lillihoj, Woman in the Eyes of Man: Images of Japanese Women in Japanese Art from the Field Museum, Chicago: De Paul University Publications, 1995, pp. 72-3. 59 See the series of posters for the Seiyukai candidate Hiraga Shu from 1928, with the caption 'Give your clean vote to the clean Hiraga Shu', collection of the Ohara Social Research Institute. 60 See the poster for the Osaka Prefectural Government, collection of the Ohara Social Research Institute. See also the selection of political posters reproduced in Asahi gurafu, 8 February 1928, pp. 78-9. 61 fiji manga, 2 March 1924, reproduced in Manga zasshi hakubutsukan, vol. 6, p. 80. 62 fiji manga, 1 January 1927; reproduced ibid., p. 7. 'Masa' is an alternative reading of the character 'sei' in 'Seiyukai'; 'Moto' is an alternative reading ofthe character 'hon' in 'Seiyu hont5'. 63 See the discussion of political cartoons in the Australian colonies in the years leading up to Federation, in Josie Castle and Helen Pringle, 'Sovereignty and Sexual Identity in Political Cartoons', in Magarey et al. (eds), Debutante Nation, pp. 136--49. 64 Yasumoto Ryoichi, 'Ah, the Dirty Election!', Tokyo Pakku, 1930; reproduced in Menzies (ed.), Modern Boy, Modern Girl, p. 105. 65 Such dichotomies of purity and corruption have been identified in representations of women in other national contexts, most memorably in Anne Summers' classic account of Australian women's history, Damned Whores and God's Police, Ringwood: Penguin Australia, 1975. One cannot assume a simple correspondence between modernist political discourse in Anglophone cultures and in Japan, but I would argue that the Tokyo Pakku cartoons suggest that a similar dichotomy was operating in Japanese popular discourse in the 1920s and 1930s.

174 Notes 66 fiji manga, 12 February 1922, reproduced in Manga zasshi hakubutsukan, vol. 6, p. 33. 67 The use of marriage as an allegory for the political process can be traced back to the political novels of the Meiji period. In The Stormy Sea of Love: A Drama of Popular Rights (Minken engi: jokai haran), written in 1880 by Toda Kindo, a geisha called 'Harbinger of Rights' (Sakigake 0-Ken) is married to a man called something like 'People's Government in Japan' (Wakokuya minji). Their eventual wedding reception is a metaphor for the opening of a national assembly. These political novels are discussed by Jay Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984, p. 39; Donald Keene, 'The Meiji Political Novel,' in his Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era: Fiction, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1984, pp. 76-95; G. T. Shea, Leftwing Literature in Japan: A Brief History of the Proletarian Literary Movement, Tokyo: Hosei University Press, 1964, p. 5. 68 Tokyo Pakku, 20 July 1908, reproduced in Manga zasshi hakubutsukan, vol. 6, pp. 74--5; Osaka Pakku, 15 February 1913, reproduced in Manga zasshi hakubutsukan, vol. 8, p. 102. 'Tami' is an alternative reading of the character 'min' in 'kokurnin' (the people, the nation). 69 fiji manga, 25 March 1928, reproduced in Manga zasshi hakubutsukan, vol. 11, p. 29. 70 Rikken minseito poster held in the collection of the Ohara Social Research Institute. 71 Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de Siecle France, London: Thames and Hudson, 1998, p. 35. 72 See the discussion of this stamp and a reproduction of the stamp in Mitsui Takaaki, 'Yubin kitte: josei o egaku mittsu no shusaku', Fujin asahi, March 1948, pp. 6-7. This stamp, of course, deserves a more extensive discussion, and I hope to pursue this theme in a future paper. Here I restrict my comments to the contrast between this representation and those of the 1920s and 1930s. 4 Substantiating the nation: terrorist trials as nationalist theatre in early Showa Japan

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Mark Beissinger, 'Nationalisms that Bark and Nationalisms that Bite: Ernest Gellner and the Substantiation of Nations', in John A. Hall (ed.), The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998,p. 175. Ibid., p. 171. The best account of the 15 May Incident trials is David A. Sneider, 'Action and Oratory: The Trials of the May 15th Incident of 1932', Law in Japan, vol. 23, no. 67, 1990, pp. 1-66. Beissinger, 'Nationalisms that Bark', p. 178. Victor Turner, 'Social Dramas and Stories About Them', in Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982, p. 70. Robert Hariman, 'Performing the Laws: Popular Trials and Social Knowledge', in Robert Hariman (ed.), Popular Trials: Rhetoric, Mass Media and the Law, Tuscalousa: University of Alabama Press, 1990, p. 19. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 27. For example, see 'Ansatsudan no ura ni Nichiren-shu no fukyoshi Inoue Nissho', Tokyo nichi nichi shinbun, 6 March 1932; reprinted in Mainichi komyunikeshonzu (ed.), ShOwa nyiisujiten, vol. III, Tokyo, 1991, pp. 117-18. Also, see StephenS. Large, 'Nationalist Extremism in Early Showa Japan: Inoue Nissho and the "BloodPledge Corps Incident", 1932', Modern Asian Studies, vol. 35, pt 3, July 2001, pp. 534, 549.

Notes

175

10 For a detailed narrative, see Large, 'Nationalist Extremism in Early Showa Japan'. Note that when they were called upon to testify during the Ketsumeidan trial, some of the 15 May Incident participants, including navy Lieutenants Koga Kiyoshi, Mikami Taku and Yamagishi Hiroshi, all of whom will be mentioned again in due course, insisted that the Ketsumeidan and 15 May Incidents were part of the same plot. Also, it was during the Ketsumeidan trial that the earlier army-led March and October 1931 Incidents, involving abortive plots for a coup d'etat, were first publicly revealed in Japan. See Amemiya Shoichi, 'Ketsumeidan jiken: "shihoken dokuritsu" no zeijakusei no rotei', in Wagatsuma Sakae (ed.), Nihon seiji saiban shiroku, vol. 4 (Showa zen), Tokyo, 1970,pp.426,433. 11 George Beckmann and Okubo Genji, The Japanese Communist Party, 1922-1945, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969, p. 219. 12 Richard H. Mitchell, Thought Control in Prewar Japan, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976, pp. 107-8. A more detailed Japanese account of the Communist trial is Odanaka Tokimura, '3.15, 4.16 jiken', in Wagatsuma (ed.), Nihon seiji saiban shiroku, pp. 123-257. 13 Amemiya, 'Ketsumeidanjiken', pp. 409-11. 14 'Inoue Nissho-ra, saibankan kihi o moshitate', 29 July 1933, in Mainichi komyi'inikeshonzu (ed.), Showa nyiisujiten, vol. IV, Tokyo, 1991, p. 110. 15 'Shinbun ni miru Ketsumeidan jiken no kohan', in Ketsumeidan jiken kohan sokkiroku geppo furoku, vol. II, March 1968, p. 4. 16 'Saibancho ga keimusho ni Nissho homon, settoku wa shippai', 20 August 1933, in Mainichi komyunikeshonzu, Showa nyiisu jiten, vol. IV, p. 111. Two Supreme Court judges later criticised Sakamaki for undermining the prestige of the court by visiting Inoue in prison: Hugh Byas, Government by Assassination, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1944, p. 50. 17 Amemiya, 'Ketsumeidanjiken', pp. 423-4. 18 Ibid., p. 426. 19 'Saibancho ga jojoron de hikoku-ra o ogoe shitta', Tokyo asahi, 20 September 1933, in Mainichi komyunikeshonzu, Shi5wa nyiisu jiten, vol. IV, pp. 137-8. 20 'Minkan niju hikoku ni kyukei Tachibana, Kawasaki wa muki', Tokyo asahi, 1 December 1933, ibid., p. 144. 21 Large, 'Nationalist Extremism in Early Showa Japan', p. 560. 22 'Fuassho boryoku shiso no fusshoku o negau', Osaka mainichi shinbun, 4 February 1934, in Mainichi komyunikeshonzu, Showa nyiisujiten, vol. IV, pp. 149-50. Also see, for instance, 'Go-ichigo jiken to kensei ni taisuru kokumin no kakugo', Fukuoka nichi nichi shinbun, 18 May 1933, ibid., pp. 128-9 and 'Genkei no shushi ni gokai o sh5zei shimeru na', Tokyo asahi, 10 November 1933, ibid., p. 143. 23 The following account of Inoue's testimony is based on the verbatim record found in Ketsumeidanjiken kohan sokkiroku, vol. I, Tokyo, 1962, pp. 41-415. 24 Inoue often used this last phrase in expressing his religious devotion to the Emperor. See Ketsumeidan jiken joshinsho gokuchii shuki, Tokyo, 1971, p. 202. 25 Khachig Tololyan, 'Cultural Narrative and the Motivation of the Terrorist', in David C. Rapoport (ed.), Inside Terrorist Organizations, London: Frank Cass & Company, 1988, p. 227. 26 Quoted in Robin Erica Wagner-Pacifici, The Mora Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, p. 279. 27 Ibid., p. 278. 28 Kagawa Yukio, Showa no satetsu: Ketsumeidan to go-ichigo jiken, Tokyo: Nishida shoten, 1995, p. 274. 29 'Nissho-ra yonin wa shikei, jushi hikoku ni kyi'ikei', 28 August 1934, in Mainichi komyi'inikeshonzu, Showa nyiisu jiten, vol. IV, p. 113. 30 Amemiya, 'Ketsumeidan jiken', p. 428. 31 Sneider, 'Action and Oratory', p. 51.

176

Notes

32 Ibid., p. 52. 33 Amemiya, 'Ketsumeidan jiken', pp. 427-8. 34 Sagoya had been sentenced to death but was released on 11 February 1934 in an amnesty marking the birth of Crown Prince Akihito on 23 December 1933. A. Morgan Young, Imperial Japan, I926-I938, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938, p. 197. 35 'Yoyaku kesshin, kaitei jitsu ni kyuju ikkai', Tokyo asahi, evening edition, 19 October 1934, in Mainichi komyunikeshonzu, Showa nyiisu jiten, vol. IV, p. 114. 36 Fujii Goichiro, 'Shizuka naru tokoro daichi ni tatsu kimochi', Ketsumeidan jiken kohan sokkiroku geppo furoku, vol. I, September 1967, pp. 2-3. 37 'Shinbun ni rniru Ketsumeidan jiken', ibid., vol. II, March 1968, p. 5. The text of the judgement is found in Ketsumeidanjiken kohan sokkiroku, vol. III, 1968, pp. 1157-80. 38 'Jiken kara ninenburi ni hanketsu, sannin wa muki ni', Chiigai shogyo, evening edition, 23 November 1934, in Mainichi komyunikeshonzu, ShOwa nyiisu jiten, vol. IV, pp. 114--15. 39 'Hanketsu no kudasatta hi no shinbun yori', Ketsumeidan jiken kohan sokkiroku geppo furoku, vol. III, October 1968, p. 7. 40 For a typical example, see 'Kensatsugawa mo koso sezu, shuno kaigi de ketsuron', Tokyo asahi, 27 November 1934, in Mainichi komyunikeshonzu, ShOwa nyiisujiten, vol. IV, p. 116. 41 'Jiken wa kanashimubeki kannen tOsaku no kekka', 23 November 1934, ibid., pp. 115-16. 42 Young, Imperial Japan, p. 200. 43 Kevin Doak, 'Nationalism as Dialectics: Ethnicity, Moralism and the State in Early Twentieth-Century Japan', in James W. Reisig and John C. Maraldo (eds), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1994, p. 175. 44 Young, Imperial Japan, p. 192. 45 Quoted in Sneider, 'Action and Oratory', pp. 54--5. 46 Ibid., p. 66. 47 Kevin Doak, Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. 48 Amemiya, 'Ketsumeidan jiken', pp. 432-9. 49 Quoted in Sneider, 'Action and Oratory', p. 63. 50 Gregory J. Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan, I9I8-I945, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, p. 135. 51 Beissinger, 'Nationalisms that Bark', p. 178.

5 Between samurai and carnival: identity, language, music and dance among the Japanese expatriate community in 1930s Brazil

Survey of Japanese overseas as of October 1938, cited in Seishii shinpo, 12 February 1939. The 1990s ethnic Japanese population of Brazil, Kaigai ijii, no. 571, September 1996, pp. 24--5. For a fuller treatment of the themes in this chapter, see Stewart Lone, The Japanese Community in Brazil I908-I940: Between Samurai and Carnival, London and New York: Palgrave and StMartin's Press, 2001. 2 J. F. Normano and Antonello Gerbi, The Japanese in South America: An Introductory Survey with Special Reference to Peru, New York: John Day Company, 1943; Jeffrey Lesser, Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1999. 3 Handa Tomoo, /min no seikatsu no rekishi: Burajiru Nikkeijin no ayunda michi, Sao Paulo: San Pauro jinbun kagaku kenkyujo, 1970, p. 602.

Notes

177

4 See the extended quotation from contemporary emigration company writings in Konno Toshihiko and Fujisaki Yasuo, Iminshi 1: Nanbei-hen, Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1994, pp. 35--42. 5 On Freyre and his ideas: Gilberto Freyre, ed. and trans. Rod W. Horton, Order and Progress: Brazil from Monarchy to Republic, New York: Knopf, 1970; also Hermano Vianna, The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999, especially ch. 6; Jeffrey D. Needell, 'Identity, Race, Gender and Modernity in the Origins of Gilberto Freyre's Oeuvre', American Historical Review, vol. 100, no. 1, February 1995, pp. 51-77. 6 Takahashi Yukiharu, Nikkei Burajiru iminshi, Tokyo: San'ichi shobO, 1993. 7 Handa, !min no seikatsu, p. 211. 8 Maeyama Takashi, 'Ancestor, Emperor, and Immigrant: Religion and Group Identification ofthe Japanese in Rural Brazil (1908-1950)', Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, vol. 14, no. 2, 1972, p. 170. As prelude to these comments, Maeyama insisted that 'Under the fascist regime, Japan developed a pseudotheocracy emphasising unconditional loyalty to the Emperor. This naturally affected the nature of emperor worship among the Japanese in Brazil'. He considers, however, the era of 'Japanese fascism' to reach back at least to 1926, a view which is less than convincing. The Japanese translation of this article is 'Senso, tenna, imin: San Pauro-shu nason ni okeru Nikkeijin (1908-1950)', in Maeyama Tak:ashi, Esunishiti to Burajiru Nikkeijin, Tokyo: Ochanomizu shoba, 1996, quoted section on pp. 52-3. On Maeyama's idea that leaving Japan was the key for migrants even to begin to understand their identity as Japanese, 'Ibunka sesshoku to bunka henda', in Maeyama, Esunishiti, pp. 10-11. The influence of this idea is apparent in Hosokawa Shuhei, Sanba no kuni ni enka wa nagareru: ongaku ni miru Nikkei Burajiru iminshi, Tokyo: Chua karonsha, 1995, p. 10. 9 Maeyama Tak:ashi, 'Ethnicity, Secret Societies and Associations: The Japanese in Brazil', Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 21, 1979, p. 594. Maeyama's view of migrant schools is repeated in Mita Chiyoko, 'Nihon to Burajiru o musubu Nikkeijin ijusha no hachijunen', Gaiko jihO, no. 1265, February 1990, pp. 45, 55. 10 Emperor's birthday celebrations, Sao Paulo City, Burajiru jihO, 26 October and 9 November 1917. 11 Tiete schools, Burajiru tak:ushoku kumiai, Chiete ijilchi nyilshoku annai, Sao Paulo, 1934, pp. 10-12. On difficulty of obtaining Brazilian teachers, Tsuji Kotara, Burajiru no dohO o tazunete, Tokyo, 1930, pp. 200-1. 12 Acknowledgement of Japanese schools as illegal, Takaoka Kumao, Burajiru imin kenkyil, Tokyo, 1925, p. 325; Tsuji, Burajiru no dohO, p. 200; Nippaku shinbun, 26 January 1937. 1937-8 laws as attack on spiritual freedom of migrants, Handa, !min no seikatsu, p. 589; Mita, 'Nihon to Burajiru', p. 46. On 1920s Hawaiian legal moves against Japanese schools, Eileen Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation and Ethnic Identity: The Nisei Generation in Hawaii, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994, pp. 147-51. 13 Burajiru jiho, 14 December 1917. For other early examples of Portuguese conversation practice, see BurajirujihO, 19, 26, 31 October and 21 December 1917. For the idea that success in global competition depended on language, Burajirujiho, 14 September and 5 October 1917. 14 'The Fascist Wife', BurajirujihO, 1 January 1938. 15 Arima Tatsunosuke, cited in Tsuji, Burajiru no dohO, pp. 371-2. 16 Nippaku shinbun, 31 July 1925. On the link between language, condescension and assimilation, Tak:aoka, Burajiru imin, pp. 280--2, 322-5. 17 British visitor's comment, Burajiru jiho, 4 November 1936. Virtues of learning Japanese at home, Burajirujiho, 14 and 21 October 1936; Seishil shinpo, 22 November 1939. Japanese teachers' meeting, Nippaku shinbun, 26 January 1937. 18 Japanese-language courses at Brazilian law schools, Seishil shinpo, 5 April 1939. There was also a Rio Japanese Language Student Society and a Sao Paulo Society for

178

19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Notes

the Study of Japanese Culture, Seishii shinpo, 12 March 1939. The interest in Japanese culture through music is noted in Burajiru jiho, 10 and 16 March 1938. Vianna, The Mystery of Samba, p. 91. BurajirujihO editorials on music and dance, 25 July 1919 and 4 May 1923. Migrant press reports on carnival, Nippaku shinbun, 7 March 1924, 14 February 1929, 12 February 1931 and 14 February 1934; Burajirujiho, 6 March 1935; Nippaku shinbun, 4 and 11 February 1937. On the Japanese and carnival at Lins, Tsuji, Burajiru no dohO, pp. 139-40. On carnival as chaos, Roberto Da Matta, 'Carnival in Multiple Planes', in John J. MacAloon (ed.), Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Peiformance, Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984, p. 224, writes, 'It is crazy because all space is inverted, dislocated, and everything is called into question'. Rio carnival float on Sino-Japanese hostilities, Seishii shinpo, 16 February 1932. Casa Allema advertisement, Nippaku shinbun, 6 February 1937; Ao Preco Fixo advertisement, Burajirujiho, 27 January 1937. Carnival as racial equality, Seishii shinpo, 8 February 1940. Brazilian conservative critics of carnival, BurajirujihO, 23 February 1939. Japan Evening, Burajiru jihO, 18 November 1936; Sao Paulo Japan Music Study Society, 2nd 'Japan Music Night' success, BurajirujihO, 18 October 1940. Kawakami Suzuko, Burajiru jihO, 7 January, 28 and 29 June 1938; Sao Paulo City audience, Nippaku shinbun, 8 July 1938. Hasegawa Toshiko visits, Burajiru jihO, 4 November and 9 December 1936, and 19 June, 17 September, 7 and 12 November 1940. Korean dancing queen, Burajiru jiho, 25, 31 May and 7 June 1940; Sao Paulo performance, Burajiru jiho, 5 June 1940; earlier invitation to Argentina, Nippaku shinbun, 26 March 1938; scheduled 1939 visit, Seishii shinpo, 3 February 1939. She showed both a nice sensitivity and a deft touch in public relations while in Sao Paulo, sending all her bouquets to patients at the Japan Hospital whom she had earlier visited. Her image may be familiar to students of Japanese history: her advertising photographs included one of her leaping gracefully in swimsuit and this appears, albeit without identifying her, in Japan Photographers' Association, A Century of Japanese Photography, London: Hutchinson, 1981, p. 212, under the title, 'Dance of Delight on Red Hill'.

6 In a house divided: the Japanese Christian socialist Abe Isoo 1 Carl Strikwerda, A House Divided: Catholics, Socialists, and Flemish Nationalists in Nineteenth Century Belgium, Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. 2 For a recent critical survey of theories of nation and nationalism, see Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, London: Routledge, 1998. 3 Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. 4 Quoted in Smith, Nationalism, p. 177. 5 For example, George Totten III, The Social Democratic Movement in Prewar Japan, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966; StephenS. Large, Organized Workers and Socialist Politics in Interwar Japan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981; Gordon Berger, Parties Out of Power in Japan, 1931-1941, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977; Sharon Minichiello, Retreat from Reform: Patterns of Political Behavior in Interwar Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984; Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 6 For example, in English, Tatsuo Arima, The Failure of Freedom, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969. Bob Wakabayashi's study of an early 1970s debate over the Nanking massacres shows how it increased controversy over the larger issue of war responsibility. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, 'The Nanking 100-Man Killing

Notes

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

179

Contest Debate: War Guilt Amid Fabricated Illusions, 1971-75', Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, 2000, pp. 307--40. For example, Irwin Scheiner, Christian Converts and Social Protest in Meiji Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970, p. 247; John Crump, The Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan, London: Croom Helm and StMartin's Press, 1983, p. 299. 'Proletarians put Notables in Field', Trans-Pacific, 14 January 1928, p. 12; 'Final Election Figures and Resume of Results', Trans-Pacific, 25 February 1928, p. 9. Quoted in Crump, Origins, p. 115. Abe Isoo, Shakaishugisha to naru made, Tokyo: Meizensha, 1947, p. 99. Ibid., p. 92. Scheiner, Christian Converts, pp. 105-9. Ibid., p. 38. Quoted ibid., p. 168. Ibid., p. 181. While studying in the United States, Niijima had always made clear that he was not supported by the Japanese government because he thought any association with the government would make him its 'slave'. Ibid., p. 161. Abe, Shakaishugisha to naru made, p. 83. Arima, Failure, p. 15. Abe, Shakaishugisha to naru made, p. 200. Ibid., pp. 197-9. Germaine Roston, The State, Identity, and the National Question in China and Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 469n; Totten, Social Democratic Movement, pp. 25, 26n. Quoted in Crump, Origins, p. 92. Ibid., p. 107. Totten, Social Democratic Movement, p. 116n. Peter d'A. Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival, I877-1914, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968, p. 398. Ibid., p. 441. My emphasis. Edward Norman, The Victorian Christian Socialists, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 4. Abe Isoo, 'Sanji chosetsu no shakaiteki igi', Taiyo, vol. 32, no. 13, November 1926, p. 101; Abe Isoo, Seikatsu mandai kara mita sanji chosetsu, vol. 6, Kindai fujin mondai meicho senshii, Shakai mondai hen, Tokyo: Nihon tosho senta, 1983 (originally publ. 1931), ch. 1. Abe, 'Sanji chosetsu no shakaiteki igi', pp. 100-5. Obama Toshie, 'Abe Isoo no riso', Bungei shunjii, vol. 33, no. 12, 1955, pp. 102-6. Totten, Social Democratic Movement, pp. 390-9. Abe Isoo, 'Jiyii ren'ai o ronzu', Kakusei, vol. 6, no. 12, 1916, pp. 4--7. Abe Isoo, 'Kosho seido to shakai no fiigi (ichigo ni tsuzuku)', Kakusei, vol. 1, no. 4, October 1911, p. 221; Abe Isoo, 'Fiiki torishimari ni kansuru seifu no mujun', Kakusei, vol. 3, no. 12, December 1913, p. 3. 'Kakuseikai shuisho', Kakusei, vol. 1, no. 1, July 1911, pp. 5-6, 9. Ibid., p. 7. Abe Isoo, 'Kosho seido to shakai no fiigi', Kakusei, vol. 1, no. 1, July 1911, pp. 26--9. Abe reiterated these points in a continuation of the same article in the October issue, pp. 219-22. Abe, 'Fiiki torishimari', p. 4. Elise K. Tipton, 'Birth Control and the Population Problem', in Elise K. Tipton (ed.), Society and the State in Interwar Japan, London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 42-62. Abe Isoo, Sanji seigenron, Tokyo: Jitsugyo no Nihonsha, 1922, p. 222. Abe, Seikatsu mandai kara mita sanji chosetsu, pp. 36--42. Ibid., pp. 123-8.

180 Notes 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., pp. 148-50. Smith, Nationalism, p. 90. Quoted in 'Capital is Excited as Returns Start', Trans-Pacific, 25 February 1928, p. 13. Ibid. Abe Isoo, Shakaishugi no jidai, Tokyo: Kagaku shiso fukyiTkai, 1924, p. 7. Ibid., p. 8. Totten, Social Democratic Movement, pp. 103, 267. Abe Isoo, 'Kokumin sOdOin ni tsuite', Kakusei, vol. 28, no. 6, 1938, pp. 1-4. Abe Isoo, 'Senji ni okeru nidai mondai', Kakusei, vol. 30, no. 8, 1940, p. 3. Abe Isoo, 'Tosei to jiyu', Kakusei, vol. 30, no. 9, 1940, pp. 2-3. Large, Organized Workers, pp. 221-3. Ieda Sakukichi, 'Abe sensei no Niigata koen kanmeiki', Kakusei, vol. 30, no. 12, 1940, pp. 24-5. 55 On the spread of cafes and their changed characteristics, see Elise K. Tipton, 'The Cafe: Contested Space of Modernity in Interwar Japan', in Elise K. Tipton and John Clark (eds), Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s, Sydney and Honolulu: Australian Humanities Research Foundation and University of Hawai'i Press, 2000, pp. 119-36. 56 Abe Isoo, 'Jinko mondai to danjo mondai', Kakusei, vol. 32, no. 3, 1942, pp. 1-4. 57 Smith, Nationalism, p. 180. 7 Saving for 'My Own Good and the Good of the Nation': economic nationalism in modern Japan

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Tessa Morris-Suzuki, A History of Japanese Economic Thought, London: Routledge, 1989, pp. 60-1; Chuhei Sugiyama, Origins of Economic Thought in Modern Japan, London: Routledge, 1994, ch. 8. James Fallows, Looking at the Sun, New York: Pantheon, 1994, pp. 180-1, 184-6, 206. Chalmers Johnson, MIT/ and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982, p. 18. Richard J. Samuels, 'Rich Nation, Strong Army': National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, pp. ix-x. Maejima Hisoka, 1875, in Yuseisho, YUsei hyakunen shi, Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1971, p. 158. Mukai Yurio, 'Okurasho yokinbu seido no seiritsu to tenkai', in Shibuya Ryuichi (ed.), Meiji-ki Nihon tokushu kin 'yil rippo shi, Tokyo: Waseda daigaku shuppanbu, 1977, pp. 494-5. See Great Britain and Ireland, Post Office Savings Banks, Reports, Minutes, and Memoranda from 30th November, 1860, to 13th September, 1861, London: W.P. Griffith, 1862, p. 33. Edwin P. Ruebens, 'Foreign Capital and Domestic Development in Japan', in Simon Kuznets, Wilbert E. Moore and Joseph J. Spengler (eds), Economic Growth: Brazil, India, Japan, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1955, p. 185. Okubo Toshimichi, 'Reasons for Opposing the Korean Expedition', 1873, in Ryusaku Tsunoda, Wm Theodore de Bary and Donald Keene (comp.), Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 2, New York: Columbia University Press, 1958, p. 153. William L. Langer (ed.), Encyclopedia of World History, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952,pp. 822,830-2,881-2. Mukai, 'Okurasho yokinbu', pp. 495-6. Quoted in Jean-Pierre Thiolon, Les Caisses d'epargne, Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1971, p. 24; also Antoine Moster and Bernard Vogler, 'France', in WissenschaftsfOrderung der Sparkassenorganisation, History of European Savings Banks, vol. 1, Stuttgart: Deutscher Sparkassenverlag, 1996, pp. 77, 82.

Notes

181

13 Hugh T. Patrick, 'Japan, 1868-1914', in Rondo Cameron etal. (eds), Banking in the Early Stages of Industrialization, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967, pp. 268-70; Juro Teranishi, 'Availability of Safe Assets and the Process of Bank Concentration in Japan', Economic Development and Cultural Change, vol. 25, no. 3, April1977, pp. 451-4, 466-7. 14 Johnson, MIT/, p. 208; Ikeda Makoto, 'Nishihara shakkan', in Nihon kin-gendai shi jiten, 1978 edn; Mukai, 'Okurasho yokinbu', pp. 518,545. 15 Yiiseisho, Yiisei hyakunen shi, p. 30. 16 Chokinkyoku tayori, March 1937. 17 Inoue Tomoichi, Kinken shOrei gyosei oyobi hOsei, Tokyo: Seibunkan, 1904, p. 3. 18 Shimomura Hiroshi, 'Senso no yiibin chokin ni oyobosu eikyo,' GinkiJ tsiishinroku, vol. 38, no. 228, October 1904, p. 21. 19 See Sheldon Garon, 'Fashioning a Culture of Diligence and Thrift,' in Sharon A. Minichiello (ed.), Japan's Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1998, pp. 312-34; Kenneth B. Pyle, 'The Technology of Japanese Nationalism: The Local Improvement Movement, 1900-1918', Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 33, no. 1, November 1973, pp. 51-65. 20 Inoue Tomoichi, 'Kyiisai jigyo ni tsuki kibo siisoku', Jizen, vol. 4, no. 3, March 1913, pp. 66-8. 21 Japan Year Book, Tokyo: Japan Year Book Office, 1911, pp. 496-7. 22 Hirata Tosuke, 'Boshin shOsho to kokuun no hatten', Shimin, vol. 3, no. 12, 7 January 1909, pp. 5-6. 23 Italics mine. Quoted in Pyle, 'The Technology of Japanese Nationalism', p. 59. 24 Takahashi Kyiiro, 'Shin' yo kumiai to fukugyo shorei', in Karniya Keiji (comp.), ChihO kairyo undo shiryo shiisei, vol. 4, Tokyo: Kashiwa shobO, 1986, p. 617. 25 Chochiku zokyo chiio iinkai, Chochiku undoshi - chozoi 30 nen no ayumi, Tokyo: Chochiku zokyo chiio iinkai, 1983, pp. 6-7. 26 Inoue, Kinken shorei gyosei, pp. 41-4. 27 Sugiura Nariyuki, 'Nichiro sengo no yiibin chokin no tenkai to chochiku shorei seisaku', Shakai keizai shigaku, vol. 56, no. 1, November 1990, pp. 34-5, 53. 28 Okada Kazunobu, Chochiku shOrei undo no shiteki tenkai, Tokyo: Dobunkan, 1996, pp. 36-7' 43-4. 29 Nakajima Kuni, 'Taisho-ki ni okeru "seikatsu kaizen undo"', Shiso (Nihon joshi daigaku shigaku kenkyiikai), vol. 15, October 1974, p. 58. 30 NaimushO shakaikyoku, 'ShOhi setsuyaku ni tsuite', Shakai jigyo, vol. 6, no. 7, October 1922, pp. 1-2. 31 'To the Chairman of the National War Savings Committee', December 1916, 'Organization File, National Savings Committee: Origin, History and Development, 1915-1916', NSC 711, Public Record Office, London. 32 'From the Chairman to War Savings Workers', December 1918, 'Organization File, National Savings Committee: Origin, History and Development, 1917-1919', NSC 712, Public Record Office, London. 33 Naimusho shakaikyoku shakaibu, Kinken shOrei undo gaikyo, Tokyo: Shakaikyoku shakaibu, 1927. 34 Akazawa Shiro, Kindai Nihon no shiso doin to shiikyo tosei, Tokyo: Akekura shobO, 1985, pp. 19-20. 35 Garon, 'Fashioning a Culture of Diligence and Thrift', pp. 320-9. 36 Saji Emiko, 'Hamaguchi naikaku no fujin kominken mondai', Nihonshi kenkyii, no. 292, December 1986, pp. 14-15. 37 Kyoiku shiihO, no. 263, 31 May 1930, p. 2. 38 This section is based on Sheldon Garon, 'Luxury is the Enemy: Mobilizing Savings and Popularizing Thrift in Wartime Japan', Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, Winter 2000, pp. 41-78. 39 Noguchi Yukio, 1940-nen taisei, Tokyo: Toyo keizai shinposha, 1995, p. 135.

182

Notes

40 Fukutoku Dojin [pseudonym], 'Anata wa okanemochi ni naremasu ka', Shufu no tomo, vol. 23, no. 1, January 1939, p. 187. 41 Wada Kenji, 'Kabushiki no shippai no nai rishokuhO', Shufu no tomo, vol. 23, no. 9, September 1939, pp. 236--9. 42 Nishi Nihon shinbun, August 20, 1944, p. 3, from Yilbin chokin kan'i hoken kankei kirinuki-cho, Communications Museum, Tokyo. 43 Italics mine. John W. Dower, 'Sensational Rumors, Seditious Graffiti, and the Nightmares of the Thought Police', in John W. Dower, Japan in War and Peace, New York: New Press, 1993, p. 123; see also John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York: New Press, 1999. 44 'Jikan chochiku koen shiryo', 5 April 1947, Aichi bunsho, Chochiku: Chochiku zokyosaku, 2, doc. l, Sengo zaiseishi shiryo (SZS), Ministry of Finance. 45 [Kurusu Takeo], 'Okura daijin koen genko', 16 September 1947, Aichi bunsho, Chochiku: Chochiku zokyosaku, 2, doc. 36, SZS. 46 'Chochiku zokyo hosakuan', secret, c. August-September 1946, Aichi bunsho, Chochiku: Chochiku zokyosaku, 1, doc. 4, SZS. 47 'Yoi Nihon o! Minna no chikara de', c. 1948-9, poster, Communications Museum, Tokyo; Chochiku zokyo chilo iinkai, Chochiku undoshi, pp. 35, 40, 128. 48 'Jikan chochiku k5en shiryo', Aichi bunsho, Chochiku: Chochiku zokyosaku, 2, doc. 1, SZS. 49 National Savings 6, no. 3, 1947, NSC 3/13, Public Record Office, London. 50 'Kyilkoku chochiku tokubetsu undo ni kansuru Katayama naikaku sari daijin dan', 1 September 1947, Aichi bunsho, Chochiku: Chochiku zokyosaku, 2, doc. 46, SZS; see also Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, pp. 163-6. 51 Stafford Cripps, in 'The Economic Debate: The Danger of Inflation', National Savings, vol. 7, no. 2, 1949, pp. 11, 14-15, NSC 3/14, Public Record Office, London. 52 Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, pp. 187-90. 53 Shufuren dayori, no. 88, September 1956, p. 4. 54 Oku Mumeo, 'Kokusaiteki na chilritsu, kokunai de mo chilritsu', Shufuren dayori, no. 119, October 1959, p. 1. 55 Oku Mumeo, 'Shin seikatsu e', Shufuren dayori, no. 52, August 1953, p. 1. 56 Johnson, MIT/, p. 210. 57 Chochiku zokyo chilo iinkai, Chochiku undoshi, pp. 44-5, 60; Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, pp. 173-5. 58 Donald Macintyre, 'Spend, Japan, Spend', Time (Asia), 20 April 1998, p. 16. 59 Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, pp. 222-30. 60 Dai 6-kai chochiku kodo to chochiku ishiki ni kansuru chosa hokokusho, 1998, Tokyo: Chochiku kodo to chochiku ishiki ni kansuru chosa kenkyilkai, 1998, p. 2. 61 Toyama Shigeru, Nihonjin no kinben-, chochiku-kan, Tokyo: Toyo keizai shinposha, 1987. 62 New York Times, 5 June 1987, sec. D, p. 1. In 1985, the figure was 36 per cent: ibid., 13 August 1985, sec. A, p. 1.

8 War, commemoration and national identity in modern Japan, 1868-1975 1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1991. 2 In recent years, groups such as the Liberal Education League, headed by Fujioka Nobukatsu, which agitate for a more 'positive' interpretation of the war in textbooks, have received a lot of attention. The negotiations over the contents of what was to be the 'War Dead Peace Memorial Hall', now reconfigured as the Showa Hall at the bottom of Kudan Hill in Tokyo, are less well known, but must be seen as part of the same debates. 3 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 18. See also the large body of recent work on the subject, of which only a selection is noted below. George L. Masse, Fallen Soldiers:

Notes

4 5

6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18 19

183

Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990; Paula Hamilton and Kate Darian-Smith (eds), Memory and History in Twentieth Century Australia, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994; Emmanuel Sivan and Jay Winter (eds), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994; Ken Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Melbourne: Mieunyah Press, 1998; John R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994; Martin Evans and Karen Lunn (eds), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century, Oxford: Berg, 1998. Beatrice Trefalt, 'Unexpected Returns: Stragglers and the Development of Collective Memory of the War in Japan, 1945-1975', unpublished PhD thesis, Murdoch University, 2002. See, for example, Alex King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance, Oxford: Berg, 1998; Ken Inglis and Jock Phillips, 'War Memorials in Australia and New Zealand: A Comparative Survey', in John Rickard and Peter Spearritt (eds), Packaging the Past? Public Histories, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press/Australian Historical Studies, 1991, pp. 171-91. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation, Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998, pp. 23-4. Moriya Hidesuke, Yasukuni jinja hyakunenshi: jireki nenpyif, Tokyo: Yasukuni jinja, 1987, pp. 35-7; Harry Harootunian, 'Memory, Mourning, and National Morality: Yasukuni Shrine and the Reunion of State and Religion in Postwar Japan', in Peter Van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann (eds), Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, p. 148. Moriya, Yasukuni, pp. 111, 119-21. Ibid., pp. 144-5. Hijikata Yoshio, Yasukuni jinja: kokka Shinto wa yomigaeru ka, Tokyo: Shakai hyoronsha, 1985, p. 21. Ibid., p. 24. Fujo shinbun, 6 March 1932, p. 2; Fujo shinbun, 16 April1932, p. 2; Fujo shinbun, 20 March 1932, p. 2; Fujo shinbun, 2 April 1932, p. 2. On this point see Sandra Wilson, 'The Past in the Present: War in Narratives of Modernity in the 1920s and 1930s', in Elise K. Tipton and John Clark (eds), Being Modem in Japan: Culture and Society from the I910s to the 1930s, Sydney and Honolulu: Australian Humanities Research Association and University of Hawai'i Press, 2000, pp. 170-84. See, for example, Harold G. Wray, 'A Study in Contrasts: Japanese School Textbooks of 1903 and 1941-45', Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 28, no. 1, 1978, pp. 69-86; Thomas R. H. Havens, Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and World War II, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1978, pp. 25-32. Kazuko Tsururni, Social Change and the Individual: Japan before and after Defeat in World War II, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970, p. 125. See also Harootunian, 'Memory, Mourning, and National Morality', p. 149. See, for example, John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, I936-1945, New York: Bantam Books, 1970, p. 580. John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1999. Yoshikuni Igarashi provides an interesting analysis of the symbolism inherent in what he calls the 'foundational narrative' of the post-war period, in Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, I945-1970, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 19-46.

184 Notes 20 Dower, Embracing Defeat, p. 247; Meirion and Susie Harries, Sheathing the Sword: The Demilitarisation of Japan, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987, pp. 61-84; Yoshida Yutaka, Nihonjin no sensokan: rekishi no naka no henyo, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1997, p. 28. 21 See, for example, Won-Soon Park, 'Japanese Reparation Policies and the "Comfort Women" Question', Positions, vol. 5, no. 1, 1997, pp. 107-34; Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996; Gavan McCormack, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996, esp. ch. 6. 22 George L. Mosse shows that a similar consciousness informed the Occupation forces in Germany, where a number of monuments were destroyed or partly hidden in 1946. The German government had to wait until 1952 for permission to build new monuments: Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, p. 212. 23 William P. Woodard, The Allied Occupation of Japan 1945-1952 and Japanese Religions, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972, p. 148. 24 Ibid., pp. 148, 150. 25 William Kenneth Bunce, Conference Report, 6 June 1947 (#30), quoted ibid. 26 Woodard, The Allied Occupation of Japan, p. 153. 27 William Kenneth Bunce, Conference report, 17 June 1947 (# 164--5), quoted ibid., p. 152. 28 Woodard, The Allied Occupation of Japan, pp. 155-6. 29 Ibid., pp. 160-3. 30 Ibid., p. 156. 31 Koseisho engokyoku (ed.), Engo gojiinen, Tokyo: Gyosei, 1997, p. 245. 32 Ibid., pp. 244-5. 33 Harootunian, 'Memory, Mourning, and National Morality', p. 154. 34 See, for example, the collection of writings published by Yasukuni mondai kenkyii'k(!i as Han Yasukuni ronshii, Tokyo: Shinchi heisha, 1987. 35 Hagiwara Hisao wrote to the Asahi as part of a series of letters on the experience of the war published between July 1986 and August 1987, a selection of which is published in English in Frank Gibney (ed.), trans!. by Beth Cary, Sensa: The Japanese Remember the Pacific War, Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1995. Hagiwara's letter appears on p. 302. 36 Letter from Kii Shii'ichiro, ibid., p. 312. 37 From Chidorigafuchi e ikimashita ka, cited in Ishikawa Itsuko, Mumei senbotsushatachi no koe: Chidorigafuchi to Showa, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1989, frontispiece. 38 Kawaichi Koji, Saigo no senshisha: rikugun ittohei Kozuka Kinshichi, Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, 1986, pp. 7-8. 39 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, 'Unquiet Graves: KatO Norihiro and the Politics of Mourning', Japanese Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 1998, pp. 21-30; KatO Norihiro, Haisengoron, Tokyo: KOdansha, 1997. 40 Nitta Mitsuko, 'Eirei to senyukai', in Takahashi Saburo (ed.), Kyodo kenkyii: senyiikai, Tokyo: Tabata shoten, 1983, pp. 222-4, quoted in Takahashi Saburo, Senkimono o yomu, Kyoto: Akademia, 1988, pp. 149-52. 41 Kobayashi Yoshinori, Sensoron, Tokyo: Gentosha, 1998, p. 64. 42 Narnikawa Eita, 'The Iniquities of History Education in Japan during the Postwar Period', in Japanese Society for Textbook Reform (ed.), The Restoration of a National History, pamphlet distributed by the Japanese Society for Textbook Reform, 1997, p. 15. 43 Ienaga Saburo, Japan's Last War, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979, p. xv. 44 Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, pp. 14, 25. 45 Yii'i Daizaburo, 'Between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima/Nagasaki: A Psychological Vicious Circle', trans!. by Laura Hein, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol. 27, no. 2, 1995, p. 54. 46 Mainichi shinbun, 14 February 1950.

Notes

185

47 See, for example, Maruyama Michiro, Anatahan, Tokyo: Towasha, 1951. The book was published in English as Anatahan, trans!. by Younghill Kang, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954. See also Mainichi shinbun, 7 July 1951; Asahi shinbun, 7 July 1951. 48 Asahi shinbun, 9 March 1952. 49 Mainichi shinbun, 21 February 1952. 50 'From Hisashi Kubota in Osaka to Don Keene in Tsingtao, November 24, 1945', in Otis Cary (ed.), War Wasted Asia: Letters, 1945-46, Tokyo: KOdansha, 1975, p. 193; Dower, Embracing Defeat, p. 59. 51 Shiikan gendai, 17 February 1972, p. 34. 52 Yoshida, Nihonjin no sensokan, pp. 82--4. 53 Koseisho engokyoku, Engo gojiinen, p. 119. 54 See, for example, Shiikan asahi, 3 April 1955, pp. 80-1; Shiikan asahi, 26 February 1956, p. 17; Shiikan sankei, 16 December 1956, p. 4. 55 See, for example, Mainichi shinbun, evening edition, 28 April 1955. 56 Takahashi, Senkimono, pp. 36, 195; Yoshida, Nihonjin no sensokan, p. 86. 57 Mainichi shinbun, 7 December 1956. 58 See, for example, the description of letters asking stragglers for information on lost husbands and sons, Mainichi shinbun, evening edition, 28 April 1955. 59 Sandee mainichi, 12 June 1960, p. 16. 60 Shiikan yomiuri, 12 June 1960, p. 9. 61 Shiikan asahi, 12 June 1960, p. 17. 62 Beatrice Trefalt, 'A Straggler Returns: Onoda Hiro and Japanese Memories of the War', War and Society, vol. 17, no. 2, 1999, p. 117. 63 Asahi shinbun, 12 March 1974. 64 Shiikan shinko, 12 February 1972, pp. 34-5, 38-9. 65 Asahi shinbun, 11 March 1974. 66 See, for example, Asahi shinbun, 26 January 1972; Yomiuri shinbun, 11 March 1974. 67 Shiikan bunshun, 22 January 1975, p. 29; Sandee mainichi, 19 January 1975, p. 25. On the question of conscription, see Shiikan yomiuri, 25 January 1975, pp. 38-9; Asahi shinbun, 30 December 1974. 68 Ellen Hammond, 'Politics of the War and Public History: Japan's Own Museum Controversy', Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol. 21, no. 2, 1995, pp. 56-9. 69 Kawaichi, Saigo no senshisha, p. 156. 70 Morris-Suzuki, 'Unquiet Graves', p. 23.

9 English and nationalism in Japan: the role of the intercultural-communication industry 1 Nakamura Kei, 'Eigo kyoiku no ideorogii 1', Gendai Eigo kyoiku, vol. 18, no. 10, 1991. 2 Tsuda Yukio, Shinryaku suru Eigo, hangeki suru Nihongo: utsukushii bunka o do mamoruka?, Tokyo: PHP kenkyujo, 1996. 3 Suzuki Takao, Nihongo wa kokusaigo ni nariurunoka: Suzuki Takao chosakushii, vol. 3, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1999. 4 Oishi Shun'ichi, Eigo teikokushugi ron: Eigo shihai o do surunoka?, Tokyo: Kindai bungeisha, 1997. 5 Asahi shinbun, 26 January 2000. 6 The in-flight video presentation sounded so confident that even I, who had entered Malaysia many times previously, became a little worried. I always put my first name first, and this time I did the same. Becoming unsure, I posed this question to a Malaysian immigration officer. In reply she looked perplexed and said, 'Why you ask? It's your name. No problem-lah'. 7 Peter Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness, London: Routledge, 1986, p. 15.

186 Notes 8 Kosaku Yoshino, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan: A Sociological Enquiry, London: Routledge, 1992; and Kosaku Yoshino, Bunka nashonarizumu no shakaigaku, Nagoya: Nagoya University Press, 1997. 9 Befu Harumi, Ideorogii toshite no Nihonbunkaron, Tokyo: Shiso no kagakusha, 1987, pp. 54-67. 10 Yoshino, Cultural Nationalism. 11 Nippon Steel Corporation Personnel Development Office, Nippon: The Land and its People, 2nd edn, Tokyo: Gakuseisha, 1984. 12 Nakane Chie, Tate shakai no ningen kankei: tan 'itsu shakai no riron, Tokyo: KOdansha, 1967; Doi Takeo, A mae no kozo, Tokyo: Kobundo, 1971, transl. by J. Bester as The Anatomy of Dependence, Tokyo: KOdansha International, 1973. 13 Mitsubishi Corporation, Japanese Business Glossary/Nihonjingo, Tokyo: KOdansha, 1983, p. 4. 14 Nissho Iwai Corporation, Skills in Cross-Cultural Negotiation, Tokyo: Nissho Iwai Corporation, 1987. 15 Toshiba Corporation Personnel Development Department, Toshiba's Practical CrossCultural Dialogs, Tokyo, 1985. 16 Gakken, Japan as it is: A Bilingual Guide, revised edn., Tokyo: Gakken, 1990. 17 Nippon Steel Human Resources Development Co. Ltd, Talking About Japan/Nihon o kataru, Tokyo: ALC, 1987, pp. 423-4. 18 Ibid., pp. 413-5. 19 Edward Shils, 'Intellectuals, Tradition, and the Tradition of Intellectuals: Some Preliminary Considerations', D(Edalus, Spring 1972, p. 22. 20 S. N. Eisenstadt, 'Intellectuals and Tradition', D(Edalus, Spring 1972, p. 18. 21 Italics added, ibid. 22 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, London: Routledge, 1984, p. 370. 23 Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, London: Sage, 1991, p. 91. 24 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol. 1: The History of Manners, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978; and Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol. 2: State Formation and Civilization, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. 25 Nippon Steel Corporation, Nippon: The Land and its People, pp. 11-12. 26 Mitsubishi, Japanese Business, p. 6. 27 Nissho Iwai, Skills in Cross-Cultural Negotiation, pp. 4-5. 28 Sandra Wallman, 'Introduction: The Scope for Ethnicity' in Sandra Wallman (ed.), Ethnicity at Work, London: Macmillan, 1979, p. 3. 29 Ethnocentrism is characteristically a perspective of dominant groups - ethnic, national or civilisational. It is not suggested here that 'ethnoperipherism' is unique to Japan's intellectual culture. Rather, it is presented here as a general analytical concept. 30 My arguments about cross-cultural manuals have previously appeared in 'Rethinking Theories of Nationalism: Japan's Nationalism in a Marketplace Perspective', in Kosaku Yoshino (ed.), Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism: Asian Experiences, London: Curzon Press, 1999. See this chapter for a more detailed discussion of the reproduction of cultural nationalism in consumer society. 31 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Politics of the World-Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 26-7. 32 Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, London: Sage, 1992, p. 173. 10 Japanese nationalism in comparative perspective

James W. White, Michio Umegaki and Thomas R. H. Havens (eds), The Ambivalence of Nationalism: Modern Japan between East and West, Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1990.

Notes

187

2 Frank B. Tipton, 'Nationalism and Economic Development in Nineteenth Century Europe,' in Adam Czamota, Halyna Koscharsky and Aleksandar Pavkovic (eds), Nationalism and Postcommunism, Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing Company, 1995, pp. 19-37. 3 Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986; Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 187-95; Josep R. Llobera, The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe, Oxford: Berg, 1994, p. 3. 4 Peter von Polenz, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1978, pp. 160-1. 5 Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process, 2 vols, London: Blackwell, 1982 (first published 1939); Robert van Krieken, Norbert Elias, London: Routledge, 1998. 6 Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. 7 Friedrich Meinecke, Weltbiirgertum und Nationalstaat, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969 (first published 1907; 7th edn 1927). 8 Robert N. Bellah, 'Civil Religion in America,' Daedalus, vol. 96, no. 1, 1967, pp. 1-21; Abraham I. Katsh, The Biblical Heritage of American Democracy, New York: KTAV, 1977. 9 Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 10 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, revised edn, 1991, p. 7. 11 Ibid., ch. 10. 12 Fritz Ringer, Education and Society in Modern Europe, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979; Phillip McCann (ed.), Popular Education and Socialization in the Nineteenth Century, London: Methuen, 1977. 13 Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996; Wally Secombe, 'Patriarchy Stabilized: The Construction of the Male Breadwinner Wage Norm in Nineteenth-Century Britain,' Social History, vol. 11, 1986, pp. 53-76. 14 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, New York: Pantheon, 1977 (first published 1975), p. 184. 15 James Albisetti, Schooling German Girls and Women: Secondary and Higher Education in the Nineteenth Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. 16 Donald N. Baker and Patrick J. Harrigan (eds), The Making of Frenchmen: Current Directions in the History of Education in France, 1679-1979, Waterloo: Historical Reflections Press, 1980; Miranda Pollard, Reign of Virtue: Mobilizing Gender in Vichy France, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. 17 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, New York: Penguin, 1987, p. 293. See Nigel Middleton, A Place for Everyone: A History of State Education from the End of the 18th Century to the 1970s, London: Gollancz, 1976; Dena Attar, Wasting Girls' Time: The History and Politics of Home Economics, London: Virago, 1990. 18 Peter N. Stearns, Schools and Students in Industrial Society: Japan and the West, 1870-1940, Boston: Basic Books, 1998, ch. 5. 19 Gilbert Allardyce, 'The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course,' American Historical Review, vol. 87, 1982, pp. 695-725; Daniel A. Segal, '"Western Civ" and the Staging of History in American Higher Education,' American Historical Review, vol. 105, 2000, pp. 787-8. 20 Translation in Arthur Tiedemann, Modern Japan: A Brief History, Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1955, pp. 113-14. 21 Sharon H. Nolte and Sally Ann Hastings, 'The Meiji State's Policy Toward Women,' in Gail Lee Bernstein (ed.), Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 151-74.

188

Notes

22 Jordan Sand, 'At Home in the Meiji Period: Inventing Japanese Domesticity,' in Stephen Vlastos (ed.), Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modem Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, pp. 191-207; Sonya Michel and Seth Koven, 'Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of the Welfare State in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880--1920,' American Historical Review, vol. 95, 1990, pp. 1076-108. 23 Frank B. Tipton, The Rise of Asia: Politics, Economics and Society in Contemporary Asia, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. 24 Phongpaichit Pasuk and Chris Baker, Thailand: Economy and Politics, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1995. 25 Paul Kennedy, Strategy and Diplomacy 1870-1945, Aylesbury: Fontana, 1984, ch. 4. 26 Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modem America: From 1870 to the Present, Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing, 1978; Alan Dawley, 'E.P. Thompson and the Peculiarities of the Americans,' Radical History Review, vol. 19, 1978-9, pp. 33-59. 27 Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969 (first published 1963). 28 Detlef Miihlberger, The Social Basis of European Fascist Movements, London: Croom Helm, 1987; Robert 0. Paxton, French Peasant Fascism: Henry Dorgeres' Greenshirts and the Crisis of French Agriculture, 1929-1939, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; John D. Brewer, Moseley's Men: The British Union of Fascists in the West Midlands, Aldershot: Gower, 1984; Mike Cronin (ed.), The Failure of British Fascism: The Far Right and the Fight for Political Recognition, London: Macmillan, 1996. 29 See George M. Wilson, Radical Nationalist in Japan: Kita Ikki, 1883-1937, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969. 30 Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (eds), The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. 31 Kosaku Yoshino, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan: A Sociological Enquiry, London: Routledge, 1992. 32 Frank B. Tipton, 'A New German Identity? Or the Ghost of German Idealism?', in Peter Monteath and Frederic S. Zuckerman (eds), Modem Europe: Histories and Identities, Adelaide: Australian Humanities Press, 1998, pp. 61-72; Dominique Schnapper, La France de I' integration: sociologie de la nation en I990, Paris: Gallimard, 1991. 33 Rupert Wilkinson, The Pursuit of American Character, New York: Harper and Row, 1988; Michael Zuckerman, Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 34 James T. Adams, The American: The Making of a New Man, New York: Scribners, 1943; Geoffrey Gorer, The American People: A Study in National Character, New York: Norton, 1948; Ernest L. Klein, Our Appointment with Destiny: America's Role on the World Stage, New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952. 35 Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968; Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier; 1600-1860, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973; David G. Pugh, Sons of Liberty: The Masculine Mind in Nineteenth-Century America, Westport: Greenwood, 1983. 36 David M. Wrobel, The End ofAmerican Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993; Reynolds J. ScottChildress (ed.), Race and the Production ofModem American Nationalism, New York: Garland, 1999. 37 Edward Countryman, Americans, A Collision of Histories, New York: Hill and Wang, 1996; John A. Hall and Charles Lindholm, Is America Breaking Apart?, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999; Philip Fisher, Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Notes

189

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Index

Abe lsoo 12, 14, 81-96, 161 advertising 157, 162 A11-Kansai Federation of Women's Organisations (Zen Kansai rengo fujinkai) 41-2 aristocracy, European 148 army 9,23,31,34,36 Association of Bereaved Families (Zen Nippon izokukai) 123, 129, 130 banks 100 Battle ofTsushima (1905) 9, 21, 27, 30 Bellamy, Edward 85, 86, 87 Bigo Toru 57 birth control 83, 87-8, 89, 90--2, 95--6 Blood-Pledge Corps (Ketsumeidan) 12-13, 55--68 Boshin Rescript (1908) 102 bourgeoisie 38, 52, 159; see also middle class Brazil 12, 69-80, 161 Brazil Review (BurajirujihO) 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79 Britain: cultural nationalism 160; education 150, 151, 158; electronic media 157, 158; 'liberty' 148; newspapers 156; political mobilisation 153; public savings 99, 104, 111, 112; socialism 87; tariffs 152 Buddhism 61, 63, 68, 122 Bunce, William K. 120 Burajiru jihif (Brazil Review) 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79 bushi (samurai) 4, 10, 84, 147-8, 155 Bushido: The Soul of Japan (Nitobe Inazo) 9 businessmen 139, 140, 142

cafes 43,95 Campaign to Foster National Strength (Minryoku kan 'yo undO) 103 carnival, in Brazil 76-8 cartoons: politicians 44, 52-3; visual culture 38, 39; war commemoration 125, 134; women 48, 49, 50--2; working-class power 45,46-7 Central Council for Savings Promotion 112-13 Central Newspaper (Chilo shinbun) 30 Central Review (Chilo koron) 83 Chichibu Incident (1884) 8 Chidorigafuchi memorial 123, 124, 126, 130 China 4, 39, 145, 161; see also Sino-Japanese War Ch'oe Songhi 79 Christian reformers: Abe Isoo 81-96; prostitution system 42; women in public space 43, 48 Christianity: Abe lsoo 82-3, 84-5, 86, 87-8, 96; relationship with socialism 85-8; war commemoration 122 Chulalongkorn 152, 156 Chilo koron (Central Review) 83 Chilo shinbun (Central Newspaper) 30 civic nationalism 18 Civil Code 115 Civil Information and Education Section (Allied Occupation) 120--2 civil society 43, 83 class: abolition of old class system 5; bourgeois values 52; 'national belonging' 49; national unity during war 10; political participation 39, 40, 42, 52, 53; pre-Restoration 4; see also elites; middle class; working class

Index Cold War 16 colonialism: political rights of colonial male subjects 41; racial hybridity concept 12; status of colonial subjects 39-40; US cultural 18; Western 8 commemoration of war 115-34 Commerce and Industry see Ministry of Commerce and Industry Communists: conversions (tenki5) 14, 93; Japan Communist Party 40, 93, 111-12; and nationalism 13; Inoue Nissho's critique of 63; suppression of 93; Tokyo trial (1931-2) 57; visual analysis 38, 39; see also the left; socialism conscription system 5, 7-8 constitution: Allied Occupation 119; Meiji 6, 39, 40; pacifism 15, 120; political citizenship 18; war commemoration 115, 122; women's rights 53 consumerism 104, 114, 132, 157 consumption 104-7, 109, 113, 114, 157, 161-2 conversions (tenkO) 14, 93 corruption: suffragist challenge to 42; women as representation of 48, 49-50,53 cross-cultural handbooks 139-41, 142, 143-5 cultural difference 19, 135, 138, 139, 142, 144-5 'cultural intermediaries' 19, 142, 143-4 cultural nationalism 12, 19-20, 69, 81, 82, 146; Brazilian 70; in Britain 160; cross-cultural handbooks 143, 144; English language 135, 136; globalisation 145 culture: consumer 157; cross-cultural handbooks 139-41, 142, 143-5; homogeneity/uniformity of Japanese 1, 147; intercultural communication 138, 142; Japanese colonialism 40; Nihonjinron 19; popular 32-3, 157, 160-1; 'reproductive intellectuals' 141 Daily Telegram (Mainichi denpO) 29, 156 daimyo 147-8 Dan Takuma 55, 57, 58, 61, 65, 66 dance 70, 76-7, 78, 79 danjo mandai ('man-woman problem') 95 debt 99-100, 101 Deposit Bureau (Yokinkyoku/Yokinbu) 100, 101, 107

209

'developmental states' 97 Diet: limited suffrage 46; navy's political participation 23-6, 27, 28-9, 33-5; SatO Tetsutaro's critique of 31; women's exclusion from 43 Diet building 13, 43, 44-5, 53, 54 Doshisha University 84-5, 89 Eastern Association (Tohokai) 93 economic nationalism 2, 14, 15-16, 19-20, 97-114 economy: German historical school 97; state control over economy 94, 96 education: comparative analysis 147, 149-52, 156, 158, 161; elites 150, 159; English language 138; Japanese schools in Brazil 70, 71-2, 73-4, 75; national identity 119, 125; nationalist ideology 2, 5, 6; private universities 84-5; public sphere 159; rational consumption 107; textbook treatment of war 125, 134; war issues 115, 125, 134; see also schools Eikaiwa (English conversation) 19, 138, 139-41, 142, 144, 145 elections 39, 40, 46-7, 52, 53, 92; see also politics; voting electronic media 157-8 elites 147-8, 152, 154, 155-6; economic nationalism 14, 15, 98; education 150-1; 'ethnoperipherism' 145; Ketsumeidan motives 62-3, 66, 67; Meiji nationalism 4, 5; navy 9, 22-37, 152; Nihonjinron 19, 139; public sphere 159; radical nationalism 154 emigration 92, 95; see also expatriates; migrants Emperor: Allied threat of indictment 119; authority of 11; Ketsumeidan motives 61,62,63;Meiji 10,24,36,44,61, 118; Occupation period 15; organ theory 10, 62, 68; Showa 15, 16, 119, 122; Taisho 36; tours of war shrines 118 emperor worship 72, 73 empress 118 English conversation (Eikaiwa) 19, 138, 139-41, 142, 144, 145 English language 135-45, 161 ethnic nationalism 15, 18-19, 67, 82 ethnicity 15, 18, 19, 144-5 'ethnie' 147 'ethnoperipherism' 145

210

Index

Europe: nation 146, 147, 148; national identity 154; nationalism 149; political parties 159 expatriates 12, 69-80; see also emigration; migrants exports 110, 111, 113, 114 Fabianism 87, 89 factory workers 43, 46 fallen soldiers 17, 115-16, 117-19, 120-6, 127-34 family 44, 152 family-state concept 6, 11 fascism 60, 71, 153--4 femininity 38, 4 7 feminism: popular culture 160; public sphere 43, 159; visual culture 38, 39 fiction 32-3 finance: naval expansion 22, 23, 24, 25-6, 27, 28-9, 31, 33, 35; public savings 14, 16, 94, 98, 99-114, 157, 161-2; see also Ministry of Finance First World War see World War I foreign borrowing 99-100 Formosa (Taiwan) 39, 41, 100, 118 France: aristocracy 148; education 150, 151, 158; electronic media 157, 158; linguistic variation 147; political mobilisation 153; postal savings 100; tariffs 152 Freedom (Jiyii) newspaper 24 French Revolution 38, 147 Fujii Go'ichiro 58, 60, 65, 67 Fujii Hitoshi 62 Fujin sanseiken kakutoku kisei domeikai (League for the Attainment of Women's Political Rights) 41 Fujita, Leonard see Fujita Tsuguharu Fujita Tsuguharu 76 Fujo shinbun (Women's and Girls' Newspaper) 118 Furu'uchi Eiji 64 Fusen kakutoku domei (Women's Suffrage League) 41 gender: educational divisions 150-1; imperial Japan 39--42; political metaphors 49-52, 53; symbolism 6; visual culture 13; see also femininity; masculinity; women Germany: education 150-1, 158; electronic media 157, 158; elite 155; 'historical school' 97; language 148;

migrants from 75; as model for Abe Isoo 94; national history 149; nationhood 147; newspapers 156; political mobilisation 153; tariffs 152 globalisation: intercultural communication 135, 138, 142, 145; threat to national identity 20, 161 Gondo Seikyo 63 'governmental belonging' 38, 42, 49, 53, 54 Grand Manoeuvres of the Fleet 21, 30,35,36 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere 14 Hamaguchi Osachi 49, 65, 106 Handa Tomoo 72 Hani Motoko 104, 105-6 Hara Kei 34, 36 Hasegawa Toshiko 78-9 Hibiya Riot (1905) 11 Hirata Atsutane 4 Hirata Tosuke 102 Hiroshima bombing 126 Hishinuma Goro 61, 64, 65 history: national 149; naval 22; negative attitudes towards 20 Hitler, Adolf 156, 157 Home Ministry (Naimusho) 9, 45, 99, 101, 103, 104 Hosokawa Shuhei 70, 76, 78 Housewives' Association (Shufuren) 112 humanitarianism 82, 87-8 Ichihara Morihiro 28 Ichikawa Fusae 41 Ichikawa ShOichi 57 iconography 38, 39 identity: expatriates in Brazil 70, 72, 73, 74-6, 79, 80; fallen soldiers 127, 131, 132; fragmentation of 160-1; imperial 40; multiple 161; renegotiation of 20; see also national identity Ienaga Saburo 125-6 Ikeda Eiji 48 Ikeda Hayato 16, 110 Ikeda Seihin 57 'imagined community' 55, 66, 115-16, 117, 120, 124, 149 Imperial Defence Policy (1907) 29 Imperial Ordinance No. 5 24 Imperial Rescript on Diligence and Thrift (1908) 102

Index Imperial Rescript on Education (1890) 6, 151-2 imperialism: Japanese 40, 81, 99; US 18 India 4 industrialisation 6, 8, 101 Inoue Junnosuke 55, 57, 58, 61, 65, 66 Inoue NisshO 13, 55, 56, 57-8, 60-4, 65,66 Inoue Tomoichi 101, 103 intellectuals 141-3 intercultural communication 19, 135-45 internationalism 70, 78, 79, 82, 143-4 lnukai Tsuyoshi 55, 56, 57, 59, 60 Ishimoto Keikichi 91 lshimoto Shizue 91 ltagaki Taisuke 24 Ito Hirobumi 24, 27, 34 ItO Masashi 131 Ito Yuko 26, 28, 36 Japan (Nippon) newspaper 24 Japan-Brazil Newspaper (Nippaku shinbun) 75, 78 Japan Communist Party 40, 93, 111-12; see also Communists Japan General Federation of Labour (SOdomei) 89, 93 Japan as it is (Gakken) 140 Japan Romantic School 67 Japan Socialist Party 112 Japanese Business Glossary (Mitsubishi) 140 The Japanese Nation: Its Land, its People and its Life (Nitobe Inazo) 9 Jiji manga (Topical Cartoons) 47, 48, 50,52 Jiji shinpo (New Report on Current Events) 29, 30 Jiyii (Freedom) newspaper 24 Jiy\itO (political party) 24 Johnson, Hugh 154 journals, naval 32 Kabayama Sukenori 23-4 Kaigun (Navy) 32 Kakusei (Purity) 90, 94, 95 Kakuseikai (Purity Association) 89-90 'kakushin' (national renovation) 55, 62-3,64,66-7,68 Katayama Tetsu 112 KatO Takaaki 40 Katsura Taro 10, 27, 34, 50--1 Kawakami Suzuko 78, 79

211

Ken'ichi Ohmae 161 Ketsumeidan (Blood-Pledge Corps) trial 12-13, 55-68 Kikuchi Kohei 10--11 Kinro kokuminto (Nationalist Labour Party) 94 Kita Ikki 63, 154 Kitahara Tetsuo see Mizuno Hironori Kitazawa Rakuten 47, 48, 50 KiuchiTsunenori 64,65 Kiyosawa Kiyoshi 67, 68 Knapp, A.M. 86 Kobayashi Yoshinori 125, 134 Koga Kiyoshi 59, 62 Koizumi Jun'ichiro 20 Kojiki 63 Kokubo sakugi (A Discussion of the National Defence Policy/Sam Tetsutaro) 31 Kokubi5 shisetsu (Personal Opinions on National Defence/Sam Tetsutaro) 26 Kokubi5 to kaigun jujitsu (National Defence and Naval Replenishment/Morita Akatsuki) 32 KokuchUkai (Pillar of the Nation Association) 60 Kokumin kyokai (political party) 24 kokumin shakaishugi (national socialism) 94 Kokumin shinbun (People's Newspaper) 24 kokuryoku (national strength) 101, 102, 103, 104 kokutai (national essence): Ketsumeidan trial 57, 61, 63, 66, 67-8; Peace Preservation Law 153 Konoe Fumimaro 65 Korea 39,41, 100,162 Kotoku Shusui 4, 10, 86, 89 Kozuka Kinshichi 128, 130, 133 Kurimoto Joun 4--5, 10 Kuroiwa lsamu 59 Kurusu Takeo 110 kyokoku itchi (national unity) 8, 10, 93 kyiikoku chochiku undo (National Salvation Savings Campaign) 110, 111,112 Kyiishii nippo (Ky\ishU Daily Report) 58 labour unions 40, 44, 92; Abe Isoo 83, 88, 89; mass mobilisation 153 Labour-Farmer Party (ROdo nomin tO) 40,45

212

Index

language: education 150; English 19, 135-45, 161; Japanese cultural uniformity 147; relationship with expatriate identity 12, 70, 72, 73, 74-6 LDP see Liberal Democratic Party Lea, Homer 33 League for the Attainment of Women's Political Rights (Fujin sanseiken kakutoku kisei domeikai) 41 the left: critique of American identity 155; ethnic nationalism 18; political mobilisation 153; political parties 40; post-war challenge to conservatism 109; radicals 81; savings campaigns 111-12; see also Communists; proletarian parties; socialism legislation: Boshin Rescript (1908) 102; Imperial Defence Policy (1907) 29; Imperial Ordinance No. 5 24; Imperial Rescript on Diligence and Thrift (1908) 102; Imperial Rescript on Education (1890) 6, 151-2; labour laws 92; National General Mobilisation Law (1938) 93-4; Peace Preservation Law (1925) 41, 57, 153; Shinto Directive 122; Universal [Manhood] Suffrage Act (1925) 40, 41 levee en masse (mass mobilisation) 147, 152-3 Li Kuang-hwei see Nakamura Teruo Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) 18, 123, 130, 132 liberalism 4, 61 liberty 148-9 linguistic nationalism 136 List, Friedrich 97 Local Improvement Campaign 14, 101-2 Looking Backward 2000-1887 (Edward Bellamy) 85, 86 Lotus Sutra 60, 61, 63 love 86, 89, 91 loyalty, ideal of 118, 119 Maejisma Hisoka 100 Maeyama Takashi 72, 73, 76 magazines, women's 104, 105, 108-9, 112, 118 Mainichi denpiJ (Daily Telegram) 29, 156 Makino Nobuaki 57 Malaysia 136-7 'man-woman problem' (danjo mondai) 95 Manchurian Incident (1931) 11, 13, 14, 42,55, 77,93

manuals, intercultural communication 139-41, 142, 143-5 marriage 89, 91; as metaphor 50-1 martyrs of the nation 117-18, 130 Maruyama Masao 18 Marxism 85, 89 masculinity 38, 47, 52 mass mobilisation (levee en masse) 147, 152-3 Matsukata Masayoshi 23, 35, 100 Matsuyama Fumio 47 May 15th Incident trials 57, 58-60, 64,65,66,67,68 media: 15th May Incident trials 59-60; expansion of 156-9; Ketsumeidan trial 13, 56, 60, 64, 65, 66; national identity debates 154; oppositional 160; wartime stragglers 128, 130, 131; see also newspapers Meiji Constitution 6, 39, 40 Meiji Emperor 10, 24, 36, 44, 61, 118 Meiji period 2, 10, 11, 81, 82; Abe lsoo 84-90; economic nationalism 14, 98-1 03; establishment of the nation 4-9;navy 21,22,23-35,36-7; savings campaigns 98-103; war commemoration 117-18; war scares 32-3 Meiji Restoration (1868) 4, 61, 62, 98-9, 117, 118 middle class: masculinity 52-3; 'new intellectuals' 142; political imagery 47; public sphere 159; see also bourgeoisie migrants: Brazil 69-80; Britain 160; United States 151; see also emigration; expatriates Mikami Taku 59,62 militarism 2, 10-11, 68, 83, 132; Allied Occupation 119-20, 121; culture of 115 Minagawa Bunzo 131 Ministry of Commerce and Industry 106-7 Ministry of Finance 100, 107, 110, 112 Minobe Tatsukichi 68 Minryoku kan'yo undo (Campaign to Foster National Strength) 103 MinseitO (political party) 40, 47, 52 Mitsubishi Corporation 140, 144 Miyagi Minoru 57 Mizuno Hironori 32 modernisation 1, 81, 84 monuments 117, 120, 121, 123-4

Index morality 88, 89, 90, 94-5 Morita Akatsuki 32 Morris, William 86 multilingualism 136 Musansha shinbun (Proletarian News) 40 music 70, 76-7, 78-9 Nabeyama Sadachika 93 Nagasaki bombing 126 Naimusho (Home Ministry) 9, 45, 99, 101, 103, 104 Nakamura Teruo 127, 128, 132, 133 Nakamura Yoroku 24 Nakasone Yasuhiro 20 nanshin (southern advance) 34 nation: Abe Isoo's conception of 12, 82, 92, 96; consciousness of 1, 5; 'daily reproduction' of 15; definitions of 1, 146, 147-9; economic interests 97; establishment of the 3-9; fascist conception of 153; as 'imagined community' 115-16, 117, 124, 149; nationalism as discourse 2-3; priority over the law 66; role of education 150, 151; 'substantiation' of 55, 56, 68; terrorist trials 13, 55--68; war commemoration 117-18, 119, 124, 125, 126; see also state nation-building 1, 146--7, 155 nation-state definition 1 'national belonging' 38, 39, 42, 49, 53, 54 national essence (kokutai): Ketsumeidan trial 57, 61, 63, 66, 67-8; Peace Preservation Law 153 National Federation of Regional Women's Organisations (Zen chifuren) 112 National General Mobilisation Law (1938) 93--4 national holidays 9 national identity 2, 4, 10; comparative analysis 149, 154; cross-cultural handbooks 143; ethnic nationalism 15, 18-19, 67, 82; 'ethnoperipherism' 145; expatriates 12; fallen soldiers 127, 130; globalisation 135; Meiji nationalism 5; Nihonjinron 19; pacifist discourse 132; public sphere expansion 160; Showa Emperor 16; state role 17; thrift 114; United States 155; war commemoration 115, 116, 117, 18-19, 125-6, 133, 134; see also identity national interest 3, 4, 10, 11, 13; savings campaigns 101; 'technonationalism' 98

213

national martyrs 117-18, 130 National Salvation Savings Campaign (kyiikoku chochiku undO) 110, 111, 112 national security 27, 30, 98 national socialism 94 National Spiritual Mobilisation campaign 14 national strength (kokuryoku) 101, 102, 103, 104 national unity (kyokoku itchi) 8, 10, 93 nationalism: Abe Isoo 82, 92; comparative perspective 146--62; definition of nation 147; as discourse 2-3; expatriate 12, 70, 72, 76; and globalisation 135; 'imagined communities' 55; Japanese history 1-2; linguistic 136; Meiji period 4-11, 81, 82; music's role in promoting 76; naval expansion 21-2, 36--7; popular culture as threat to 161; post-war 14-20; radical 146-7, 153--4, 162; rival discourses 9-14, 15; 'soft' 74; state-centred 10, 12; universalism 38; visual culture 38, 39; war commemoration 121; see also civic nationalism; cultural nationalism; economic nationalism; ethnic nationalism; ultra-nationalism Nationalist Labour Party (Kinro kokumintO) 94 navy 9, 21-37; and elites 9, 22-37, 152; expansion of 21-2, 23, 25-6, 29-32, 33-7; and nationalism 9, 21-2, 36-7; warship launches 30-1, 35--6 Navy (kaigun) journal 32 Navy Day 9, 30 Nazism 153, 156 'new intellectuals' 141-3 New Order 14, 93, 94 New Report on Current Events (Jiji shinpif) 29, 30 New State, Brazil 71-2 newspapers: 15th May Incident trials 59--60; anti-navy rhetoric 24; Japanese migrants in Brazil 74-5; Ketsumeidan trial 56, 58, 60, 64, 65, 66; nationalist ideology 6, 7, 156-7; oppositional media 160; socialist press 40, 47; support for navy 28-30, 33; wartime stragglers 128, 130, 131; see also media Nichiren 60, 61, 63 Nihongi 63

214

Index

Nihonjinron (theories/discussions of the Japanese) 19-20, 138, 139--41, 142-3, 145, 154 Niijima J6 85 Nippaku shinbun (Japan-Brazil Newspaper) 75, 78 Nippon: The Land and its People (Nippon Steel Corporation) 139--40, 144 Nippon (Japan) newspaper 24 Nippon Steel Corporation 139--40, 144 Nire Kagenori 24, 25 Nishida Kitaro 11 Nishihara Kamezo 100 Nishihara loans 100 Nissho Iwai Corporation 140, 144 Nitobe Inazo 9 Nogi Maresuke 11

Obama Toshie 88 Obuchi Keizo 135, 137 Occupation 15, 115, 116, 119-26; ethnic nationalism 18; returned soldiers 128, 129, 131; war remembrance 17; see also Civil Information and Education Section Oe Kenzaburo 126 Ogawa Jihei 48, 50 Oi Kentaro 4, 5 oil crisis 16, 113-14 Okawa Shumei 58, 59, 62, 64 Okinawa 12, 15, 39 Oku Mumeo 112 Okubo Toshimichi 99 Okuma Shigenobu 8 Onoda Hiro 17, 127, 128, 130, 132, 133 Onuma Sho 61, 64, 65 organ theory of imperial rule 10, 62, 68 Osaka Pakku (Osaka Puck) 47 Ozaki Yukio 28, 35 pacifism 15, 120, 124, 132, 133 pageantry 9, 21, 25, 27-9, 30-1, 35-7 Paris Exhibition (1867) 4 patriotism: fallen soldiers 129, 130, 131, 134; public savings 14, 98, 101, 107 Peace Preservation Law (1925) 41, 57, 153 People's Newspaper (Kokumin shinbun) 24 Pillar of the Nation Association (Kokuchukai) 60 political nationalism 15, 18, 82 political parties 24, 153, 156, 159; bourgeois 52; gendered metaphors 52;

Inoue Nissho 62; and navy 23-6, 33-5, 36; proletarian 40, 46, 47, 52, 88, 93, 153 political rights for women 41, 48 politics: centralised government 147-8; Diet building as symbol 13; exclusion of women from 41-2, 43, 151-2; gendered metaphors 49-52; mass mobilisation 147, 152-3; navy engagement with 22-6, 27, 33-5; oppositional political movements 39; participation 13, 38; public space 43-5; social democratic movement 88, 92; Taisho Political Crisis 34; women's participation 13, 41-2, 48-9, 53, 54; working-class participation 40, 46-7, 52, 53, 153; see also Diet; elections; political nationalism; political parties; voting popular culture 32-3, 157, 160-1 popular fiction 32-3 population growth 87, 91-2, 95 postal savings 99-100, 101, 109, 112 postcards 9, 30-1 posters: election 49; Home Ministry 45; savings-promotion 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111; women's protest 44 poverty 84, 86,87, 88,89,91,95-6 'print capitalism' 149, 156 Proletarian News (Musansha shinbun) 40 proletarian political parties 40, 46, 47, 52, 88,93,153 propaganda: naval 22, 26-7, 29-30, 31, 32-3; public savings 101-14; wartime 119; see also public relations prostitution 42, 83, 88, 89-90, 95 protests: against conscription 5, 7-8; women 43--4 public mourning 117, 124, 125 public opinion: 15th May Incident trials 59-60, 64; Ketsumeidan trial 55, 56, 64, 66, 67, 68; navy propaganda 29, 33; returned soldiers 128, 129-30, 131, 133--4 public relations 28, 29, 35-6, 152; see also propaganda public sphere 43, 146-7, 155-62 public works projects 33--4 purity 43,49-50,53 Purity (Kakusei) journal 90, 94, 95 Purity Association (Kakuseikai) 89-90 racial hybridity 12, 18 racial purity 11-12

Index racism 69, 74, 79, 155, 160 radical nationalism 146-7, 153-4, 162 Red Flag (Sekkl) 40 religion: state separation from 120, 122; war commemoration 119, 120 remilitarisation 2 'renovation' (kakushin) 55, 62-3, 64,66-7,68 repatriation of fallen soldiers 116, 127, 128, 129, 130-1, 132 'reproductive intellectuals' 141 Reservists' Associations 9 'reverse course' (Occupation) 120, 121 the right: ethnic nationalism 18; political mobilisation 153-4; radicals 81; revolutionaries 12-13, 55-68; US triumphalism 155 ROdo nomin tO (Labour-Farmer Party) 40,45 Roosevelt, Franklin 154, 157 rural areas 14, 61-2, 101-2 Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) 8, 9, 10, 11, 13; Abe Isoo 89; postal savings 101, 103; pro-navy sentiment 27, 29, 33; street celebrations 44; Yasukuni Shrine 118 sacrifice, ideal of 6, 118, 119 Sagoya Tomeo 65, 66 Saigo Tsugumichi 24, 25 Saionji Kinmochi 33, 34, 51, 57 SaitO Makoto 29, 33, 34, 35-6 Sakamaki Tei'ichiro 56, 57, 58, 67 Sakuradamon Incident (1860) 61 'salarymen' 16, 20, 74 samurai (bushi) 4, 10, 84, 147-8, 155 Sanger, Margaret 90 Sano Manabu 93 SatO Tetsutaro 26-7, 31 savings 14, 16, 94, 98, 99-114, 157, 161-2 savings associations 103, 107, 108 SCAP see Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers schools: English-language 138; Japanese-language schools in Brazil 70, 71-2, 73-4, 75; primary 6, 150; ruling elites 150; see also education Second World War see World War II 'secondary intellectuals' 141 seinendan (young men's associations) 9 Seiyu hontO (political party) 47 Seiyukai (political party) 33-5, 40, 47, 52 Sekki (Red Flag) 40

215

self-interest 14, 97, 98, 101, 107, 109 sexuality 48,50,53, 89 Shakai minshu:to (Social Democratic Party) 83, 94 Shakai taishu:to (Social Masses Party) 83, 93,94 Shakaishugi kenkyUkai (Society for the Study of Socialism) 86 Shanghai Incident (1932) 62 Shimada Saburo 90 Shimada Shoichi 127-8, 133 Shimomura Hiroshi 101 ShintO 63, 122 Shinto Directive 122 ShOriki Matsutaro 156, 157, 158 Showa Emperor 15, 16, 119, 122 Showa Hall (ShOwakan) 133 Shufuren (Housewives' Association) 112 Sino-Japanese War (1894-5) 8, 10, 11, 13, 26, 82, 93; finance for 100, 101; street celebrations 44; Yasukuni Shrine 118 Skills in Cross-Cultural Negotiation (Nissho Iwai) 140, 144 Social Democratic Party (Shakai minshu:to) 83, 94 social democrats 88, 92, 112 social justice 12, 82, 88, 92 Social Masses Party (Shakai taishu:to) 83, 93,94 socialism: Abe Isoo 12, 82, 83, 85-8, 93, 96; Christian 85-8; iconography 38; Japan Socialist Party 112; national interest discourse 4; suppression of 153; see also Communists; the left Society for the Study of Socialism (Shakaishugi kenkyukai) 86 Sodomei (Japan General Federation of Labour) 89, 93 soldiers 16, 17, 116, 117, 119, 120-6, 127-34 sonno joi faction 117 sport 73,79 state: Abe Isoo's conception of 82-3, 89; commemoration of war dead 120-1, 122; control over economy 94, 96; 'developmental' 97; ethnic nationalism 18; national identity 17; separation of religion from 120, 122; terrorist trials 13; see also nation 'stragglers' 17, 116, 127-34 Sufu Kimihira 28 Sugita Tei'ichi 24 Suikosha 26-7, 32

216

Index

Suikiisha kiji (Suikosha News) 32 Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) 120, 121-2 Suzuki Bunji 89, 93 Suzuki Kunio 18

Tachibana Kosaburo 58, 59 'Taisho democracy' 6 TaishO Emperor 36 TaishO Exposition (1913) 90 Taisho Political Crisis 34 Taiwan (Formosa) 39, 41, 100, 118 Takahashi Korekiyo 64 Takaoka Kumao 75 TakekoshiYosaburo 34 Tanaka Chigaku 60--1 Tanaka Giichi 40, 50, 52 Tanaka Mitsuaki 61 tariffs 152 'technonationalism' 98 Teikoku kaigun no kiki (Crisis of the Imperial Navy/Morita Akatsuki) 32 Teikoku kokuboron (On Imperial Defence/Sati5 Tetsutaro) 27 Teikoku kokubiishi ron (On the History of Imperial Defence/Sati5 Tetsutaro) 31 tenkii (conversions) 14, 93 terrorist trials 12-13, 55-68 Thailand 152, 156 Togo Heihachiro 11, 27, 28, 29, 30 Tohokai (Eastern Association) 93 Tokonarni Takejiro 50 Tokyo asahi (Tokyo Morning Sun) 21, 29, 30, 58, 66, 156 Tokyo nichi nichi shinbun (Tokyo Daily Newspaper) 64, 65 Tokyo Pakku (Tokyo Puck) 47, 48 Tokyo Shrine to the War Dead 118 Topical Cartoons (Jiji manga) 47, 48, 50,52 Toshiba 140 Toshiba's Practical Cross-Cultural Dialogs (Toshiba) 140 Toyama Hidezo 58 Toyama Mitsuru 58 trade 110, 113, 114, 152 Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) 26 Tsugi no issen (The Next Battle/Mizuno Hironori) 32 Tsunoda Shinpei 24 Uehara Yiisaku 34 Ueyama Shunpei 11

ultra-nationalism 2, 82, 83, 93; undermining of 109; war commemoration 120, 121 Unitarianism 86 United States: 'cultural colonialism' 18; cultural comparison with Japan 145; education 150, 151, 152, 158; electronic media 157, 158; elite 155-6; hostility towards 15; Japanese emigration to 92; national character 19, 155; nationalism 146, 149; newspapers 156; political mobilisation 153; political parties 159; radical nationalism 154; settler societies 148; socialism 87; tariffs 152; US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty (1960) 15, 132; war scare fiction 32, 33 universal male suffrage 40--1, 46, 47, 52,53,88,92 Universal [Manhood] Suffrage Act (1925) 40,41 US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty (1960) 15, 132 utopian socialism 86, 87 The Valor of Ignorance (Homer Lea) 33 Vargas, Getulio 71 veterans' associations 123, 125 visual culture 13, 38-9, 45-54 voting 40, 41-2, 45, 49-50, 53; see also elections; politics

Wakatsuki Reijiro 50, 56-7 war: as catalyst for nationalism 55; commemoration 16-17, 115-34; national heroes 10--11; national narratives 10; public savings schemes 100, 104; publications 32-3; see also army; militarism; navy; Russo-Japanese War; Sino-Japanese War; World War I; World War II War Crimes Trials (1946-8) 120 War Dead Peace Memorial Hall 133 war monuments 5, 117, 120, 121, 123-4; see also Yasukuni Shrine warship launches 30--1, 35-6 women: Abe Isoo's support for 83, 89, 90, 91, 94-5; as consumers 161; education 150--1, 152; exclusion from politics 151-2; family role 40; idealised representations 13; participation in national projects 6; political participation 13, 38, 41-2, 48-9,

Index 53,54;publicspace 43-4,53;purity and corruption metaphors 49-50, 53; savings campaigns 104-7, 108-9, 112, 162; suffrage 41-2, 48-50, 53; see also femininity; feminism; gender Women and Girls' Newpaper (Fujo shinbun) 118 Women's Suffrage League (Fusen kakutoku domei) 41 working class: education 150; factory workers 43; political participation 38, 40, 46-7, 52, 53, 153; political parties 40,46,47,52,88,93, 153;postal savings 99; street space 44 World War 1: economic boom 103; German radical right 153; monuments 117; Western savings campaigns 104 World War II 1, 16-17, 154; Abe Isoo 82, 95--6; commemoration 115-34; economic nationalism 14, 107-9; fallen soldiers 17, 116, 117, 119, 120-1, 122--6, 127-34; German radical right 153; Japanese justification of violence 68; re-interpretations of 15, 17, 115, 116, 134; savings campaign 107-9 Yamagishi Hiroshi 59, 62 Yamamoto Gonnohyoe 11, 21, 25--6, 27,28-9,33,34-5,36-7

217

Yamamoto Senji 91 Yanagi Muneyoshi 12 Yanase Masamu 44, 45, 46-7 Yasukuni Shrine 5, 6, 17, 20, 116, 117-19; Allied Occupation 122-4; fallen soldiers 126, 129, 130, 131-2 Yasumoto Ryoichi 50 Yokinbu/Yokinkyoku (Deposit Bureau) 100, 101, 107 Yokoi ShOichi 17, 128, 132 Yomiuri Sandee manga (Yomiuri Sunday Cartoon) 49 Yomiuri shinbun (Yomiuri Newspaper) 156, 157, 158 Yosano Akiko 42 young men's associations (seinendan) 9 Yugoslavia 162 Yili Daizaburo 126 Zen chifuren (National Federation of Regional Women's Organisations) 112 Zen Kansai rengo fujinkai (All-Kansai Federation of Women's Organisations) 41-2 Zen Nippon izokukai (Association of Bereaved Families) 123, 129, 130