Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology 9780520926844

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
1. Introduction: The Trouble with Nature
2. The Topographical Imagination of Tokugawa Politics
3. Early Meiji’s Contentious Natures
4. Katō Hiroyuki: Turning Nature into Time
5. Baba Tatsui: Natural Laws and Willful Natures
6. Ueki Emori: Singing the Body Electric
7. The Acculturation of Japanese Nature
8. Ultranational Nature: Dead Time and Dead Space
9. Conclusion: Natural Freedom
Index

Citation preview

Reconfiguring Modernity

twentieth-century japan: the emergence of a world power Irwin Scheiner, Editor 1. Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan, by Andrew Gordon 2. Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative, by James A. Fujii 3. The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750–1920, by Kären Wigen 4. The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1910, by Peter Duus 5. Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan, by Leslie Pincus 6. Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan, by T. Fujitani 7. Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan, by Helen Hardacre 8. Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism, by Louise Young 9. Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, edited by Stephen Vlastos 10. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory, by Lisa Yoneyama 11. MAVO: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931, by Gennifer Weisenfeld 12. Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology, by Julia Adeney Thomas 13. The City as Subject: Seki Hajime and the Reinvention of Modern Osaka, by Jeffrey E. Hanes

Reconfiguring Modernity Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology

Julia Adeney Thomas

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2001 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thomas, Julia Adeney, 1958– Reconfiguring modernity : concepts of nature in Japanese political ideology / Julia Adeney Thomas. p. cm.—(Twentieth-century Japan ; 12) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-520-22854-5 (Cloth : alk. paper) 1. Japan—Politics and government—1868– 1912. 2. Nature—Effect of human beings on—Japan. I. Title. II. Series. DS882 .T48 2002 304.2'0952—dc21 2001005374

Manufactured in the United States of America 10 10

09 08 07 9 8 7 6

06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).8

For Alan

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Contents

Preface Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration 1. Introduction: The Trouble with Nature Objections Justifications Outline of Nature’s Political History in Japan

2. The Topographical Imagination of Tokugawa Politics Mental Maps China as Imperial Center Japan’s Imperial Center Rural Centers Centers of Learning Divorce Proceedings: Space versus Time

3. Early Meiji’s Contentious Natures Natural Forms of Contention: Laws and Bodies The Historiography of Meiji Ideologies Nature’s Indeterminate Determinism

4. KatÖ Hiroyuki: Turning Nature into Time KatÖ Hiroyuki and TenkÖ Shinsei tai’i and Kokutai shinron Jinken shinsetsu The Reaction to Jinken shinsetsu

5. Baba Tatsui: Natural Laws and Willful Natures The Equilibrium of Forces in Nature and History The Death Wishes of Baba Tatsui and Herbert Spencer Tenpu jinkenron: The Reply to KatÖ Catalyzing Nature: The Role of Will in Baba’s Social Evolution

ix xiii xv 1 4 10 29

32 34 40 43 48 53 56

60 62 73 80

84 87 95 103 108

111 114 117 121 130

6. Ueki Emori: Singing the Body Electric

133

The Basic Body of Tenpu jinkenben The Political Problems of Ueki’s Bodies A Dance of Loneliness

138 146 155

7. The Acculturation of Japanese Nature

158

Social Evolution’s Victory Social Evolution’s Defeat: The Political Inadequacy of a Progressive Cosmopolis Nature as Japanese Culture: Bringing the Outside In The Last Vestiges of Social Darwinism

160

8. Ultranational Nature: Dead Time and Dead Space

179

163 168 176

ShintÖ’s National Nature Economizing Nature Educating the National Family World-Historical Nature

188 193 198 201

9. Conclusion: Natural Freedom

209

Index

227

Preface

This book began on a Tokyo subway. In the spring of 1987, the Chiyoda line decorated its cars with posters of flowers. Since I rode this subway every day, I spent a lot of time in the usual commuter’s stupor, staring at these posters and reading horticultural descriptions. For want of anything better to do, I became informed about azaleas. One day it occurred to me to wonder why the “Japanese love of nature” was such a ubiquitous theme, proclaimed not only on commuter trains but in many venues. What exactly did this “nature” mean? Why was it linked to national identity? Was this national love of nature really as simple and innocuous as it sounded? This book is an attempt to answer these questions historically. As the reader will have guessed, I found that “nature” was far from simple. Indeed, an investigation into the ideas of nature in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan quickly became an investigation of political modernity. The reason that nature and modernity are so inherently connected is that modernity is often defined as the antithesis of nature in its celebration of a denatured, liberated subjectivity and in its technological control of the physical environment. Many political theorists, including twentieth-century Japan’s leading scholar, Maruyama Masao, have assumed that nature in political ideology is always the mark of traditional, conservative, if not right-wing, ideals. This dichotomy meant that the Japanese had to choose between modernity and nature: nationhood could be founded by transcending nature and pre-modern political forms in alignment with “the West,” or it could be rooted in referix

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Preface

ences to nature and remain mired in traditional, indeed “Oriental,” aesthetic, social, and political patterns. It was an either-or choice. As I began reading Japanese documents and non-Japanese texts that had been influential in Japan, this powerful dichotomy seemed less and less tenable. The documents revealed not one “nature” in opposition to modernity, but multiple concepts of nature aligned with many political positions, some of them autocratic, some democratic, some anarchic. Indeed, even discounting the wild varieties of nature propounded by dissident writers, the mainstream conception of nature in Japan underwent three radical shifts during the century I examined, moving from the universal, hierarchical concept of the Tokugawa period, through social Darwinian ideas of competitive struggle and inevitable progress, to a celebration of a uniquely harmonious, natural nationhood. To put it another way, that conception metamorphosed from nature as place to nature as time to nature as Japanese consciousness itself. Given this transformation, fulsome references to the Japanese love of nature during the war years and after could hardly mark the polity as dangerously (or quaintly) traditional. Instead, it was evidence that Japanese political philosophers and bureaucrats had crafted a new, modern national identity on the basis of a reformulated conception of the nature of human beings and their environment. Japan had attained modernity and proclaimed the naturalness of its political values simultaneously. It did not have to make an either-or choice; it could choose both. This revelation of Japan’s particular history returned me to the issue of political modernity in general. It raised the questions of why nature was usually spoken of in the singular, as “Nature” rather than “natures,” and why the concept’s politicality was generally ignored in the theoretical literature. It seemed that many theorists, from Hegel to Weber to Maruyama, in their commitment to thinking of modernity as a universal, monolithic phenomenon, had projected (often unwittingly) a single version of nature as modernity’s origin or antithesis. Their tactic of repressing nature stabilized modernity, not just for European thought but throughout the world, as “Western” social scientific paradigms were adapted elsewhere. In this way, nature in the singular served as the often unarticulated, rarely examined substratum anchoring the vibrant story of modern development. It also anchored East-West, nature-culture dichotomies. However, if we shift the conceptual focus to nature’s many political functions, universal modernity loses its mooring. Recognizing multiple concepts of nature, as I came to realize, meant recognizing multiple forms of modernity.

Preface

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From a chance beginning with the posters of azaleas, my project had grown to a reexamination of the foundations of modernity and Japan’s place within it. This book therefore joins the work of other postmodern, postcolonial scholars attempting to resituate “East” and “West.” My own contribution to this vast enterprise is to suggest that we take nature seriously.

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Acknowledgments

I’ve had a lot of fun, luck, and help with this book, fortunately much more of all three than I deserve. Alan Thomas has my greatest thanks for his wit, his convictions, his encouragement, and his critiques. Many people have offered provocative suggestions and ideas about what to read and how to think about the problem of nature and modernity, most especially my teachers at Princeton, Oxford, and the University of Chicago. Others have read parts or all of the manuscript or invited me to speak so that I could air the argument (and work on its flaws) in public. I have also benefited from discussions at conferences focused on nature and/ or modernity; most crucial for this project were the 1993 Japan Anthropology Workshop on “Culture in Japanese Nature” in Banff organized by Pamela Asquith and Arne Kalland, the 1995 Northeast Asia Council Conference on “TaishÖ Democracy: Competing Modernities in TwentiethCentury Japan” organized by Sharon Minichiello and Germaine Hoston, and the three-part colloquium on “The Moral Authority of Nature” at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin from 1999 to 2000, presided over by Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal. Friends and colleagues at these forums and elsewhere have shown extraordinary generosity of spirit and intellect. My profound thanks goes to them all, including Robert Adams, Rene Arcilla, Aoyagi Hiroko, Andrew Barshay, James Bartholomew, Gail Bernstein, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Martin Collcutt, Jean and Bill Crocker, Joe Cutter, Kevin Doak, Wendy Doniger, Sean Gilsdorf, Fa-Ti Fan, Norma xiii

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Acknowledgments

Field, Michael Geyer, Harry Harootunian, Jennifer Hendriks, Peter Hendriks, Igarashi Akio, Marius Jansen, James McMullen, Pickens Miller, Tetsuo Najita, Larry Norman, James O’Brien, Oshima Mario, Brian Powell, Robert Richards, Donald Roden, Irwin Scheiner, William Sibley, Miriam Silverberg, Julia Stern, Stanley Szuba, Tanaka Mikae, Teh Ten-Sing, John Whittier Treat, Luk Van Haute, Jim Vestal, Stephen Vlastos, Anne Walthall, Ann Waswo, and George Wilson. And, speaking of good fortune, working with Jim Clark, Sheila Levine, Mary Severance, and the staff at the University of California Press has not only improved the book immeasurably but been a pleasure as well. I also thank Martin White for his excellent work on the index. To these people, and to many more who have helped in this long process, I feel intensely grateful. This project has also had the generous support of a Japanese Ministry of Education Research Grant; a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council and the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science; a semester at the University of Wisconsin Humanities Institute; an Advance Research Grant from the Joint Committee for Japanese Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies; summer research grants from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate School; and a Northeast Asia Council U.S. (Domestic) Research Travel Grant. I would also like to thank Donnie Shiflett, guiding spirit of the Mountain Falls Humanities Retreat. A version of some of the material in Chapter 8 appeared in Japan’s Competing Modernities, edited by Sharon A. Minichiello, and is republished here with the kind permission of the University of Hawai‘i Press.

Note on Transliteration

Japanese names appear in Japanese order, with family name first. Names of authors of works in English, however, follow the order given in the publication and the author’s preference for the use of macrons. Subsequent references to Tokugawa authors follow the custom of referring to these writers by their given names. Meiji and later figures are referred to by their family names. Macrons have been omitted from common placenames such as Tokyo.

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chapter 1

Introduction: The Trouble with Nature

When blues legend Howlin’ Wolf sings, “Nature cause me to mess up my life,” we know how he feels.1 Caught by the inevitable, yet never entirely blameless, a person trapped by “nature”—“bad-ass nature” in this case—will surely sing the blues. And yet, despite our instinctive respect for nature’s power, we rarely define what we mean by the term. Nature may mean a person’s individual nature, as it seems to for Howlin’ Wolf, or human nature in general. Alternatively, it may mean physical nature, the concrete world external to ourselves, or it may mean the nature of circumstances, the situation in which we find ourselves in the natural course of events, including not only human nature and the natural environment, but the social environment as well.2 In fact, “nature” seems to mean so much and therefore to specify so little that commentators as dissimilar as John Stuart Mill, Arthur Lovejoy, and Raymond Williams have thrown up their hands in consternation at the concept’s analytical indeterminacy.3 1. Howlin’ Wolf (Chester Arthur Burnett), “Nature,” on Howlin’ Wolf: The Real Folk Blues, 1957, Chess CHD-9273. 2. Raymond Williams distinguishes three general areas of meaning roughly corresponding to these distinctions: “(i) the essential quality or character of something; (ii) the inherent force which directs the world or human beings or both; (iii) the material world itself, taken as including or not including human beings.” Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 219. 3. See John Stuart Mill, “Nature,” in Nature and Utility of Religion (New York: BobbsMerrill, 1958); Arthur Lovejoy, “Nature as Aesthetic Norm,” Modern Language Notes

1

2

Introduction

And yet, as I will argue, nature can be defined quite precisely in the parlance of particular historical moments, if not in enduring philosophical terms.4 When we attend to its nuances in the documents of a certain period and press for clarity, asking both what nature is taken to be and also what is not considered nature, we can begin to delineate the concept’s parameters. This exercise is no mere philological reconstruction. Understanding what nature means in a given instance substantiates more than the observation that concepts are socially constructed and change over time. More importantly, each conception of nature betrays a distinct perspective on the human condition and the circumstances of our liberty. For nature, however defined, seems in almost all instances to denote the foreordained and given elements of a situation and, therefore, how much room we have to maneuver. In other words, in our understanding of nature we indicate what we can hope to change in ourselves, our situation, and the course of events. This is where the concept’s power lies. Nature can cause us to mess up our lives, as Howlin’ Wolf discovered, or it can be the matrix of our freedom. Viewed in this way, nature necessarily functions as a powerful political and ideological concept. Whoever can define nature for a nation defines that nation’s polity on a fundamental level. In so doing, they also define the individual liberty commensurate (or incommensurate) with that polity.5 A nation’s sense of nature—whether as challenging frontier or Edenic garden;6 as boundless natural resource, picturesque landscape,

(1927), 444; rpt. in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948), 69; and Williams, Keywords, 219. Raymond Williams calls nature “perhaps the most complex word in the language.” Louis Dupré notes that “Leslie Stephen described the term nature as contrived to introduce the maximum number of equivocations into any theory it enters.” Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 15. 4. Analyses of “nature” as a philosophical concept are most persuasive when they consciously consider the concept historically. For instance, Henri Lefebvre’s essay “Nature and Nature Conquered” uses the concept’s ability to refer both to internal human nature and the nature external to humans as a way of defining the possibilities of praxis in the modern era. See Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, trans. John Moore (New York: Verso, 1995), 132–56. 5. Serendipitously, the connection between “nature” and “nation” in English can also be made at the etymological level since the two terms share in common the Latin root nasci— to be born. 6. The contrast between these malign and beneficent views of nature has had particular resonance in American history. See, for instance, Leo Marx’s classic The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964) and Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).

The Trouble with Nature

3

or imperiled environment; as permanent Confucian hierarchy, evolving Darwinian society, or organic family-state—bespeaks its sense of collective and individual possibilities. It is with this understanding of nature that I reexamine some of the major debates about state ideology in Japan from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth, the period during which Japan metamorphosed from a semi-feudal world relatively isolated under the rule of daimyo to an industrializing colonial empire. My principal argument is that during this crucial period the intellectual and political leadership of Japan repeatedly and consciously reconfigured the concept of nature. The ruling oligarchy strove to restructure the government, the military, and the economy in order to secure the nation against international pressures while maintaining the oligarchy’s own elite political and social dominance. These twin goals of dramatic restructuring and oligarchic continuity were inherently contradictory in that they contained dueling progressive and conservative impulses. The consequent need for ideological stability drove nineteenthand early-twentieth-century political thinkers to seek an incontestable form of validation for their policies, and nature appeared to promise the validation they sought. However, there was no clear agreement on nature’s political lessons, especially during the Meiji (1868–1912) period. Populists of various leanings proposed forms of nature legitimizing rapid democratization, individual liberty, local independence, and other policies at odds with central state control. In other words, nature, far from being an aesthetic or scientific concept distant from politics, became a charged issue at the heart of Japan’s political upheavals. Put most simply, my major thesis is that nature in political terms moved from being that which Japan must investigate in order to arrive at true political forms to that which Japan is, the truth of itself. This transformation in the concept of nature is radical, not a movement in which a remnant of the old reasserts itself over the new; it evinces a confrontation with modernity that takes an aggressive posture rather than a defensive one. Most commentators have treated concepts of nature during this period as relics of Japanese tradition or as forms of “continuative consciousness,”7 but, as I will argue, nature was instead the changing, contested matrix within which the political possibilities of modernity were explored. The politics of which nature partakes most crucially is

7. Maruyama Masao’s term.

4

Introduction

not the politics of particular policy decisions or governmental structures, but the larger “politics of vision,”8 the fundamental ordering of meaning and power that situates individuals, communities, and their environment in relation to each other. This book, then, grapples with the central problem of defining the extent—and nature—of ideological change from the bakumatsu era through the Meiji and TaishÖ (1912–26) periods. What were the fundamental parameters of political possibility during this time? What alternative conceptions of the subject—communal or individual—were articulated, and how were they grounded? What historical trajectories were deemed possible? And how does Japan’s particular engagement with modernity resonate with modernity’s global reverberations?

Objections At least two objections can be raised to this approach from the very beginning. First, it risks being misunderstood by those for whom nature is more readily associated with (or only associated with) fields other than intellectual history. In particular, because of the concept’s connection to contemporary environmental concerns, some will insist that their own definition of nature—an ecological emphasis on the relations among fauna, flora, and the inanimate world—remain the central focus of any historical inquiry into the subject. Without the familiar trees and mountains, without natural science and human resource use at its center, a study cannot properly be said to concern nature at all, or so it may be argued. If these were the only terms acceptable, I would indeed be guilty of not really talking about nature. This environmentalism, however, is rather narrow and specific to the concerns arising in the late twentieth century. In itself it is the product of a particular history, traced eloquently in the American context by Donald Worster,9 and only one of the many conceptions of nature prevalent in the European and American past.10 Other versions of nature catalogued by Clarence Glacken in his study begin8. I am indebted to the discussion of two related senses of political vision in Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), 17–21. 9. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 10. Even within Western science, the concept of nature has not always been associated with the environment. In fact, its meaning has changed many times, as R. G. Collingwood’s study, The Idea of Nature, demonstrates. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945).

The Trouble with Nature

5

ning with the ancient Greeks11 or lyrically unveiled by Robert Pogue Harrison in Forests12 do not emphasize the circulating physical exchanges of nature’s economy. Instead, as these studies show, nature over the centuries has shifted among disciplines, considered at different times the special preserve of religion, philosophy, politics, and the arts, as well as agriculture, industry, medicine, and the sciences. Often these transformations in our understanding of nature have been quite rapid. As succinctly delineated by philosopher Stephen Toulmin, the concept’s shifting signification in Europe can be traced as follows: “In 1590, skeptics still doubted whether humans can find universal regularities in nature; by 1640, nature was in irremediable decay; but, by 1700, the changeover to the ‘law-governed’ picture of a stable cosmos was complete.”13 Each of these earlier views differs from the environmental and ecological concerns that emerged in the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, even ideas of nature as recent as those of the nineteenth century may appear strange to us in that they take nature to be a realm of divinely created value or a systematic yet inexhaustible order on which to hone scientific reason.14 Our current concept of earthly nature as finite and complex is quite distinct from its predecessors; the current usage both echoes and propels the general cultural trajectory of postmodernism.15 In short, there is no necessity for “nature” to mean “environment” as we look back at past usages. Although it is, of course, possible to write environmental histories of Japan, that is not my intention.16 11. Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 12. Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 13. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 110. 14. Isaiah Berlin argues that nineteenth-century liberals managed to hold both these views of nature despite their logical contradictions: “Rights described as ‘natural’ or ‘inherent,’ absolute standards of truth and justice, were not compatible with tentative empiricism and utilitarianism; yet liberals believed in both.” “Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 12. John Stuart Mill, recognizing the contradiction, was not among those who sought to establish or defend rights on the basis of “nature,” which he excoriates when used as a political term. 15. There is, of course, no consensus on the state of the environment or the political ramifications of environmentalism. For instance, Andrew Ross claims that the finitude of earthly resources, far from being a rallying concern for those suspicious of capitalism, is merely an invention of capitalists for manipulating demand and bolstering consumer desire. Andrew Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Ecology, Culture, and Society (London: Verso, 1994). 16. Environmental histories of Japan include the works of William Wayne Farris, Population, Disease, and Land in Early Japan, 645–900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

6

Introduction

Instead, the question guiding my research is what nature meant within the discourse of Japanese politics on its own terms. The evidence here is that nature’s implications for society—its prescription for the relations of power among human beings—mattered far more to most Meiji and TaishÖ writers than its scientific or ecological import. Although concepts of nature had ramifications for resource use, as well as for the modes of production, ownership, and consumption—and therefore for “the environment” as we would now call it—the dramatic reconfiguration of nature pertained to the structure of government, the position of the individual in relation to society, and the rate of social change. As I will show in Chapter 8, even the devastation wrought by the Ashio Copper Mine in the Watarase River basin beginning in the 1880s and the destruction of natural habitats during the consolidation of ShintÖ shrines after the turn of the century failed to make ecological networks the primary definition of nature in Japan. Had Meiji and TaishÖ writers placed a concept similar to our idea of “the environment” at the center of their discussions, the political consequences would have been very different. But, of course, such an approach was highly improbable and never pertained. As we attune ourselves to historical texts, we should not be surprised that the “nature” that emerges from them is unfamiliar and at times almost unrecognizable in our terms. That necessary imaginative and intellectual leap into the strangeness of the past is what gives history its charge, its capacity to serve as a political resource, as a repository of difference, for the present. Rather than employ contemporary definitions of nature, I will try to excavate the way Japanese thinkers’ use of nature shaped their ideas of necessity and freedom, in part so that we can reexamine what today’s foregrounding of the environment entails for our own sense of possibility.17

Press, 1985), and Conrad Totman, especially Totman, The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 17. Scholarship considering the broader ideological and political implications of environmentalism is diffuse in that writers approach this subject from such different backgrounds that an arena of sustained dialogue and shared vocabulary has yet to be created. The range of contrasting views of environmentalism’s broader implications is represented by Christopher Manes, Greenrage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), who argues that preventing environmental destruction should dictate political decisions; Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order, trans. Carol Volk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), who argues that overly stressing environmental protection endangers the concept of free will; and André Gortz, Ecology as Politics, trans. Patsy Vigderman and Jonathan Cloud (Boston: South End Press, 1980), who argues that democratic socialism is the necessary political form for protecting the environment.

The Trouble with Nature

7

The second major objection to placing nature at the center of a study of this sort is the criticism that the concept changes too much to unify a historical narrative or serve as an analytical tool. This criticism reveals a singular faith in the permanence of meaning and the continuity of conceptual categories. My own experience of reading historical documents suggests the opposite: that to excavate any powerful idea is to grapple with a protean monster, a shape-changing wraith that refuses to give solid comfort. “Nature” in Japanese political discourse is no different. As I will discuss in greater detail, the vocabulary itself during this period slides among terms such as “tenri,” “tenzen,” “tenpu,” “tenchi,” “ÜchÜ,” and “banbutsu” before stabilizing, more or less, in the 1890s with the term “shizen.”18 With each word, slippages of emphasis and meaning occur. “Shizen,” especially in its alternative pronunciation, “jinen,” at an earlier stage suggested “idleness” or “purposelessness,” only later coming to emphasize “spontaneity.”19 Furthermore, terms shift in meaning as they cross discursive categories, for instance from the naturalism in literature (shizenshugi) or in law (shizenhÖ or shizenhÖsoku) to that in science (shizen kagaku) in the Meiji period. In other words, it is quite true that “nature” is a discontinuous field; it remains the same neither across the disciplines nor through time. What interests me is the transformation in vocabulary, emphasis, relations to other concepts, and references to the physical, psychological, or social worlds as it pertains to political thought. The objection that conceptual instability translates into conceptual invalidity (in other words, that without a stable core of meaning through time and across discursive space, there is in fact no meaning as such) speaks to a central historiographic and philosophical conundrum. The literature on this issue is vast: W. B. Gallie grapples with the stubborn incomprehensibility of the event seen as a unique moment of disconti-

The literature categorized as “sociobiology” is distinct from that mentioned above in that it concerns the political dictates of biological nature rather than the political consequences of environmental protection. Some of these works insist on a grim view of humanity’s capacity for disinterested democratic practice and social equality (Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975], and Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene [New York: Oxford University Press, 1976]), while others are quite sanguine about the moral and social dictates of biology (Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation [New York: Viking Penguin, 1998]). Ridley, for instance, argues that private ownership of natural resources inherently provides better environmental protection than public management. 18. Yanabu Akira, Hon’yaku no shisÖ: “Shizen” to “nature” (Toyko: Heibonsha, 1977). 19. Hino Tatsuo, “Soraigaku ni okeru shizen to sakui,” in Shizen, eds. Sagara Toru, BitÖ Masahide, and Akiyama Ken, vol. 1 of Nihon shisÖ (Tokyo: Tokyo shuppankai, 1983).

8

Introduction

nuity; 20 Hayden White examines the artificial force of narrative in shaping time into meaningful forms; 21 Richard Rorty insists that it is the power of metaphor that structures the possibilities of thought rather than any independently existing order to which language refers; 22 and the list goes on. What Peter Novick has ironically termed “that noble dream” of absolute objectivity in historical research or the Cartesian “quest for certainty” conducted by philosophers since the seventeenth century still has its defenders, who do not wish to bear the onus of participating in the creation of meaning. In this book I do not directly address the arguments about how meaning is created in histories, but it will become clear that I hold with those who argue that there is no unchanging structure to meaning—i.e., that it is contingent upon the hopes, desires, and interests of the community for whom it exists. The task of the historian is to attempt to negotiate between the communities of past and present, not to excavate an indisputable truth but to arrive at an interpretation that at best can only be the most refined that “obtain[s] in a given society at a period, within the subject in question,” in Isaiah Berlin’s words.23 But, more than this, I argue that it is precisely the belief in the permanency and unchangeability of an idea, particularly a relatively unmarked, unexamined idea like nature, that gives such a concept its ideological potency. We rarely stop to ask what nature means in a political document or elsewhere because we rarely feel we do not already know. As a consequence, we rarely question the way our assumptions about it shape our understanding of future possibilities. This unexamined sense of meaning’s necessary permanency takes specific form in reference to nature and Japan. An interest in nature is often taken to imply a celebration of the so-called Japanese love of nature, which, it is argued, has uniquely distinguished Japan since before the advent of agriculture.24 The love of nature, in other words, is a per-

20. W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, 2nd edition (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). 21. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 22. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 23. Isaiah Berlin, “Political Ideas,” 2. 24. See, for instance, the work of anthropologist Ishida EiichirÖ, who argues for the essential continuity of Japanese approaches to nature from prehistory to the present. Ishida, “Nihon bunka no jaken to kankÖsei: aru henkyÖ bunka no takushitsu,” in Nihon bunka no kÖzÖ, eds. Umesao Tadao and Tada MichitarÖ (Toyko: KÖdansha, 1972), 24. Similar

The Trouble with Nature

9

manent national characteristic. The mere mention of nature in Japan tends to elicit a cascade of commentary on Japan’s seasonal poetry, bonsai, and temple gardens.25 Given the “love” demonstrated by these cultural forms and many others, what is left for research to do but to produce further examples of this essential and eternal truth of Japanese relations with nature? This assertion that Japan loves nature often slides into wistful declarations that Japan treats its natural environment lovingly as well, an idea dubbed “eco-nationalism” by historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki.26 Accord-

statements can be found in the work of historian of science Watanabe Masao, who believes that “it is probably not wrong to assert that the Japanese attitude toward animals, which in these [twentieth-century] studies [of animal behavior] played a crucial role, resembles that revealed in the animal studies (chÖjÜ giga) [scroll paintings of animal caricatures often in human garb] of the twelfth century.” Watanabe, Nihonjin to kindai kagaku (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1976), translated as The Japanese and Western Science by Otto Theodor Benfey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 110. Sociologist Shimizu IkutarÖ, one of Maruyama Masao’s critics, equates the reaction of the Japanese to the 1923 Great KantÖ Earthquake, specifically their enjoyment of the sunset that evening, with the 1212 work HÖjÖki, of Kamo no ChÖmei, who left court life to become a hermit. See Shimizu, Nihonteki narumono (In the Japanese Manner) (Tokyo: Ushio shuppansha, 1968). In each of these cases, “the” Japanese view of nature is taken to be uniform and unchanging across eons. 25. One instance of this tendency can be found in Watanabe, Nihonjin to kindai kagaku. In Chapter 6 on “Modern Science and the Japanese Conception of Nature,” Watanabe discusses chrysanthemums in the tokonoma, the tea ceremony, the aesthetic preparation of Japanese food, the shape of Japanese sweets, and Japanese place names, all of which, Watanabe concludes, “points to the special love of nature on the part of the Japanese.” The Japanese and Western Science, 103. 26. The argument that Japan’s unique love of nature provides not only aesthetic guideposts but also a foundation for careful environmental stewardship has been advanced by Japanese scholars such as anthropologist Ishida EiichirÖ, archaeologist Yasuda Yoshinori, and philosopher Umehara Takeshi, and by American scholars such as Lynn T. White, Roderick Nash, and Edward Olsen. These views have been countered from different perspectives by Ian Reader, Arne Kalland, Gavan McCormack, and Tessa Morris-Suzuki. For the argument that Japanese culture’s approach to nature, treated almost always as singular, entails a desire to protect the natural environment, see Yasuda Yoshinori, “Passivity and Activity of Japanese Studies,” Nichibunken Newsletter no. 3 (July 1989) and “Animism Renaissance,” Nichibunken Newsletter no. 5 (January 1990); Umehara Takeshi, Mori no shisÖ wa jinrui o sukuu (Toyko: ShÖgakukan, 1991); Lynn T. White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science no. 155 (1967), 1203–7; Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967); and Edward Olsen, “Man and Nature: East Asia and the West,” Asian Profile 3, no. 6 (December 1975). Critical responses to this view include Ian Reader, “The Animism Renaissance Reconsidered: An Urgent Response to Dr. Yasuda,” Nichibunken Newsletter no. 6 (May 1990); Arne Kalland, “Culture in Japanese Nature,” in Asian Perceptions of Nature: A Critical Approach, eds. O. Bruun and A. Kalland (London: Curzon Press, 1994), 243–57; Gavan McCormack, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996); Totman, Green Archipelago; and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Concepts of Nature and Technology in Pre-Industrial Japan,” East Asian History, no. 1 (June 1991), 81–97 and Reinventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Armonk, N.Y: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 35–59.

10

Introduction

ing to the advocates of this view, environmental destruction in Japan is “the product of alien cultural and economic influences.”27 This position neatly combines the two objections to the study of nature that I am proposing. The insistence that “nature” must mean “environment” (the first objection) and the view that “nature” must have a stable definition in order to be an object of historical study (the second objection) merge in the discourse on Japan to deflect serious investigation of the concept of nature. My task in demonstrating the political potency of the concept of nature is to reveal the power behind the seemingly mild stereotype of Japan’s permanent love of nature and the historical process of its production. As the megalopolis of Tokyo burns hotter with each passing summer, as Japan’s last free-flowing rivers are dammed, and as its harbors are filled with mountaintops,28 what is meant by these terms—“Japan,” “love,” and “nature”? When was this conceit formulated and what is its import? Why is this particular trope of national identity so often repeated? This study takes this stereotype as a paradox from which to launch an investigation, rather than a conclusion to celebrate or memorialize.

Justifications This book, then, is not about environmental policy or environmental history; nor is it about the aesthetics of landscape painting or of gardens; it does not analyze the natural sciences, the technologies used for extracting natural resources, or urban-rural relations; it rarely touches on the spiritual associations of nature; and yet, nature, most emphatically, is its focus. Despite the risk of incurring the types of misunderstandings suggested above, I have chosen to make nature the guiding concern in this study of modern Japanese political ideology for three reasons. In short and in ascending order of generality, these are, first, the prevalence of conceptualizations of nature in the documents articulating political ideals; second, the need to find a “deterritorialized” terminology appropriate to analyzing Japanese political and ideological tensions during this period; and, third, the project of understanding modernity’s relation to nature and situating Japan (and, by implication, other non-Western nations) within modernity’s global reach. I hope to convince readers not only of the strate27. Morris-Suzuki, “Concepts of Nature and Technology,” 82. 28. On Japan’s environmental problems, see, for instance, McCormack, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence, Kamioka Namiko, Nihon no kogaishi (The History of Pollution in Japan) (Tokyo: Sekai shoin, 1987), and Environmental Protection in Tokyo (Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Research Institute for Environmental Protection, 1970).

The Trouble with Nature

11

gic interest of interrogating political ideology through attention to ideas of nature, but of the fundamental loss incurred in ignoring the concept.

Prevalence in Documents The first of these justifications is quite straightforward. “Nature” is not a concept I impose on the documents. Rather, Tokugawa, Meiji, and TaishÖ documents related to state-building are permeated with references to nature and discussions of what nature means for the political order. Contemporary researchers have generally failed to notice these references because nature has not been considered part of the vocabulary of power or of its serious analysis. As once were other aspects of history (for instance, women, labor, or the environment), the concept of nature has been treated as a mere embellishment, a metaphorical flourish at best, embarrassing nonsense at worst, but hardly worth serious study. As with those other categories, previously invisible because they were deemed irrelevant to the real play of power, once we begin to pay attention, nature’s prevalence astounds us. Standard political sources mention it frequently; public debates in newspapers, journals, and books, documents related to the attempt to develop political parties, government pronouncements on the economy and religion, and government-sponsored textbooks all refer to it. In terms of its sources, then, this study is quite conservative. There is no attempt to bring to light hitherto unpublished material because doing so would suggest that nature is a valid theoretical category only when interrogating obscure documents rather than the central category of political thought I take it to be. This study, therefore, reoccupies familiar ground from a new theoretical vantage, one rooted in the conceptual world of Japanese writers themselves. Recognizing nature’s prevalence in the debates central to state ideology is the first step toward questioning its significance for the participants in these debates and ultimately to restoring our cognizance of nature’s power to shape political vision.

Political Terminology and Historical Narratives The second justification for focusing on concepts of nature is that they provide an alternative vocabulary for understanding ideological tensions within Japan. Finding a language appropriate for such analysis has not been easy because the preponderance of power lies with Western theoretical concepts. Research into Meiji and TaishÖ political thought has relied heavily on terms such as “liberalism” (jiyÜshugi), “democracy” (min-

12

Introduction

shÜshugi), and “revolution” (kakumei), which in their Japanese forms were cobbled together in the Meiji period using new combinations of kanji (Japanese characters borrowed or adapted from the Chinese) in order to speak of Western political ideas. Sophisticated and careful research into the complexities of this translation process has enabled us to understand more clearly how the terms functioned, and yet their awkwardness remains.29 Often the reader is left with a greater sense of the difference between non-Japanese and Japanese usage, their incommensurability rather than their translatability. To add further to these difficulties, some of these words come encumbered with the tangled skeins of centuries-long debate created in particular contexts far from Japan.30 In writing English-language Japanese history, ignoring the task of disentangling each standard term from its variegated history in European and American contexts undermines the possibility of comparative analysis, yet focusing on this task shifts the emphasis outside Japan, conveying the sense that the real meaning of these standard terms is rooted elsewhere. In other words, the usual political terminology applied and adapted in Japan bears the scars of distant battles, the landmarks of another territory. This territorialization of standard political terms extends beyond the level of isolated words alone when applied to Meiji and TaishÖ contexts. Each term bears not just definitional complexities but entire narratives. “Democracy” and “liberalism,” for instance, partake at least covertly of modernization’s optimism about the development of political openness, often assumed to be concomitant with industrialization, urbanization, and general economic development. Discussions of the Meiji people’s rights movement and “TaishÖ Democracy” in these terms often create a story line shadowing Western progress, predictably narrating Japan’s economic advances and its adoption of constitutional forms. This same story line, however, finds itself at a loss to explain the aggressive militarism of the 1930s and 1940s, which bafflingly disrupts the progressive narrative.31 Likewise, the term “revolution” or “kakumei” projects its own story 29. See, for instance, Ishida Takeshi, Nihon no seiji to kotoba: “jiyÜ” to “fukushi” (Japanese Politics and Language: ‘Freedom’ and ‘Prosperity’) (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppansha, 1989) and Tanaka Hiroshi, Kindai nihon to riberarizumu (Modern Japan and Liberalism) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1993). 30. It is sometimes forgotten that some of these terms were also quite new in Europe and America as well. For instance, “individualism” was coined by Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) in his effort to describe the American character in 1835. 31. See the six-volume Studies on the Modernization of Japan published by Princeton University Press, 1965–71. As Sheldon Garon notes,“To most modernizationists, the history

The Trouble with Nature

13

line of successive class struggles and the overcoming of unjust relations of power. The question of which stage in this liberatory trajectory Japan occupied acquired great importance for Japanese and international Marxists and socialists concerned particularly with the question of whether the Meiji Ishin of 1868 was an incomplete bourgeois revolution.32 The disaster of 1930s militarism could be explained by the bourgeoisie’s unsuccessful bid for power, but Meiji and TaishÖ Japan’s success as an industrializing nation with many of the forms of middle-class democracy, including a constitution, political parties, and universal male suffrage by 1925, undercut the cogency of Marxist narrative. Like the modernization narrative sketched above, revolutionary terminology also projects a redemptive narrative. Transferred to Japan, these redemptive histories become the enactment of promises founded on Western European and American experiences and hopes. On the other hand, those who argue for the untranslatability of Meiji and TaishÖ experience into Western terms foreclose comparative study. Japan emerges not just as a country with a precise, concrete, and particular experience, but as one whose uniqueness makes it opaque to comparative analysis. With this approach, tradition provides not a “horizon of possibility,” in Michael Oakschott’s phrase, but an impenetrable barrier of difference. Put in terms of Japan’s particularity (nihonjinron) or the more inclusive notions of “Confucian” or “Asian” values said to underpin postwar economic development in East Asia, these analyses create a structure determinedly outside global histories.33

of modern Japan was one of gradual convergence toward the liberal democratic orders of the West. They therefore depicted the 1930s as an aberration, a ‘dark valley’ in the modernization process, asserting that postwar democratization in areas such as party government and labor organization rested on progress made during the 1920s.” Sheldon Garon, “Rethinking Modernization and Modernity in Japanese History: A Focus on StateSociety Relations,” The Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 2 (May 1994), 348. 32. For Comintern perspectives on this issue, see Julia Mikhailova, “Soviet-Japanese Studies on the Problem of the Meiji Ishin and the Development of Japanese Capitalism,” in War, Revolution & Japan, ed. Ian Neary (Japan Library, 1993), 33–38. For analysis of TaishÖ Marxism, see Miriam Silverberg, Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), and Germaine A. Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986). 33. In Chapter 8 I will discuss the assertion of cultural essentialism that underlies this approach as it began to be formulated the 1880s. Could it be posited that the progressivism of Western historiography spawned its logical counterweight in the theories of decline and decadence in Spengler and Toynbee, while Japanese historiography produced its logical counterweight not in terms of tragedy, a thoroughly temporal trope, but in terms of displacement, the fear that Japan might lose its connection to a particular (imagined) landscape of folk practice if it embraced historical progression too thoroughly?

14

Introduction

The conundrum resulting from these three major approaches to Japanese political thought is that we become trapped between normative claims to universalism inherent in terms developed within Western contexts, on the one hand, and claims to national exceptionalism denying the applicability of these concepts to Japan on the other. In these older modes of scholarship, Japan either must mirror, often in mutated form as late developer or thwarted bourgeois democracy, the redemptive trajectory of Western development or be treated as sui generis and thus beyond comparative analysis. In proposing “nature” as the principal term of analysis, I break with this scholarship to suggest a vocabulary that is comparative yet sensitive to cultural particularities. Such a strategy is possible today only because “nature” seemingly carries little ideological baggage, its apparent political neutrality being in fact one of its greatest assets as ideology, both inside and outside Japan. For us, the term is not exclusively anchored in some original way to one tradition or another; at least for the time being, it can serve to reposition the discussion. Furthermore, nature provides an alternative vocabulary that contains no inherent narrative teleology for readers today, although it contained precisely that during some of the period under discussion, especially when social Darwinism was at its height. For us, the mention of “nature”— unlike, for instance, “revolution”—does not resonate with an alreadyattached political story line of feudal adversity challenged and overcome. Nature, therefore, helps to resituate Japanese history outside the gradualist narrative of modernization, the revolutionary tale of Marxism, or the exceptionalist version of Japanese culture. Of course we cannot leave behind the older political terms entirely, nor would we wish to since much of Meiji and TaishÖ debate and subsequent historiography uses these terms, but we can displace them from the center of analysis. Just as Victor Koschmann’s attention to the centrality of shutaisei (subjectivity) helps to resituate the English-language debate on postwar democracy in Japan,34 an examination of concepts of nature and the emergence of shizen disturbs the established contours of our analyses. We can ask again the question of what happened in Japan without the frustration of measuring Japan against often unacknowledged, artificial yardsticks. We can turn again to the question of how the radical transformation of politics, economics, international relations, social structure, language, education, 34. J. Victor Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

The Trouble with Nature

15

and technology could be accomplished in Japan with so little liberation of the individual critical spirit. We can ask once more how the dissolution of the old order was masked as continuity. Nature as an alternative analytical term provides a means for sidestepping some heavily freighted terms and the narrative burdens they bear.

Nature as the Unconscious of Modernity The third justification for focusing on concepts of nature concerns neither Japanese documents nor Japanese historiography per se but rather the broader question of modernity around the globe and the locus of the non-Western world within it. When I began this study, I had assumed that a naturalized politics was the antithesis of modernity.35 Nature in political ideology indicated the suppression of freedom, the blind continuance of tradition, and, often, “the Orient.” People who justified society’s power structures or limited the possibilities open to individuals through reference to some form of nature, whether organic social order, social Darwinism, sociobiology, race, or gender, seemed to reveal a dangerous, even malevolent, archaism. In these initial suspicions, I followed the lead of Japan’s foremost po-

35. I use the English-language terms “modernity,” “modernization,” and “modernism” to refer to quite distinct phenomena, although sometimes these terms are used almost interchangeably, as in Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1982, rpt. 1988). “Modernization” I take to refer primarily to the economic, technological, and industrial developments that have rationalized production over the last two hundred years and the accompanying social and political institutions. As Jürgen Habermas argues, the technical use of this term was developed in the 1950s for the purpose of creating a functional model applicable beyond European borders. See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 2–3. “Modernism” refers to the artistic movement circa 1890 to 1930 that Henri Lefebvre glosses as “the cult of innovation for innovation’s sake, innovation as fetish” (Introduction to Modernity, 169). See also Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism: 1890–1930 (London: Penguin, 1976, rpt. 1981) and T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999). I define “modernity,” the term of greatest importance in this study, in the following pages. The distinctions above do not pertain in quite the same way in Japanese, in which “kindaishugi” may be translated as either “modernity” (see, for example, J. Victor Koschmann, “Maruyama Masao and the Incomplete Project of Modernity,” in H. D. Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi, eds., Postmodernism and Japan [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989]) or “modernism” without the artistic connotations (see, for example, Matsumoto Sannosuke, “Introduction,” Journal of Social and Political Ideas in Japan 4, no. 2 [1966], 2–19). Andrew Barshay translates “kindaisei” as “modernity” and “kindaishugi” as “modernism,” using both these terms in their political and social developmental senses in “Imagining Democracy in Postwar Japan: Reflections on Maruyama Masao and Modernism,” Journal of Japanese Studies 18, no. 2 (Summer 1992), 365–406.

16

Introduction

litical scientist, Maruyama Masao (1914–96).36 Over the course of his long career, Maruyama repeatedly excoriated Japan’s reliance on the political authority of nature (shizen). Under its regime, according to Maruyama, the autonomous political subject could never hope to develop, and, without the development of autonomous individuals, state power could never be challenged. Nature haunted Japanese political thought, deforming the modernity for which Maruyama, somewhat ambiguously, yearned. Since this analysis has proven to be such a powerful one, and since it represents an understanding of modernity common to his generation in Europe as well as Japan, it is worth reviewing here briefly. Maruyama’s most sustained attack on nature appears in an essay titled “Kindai Nihon seiji shisÖ ni okeru ‘shizen’ to ‘sakui’ ” (“‘Nature’ and ‘Invention’ in Modern Japanese Political Thought”), written just before he left Tokyo to join the Imperial Army in 1944.37 Although it poses as an analysis of Tokugawa political thought, this essay can be read as a partial critique, despite wartime censorship, of the “fascist” system Maruyama would serve.38 As Maruyama describes early Tokugawa philosophies, two concepts, nature (shizen) and invention (sakui), are pitted against one another, “nature” being embraced by Chu Hsi Confu36. Testaments to Maruyama’s importance and his independent stance during the heated debates of the postwar period can be found in Herman Ooms and Harry D. Harootunian, “Maruyama’s Achievement: Two Views,” Journal of Asian Studies 36, no. 3 (May 1977); Sasakura Hideo, Maruyama Masao ron nÖto (Toyko: Misuzu shobÖ, 1988); Gendai shisÖ, which devoted an entire issue to commentary on Maruyama’s thought (vol. 22, no. 1, 1994); Andrew Barshay, “Imagining Democracy in Postwar Japan: Reflections on Maruyama Masao and Modernism,” Journal of Japanese Studies 18, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 365–406; and Rikki Kersten, Democracy in Postwar Japan: Maruyama Masao and the Search for Autonomy (London: Routledge, 1996). In pursuing the issue of nature in politics, I am indebted not only to Maruyama, but also to the works of his students and colleagues, especially Ishida Takeshi, Meiji seiji shisÖ shi kenkyÜ (Studies in the History of Meiji Political Thought) (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1954), and Ienaga SaburÖ, ShÜkyÖteki shizenkan no tenkai (The Development of the Religious View of Nature) (Tokyo: SaitÖ shoten, 1944), as well as his extensive research on Ueki Emori, the principal figure in Chapter 6, and Matsumoto Sannosuke. 37. Maruyama’s “Kindai Nihon seiji shisÖ ni okeru ‘shizen’ to ‘sakui,’ ” (‘Nature’ and ‘Invention’ in Modern Japanese Political Thought) was originally published in Kokka gakkai zasshi before being issued with two other essays in Nihon seiji shi shisÖ kenkyÜ (Research in Japanese Political Thought) (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1952). It was translated by Mikiso Hane as “Nature and Invention in Tokugawa Political Thought: Contrasting Institutional Views” in Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, and Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974). References are to Hane’s translation unless otherwise specified. 38. Hidaka RokurÖ, for example, argues that Maruyama’s implied advocacy of individual autonomy in his wartime essay on Fukuzawa Yukichi was also an instance of wartime resistance. See Hidaka’s introduction to “Fukuzawa Yukichi ni okeru chitsujo to ningen” (originally published by Maruyama in Mita Shinbun, November 1943) in Kindaishugi (Gendai Nihon shisÖ taikei 34), ed. Hidaka RokurÖ (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten), 55. I use the term “fascism” here advisedly. Although it is questionable whether the term

The Trouble with Nature

17

cianism 39 and “invention” by OgyÜ Sorai (1666–1728) and his followers.40 Although both schools of thought supported the Tokugawa shogunate and aimed to quell disobedience, their different theoretical bases harkened to widely divergent future possibilities. In Maruyama’s view, Chu Hsi philosophy encouraged entrenchment by holding up the mirror of nature to the feudal hierarchy. This mirror produced a double reflection of shogunal authority: one image on a cosmological level in “the order of the universe (the Principle of Heaven),” or tenri, and a duplicate image in “man’s ‘original nature,’ (honzen no sei).”41 Thus, the bakufu, the cosmos, and inner human spirit, despite their superficial differences, were homologous manifestations of identical li, often translated as “principle.” As Maruyama sees it, the hierarchical, ethical, and political orders were thus locked in moribund rigidity by reliance on nature for justification. Closing off all room for critique, this thought pattern foreshadowed the stillbirth of modern liberty in Japan. Against Chu Hsi Confucianism, Maruyama posits an inevitable turn away from nature to invention. He writes that in an increasingly unstable political situation, “when social relations lose their natural balance . . .

ought to be applied to Japan at all (See Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995]), the term “fashizumu” was widely used in postwar Japanese discussions, including Maruyama’s essay “The Ideology and Dynamics of Japanese Fascism,” in Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 25–83, originally delivered as a lecture in June 1947. Japan’s particular form of “fascism” has been characterized as “tennÖsei fashizumu” (emperorsystem fascism), prompting a long-running debate. See, for instance, Komatsu Shigeo, “Nihon gata fashizumu” (Japanese-Style Fascism) in ShidÖ sha to taishÜ, vol. 5 of Kindai Nihon shisÖ shi kÖza (Tokyo: Chikuma shobÖ, 1960), 277–326; Nakamura Kikuo, “TennÖsei fashizumu wa atta ka” (Was There Emperor-System Fascism?), JiyÜ (December 1965), 50–59; Ishida Takeshi, “‘fashizumu ki’ Nihon no okeru dentÖ to ‘kakushin’ ” (Tradition and ‘Renovation’ in Japan’s ‘Fascist Era’), ShisÖ (January 1976), 1–20; Yamaguchi Yasushi, Fashizumu (Fascism) (Tokyo: Yuhikaku sensho, 1979); Amano Keiichi, “‘ TennÖsei fashizumu ron’ no genzai” (The Current ‘Emperor-System Fascism Debate’), RyÜdÖ (January 1980), 56–65. The term “fascism” continues to be used in such works as Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Kusa no ne no fashizumu: Nihon minshÜ no sensÖ taiken (The Roots of Fascism: The Japanese People’s Wartime Experience) (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppansha, 1987, rpt. 1996). 39. “Chu Hsi” is the older romanization of what is also referred to as “Zhu Xi” or Neo-Confucianism. 40. Maruyama himself subsequently questioned the hegemony of Neo-Confucian thinking in early Tokugawa thought and consequently undermined the drama of OgyÜ’s struggle, but the polemical difference between nature and invention remained crucial to his critique of wartime and postwar Japan. See Maruyama’s “Author’s Introduction” in Mikiso Hane’s translation, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, xxxiv. See also Herman Ooms, Tokugawa Ideology: Early Constructs, 1570–1680 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985). 41. Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, 198.

18

Introduction

a body of thought is bound to emerge that stresses the idea of the autonomous personality (shutaiteki jinkaku) whose task it is to strengthen the foundations that uphold the social norms and to bring political disorder under control.”42 OgyÜ Sorai and his followers in the kogakusha (School of Ancient Learning) fulfill this role by valorizing the acts of the Ancient Sages who, in the time before time, somewhere in China, invented the social forms of rites and music and the economic activities of agriculture and weaving. The Sages’ inventiveness becomes the standard by which subsequent rulers are properly judged.43 OgyÜ’s theory of autonomous personality (shutaiteki jinkaku) hints at a future of freedom. The struggle between “nature” as championed by the NeoConfucianists and “invention” as championed by OgyÜ takes on an allegorical significance. OgyÜ plays the role of the hero whose failure, since he ultimately does fail, is made more poignant because Maruyama describes exactly what his victory should have looked like. “If the theory of natural order was to be completely overcome, no normative standards of any kind would be present in the background as the premise; instead, the starting point had to be human beings who, for the first time, invented norms and endowed them with their validity.”44 Indeed, had OgyÜ not betrayed the narrative of modernity, he would have grounded autonomy in the complete rejection of nature and the complete acceptance of invention. However, by Maruyama’s lights, OgyÜ fails to achieve a sufficiently definitive break with nature. His reliance on “an agricultural livelihood, a natural economy, a family-based masterservant relationship and so on”45 restricts the powers of the autonomous rulers to create new institutions. Maruyama writes, disappointedly, that

42. Ibid., 206–7. 43. Both Maruyama and the Frankfurt School writers return to mythic heroes in their discussions of the modern subject. Maruyama, through an analysis of OgyÜ Sorai, elevates the Ancient Sages to the status of exemplars of full, creative subjectivity. Properly decontextualized, they represent the values Maruyama desires for the modern subject in their capacity to re-imagine society and master nature through such innovations as silk production and new agricultural techniques. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno present Odysseus as the primal exemplar of modern subjectivity. In contrast to the Sages, Odysseus wrests a tortured subjectivity from the wild lashings of nature and the seductions and horrors of myth only to return home all but unrecognized (except by his dog). While Maruyama’s Sages are socially engaged, honored by their communities, and economically productive, Horkheimer and Adorno’s portrayal of the Ur modern subject suggests “his” loneliness and alienation from society. 44. Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, 210. Emphasis mine. 45. Ibid., 222.

The Trouble with Nature

19

“the Sorai school’s position is, really, in the last analysis, an attempt to produce nature by the logic of invention.”46 Maruyama’s disappointment with OgyÜ is in my view ironic, for Maruyama himself steps back from invention at the critical moment, unable, it would seem, to embrace it as the culmination of the historical process. For all Maruyama’s disapproval of nature and his seemingly wholehearted embrace of invention, he is not optimistic about the contingency that results from introducing pure invention into political life. Maruyama’s ambivalence on this crucial point emerges in the key passage, “I have argued above that when any really existing order is justified by the idea of a natural order, that existing order is in its stage of ascendancy or stability, whereas when, on the contrary, if justified in terms of autonomous personalities, it is in its period of decline or crisis.”47 Under this schema, the very modernity for which Maruyama strives must be a moment of “decline or crisis” and autonomous individuals—the agents of invention—do little more than mark the transition. Like the Ancient Sages, they arise and act at the start of an era, only to sink back into the history-less miasma of a stable, naturally justified order. The inventing subject is so unbounded that his or her continued autonomy promises only chaos. In short, Maruyama’s own autonomous individuals can do little else but invent nature.48 Nevertheless, whatever uneasiness Maruyama may have felt about sakui and perhaps modernity itself, he never returns to nature for solace. The binary opposition between nature and invention that Maruyama developed through his reading of political scientist Hans Kelsen, a German positivist, locks political action into a rigid “either-or” (entweder-oder) pattern where the only options are revolution or acquiescence. Although Maruyama admits that there are moments when nature, as pure revolutionary principle, might be “directed against the concrete social order,”49 these moments are fleeting and ineffectual. Ultimately, Maruyama dismisses them, asserting that nature is exclusively tied to the conservative task of 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 228–29. Emphasis mine. 48. In later works, Maruyama explores the idea of continual resistance to the state in a group discussion in “Nihon shakai no ideorogii to kÖzÖ” (Ideology and Structure of Japanese Society), in Sekai HyÖron part I (February 1948), 40–50, and part II (March 1948), 26–43; and the idea of democracy as permanent revolution in “Fashizumu no shomondai” in ShisÖ (October 1952), which was translated as “Fascism—Some Problems: A Consideration of its Political Dynamics” in Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 157–76. 49. “Generally speaking, as soon as natural law is related to the actual social order, it encounters an ‘either-or’ (entweder-oder) characteristic. Either by rigid adherence to pure

20

Introduction

justifying an “existing order in its stage of ascendancy or stability.”50 Any latitude for continual negotiation between nature and invention, any sense that the individual, society, or the State might be hybrid developments, both natural and invented at once, is anathema. Nature is absorbed within the ascendant State in congenial forms, such as the family-state community (kyÖdÖtai), so that “by its complete identification with the actual social relations it becomes an ideology guaranteeing the permanence of the existing order.”51 In short, from Maruyama’s powerful mid-twentiethcentury perspective, because Japanese politics justified itself through reference to nature, it was by definition anti-modern, deadeningly traditional, and opposed to liberty. It epitomized the trouble with nature. Maruyama was not my only authority for the idea that true modernity was premised on the rejection of nature. Indeed, most modern left and liberal theorists, especially in the early and mid-twentieth century, were highly skeptical of any reliance on nature in political thought, equating such dependence with deterministic physical forces opposed to free will, or with romantic obfuscation, or with the deleterious weight of tradition over which liberating forces should triumph. Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and George Herbert Mead, for instance, view the denaturalization of tradition as a key element in the development of a reflective, modern rationalism. For this theoretical and historiographic tradition, modernity was defined by the emergence of individual critical consciousness, what modernity’s great defender Hans Blumenberg calls “self-assertion.”52 This form of subjectivity, the sine qua non of the most widely accepted version of modernity, appears to necessitate the suppression of nature as a conceptual category along with the control of nature as physical environment. As political theorist Fred Dallmayr notes, writing of the tradition stretching from Descartes to Kant to Karl Jaspers, “man’s humanity tends to be seen not only as differentiated from but as antithetical to his naturalness.”53 Mind was separated from the body; society was separated from species and locale. Consequently and necessarily, this up-

doctrine it becomes a revolutionary principle directed against the concrete social order, or by its complete identification with the actual social relations it becomes an ideology guaranteeing the permanence of the existing order.” Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, 199. 50. Ibid., 228. 51. Ibid., 199. 52. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983). 53. Fred R. Dallmayr, Twilight of Subjectivity: Contributions to a Post-Individualist Theory of Politics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 146.

The Trouble with Nature

21

rooted notion of subjectivity, emerging in the seventeenth century, transformed the idea of freedom. “Freedom,” as theologian and philosopher Louis Dupré argues (in words echoing Maruyama54), “henceforth became a self-choice, more than a choice that selects among given alternatives. It refused to be restricted by the given.”55 Histories written to serve this form of freedom concerned “second nature”— conscious will, thought, and actions of human beings. This second nature figured as the proper, indeed the only, subject of meaningful history for nineteenth-century versions of modernity as different as those, for example, of Hegel, Marx, and Mill. For each of these writers, history’s mission is to trace the universal arc of freedom rising above the givenness of biology and geography. Nature, it could be argued, figures as this form of modernity’s unconscious, repressed for the sake of a particular mode of subjectivity, pure freedom, and meaningful history.56 Critics of modernity have long castigated this denatured version of subjectivity and doubted its liberatory claims.57 For instance, Frankfurt school writers Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) and Theodor Adorno (1903–69) agree that the eradication of nature from political consciousness is the sign of modernity, but they argue that nature’s utter subordination to the apparatuses of reason and state power produces nothing but oppression. Modern systems of knowledge, originating in ancient Greek ideas of reason, may have conquered “terrifying nature, which was finally wholly mastered,”58 but this “fully enlightened earth radiates dis54. Maruyama argues that to attain freedom “no normative standards of any kind would be present in the background as the premise; instead, the starting point had to be human beings who, for the first time, invented norms and endowed them with their validity.” Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, 210. 55. Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 124. 56. R. G. Collingwood argues that it is possible and necessary to distinguish clearly between nature and history in defining the historian’s object of study: “A natural process is a process of events, an historical process is a process of thoughts. Man is regarded as the only animal that thinks, or thinks enough, and clearly enough, to render his actions the expressions of his thoughts. . . . It does not follow that all human actions are subjectmatter for history; and indeed historians are agreed that they are not . . . so far as man’s conduct is determined by what may be called his animal nature, his impulses and appetites, it is non-historical; the process of those activities is a natural process.” R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1982 [1946]), 216. 57. Among these critics are Thomas Carlyle, Schopenhauer, and Carl Schmitt. There are also critics of modernity who have little interest in nature. For instance, Michel Foucault, who speaks of his own initial resistance in “Questions on Geography,” in Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books), 1980. 58. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1987), 105.

22

Introduction

aster triumphant,” not modern liberty.59 Even the natural pleasures of the body, they assert, have been commandeered by the state that administers and corrupts them. No longer an active subject, mysterious and beyond human control, nature is made pure object, a dissected corpse that only too late we discover to be our own. Reason has triumphed over nature; humankind is liberated from nature to the realm of pure reason, a reason that, paradoxically, becomes ultimately as terrifying as nature ever was. Horkheimer and Adorno warn that “it is as if the final result of civilization were a return to the terrors of nature.”60 Dialectic of Enlightenment, written at the same time that Maruyama was critiquing Tokugawa reliance on nature,61 comes to diametrically opposed conclusions. Contrary to Maruyama, Horkheimer and Adorno link not nature itself, but the complete subordination of nature, to the totalitarian power that reigns over all aspects of life. Nevertheless, they, like modernity’s defenders, define modernity as transcending nature. Despite the prestige of these many authorities, I gradually began to doubt that modernity had really been denatured. While certainly there had been a vigorous attempt to suppress it, nature endured beneath the surface of most analyses as either the starting point of modernity’s dialectical development or as the antithesis of modernity. Nature stabilized these developmental or revolutionary historical narratives, without ever attracting much analytical attention itself. Its multiplicity of meanings was ignored so that modernity could appear to be a universal and monolithic process of liberation. However, from our current vantage point, liberation’s brightest promises have paled and the strong tide of nineteenthcentury Progress has run into the sands. The restitution of the human subject’s relation to nature seems necessary in order to get our bearings. Absolute defenders of modern subjectivity such as French theoretician 59. Ibid., 3. 60. Ibid., 113. Slavoj Zizek observes the same Hegelian paradox in postmodern Europe where “elevating a contingent Other . . . into an absolute Other” breeds excessive violence. Zizek writes, “the final arrival of the truly rational concrete universality—the abolition of antagonisms, the mature universe of negotiated coexistence of different groups—coincides with its radical opposite, with thoroughly contingent outbursts of excessive violence.” Zizek, “A Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism,” Critical Inquiry (Summer 1998), 1000. 61. In 1944, Horkheimer and Adorno had escaped Germany and were in Santa Monica, California. Jürgen Habermas describes Dialectic of Enlightenment as “an odd book,” cobbled together in large part from notes taken by Gretel Adorno listening in on their discussions. It was eventually published by Querido Press in Amsterdam in 1947 three years after its completion. See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse on Modernity, 106–7, for a brief history of Horkheimer and Adorno’s text and its extensive influence despite few sales.

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23

Luc Ferry continue to resist any reintegration with nature,62 but others as dissimilar as philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin and French Marxist Henri Lefebvre have argued that the self-realizing subject never escaped nature either in its historical emergence or in its internal structure. In different ways, these different thinkers, both modernity’s sympathizers, argue that concepts of nature shaped, indeed were constitutive of, even the most seemingly unnatural modern forms of society and individual. Their converging reevaluations of modernity’s naturalism are worth considering further because resituating nature in relation to modernity is, as I began to realize, central to resituating Japan in relation to modernity’s globalizing energy and to reconfiguring our ideas of modernity itself. Toulmin, in his history of modernity’s multiple origins, reconstructs the intellectual scaffolding within which the supposedly anti-natural Cartesian subject emerged. Central to his thesis is the concept of “cosmopolis,” a concept encapsulating the resonance between nature or cosmos and the social order of the polis.63 Toulmin charges that the cerebral, exact world of the rationalists was conceived not in peace and plenty’s clear light, but in response to the devastating horrors of the Thirty Years War. An exhausted Europe, desperate for some form of settlement, sought to discover not merely a rational individual rising above the physical world, but a natural world that was also rational. Politics, science, and philosophy were called upon jointly to create “a new Cosmopolis, in which the divinely created Order of Nature and the humanly created Order of Society were once again seen as illuminating one another.” This “new Cosmopolis” eschewed the tolerant, modest, skeptical world of sixteenth-century humanism in the hope of absolute certainty and stability. The new vision created grounds for treating “nature and society as twin, and equally rational, ‘orders’”64 to secure the world against tumult. Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz, in their different fields, focused investigations away from the local, concrete phenomenon of their war-torn landscape toward the realm of abstraction. Only on that higher, less emotional plane could knowledge soothe sectarian violence, or so it appeared. Toulmin persuasively argues that “the Dreams of the Rationalists . . . turn out to be aspects of a larger dream. The dreams of a rational method,

62. Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order. 63. Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, 67–69. 64. Ibid., 98.

24

Introduction

a unified science, and an exact language, unite into a single project.”65 This single project, the pursuit of systematic, complete knowledge of the world both cosmological and political, is what Toulmin refers to as the “Modern Framework.” Within this modern framework, although “the rational history of humanity and the causal history of nature” became “distinct topics of inquiry,” the rational modern subject, far from being anti-natural, relied on the particular form of nature to mirror its claim of universality and order.66 Toulmin argues that the Cartesian subject, while seeming to reject nature entirely, actually required a precise and distinct form of nature to ground its existence.67 Lefebvre, more concerned with contemporary praxis than the historical emergence of the Cartesian subject, also argues that modernity never left nature behind. In his almost elegiac Introduction to Modernity, Lefebvre explores what he calls nature’s “double determination.” He argues that nature is both past and future, external and internal, “the origin, what history has emerged from . . . ” and “‘the human being,’ the ‘human nature’ which will emerge and is already emerging from history. . . . ”68 This double determination, this contradiction of absence and presence, or presence-in-absence and vice versa, is, writes Lefebvre, “extraordinarily stimulating. It is forever being resolved in the transition from the ‘thing-in-itself’ to the ‘thing-for-us’, and is forever reappearing at the very heart of this difference.”69 Nature’s conceptual fissures and narrative redoublings are, in this account, emblematic of modernity as a whole. Far from successfully repressing nature, then, the modern subject repeatedly discovers nature within itself, circling away from it only to find that nature again appears at its core. The entirely autonomous, self-choosing human subject posited by some conceptions of modernity is alluring in its resplendence against the darkened landscape, but, for Lefebvre as well as for Toulmin, that landscape of repressed nature reemerges not simply

65. Ibid., 104. 66. Ibid., 111. Claiming that this scaffolding has now been dismantled, Toulmin argues that science and technology have shifted their focus in ways that will allow for a reintegration of the abstract with the local and concrete. See pp. 182–83. 67. Ernst Cassirer also argues for the simultaneous autonomy of nature and intellect: “ . . . the autonomy of the intellect corresponds to the pure autonomy of nature. In one and the same intellectual process of emancipation the philosophy of the Enlightenment attempts to show the self-sufficiency of both nature and intellect. Both are now to be recognized as elemental and to be firmly connected to one another.” Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Loelln and James P. Pettegrove (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 45. 68. Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 134. 69. Ibid., 137.

The Trouble with Nature

25

as backdrop but as the intellectual ground of the modern subject’s world and within the very subject itself. As I probed deeper into the problem of nature and modernity, I came to reject Maruyama’s view—or, rather, to see it as emblematic of a particular generation’s experience. Once we become aware that a particular form of nature was constitutive of modernity, nature can no longer appear synonymous with the anti-modern, the past, the oppressive, or the Orient. From our contemporary perspective on the “far side of modernity,” nature can now be seen as multivalent rather than the antonym in a series of binary opposites. As I will show in subsequent chapters, nature can, in alternative forms, be a dangerous idea, capable of undermining existing relations of power. Understood as preceding human community, as dividing the political subject so that a dual consciousness is produced, as existing outside human community, or as a local, rather than national, phenomenon, nature has justified critiques of the status quo. Not all these anti-establishment forms of nature are to be found in Japan. It was rare, for instance, that nature was thought of as pre-social. Even the idiosyncratic critic of the Tokugawa bakufu, AndÖ ShÖeki (mideighteenth century), described a natural society, not a pre-social state of nature prior to human community. It was also rare that the political subject came to conceive of himself or herself as riven by duality, both natural and cultural, both given and created, and thus capable from within of critiquing the institutional arrangements that he or she had received, a point I make in Chapter 6. On the other hand, the insistence that nature’s political values were local rather than national claimed adherents among Tokugawa nativists (kokugakusha) (Chapter 2) and TaishÖ dissidents such as biologist Minakata Kumagusu (1867–1941) (Chapter 8). The use of nature as an exterior standard capable of revealing the faults in existing conditions had its heyday in the early Meiji period when social Darwinism took the fore (Chapters 3, 4, and 5). Ueki Emori’s (1857– 92) adamant emphasis on the human body produced yet another form of nature opposing the status quo (Chapter 7). In other words, it is not, as Maruyama would have it, the existence of nature per se in political thought that narrows the capacity for political liberty, but the articulation of a cosmopolis too tightly knit to allow space for political liberty. As prior to society, productive of dual consciousness, outside society, or local, nature can be used to critique the existing state. Today it is no longer possible to share the view, widespread during the mid-twentieth century, that nature can be completely transcended or infinitely controlled. This is not because postmodernity provides us with

26

Introduction

a privileged perspective outside history. Instead, it is our particular position within history from which nature seems both more fragile and more insistent than it did when Maruyama wrote. The restitution of nature to our understanding of modernity is not merely an additional category appended to the framework of our original analyses. Instead, it transforms that framework. As we have already witnessed in the field of environmental history, the recognition of nature’s physical potency has humbled the human subject and reordered our stories. Research into environmental factors in history has demonstrated that the power of empires rested not on armies, economies, and social organization alone but also on germs,70 that feats of agrarian proficiency required not just technical knowledge and hard work but also bees and particular weeds.71 Factors beyond human desire, decisions, and actions must be taken into account to explain the fate of individuals, nations, and global exchanges. In intellectual history, recognition of nature’s conceptual potency similarly undermines modernity’s heroic concept of the historical subject, either as individual or as collectivity, and attenuates history’s narrative drive. For Toulmin, the analysis of “cosmopolis” reorients modernity by situating its origins in the sixteenth century’s skeptical humanism rather than in the seventeenth century’s Cartesianism. For Lefebvre, recognition of nature’s continual reemergence dislodges the presumed endpoint of modern history. Although, as Lefebvre notes, Marx’s view of nature is not entirely clear, he suggests that Marx held the view that human productive activity—i.e., the appropriation of external nature—would resolve the alienation human beings feel from their own internal natures. Contra Marx, Lefebvre’s insistence that nature cannot ever be overcome in these ways redirects history toward more tentative aspirations. In other words, when “man’s” humanity is no longer understood to be antithetical to his naturalness (as described by Dallmayr), then the pure self-choice (described by Dupré) as the characteristic desideratum of modernity is no longer possible. In short, the recovery of conceptual nature from modernity’s unconscious raises historiographic issues at the heart of the discipline and political issues at the heart of any discussion of human possibility. 70. See, for instance, William H. McNeil, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.J.: Anchor Press, 1976). 71. See, for instance, Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Publishing, 1972), and Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe 900–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

The Trouble with Nature

27

This transformation in our understanding of modernity is particularly important for the study of Japan, since Japan has often been measured against modernity’s purportedly anti-natural goals. As few scholars of European and American intellectual history (including Toulmin, Lefebvre, and Dupré) fully realize, one major ramification of recognizing nature’s presence within modernity is that it provides an intellectual framework for the decisive incorporation of the non-West, including Japan, within this global experience. Indeed, the restitution of nature to our historical understanding of modernity tears down one of the more resilient East-West divides. Universal histories (pace Hegel) have relied on the tension between nature and culture, read as “East” and “West,” to propel the promise of humanity’s self-realization as the world moves from nature to culture, from emotion to reason, from necessity to freedom, from tradition to modernity.72 This series of oppositions has, consciously or unconsciously, guided standard redemptory narratives of modernity, leaving many Japanese intellectuals caught between articulation of Japan’s distinctive characteristics and its claims to global participation. For instance, those urging “Westernization,” “modernization,” or “democratization”— for instance, Fukuzawa Yukichi in the Meiji period and, later, Maruyama Masao, Matsumoto Sannosuke, and Ienaga SaburÖ—found themselves rejecting one “side” of this set of opposites or gyrating awkwardly between “the East,” tradition, and nature, on the one hand, and “the West,” modernity, and freedom on the other. If nature is no longer positioned as something to conquer, overcome, or leave behind in order to attain modernity, this series of oppositions falters and Japan—indeed all the world—escapes from its designated place within modernity’s narrative. In rejecting the axiomatic trajectory from nature to culture, from East to West, from tradition to modernity, we can confront the confines of the “Western” achievement of modernity and move beyond the trope of “the East” as mere foil or utopian Other to Western ideas.73 With a heightened awareness of nature’s constitutiveness of modernity, I will argue that modernity is not an achieved state but a historical experience. Instead of defining modernity along the lines of the teleological nar72. Fred R. Dallmayr also develops an opposition between the state (as the embodiment of reason and culture) and society as the realm of nature. See Dallmayr, Twilight of Subjectivity, 172. 73. For parallels between the rethinking of the relation between “nature” and “culture” and the rethinking of “tradition” and “modernity” in Japan, see Stephen Vlastos, ed., Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), and Sharon A. Minichiello, ed., Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy: 1900–1930 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998).

28

Introduction

rative described above—as the attainment of individual critical consciousness over and beyond nature—or equating it with modernization as the system of political and social institutions and modes of production that have mastered nature, modernity may be defined as a particular historical experience with several possible outcomes spanning the political spectrum from left to right.74 What unites these different forms of modernity around the globe is the shared experience of the dissolution of the old “cosmopolis,” the fundamental relationship between nature and society, followed by its conscious reconstruction in a different pattern. This conscious reconfiguration of nature and politics through the rationalization of social, economic, and political forms and the consequent increase in material productivity sought to resolve all contradictions. The promise of modernity, whether of the left or the right, was that through some mode of rationalization all that is desirable may be attained: freedom and order, mercy and justice, truth and skepticism, high-growth prosperity and sustainability. The premium placed on consciousness by Blumenberg, Maruyama, and others is indeed important, but it need not be the individual’s consciousness that is paramount in every construction of modernity. Concepts of nation and race developed alongside concepts of the individual in the creation of modernity and are no less modern. Sometimes, these forms of collectivity were held to be—or were hoped to be—ultimately compatible with some form of individuality.75 The manner in which latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Japanese political thinkers con74. If even the most hopeful versions of modernity necessitated a particular conception of nature rather than complete freedom from it, one of the fundamental ways of differentiating between left and right disappears. Once it becomes apparent that even the left and liberal embrace of the self-realizing subject relied on positioning nature as an orderly and predictable foil, we require a different means to separate liberatory versions of modernity from right-wing assertions of natural political forms such as organic societies, natural hierarchies, or racial purities. This is not to say that the left-right distinction is no longer significant, only that modernity cannot lay claim solely to the left and liberal side of the movement on the basis of nature. Norberto Bobbio insists on the significance of the distinction between right and left not as a question of modernity versus tradition, but as an issue of the balance between egalitarianism and liberty. Like Bobbio, I think that modernity contains both left and right political visions, although I have reservations about the usefulness of his egalitarianism versus liberty criteria to politics outside Europe. See Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, trans. Allan Cameron (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Sheldon Garon makes a similar point about modernization: “Rather than treating modernization as simply a process of ‘progressive’ transformation, we would do well to specify relationships between modernization and a variety of political outcomes, ranging from liberalization to the statist management of society.” “Rethinking Modernization and Modernity,” 346. 75. Kevin Doak argues forcefully that despite efforts to mold a harmonious, homogeneous nation, friction existed between ideas of kokka (the state) and minzoku (the ethnic

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29

struct the relationship between nature, either human or cosmic, and society—whether by equating nature and society, treating them as stark opposites, or linking them through a narrative of becoming—creates different matrixes for modern freedom, now defined not as pure state but as the negotiation between givens and possibilities.76 Limitations on political liberty arise not because of nature per se, but in conjunction with particular forms of nature; nature therefore figures in opposition as well as in hegemony, in the thought of the left as well as of the right. In other words, the statist, reactionary concepts of nature found in the most powerful strains of Japanese thought do not necessarily make it less modern. Prewar Japanese political thought can be right-wing, appeal to nature, and modern all at once.77 Indeed, this definition of modernity as the conscious reconfiguration of the cosmopolis comprehends not just the desiderata of the left or of liberals, but the experience of many peoples. As this book will argue, this definition places Japan firmly within the broader intellectual experience of modernity. Japan’s was not a deformed modernity or a belated modernity, but a true modernity with all the problems that arise from it. In order to understand this global process, we must ask what makes some modernities more productive of justice in public life and others less so. Differing concepts of nature are part of the answer.

Outline of Nature’s Political History in Japan Nature, then, has a political story, but it is a tale long suppressed by modernity’s image of itself as transcending nature. Nature’s particular

nation). Kevin Doak, “What is a Nation and Who Belongs? National Narratives and the Ethnic Imagination in Twentieth-Century Japan,” American Historical Review 102, no. 2 (April 1997), 282–309. 76. Louis Dupré discusses the problem of modernity and freedom at length, arguing that “the actualization of a freedom conceived in this manner [i.e., as complete self-choice] requires a certain indeterminacy of its external environment. A totally predefined and predictable universe severely restricts self-determination.” Passage to Modernity, 125. In his conclusion he argues that modernity must displace the absolute dominance of the subject by recognizing as co-equal the powers of nature and the transcendent divine, a move that necessarily redefines freedom. Ibid., 251. Paul Ricoeur also seeks to redefine the nature of freedom and the subject in a similar way in Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim V. Kohák (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966). 77. The tendency to equate modernity with liberal or left-wing values and to treat it as an extension of the European Enlightenment persists in much of the scholarship on Japan. I am distinguishing here between modernity on the one hand, and left and liberal thought on the other. Right-wing, fundamentalist responses to modernity may be even more common than left and liberal ones.

30

Introduction

story in Japanese political thought is complex and disjunctive, with three successive and distinct mainstream configurations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each of these formations was complicated by non-mainstream views of nature and by changing notions of what is properly included within the political realm as state power expanded. The story line is thus an intricate one in which nature serves both as a tool for oligarchic self-justification and as a basis for critiquing the centralizing state. To put it differently, nature performs the role of central character in this book only by virtue of adopting multiple masks, both hero and villain, constantly shifting in search of the undisturbed sanctuary of hegemonic ideology. Setting aside these complexities for the moment, it is possible to distill the main story line as follows. In the Tokugawa period, it was widely assumed that the static, hierarchical pattern of the physical cosmos promised universal social harmony if social forms accorded with the model provided by the external world; the goal became finding the correct center where geographic place and political practice could be rightly conjoined. By the 1870s, nature was everywhere in flux, driving toward social Darwinism’s progressive future with the natural hierarchy produced by fierce competition rather than by harmoniously arranged orders of being; social evolution, although often dismissed today as a tenet solely of the right, was embraced by Japanese with progressive, democratic predilections such as Baba Tatsui (1850–88), as well as by firm supporters of oligarchic power such as KatÖ Hiroyuki (1836–1916). By the 1930s, the changeover to a nationalized nature, no longer progressive or even universal, was complete. In this third stage, Japan existed in a coalescent intimacy with a nature known to itself alone. Whatever possibilities had been opened up for a form of modernity premised on individual human nature were closed off in favor of a nationalized nature and by the stringencies necessitated by viewing nature as miserly in its physical resources but infinite in its genealogical extension through the lineage of the Japanese people. To further distill nature’s career, the dominant political images of nature in modernizing Japan can be characterized as follows: nature as place, nature as time, and nature as nation. Robert Bellah has rightly pointed out that “the concern for nature has been a pervasive one in much of modern Japanese thought.”78 It is now

78. Robert N. Bellah, “Ienaga SaburÖ and the Search for Meaning in Modern Japan,” in Changing Japanese Attitudes Toward Modernization, ed. Marius B. Jansen (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965; rpt., Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1985), 390.

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time to recover the historical mutability of that concept and to describe precisely its politics at particular moments in Japan’s confrontation with modernity, both within the dominant ideology of the moment and within the alternatives to it. If, as Fredric Jameson comments, “in different historical circumstances the idea of nature was once a subversive concept with a genuinely revolutionary function . . . ,”79 a return to history with a more expansive view of nature’s multiple possibilities, including the possibility of critique, seems in order. 79. Fredric Jameson, “Reflections in Conclusion,” in Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1986), 207.

chapter 2

The Topographical Imagination of Tokugawa Politics

The sheer number of words for nature in Tokugawa texts dramatizes the concept’s many facets and renders vocabulary an obvious starting point for discussing nature’s multivalence. Despite this abundance of terms, Maruyama Masao’s critique of nature in early modern Japanese political thought relies almost exclusively on one word, shizen (©R). That word, however, did not become standard until the 1890s. Indeed, before the 1890s, shizen appears to have been rather uncommon; certainly it was not a preoccupation in Confucian studies. As historian Hino Tatsuo comments, “In the nine classics [of Confucianism], you cannot find one example of the use of the word ‘shizen.’ ”1 Instead of being central to Tokugawa Neo-Confucian thought, Maruyama’s favored term trails a Taoist heritage. Often read jinen, it expresses the Taoist idea of “the thing in itself.” “Shizen” or “jinen” occurs in non-Taoist Tokugawa texts as well with this meaning or to emphasize a noun or pronoun as in the phrase “he himself.”2 Used as an adverb, shizen is quite close to the adverbial form of “nature” in English, i.e., “naturally,” and can also be understood as “spontaneously” or “of course.”3 Sometimes these kanji are 1. Hino Tatsuo, “Soraigaku ni okeru shizen to sakui,” in Shizen, eds. Sagara TÖru, BitÖ Masahide, and Akiyama Ken, vol. 1 of KÖza: Nihon shisÖ (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1983), 193. 2. For example, see ÑgyÜ Sorai, BendÖ, translated by Olof G. Lidin as Distinguishing the Way (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1970), 94. 3. Linguist Yanabu Akira and others dispute this point, claiming that the English word

32

The Topographical Imagination

33

given the reading “onozukara” (usually expressed in hiragana, one of the Japanese syllabaries) to emphasize the sense of spontaneity.4 Although occasionally shizen was used to refer to the cosmos, the physical world, or the general order of things, other words and phrases were much more common. Certainly shizen was not the only, or even the primary, word in discussions of nature’s political lessons in the Tokugawa period. Instead, the richness of continental and native traditions and the inventiveness of Tokugawa writers produced an array of terms and phrases to express ideas of nature. Historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki emphasizes the terms “kaibutsu (J®), a term which literally means ‘the opening up of things,’ but might be interpreted either as ‘revealing the nature of things’ or as ‘developing’ or ‘making use of’ the natural world” and “manbutsu (ú®)—‘the myriad objects’—which Japanese philosophers, borrowing from China, used to denote the totality of the physical universe.”5 NeoConfucian writers also speak of tenchi (Vn, heaven and earth), tenten (VA, the truth of heaven), tenka (V∫, all under heaven), and tenri (Vù, heaven or nature’s law) and honzen no sei ({Rô, human nature). “The way of heaven and earth” was expressed with terms such as tendÖ (Vπ) and tenchi shizen no michi (Vn©RÃπ), and “the principle of nature” with jÖri (Ëù), tenchi seibutsu no ri (Vn´®Ãù), and tenchi no jÖri (VnÃËù). This terminology had been further enriched by contacts with European ideas in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries when missionaries, particularly those of the Jesuit order, sought to translate terms important in Catholic doctrine, in which nature is seen as God’s creation. The Latin natura, for instance, came to be expressed tenchi banbutsu (Vnú®) and tenchi jitsugetsu (Vn˙é). To underscore interpretive disputes within Japan, idiosyncratic forms of expressing “nature” also sprang up. In particular, writers attacked the assumption of natural hierarchy by refusing to use the kanji “ten” meaning “heaven” because of its implicit reference to “higher authorities.” Since Japanese orthography permits the sound “ten” to be represented by other kanji, dissidence could be expressed merely through the creative choice “nature” fails to carry the connotation of spontaneity, a connotation unique, they argue, to the Japanese idea of nature. 4. Tellenbach and Kimura point out that there is an instance in Japan’s oldest poetry collection, the ManyÖshÜ, where “onozukara” is written with the same characters as “shizen.” See Hubertus Tellenbach and Bin Kimura, “The Japanese Concept of ‘Nature,’ ” in J. Baird Callicott and Roger T. Ames, Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 154. 5. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Concepts of Nature and Technology in Pre-Industrial Japan,” East Asian History no. 1 (June 1991), 83–84.

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of ], meaning “to revolve” or “to change.” AndÖ ShÖeki (1703/6–62?), who envisioned a world of small egalitarian communities in which everyone worked the land, emphasized nature’s cycles and the constant ebb and flow of life by writing tenchi with the characters ]Ë and tenten with the characters ]A.6 Likewise, Neo-Confucian naturalist Miura Baien (1723–89) used the kanji ]ù for tenchi to impress upon his readers the fluctuations of nature.7 As this diverse nomenclature indicates, nature was multivalent, used and useful in many contexts. In relying on “shizen” in his argument, Maruyama deploys the term primarily as an analytical tool rather than as a transcription from Tokugawa texts. Nevertheless, his methodology effectively masks the plethora of “natures” in the Tokugawa period and creates too exact an equivalence between concepts of nature in Tokugawa and in modern thought. In order to combat the illusion that the modern version of nature is merely a continuation of an older, premodern, monolithic idea, this chapter aims to do two things: first, to demonstrate that there were not only many words to express ideas of nature, but also many competing versions of nature’s political lessons in the Tokugawa period; and, second, to explore the belief shared by almost all these contending positions, i.e., that nature provided a sanctioned locale for correct political practice. The aims of this chapter are, therefore, somewhat at cross-purposes. On the one hand, I will emphasize the heterogeneity of Tokugawa political conceptions of nature; on the other hand, I want to analyze the homologous characteristics that make these different “natures” comparable and that set them apart from later ideas in the Meiji and TaishÖ eras. Turning first to these homologous characteristics, I will sketch the assumptions common to most Tokugawa views of nature before detailing the variety of politically meaningful senses of nature.

Mental Maps Nearly all Tokugawa writers—Neo-Confucianists, kokugakusha, Mitogakusha, and even scholars of “Dutch” learning—seem to have understood the notion of a “political landscape” literally as well as figuratively.8 6. Maruyama Masao, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, and Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), 256 n. 29. 7. Minamoto RyÖen, “Komento,” in Shizen no shisÖ (Tokyo: KenkyÜsha, 1974), 46. 8. Art historian Martin Warnke, who uses the German phrase “Politische Landschaft” as a book title, provides an interesting account of his research into the phrase’s origins. According to Warnke, the Duden dictionary attributes its coinage to Joseph Goebbels, the

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What I mean by this is that political rectitude was comprehended not only as a question of the right actors performing the right actions, but also as a matter of locating the right place. Therefore, disputes erupted over the geographical coordinates of proper political practice, and it was in this guise—as the place of political authority—that concepts of nature entered Tokugawa arguments most crucially. In this obsession with locale, Tokugawa political thinkers mentally mapped the world, creating ideological diagrams that represented the pattern of power spatially. These maps were not pure Platonic forms dreamed up entirely from ancient texts and utopian longings. Instead, they were partly—but only partly—shaped by physical experiences of geography, climate, and the general abundance that raised Tokugawa society far above the standard of mere subsistence.9 Although Kito Hiroshi’s

Reich minister of propaganda. Warnke was able to uncover only one earlier use of the phrase, from 1849, considerably predating Goebbels. See Martin Warnke, Political Landscape: The Art History of Nature, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 7. 9. Tokugawa Japan enjoyed sufficient material abundance to allow broad latitude for intellectual activity. Largely free from devastating epidemics since the thirteenth century, Japan had sufficient population density and regular enough contact with continental populations for plagues to be transformed into endemic diseases with less deadly effects. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Doubleday, 1976), discusses the general repercussions of microparasites in Japan in chapter 1 and the patterns of disease in Japan on pp. 124–25. Farming and forestry management techniques were well developed, and, most importantly, between 1721 and 1846 the Japanese population achieved stability at around thirty-one million, as described by Conrad Totman, The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 172, and Thomas C. Smith, Nakahara: Family Farming and Population in a Japanese Village, 1717–1830 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1977), 7. This generally benign environment continued to support the human population throughout the Edo period, though there is some dispute over the specifics. For instance, Susan Hanley and Kozo Yamamura argue that the seventeenth century was “blessed with favorable weather conditions, and no major famine is on record,” while Conrad Totman contradicts them, claiming that during the 1630s “weather patterns in northeast Asia appear to have deteriorated, and Japan experienced widespread crop failure and the resulting Kan’ei famine.” See Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Pre-industrial Japan, 1600–1868 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 320, and Conrad Totman, The Green Archipelago, 94. General consensus indicates a subtle decline in the climatic conditions during the last decades of Tokugawa rule, contributing to political instability. Kito Hiroshi points to an average temperature drop of two degrees in the middle and late Edo. Kito Hiroshi, “Edo jidai no shizen to ningen” (Nature and Human Beings in the Edo Period), Sophia 33 (1984), 25. Donald Keene writes that “the generation of 1770–1790 saw an unprecedented series of natural disasters—volcanic eruptions, floods, epidemics, drought—that brought about severe famines.” The Temmei (1783–87) and the TempÖ (1833–36) famines and the subsequent peasant uprisings are attributable, in part, to changing weather patterns. Donald Keene, The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720–1830, revised edition (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969), 97. Toward the end of the period, cultural practices seem to have been in some small measure more tightly circumscribed by the deteriorating climate.

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portrait of Edo Japan as a somnolent Elysium of perfect ecological balance (seitaigaku kinkÖ) is certainly overdrawn,10 the fundamental factors of population stability and resource renewal generally favored social maintenance and even economic growth.11 In other words, general physical conditions gave assurance that nature would submit to mental mapping. Physical nature’s stability and comprehensibility made it an epistemological resource for political ideas. Over and above this basic physical experience, the bakufu’s capacity for organizing and dominating the terrain further bolstered conditions for conceiving of nature in spatial terms. Actual maps proliferated, regional boundaries were decisively established, and great highways contoured. New policies determined the proper location and prescribed movements of each class of person from the top to the bottom of society: emperors were constrained within Kyoto’s narrow bounds and not even allowed to travel to their own summer palace just a few miles away; daimyo were required to spend their childhoods as hostages in Edo and ever after to move between their domains and the shogunate’s capital in sankin kotai (alternate attendance) processions; lesser mortals under the sixteenth-century policy of Toyotomi Hideyoshi had been constrained to choose between the bureaucratic urban lives of sword-bearing samurai in castle towns and the rural village existence of peasants. Thereafter, town and country became distinct arenas governed by different modes of community. While European customs of aristocratic country retreats and county gentry brought town and country together, such intermingling was comparatively limited in Japan. Farmers had their own distinct place, purpose, and rules, some of which were less restrictive than those urban regulations.12 Further down the social scale, people so unfortunate as to be entirely without political or social standing, the outcasts now called burakumin,13 were deemed, quite literally, to occupy no space at all, at least in one sense. When distances were calculated along 10. Kito, “Edo jidai no shizen to ningen,” 33. 11. Susan B. Hanley argues that “material culture” in the sense of daily practices pertaining to health in the Tokugawa period provided the basis for subsequent economic growth. Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Alan MacFarlane compares these factors in Japan and England in The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan and the Malthusian Trap (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). 12. Thomas C. Smith argues that the relative freedom of non–urban dwellers in Tokugawa Japan created a class of rural entrepreneurs. See Smith, “Premodern Economic Growth: Japan and the West,” in Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 13. Certain groups within this category were even referred to as hinin, or non-persons.

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highways, the area of outcast villages was excluded: to pass through one of these dirt-poor places was to travel through the nowhere of discounted space. Finally, no person was supposed to journey from Japan. Even storm-swept sailors who inadvertently left their native waters were ruthlessly refused reentry. The restrictions imposed on the few foreigners resident in Japan and those foreign countries attempting diplomatic relations were cumbersome in the extreme. In short, positioning people on the land and designating the proper compass of their movements were fundamental techniques of Tokugawa governance. The rulers’ emphasis, it can be argued, fell on placement at least as much as on processes, on space as much as on time. The physical experience of nature’s abundance and the bakuhan’s instrumental organization of the landscape greatly conditioned the mental “lay of the land” (to borrow Annette Kolodny’s phrase).14 These experiences and activities suggested to Tokugawa intellectuals that nature’s political authority might best be understood by grasping its vertical and horizontal expanse. Nevertheless, Tokugawa mental maps were not wholly determined by these experiential factors. Judgments based on experience of and even control of physical places conditioned judgments about the relative importance of places without coinciding with them.15

14. Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). 15. Here I (obliquely) assert a middle position between sociobiologists who argue for extremes of biological determinism and cultural determinists who claim that nature is completely subject to human molding. Representatives of the first group include ant specialist Edward O. Wilson, who at his most exuberant argues that “ideology bow[s] to its hidden masters the genes.” Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 4. At other times, however, he allows that “the genes have given away most of their sovereignty,” except in that “they maintain a certain amount of influence in at least the behavioral qualities that underlie variations between cultures.” Wilson, Sociobiology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 550. See also the work of Roger D. Masters, political scientist and translator of Rousseau, who tries to escape the problems inherent in focusing on genotypes by treating human beings not as separate, individual DNA containers but the human species in toto as social animals. Masters, The Nature of Politics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989). The cultural determinist side is represented by the work of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, who claims that “the biology of mankind has been shaped by culture, which is itself considerably older than the human species as we know it.” Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976), 12–13. As indicated above, my own view is that nature conditions human experience, sometimes with greater stridency, sometimes with less, depending on the level at which it is examined. I would agree with Sebastiano Timpanaro’s formulation: “By materialism we understand above all acknowledgement of the priority of nature over ‘mind,’ or if you like, of the physical level over the biological level, and of the biological level over the socio-economic and cultural level, both in the sense of chronological priority (the very long time which supervened before life appeared on earth, and between the origin of life and the origin of man),

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Mental maps charted powerful emotions as well as physical places; they incorporated the society’s fears and longings, its sense of identity and of history, as well as its sense of geography. These mental maps can be seen as shorthand displays—like a museum collection—of what Edo culture valued and how places of value related to one another. Their power was such that they defined, with considerably stringency, who had the space to become a political actor and the range of possible motion for that actor. In this way, geography imbued with value produced what one might call the “topographic political imagination” of Tokugawa Japan. This topographic imagination combined the material and the mental, charting the relationship between nature as place and human power. Two specific characteristics of the Tokugawa topographic imagination are worth noting at the outset. First, the creators of these mental maps had a particular penchant for discovering a central point. They focused on the place of greatest value, the place where nature and political virtue cohered most firmly. Outward from this natural political center stretched a lesser landscape, increasingly barren of right, righteousness, and sometimes even riches as well. In many formulations of this idea, the center contained all that was good both in nature and in culture; at the edges lurked unnatural anarchy.16 The Tokugawa emphasis on geographical centeredness differs markedly from the obsession with borders that later drove developing nation-states into a frenzy of surveying. As historian of Thailand Thongchai Winichakul and others have noted, delineation of borders is a central motif of the modern nation-state, and Japan, too, would shift its focus to its expanding borders during the Meiji period.17 and in the sense of the conditioning which nature still exercises on man and will continue to exercise at least for the foreseeable future.” Timpanaro, On Materialism, trans. Lawrence Garner (London: Verso, 1980), 34. This “conditioning” differs at different levels of experience so that, given sufficient material abundance, the realm of intellectual and political activity can be quite undetermined, as it was during the Tokugawa period. 16. Many cultures project upon the unknown forms of wildness in which natural phenomena, human physiology, and social and political arrangements are all at odds with the writers’ or cartographers’ sense of civilization. Examples include Herodotus’s horseobsessed Scythians, the three-headed people described in China’s Shanhai jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas; ca. second century b.c.e.), and the land of female demons called Rasetsukoku existing south of Japan in Heian and Kamakura period maps. As these examples demonstrate, “wildness” usually consists of a combination of natural and cultural abnormalities. See Herodotus, The History, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Richard J. Smith, Chinese Maps: Images of “All Under Heaven” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, vol. 2, book 2, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Hugh Cortazzi, Isles of Gold: Antique Maps of Japan (New York: Weatherhill, 1992). 17. See, for instance, Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body

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However, during the Tokugawa era, borders—the relationship of the bakufu with Okinawa and Ezo, for instance—remained relatively fluid, while the problem of locating a geographical center conjoined to righteous political practice impelled the drive for intellectual clarity and structured political possibilities.18 The second feature of Tokugawa mental maps is their capacity to combine stability and dynamism. On the one hand, the topographic imagination generally envisions a political landscape without cataclysm: the center ideally remains the center throughout time. On the other hand, although natural space should be permanently configured around the center, this natural center is not itself a place of stasis. In other words, the natural center does not legitimate politics simply as a frame or a setting for action, but as instrumental in the action. Indeed, it is hardly pressing the concept too far to claim that spatial nature was itself conceptualized in many Tokugawa texts as a form of practice rather than as the object of practice: “nature” as tenchi whether written as Vn or as ]Ë or as ]ù was the political activity of governance or labor or worship in a particular locale. In this, Tokugawa writers seem anachronistically attuned to the efforts of contemporary scholars who would turn our attention away from histories of time to histories of space. Australian writer Paul Carter, for instance, argues against “treating the historical space as ‘natural’, passive, objectively ‘there’ ” and asserts that conventional narrative history, “which reduces space to a stage, [and] pays attention to events unfolding in time alone, might be called imperial history.”19 Carter instead adof a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, 1994). Jeremy Black discusses the nineteenthcentury focus on borders in Maps and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 134–36. 18. Other cultures have also construed the world as radiating from a single point, often one where material, spiritual, and political desires were concentrated. The range and power of this trope are suggested in essays on ancient Greek, Taoist, and Andean cosmogony in Robin W. Lovin and Frank E. Reynolds, eds., Cosmogony and Ethical Order: New Studies in Comparative Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 2. For medieval European Christians, Jerusalem served as such a point, the origin of a new relationship between human beings and God sealed with the blood of both. Redemption reordered the world from that particular locale, and, consequently, Jerusalem was at times made the central point of maps. A more idiosyncratic example of portraying alluring places at the very center of a diagram can be found in Sir Walter Raleigh’s depiction of El Dorado. Although Raleigh never reached this imagined city of wealth and beauty during his South American expedition, he forecast its location in the very center of the map he drew, despite having to leave entirely blank the unknown area of the south. Charles Nicholl, The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado (New York: William Morrow, 1995), 13–15. 19. Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New York: Knopf, 1987), xxi, xvi.

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vocates a “spatial history” focusing on the act (in Australia) of bringing land and language together through naming places. In Japan, Tokugawa writers also focused on the acts that brought land and political practice together in a form of spatial history. Sometimes these acts were rituals of civilized behavior and imperial rule prescribed by the Sages; sometimes these acts were manifest in the daily work and worship of commoners; sometimes they included empirical investigation of the world. This dynamism at the center was of a different order—more constrained and repetitive—than activity across time, but it nonetheless meant that nature was seen in Tokugawa political thought as stable without being utterly static. Despite the shared assumption that nature guaranteed a dynamic center for stable political practice, there was plenty of room for disagreement. While the configuration of space served as a common theme, debate about the location of the central point was fierce. It is to this debate that I now turn, and to the various natural political centers constituted by the debate: the imperial centers of China and Japan, the rural community centers within Japan, and the centers of learning that were located alternatively in China, Japan, and occasionally in the West. Each of these centers commandeered a place on a map, authorizing particular political actors and activities, while disestablishing others. Nature was used not only to justify the status quo, but also to authorize alternative hierarchies and even forms of radical egalitarianism. It all depended on how the writer’s topographic imagination sketched the map.

China as Imperial Center For many centuries, China held pride of place as the political, cultural, and, according to many maps, geographical center of the world.20 This was partly because Chinese sources said so and partly because admired Chinese culture and Confucian teachings originated there.21 Tokugawa

20. The long history of Chinese graphic accounts of the world is often dated from the sixth century b.c.e. Shujing (Classic of History), particularly the chapter called “Yugong” or “The Tribute of Yu,” which portrays the world as divided into “five major concentric geographical zones emanating outward from the capital: royal domains, princely domains, a pacification zone, the zone of allied barbarians, and the zone of savagery.” Smith, Chinese Maps, 23. See also the discussion of this work in John B. Henderson, “Chinese Cosmographical Thought: The High Intellectual Tradition,” in Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, eds. J. B. Harley and David Woodward. 21. See Marius B. Jansen, China in the Tokugawa World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

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Neo-Confucianists revered China as chÜgoku (Middle Kingdom) or chÜka (central efflorescence). The universal empire or tenka (all under heaven) of which China was the pinnacle spread out slowly from the imperial center toward the murky edges where barbarians dwelt. Knowledge of Confucian virtue riding on the back of desire for universal order could travel toward those edges. Conversely, barbarians from the edges of the world were drawn to the Chinese emperor, as the Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean) put it, “from the four quarters of the earth,” and were accepted under his sway. T’ang scholar Chen Yan commented, “Some people are born in barbarian lands but their actions are in harmony with rites and righteousness. In that case, they are barbarian in appearance but they have a Chinese heart and mind.”22 According to Confucian doctrine, nature precisely located the true political center, but, in this rather generous vision, sharp dividing lines did not exist in either physical or moral space between central virtue and immoral periphery. There was a magnanimity to the Confucian conception of Chinese centrality. Given the solubility of the border between chÜka and its circumference, Japanese scholars like ItÖ Jinsai (1627–1705), who accepted the nomenclature of “barbarian” in relation to the centrality of Chinese civilization, could insist that a Japanese person, barbarous though he admittedly was, could attain virtue by scrupulously following the Way. Echoing Chen Yan, Jinsai argues, “No matter where under Heaven or where on earth [they may live], all men are equally men. Even a barbarian, if he but possesses ritual and righteousness, is part of the Middle Kingdom. Even a Chinese, should he lack ritual and righteousness, cannot escape being barbarian.”23 In other words, the type of centrality ascribed to China did not exclude non-Chinese individuals from the role of historical subject. While defining “nature” as the entire universe and valorizing the practices emanating from the central point in that vast universe, the concept of chÜgoku dissociated nature’s political lessons from race. Non-Chinese-ness did not necessarily determine non-participation in central kingdom virtues. In other words, nature was less intimately associated with biology, let alone with the minute differences among human races, than with the grandeur of geographic space. Not surprisingly, however, individual reclamation within chÜgoku was

22. Quoted in Smith, Chinese Maps, 8. 23. Quoted in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Leaning in Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1986), 25.

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not enough for many Tokugawa political thinkers who wished to realize a role for their country as a whole within this China-centered universe. One method of reclamation, widespread among Neo-Confucianists, was to equate the way of the Chinese Sages with ShintÖ or the way of the kami. Kate Wildman Nakai includes Hayashi Razan (1583–1657), Kumazawa Banzan (1619–91), Yamaga SokÖ (1622–85), Yamazaki Ansai (1618–82), and OgyÜ Sorai among those who drew this analogy in diverse ways.24 Tokugawa Neo-Confucianists contrasted China’s history of military invasions and dynastic overthrows with Japanese invincibility and the continuity of the imperial line, suggesting that these provided proof that centralness need not be possessed physically to be enacted morally by the country. However, as Nakai points out, these exertions involved Neo-Confucianists in the “contradictory interplay between efforts to universalize, or de-Sinify, Confucianism on the one hand, and to affirm the Sinitic essence of the way of the sages on the other.”25 Gradually, the connection between Middle Kingdom virtues and China slackened as Japanese scholars became more insistent on their own national virtues and more skeptical of Chinese political achievements. “By the late eighteenth century,” argues historian Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, “the Sinocentric Middle Kingdom world view had been so relativized, or compromised to Japanese values and socio-political realities, that it was untenable.”26 During this period, Japanese scholars did not relinquish the idea of a natural political center; instead, in three different ways, the topographic imagination of the time transplanted centrality away from China. Breaking the Chinese empire’s seeming monopoly on nature’s political imprimatur, Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) and Aizawa Seishisai (1782–1863) exemplify the effort to elevate Japan’s imperial center as preeminently blessed; AndÖ ShÖeki (1703/6–1762?) and Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) represent a competing impulse to concentrate attention on rural communities; and, alternatively, pragmatists suggest that any place where successful research into the manifest workings of nature occurs will also radiate moral and political authority. In the next few pages, I will examine these three non-China-centered manifestations of the topographical imagination.

24. Kate Wildman Nakai, “The Naturalization of Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan: The Problem of Sinocentrism,” Harvard Journal of Asian Studies 40 (1980), 159–60. 25. Ibid., 165. 26. Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, 51.

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Japan’s Imperial Center Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769), foremost among the kokugakusha (scholars of national learning or nativists), laid the groundwork for asserting the superiority of Japan over China. For instance, in KokuikÖ (1765), Mabuchi declares with unbridled delight and energy that there is nothing worthy of Japanese admiration in the history of the Sage Kings, Chinese medical theory, the Chinese writing system, Chinese incest taboos, or the Chinese insistence on honoring human beings above birds, beasts, and other living things. The natural goodness of the human heart “turns evil” when it comes into contact with Confucianism’s unnatural obsession with doctrine.27 “In reality,” Mabuchi argues, “this land [ Japan] was ruled in conformity with the heart of heaven-and-earth” before the introduction of Confucianism from China, and it is to this gentle original state that he urges return. Motoori Norinaga not only accepted most of these ideas after meeting Mabuchi, but elaborated them through research into the Kojiki (Japan’s earliest compendium of mythic tales) and into the prose and the poetry of ancient times.28 Although the study of eighth-century documents might not appear to be the most direct way of reshaping conceptions of nature so that Japan would form the center of mental maps, Norinaga claimed that his research demonstrated Japan’s moral precedence as the land where the sun goddess Amaterasu Ñmikami was born and the land where her descendants ruled thereafter. These descendants, the emperor or sumera mikoto, possessed a majesty that radiated throughout the world. “So far as heaven and earth extend, so long as sun and moon dispense their light, and however many tens of thousands of generations have passed,” declares Norinaga, “our great ruler remains immutable.”29 Not just Japan in general, but the imperial line itself, served as the pivot of the universe. Like Mabuchi’s, Norinaga’s analytical approach propounds a system

27. Kamo no Mabuchi, KokuikÖ (1765), in Taira Shigemichi and Abe Akio, eds., Nihon shisÖ taikei, vol. 39 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1972), 382. 28. Norinaga did not agree with Mabuchi that human beings are no better than any other living creatures. Acknowledging that all beings spring ultimately from Musubi no Kami, Norinaga nevertheless declares that human beings are particularly excellent, knowing how to behave at all times without instruction, unlike lower animals. “Things like goodwill and righteousness, decorum and discretion, love of parents and respect before elder kin, loyalty toward the ruler, and faith in fellowmen belong unconditionally to the nature of human kind,” declares Norinaga in Naobi no Mitama, trans. Harry D. Harootunian, Readings in Tokugawa Thought (Chicago: The Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago, 1994), Select Papers, vol. 9, p. 123. 29. Ibid., 119.

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of binary opposites to differentiate Japan from China. Focusing on language, he contrasts the living words (ikita kotoba) of Japanese with the dead words (shinda kotoba) of Chinese and continues through syntagmatic reasoning to create a series of antonyms separating a highly vaunted Japan, replete with sacred blessings both tangible (such as having the best rice) and intangible, from China, with all its artificiality and false scholarship.30 According to Norinaga, the Chinese had attempted to glorify themselves on the basis of specious distinctions between words and things, origins and the present, nature and culture. In so doing, they created a state of inauthenticity, rebellion, and corruption. In Japan, on the other hand, all such specious differences were not pursued until the introduction of Chinese thought. Unlike Mabuchi, however, Norinaga is not content to let this system of binary opposites rest intact. Rather, Norinaga subverts his system of difference by insisting that the qualities attributed to Japan and guaranteeing Japan’s difference from China encompass their opposites as well. He begins with the proposition that Japan is absolutely different from China by virtue of its refusal to reify differences. However, it eventually follows that within Japan all distinctions, including the difference from China, are swallowed up, digested into the whole body of Japanese culture.31 Japan, therefore, is not only distinct from China but also superior in China’s terms as well as in its own. This subversive logic is revealed with particular clarity in Norinaga’s concept of nature. Norinaga and other kokugakusha stood accused of employing a Taoist conception of nature (shizen) to attack cleverness (sakashira).32 The Mito scholar Fujita TÖko (1806–55) would charge that “their intricate studies all propound that the quintessence of the Way of Man is natural spontaneity [shizen, jinen], uncorrupted by human purpose [ jin’i]. But this is merely a warmed-over version of the [Taoist] doctrines of Lao-tzu and Chang-tzu.”33 In a work called Kuzubana, Nori30. Harry D. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 60, and Tetsuo Najita, “History and Nature in Eighteenth-Century Tokugawa Thought,” in Early Modern Japan, ed. John Whitney Hall, vol. 4 of The Cambridge History of Japan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 618. 31. Karatani KÖjin deploys much the same strategy when he compares modern Japan to “the West” in Kotoba to higeki (Language and Tragedy) (Tokyo: Daisan bunmei, 1989). See my discussion in Chapter 7. 32. Maruyama reiterates this charge, especially in relation to Mabuchi. Maruyama Masao, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, 268. 33. Quoted in Victor Koschmann, The Mito Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 53.

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naga defends himself from the imputation of Sinophilic Taoism, claiming that it was the Chinese Taoists, not he himself, who made nature the opposite of a despised cleverness. Norinaga contends that because of this false opposition, the Taoists’ “nature was not true nature.” “If they really considered leaving things to nature to be good they should have gone along with cleverness when the world became clever, for such cleverness would constitute true nature (shizen or things as they are).”34 As historian Wakabayashi argues, “In contrast to the Taoists’ normative nature, Norinaga held that Japan’s Way of the Gods was truly natural because it was ‘as the gods would have it’ (kannagara), and if the gods would have it ‘clever,’ Japanese should submit to it as such.”35 In other words, Norinaga does not separate nature from culture claiming that Japan represents nature as opposed to Chinese culture, but instead enfolds both nature and culture under the aegis of Japan. In melding nature with imperial Japanese culture, Norinaga advocates a thoroughly naturalized politics, just as the Neo-Confucians did, but he locates its true center in Kyoto, where the performance of imperial rites, in accord with ancient custom, guarantees stability to the surrounding world. Seemingly different forms of nature—nature as the divine spirit of kami both good and bad, nature as the human heart, and nature as the “sacred land” of Japan—are united through these imperial practices without need for mediation by words, rules, or doctrine. Because it is the only place where the unification of these natures may be enacted, Japan is religiously, politically, and morally central, and the emperor “rules all under Heaven through the Way.”36 In 1786, fellow kokugaku scholar Ueda Akinari (1734–1809) suggested to Norinaga that “the land of the gods” was not particularly physically impressive and pointed out that on Dutch maps depicting the globe, “our Divine Land” is “but a tiny island, a single leaf floating on the surface of a wide pond.” Norinaga accepted this point but tried to brush aside its implications, asserting that Japan’s moral centrality had nothing to do with its small geographical dimensions.37 Still, the topographic imagination of the early modern period impelled some subsequent writers to recuperate ideas of geographical preeminence, undaunted by the discovery of Japan’s relatively small size or by the knowledge that the 34. Motoori Norinaga, Kuzabana, in Motoori Norinaga zenshÜ vol. 8 (Tokyo: Chikuma shobÖ, 1972), 163. Translation from Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, 288 n. 81. 35. Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, 288 n. 61. 36. Motoori Norinaga, Naobi no Mitama, Harootunian’s translation, 123. 37. See Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, 38–39.

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earth’s newly recognized sphericality undercut the salience of a central point.38 The resonance between spatial prominence and political and moral authority was reinstated in various ways. ShintÖ priest Maki Izumi (1813–64), for instance, linked political, moral, and geographical centrality by claiming that “Japan stood at the head of the great world land mass (taiji).”39 Kokugaku scholar Hirata Atsutane argued that geographical distance from the “land of the gods” was the measure of political and moral virtue. Atsutane felt certain that Europeans were “barbarians [who] spew forth such shallow falsehoods . . . because they were born in filthy, remote countries, far from the Divine Land,” despite his own reluctant respect for Western medicine, astronomy, and even Christianity.40 Ñkuni Takamasa (1792–1871), an eclectic thinker familiar with almost all schools of thought, insisted not only that Confucianists “typically confuse center with periphery,” but also that Japan’s mission was to aid other countries to “conform to the original wishes of the Ruler in Heaven and the Creator, and have them regard Japan as a central nation, and revere the Emperor as the great center of the human world.” 41 According to Takamasa’s Bankoku kÖhÖ, both the Chinese world system and the code of international law articulated by Hugo Grotius (1538–1645) were doomed before the majesty of imperial Japan, which rejoiced in, among other things, the quality and abundance of its natural resources from gold and silver to rice, cloth, and paper. In other words, the compulsion of the topographic imagination to accord political authority to a central place of right, righteousness, and riches was so strong that many writers reconfigured the geography of mental maps rather than dispense with this conceptual framework. In accord with the drive to locate Japan and the imperial throne at

38. This desire to assert geographical predominance did not affect everyone. For instance, Ñtsuki Gentaku (1757–1827) understood how completely the idea of a “central kingdom” was undermined by the discovery that the earth was round. As he puts it, “Hidebound Confucianists and run-of-the-mill doctors have no concept of the immensity of the world. . . . the world is a great sphere on the surface of which are disposed the various nations. Although boundaries are determined by nature, each people gives an honorific name to the homeland.” Quoted in Keene, Japanese Discovery of Europe, 26. Using not only China and Japan, but also Holland, Germany, and England as examples, Ñtsuki points to the use of centrality in each case of patriotic vanity. 39. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen, 382. 40. Keene, Japanese Discovery of Europe, 159. 41. Ñkuni Takamasa, Bankoku kÖhÖ, trans. John Breen, in Readings in Tokugawa Thought, Select Papers, vol. 9, Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago, 1994, p. 245.

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the center of the world, Aizawa Seishisai, one of the Mito school’s most famous and flamboyant scholars, orchestrates geographic description, metaphors of the body, and claims to moral superiority in the opening pages of Shinron (New Theses), published in 1825. He declares, “All things exist as nature [shizen] dictates. Thus, our Divine Realm is at the top of the world. Though not a very large country, it reigns over the Four Quarters because its Imperial Line has never known dynastic change. The Western barbarians represent the thighs, legs, and feet of the universe. This is why they sail hither and yon, indifferent to the distances involved. Moreover, the country they call America is located at the rear end of the world, so its inhabitants are stupid and incompetent. All this is as nature [shizen] dictates.”42 In a later section of Shinron concerning foreign affairs, Seishisai creates an even more explicit political geography by measuring the world from its purported central point of Kyoto (just as some medieval Europeans used Jerusalem as the center point of world maps).43 Those land masses to the west (designated by the barbarians as Asia, Africa, and Europe) and to the east (North and South America) are located by Seishisai with seeming (though inaccurate) precision, not just from Japan in general, but from the imperial court in particular. Going beyond Mabuchi’s plea for a “return to the uprightness of the original heart” and Norinaga’s insistence on deeds and sacrifices that bring joy to the kami, Seishisai declares that a wide range of action accords with Kyoto’s natural political centrality. While the kokugakusha recommend mild actions aimed at apprehending nature’s original political harmony, Seishisai, along with other Mitogaku scholars, argues that policies aimed at the “unity of land and people” must continually be updated since “change is the constant Way of Heaven and Earth,”44 except, of course, for the crucial and eternal stability of the imperial house. His own proposals include returning warriors to the land and reestablishing a non-monetary, rice-based economy, and, less conservatively, instituting sophisticated systems of coastal defense and communication, and the manufacturing and stockpiling of weapons, including firearms. He even suggests the extension of Japan’s sovereignty into Ezo (now Hokkaido). To some commentators, Seishisai’s emphasis on instrumental activity 42. Aizawa Seishisai, Shinron (New Theses), in Mitogaku Taikei, vol. 2 (Ida shoten, 1941), 2–3. Translation from Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, 149. I have also consulted the translation by J. Victor Koschmann in Readings in Tokugawa Thought, 197–233. 43. Seishisai, Shinron, 68; Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, 193. 44. Seishisai, Shinron, 68.

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seems to defy nature’s political guidance for the sake of “invention,” to use Maruyama’s term. For instance, historian Victor Koschmann argues that “the Mito synthesis” sought “natural order through artifice.”45 I would suggest, however, that the activity advocated by Seishisai and others was not considered by them to be anti-natural inasmuch as these activities were themselves part of nature’s fluctuations. As Seishisai writes in the closing passage of Shinron, “It is said, ‘The universe is a living entity.’ Man as well is a living entity. When one living thing operates amidst another, transformations occur which we cannot fully fathom. With the passing of ages, innumerable transformations take place, and the moment at which each transpires is instantaneous.”46 Seishisai’s dynamic concept of nature contrasts sharply with the somnolent kokugaku vision of an “unchanging Heaven-and-Earth,” but activity and transformation remain qualities of nature, not characteristics outside its compass or something unique to the individual human intelligence.

Rural Centers Norinaga, Seishisai, and others wrested centrality from China and made Kyoto and Japan’s emperor the central pivot of the world, but theirs was not the only topographic reconfiguration proposed during the Tokugawa period. In the mid-eighteenth century, AndÖ ShÖeki and, later, Hirata Atsutane and his rural kokugaku followers chose to center not Japan’s imperial capital, but village life instead. Hamlets and villages became, for these theorists, the true sites of naturally (and in Atsutane’s case, divinely) sanctioned social and political structures. AndÖ ShÖeki, a former Zen acolyte and medical doctor from the northern provinces, distrusted all gods and all creeds.47 He turned directly to nature alone, to the world of “the self-acting living truth,” to find a brief for proper political and social life. His manuscript, Shizen shin’eidÖ (The way of nature and true vocation),48 launches its attack on the oppres-

45. Koschmann, The Mito Ideology, 48. See also chapter 5, in which Koschmann discusses the use of place as strategic symbol during the bakumatsu period. 46. Seishisai, Shinron. Translation from Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, 276–77. 47. ShÖeki (despite his own Zen training) despised Buddhism, ShintÖ, and Taoism and all forms of book learning. He argues that scholars should be forced to become farmers because “Study, with its words and books, is the root of greedy consumption without cultivating, of misappropriating the nation, the world, and Heaven-and-Earth. Thus, first and foremost, study must be prohibited.” Toshinobu Yasunaga, AndÖ ShÖeki: Social and Ecological Philosopher of Eighteenth-Century Japan (New York: Weatherhill, 1992), 239. 48. Shizen shin’eidÖ was never published during ShÖeki’s life for fear of government

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sive bakuhan system and the dire plight of the peasants by asking, “what is nature [shizen]?”49 a question he answers in terms of egalitarian human communities where everyone works the land. Using the same criteria of virtue and stability that the bakufu used to judge political arrangements, ShÖeki argued that peasants were not content and that society was not stable because, despite claims to the contrary, the bakufu had failed to understand nature properly. The moral intersection of nature and politics was not to be found at one central pinnacle; rather, the proper intersections were multiple, local, and non-hierarchical, enacted in the “direct cultivation” of the land that ought to be the occupation of every person in Japan. Properly met in this way, nature and politics dissolved distinctions among classes rather than created them. The resulting political landscape would be a pattern of small, self-sufficient hamlets, tiny local centers rather than one countrywide pivot. In ShÖeki’s view, since society rested on agriculture, rulers should tumble from their privileged heights to work the fields and share equally with peasants the austerity of a vegetarian diet unleavened by the pleasures of alcohol. Once hierarchy, taxation, learning, and luxury are dispensed with, ShÖeki believed that humanity would be cleansed of lust, greed, revolt, and even disease. The distinctions among people, the very “terms ‘order’ and ‘riot,’ ‘wealth’ and ‘poverty’ would cease to exist.”50 All that was needed was the emergence of a “Right Man,” and all humanity would return to “Right Cultivation,” which ShÖeki glosses as “another name for the production of food and clothing.”51 The only sour note disturbing this vision of harmonious egalitarianism is the suggestion that village headmen would still be needed to see that everyone works and that particularly recalcitrant evil-doers are punished by starvation and even put to death outright by their households.52 ShÖeki provides no in-

reprisals. Before the ninety-two-volume manuscript, in the possession of the Tokyo Imperial University, could be published, the Great KantÖ Earthquake of 1923 destroyed all but fifteen volumes. See Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, 250 n. 17. Other commentators include E. H. Norman, “AndÖ ShÖeki and the Anatomy of Japanese Feudalism,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Third Series, II (December 1949); Watanabe DaitÖ, AndÖ ShÖeki to Shizen ShineidÖ (Tokyo: Mokusei shoin, 1930); and Yasunaga, AndÖ ShÖeki. 49. AndÖ ShÖeki, Shizen shin’eidÖ, in AndÖ ShÖeki, ed. Noguchi Takehiko (Tokyo: ChÜÖ kÖronsha, 1984), 77. 50. Ibid., 256. 51. Yasunaga, AndÖ ShÖeki, 263. 52. AndÖ ShÖeki, Shizen shin’eidÖ, 253–54. I am not convinced by Toshinobu Yasunaga’s argument that ShÖeki’s description of these draconian methods is mere playfulness. Yasunaga, AndÖ ShÖeki, 94–95.

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dication as to how this headman would be chosen or how the evil persons were to be recognized and judged. The intricate interrelation of the human and natural worlds is guaranteed by a series of correspondences among the social classes, the parts of the face and the body, the internal organs, cooking pots, the planets, and the stars. Indeed, ShÖeki claims that the “mind-and-body” (shinshin) of human beings is indivisibly linked with the natural world (tenchi no shizen). Nevertheless, Confucians, Buddhists, Taoists, ShintÖists and others somehow managed, despite nature’s seamless web of mutuality, to perpetrate systems under which governors were fattened off the labor of the governed without themselves producing the “five grains.” ShÖeki demands that his own country abandon this travesty and return to the natural web of agrarian life. Such a life was not, insisted ShÖeki, a utopian fantasy. Indeed, ShÖeki believed that communities in Ezo (Hokkaido) and Holland were enjoying the “subtle action of the beginningless and endless living truth of spontaneously doing heaven-and-earth”—in simpler terms, living naturally—during his own lifetime.53 Quite obviously, AndÖ ShÖeki’s natural community is not akin to the “state of nature” conjured by European Enlightenment philosophers. First, nobody lives alone outside human communities. Second, the natural realm of equality and labor that ShÖeki prescribes is not a beginning point from which to develop a full-blown society, but sufficient unto itself. In other words, unlike the European theorists, ShÖeki calls for a return to nature not so that he may imagine how to leave it again for a better community constructed according to consensus, reason, or security, but in order to stay there forever. For Maruyama Masao, however much he admired ShÖeki, this type of radicalism was strictly formal. “For all ShÖeki’s conceptual rejection of feudal society and his hopes for the advent of the world of nature, he was so opposed to any ‘dogma of human invention’ that his theory lacked the active element necessary to bring about the transformation of the world of law into the world of nature.”54 Such “rigid adherence to pure doctrine” allowed ShÖeki to gainsay 53. Yasunaga, AndÖ ShÖeki, 263. Maruyama points out that ShÖeki visited Nagasaki often and had a high regard for Dutch medicine, but ShÖeki’s description of Dutch enthusiasm for “direct cultivation” is confused: “From the beginning of its history, Holland has had no rebellions or wars. The people engage in direct cultivation, are naturally skilled in handicraft work, excel in shipbuilding, sail around the world, and half the population is engaged in the business of trading goods.” The emphasis on trade contradicts the ideal of everyone engaged in farm labor. See Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, 262 n. 34. 54. Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, 263.

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bakufu ideals, but did not allow him to engage them in a process of negotiated change. Although not as directly critical of imperial and bakufu hierarchy as ShÖeki, Hirata Atsutane and his followers also slighted claims for Kyoto’s preeminence as the moral pivot of the Japanese cosmos.55 They turned away from the Ise myth and the sun goddess Amaterasu, not for Ezo or Holland, but for the Izumo cult and the tiny tutelary shrines that dotted the countryside. These places served as direct conduits to the ancient Japanese gods. These gods, the Musubi no Kami,56 had tied virtue and land together most securely not in one single imperial hub at the center of the universe but in the hundreds of farming communities standing in the middle of their fields, tiny centers of miniature worlds. The reason for revering rural hamlets was not just that they were the theaters of cultivation, although that mattered to Atsutane as it had to ShÖeki. As Harry Harootunian argues, Atsutane “encouraged the idea that the human community came into existence simultaneously with the formation of the land. . . . The formulation also invited the conclusion that the land and the folk had existed even prior to the emperor.”57 This original link with the divine, more than anything else, confirmed the central significance of villages, a significance reconfirmed ever after through the acts of work and worship in rural communities. Through farming the same land as their forebears and through maintaining family shrines and festivals of the dead, agricultural communities were continually in contact with the invisible world of the spirits. The village was the place where the human, the divine, and the natural were apprehended in such perfect harmony that any attempt to distinguish among these elements instantly dispelled their charmed unity. While ShÖeki attempted to suture the gap between human beings and nature through farm labor, rural kokugakusha attempted to unify human beings, nature, and the divine not only through work but also through worship in the context of daily life. Atsutane’s portrait of harmonious village life contrasted with the increasing discord in actual villages. By the early 1830s, when “nativism left the cities for the countryside,”58 agrarian entrepreneurs were threatening the prestige of traditional village leaders and upsetting the tradi55. Hirata Atsutane calls the bakufu system “eternal” and is especially admiring of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s military capabilities and the peace he established. 56. Amenominaka-nushi (the supreme god in the center of heaven), Takami-musubi, and Kami-musubi were the principal deities mentioned in kokugaku texts. 57. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen, 161. 58. Ibid., 176.

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tional village hierarchy. Peasant notables called upon the kokugaku image of the self-sufficient village in an attempt to arrest the changes wrought by the market economy and to reassert their own control as natural and beneficent. This image was, in Harootunian’s words, “more religious than political, relying on a ‘natural’ sense of order derived from the necessity of human reciprocity rather than an obedience determined by institutions.”59 When desperate and debt-ridden peasants rioted, private charity rather than public restructuring was the first impulse of village leaders.60 In short, traditional agrarian practice gained ideological articulation as it was losing ground to market-oriented modes of production in the late Tokugawa period. Rural kokugaku visions of natural community were posed against new entrepreneurial uses of natural resources and the consequent political and social ramifications, as well as against a China- and Kyoto-centered view of the universe. The differences between the ideas of ShÖeki and the rural nativists are stark on issues of divinity and on whether and where natural community was actualized, yet the similarities are striking as well. In both cases nature militates against hierarchy in human community. Mutual cooperation rather than obedience, instinctive respect and kindness rather than administrative and judicial process, is the proper tenor of human relationships. It could be said that nature, fully expressed by the human community, displaces politics, if politics is defined as a system for negotiating competing interests. Likewise, in both cases, the vision is populist without being democratic. Since choice is anathema or, more precisely, an incoherent concept where natural harmonies hold sway, there is, or should be, nothing to choose between: interests are compatible rather than competing; desire is dampened61 or ritualized.62 Indeed, reasoning through the creation of distinctions (funbetsuchi), the fundamental first step in the act of choice, is to fall away from nature into corruption. This distrust of choice and desire, this view that the natural community pro59. Ibid., 276. 60. Irwin Scheiner discusses the tension between the private charity of village leaders and the bakufu’s insistence that aid be official and public in “The Japanese Village: Imagined, Real, Contested,” in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 71–73. 61. ShÖeki’s vision of the mutuality of all things precludes desire because, to use Plato’s formulation, it precludes lack. Sexual desire in natural communities would diminish, he believed, because “the nature of the male creature is the female creature and the nature of the female creature is the male creature,” and one would never be without the other. Yasunaga, AndÖ ShÖeki, 277. 62. For a discussion of desire and the contrast between Atsutane and Norinaga on this point, see Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen, 140–42.

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vides absolute fulfillment, creates little ground for political practice. Nature, in these formulations, sanctions activity such as labor or worship in abundance without sanctioning action, the willful, instrumental, reasoned “invention” that Maruyama prescribes. Given these qualities, the natural communities envisioned by ShÖeki, Atsutane, and others remain shimmering counterexamples to the bakufu, rather than programmatic critiques.

Centers of Learning My argument in this chapter has been that nature, insofar as it pertained to political thought, was defined fundamentally in spatial terms during the Tokugawa period. In the work of Neo-Confucianists, kokugakusha, Mito scholars, and non-affiliated intellectuals such as AndÖ ShÖeki and Ñkuni Takamasa, the power of the topographic imagination to shape alternative centers of political righteousness is fairly easy to trace. Despite relying on different texts, proceeding by different methods of analysis, and supporting competing factions within the government and among commoners, these writers were all acutely conscious of the need to locate the correct place of political practice through the correct apprehension of nature’s patterns. Surprisingly, this is true, at least early on, even of those scholars who broke with a reliance on textual knowledge and sought to incorporate empirical observation into their political theories. As ShÖeki’s case exemplifies, training in medicine and wrenching encounters with residents in famine-stricken districts did not divert his attention from the perceived necessity to recover, once and for all, the sort of political landscape that accords with the true nature of rural hamlets. Other scholars attracted to empirical studies, whether students of European or “Dutch” learning (rangakusha), medical students, agricultural technologists, or merchants with a flair for research, also retained an acute awareness of nature as geographic space. Their mental maps highlighted the place where knowledge of nature (a sign of virtue) was most advanced. Since a high moral and political value was ascribed to the successful investigation of nature (kyÜri), it followed that the place most conducive to investigation served as the central exemplar in all fields.63 It was from this place that the world

63. Historian Albert Craig makes the point that despite a certain ambivalence about Western barbarians, “[Yamagata] BantÖ’s basic position was that the superiority of the West in its knowledge of the ri of science implied its possession of a superior level of moral

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should be remapped. At first, both knowledge of nature and nature itself were conceived of as fairly stable; the dynamism lay in the process of investigation itself. Gradually, however, not only the processes of investigation but knowledge and nature themselves became more and more dynamic. By the early nineteenth century, the emphasis began to shift to defining nature in temporal rather than spatial terms. Originally China was seen as the locus where investigation had led to the most perfect understanding of ri, the orderly essence underlying the world’s chaotic appearance. However, for those Tokugawa thinkers who took physical nature as the object of their investigation, it became increasingly obvious that China had not been outstandingly successful in comprehending, or even describing, natural phenomena, particularly in the prized fields of medicine and military science. Limited though their access was to European texts, many writers realized that the countries where investigation of nature had been practiced most successfully were European. If one believed in the resonance between a proper understanding of nature and a proper grasp of politics, the success of European natural science intimated that Europeans had a superior grasp of political arrangements as well. Some scholars of “Dutch” learning took this idea to its logical consequence in extolling the virtue of European monarchies. Maeno RyÖtaku (1723–1803), for instance, maintained that Europe’s superior mastery of nature and its scientific advances must be concomitant with superior statecraft.64 Yamagata BantÖ (1748–1821) also recharted the world according to its knowledge of nature, turning Holland into what Albert Craig describes as a “Confucian Utopia.” Speaking admiringly of these foreigners, BantÖ writes, “The Western Europeans circle the globe. They advance in astronomy and make geographical observations; they understand the world as a whole. That they are loyal, filial, humane and virtuous goes without saying; they are addicted solely to advancing knowledge and investigating things, and do not waste their days on useless arts and skills.”65 The link between understanding ri and civic virtue was not new; the idea that this knowledge might not be perfectly conpractice.” Craig, “Science and Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan,” in Changing Japanese Attitudes Toward Modernization, ed. Marius B. Jansen (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1965), 133–60 [145]. 64. Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, 47. 65. Quoted in Craig, “Science and Confucianism,” 145–46. BantÖ accepted Copernican theory and expressed contempt for the old notion of chÜgoku. As Tetsuo Najita argues,

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tained within the writings of the ancients was. The effort to test classical teachings against actual experience transformed knowledge, making it progressive, instrumental, protean. As knowledge of nature became a changeable commodity and as nature itself seemed more and more changeable, the political world gained a corresponding fluidity. This reapprehension of knowledge and its natural object reconfigured the image of the political world. The passionate embrace of this reconfigured world is nowhere better exemplified than in the writings of Yokoi ShÖnan (1809–68), a lower samurai from the Kumamoto han in Kyushu who served as an advisor in Fukui. In the 1860 Kokuze sanron (The three major problems of state policy), ShÖnan argues that change, not constancy, is charted by heavenand-earth.66 For ShÖnan, the greatness of China in the past need not be tarnished by the contemptible refusal of contemporary China to face changing conditions, particularly the incursions of Europeans and the notorious Opium War. ShÖnan does not reject outright the ancient texts of Confucian learning; in fact, he insists on using the same criteria that they put forward for judging good government in his reference to the classic admonition that the government’s main work is “nourishing the people.” However, ShÖnan refuses the governmental solutions put forward in the ancient world and by the Tokugawa bakufu. He argues instead that contemporary “forces of heaven-and-earth” dictate internationalism: “for Japan alone to keep herself isolated is of course not right.”67 Looking to England, Russia, and the United States, ShÖnan urges trade and commerce with other nations, active and strong defense, public discussion of the issues of the day, and a vibrant, reorganized government. This is not a rejection of nature and the forces of heaven-andearth, but a redefinition of nature; these proposed reforms are themselves required, argues ShÖnan, by “shizen no jÖri,” the principles of nature.68 What ShÖnan rejects is a static or even stable natural political order; he does so in order to redefine nature as progressive, to create a narrativized nature that combines with historical fluctuations to chart a course for Japan in a world increasingly dominated by Western powers.

“BantÖ could then, through comparative geography, address himself to the particularity of Japanese history, denying its having any divine privilege.” Najita, “History and Nature,” 654. 66. Yokoi ShÖnan, Kokuze sanron, trans. D. Y. Miyauchi, Monumenta Nipponica 23 (1968), 160. 67. Ibid., 160. 68. Ibid., 167.

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ShÖnan’s view injected temporality into the spatial universe. While Aizawa Seishisai had also believed that “change is the constant Way of Heaven and Earth,”69 he had reserved the imperial center from relativity and inconstancy. ShÖnan, on the other hand, dispelled the idea of a fixed center entirely. It became plausible to think of historical change not as either waywardness or return in relation to a fixed point but as transformation to a hitherto unknown condition. Outward-looking writers began to feel that Japan could participate in this new international narrative by keener investigation of the physical world. This prospect was unsettling indeed.

Divorce Proceedings: Space versus Time European history offers parallel moments of distress when it seems that apprehension of the divine, theories of proper social and governmental forms, and knowledge of the natural world do not seem compatible. Efforts to reconcile scripture, civic virtue, and natural philosophy have taken elaborate and fascinating forms.70 Japanese authors in the final decades of the Tokugawa period felt a comparable pressure, even without the weight of monotheism. One of the most radical solutions was the attempt to sever mastery of the natural world from moral and political mastery. Knowledge of the natural world could be obtained through Western science and technology, it was felt, without disturbing the traditional understanding of the natural social order that sanctioned bakufu politics. Thus, “Dutch” forms of mastering the physical world would be entirely compatible with Neo-Confucian mastery of natural political principles. One of the earliest proponents of this view was Sugita Gempaku (1733–1817), the driving force behind Kaitai shinsho (New Book on Human Dissection, 1774), a translation with illustrations of a Dutch work on human anatomy.71 Fascinated though Gempaku was by European 69. Aizawa Seishisai, Shinron, 68. 70. The problem of how to make sense of the relations among natural, divine, and human worlds has been addressed by many authors, from Jean Bodin (Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds [New York: W. W. Norton, 1945]) to Louis Dupré (Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993]). One might even include Bruno Latour in this genealogy since Latour describes modernity as “the conjoined creation of those three entities: ‘humanity,’ ‘non-humanity,’ and ‘a crossed-out God.’” Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 13. 71. For a discussion of Tokugawa interest in empirical science, see James R. Bartholomew, The Formation of Science in Japan (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), especially chapter 2.

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techniques of healing the sick, he sought to restrict the application of new knowledge to medicine and a few other fields. Gempaku insisted that such knowledge engendered no basis for questioning current morality and political arrangements, wrong though Chinese sources obviously were about anatomy as revealed through dissecting human corpses. If the nature of science was different from the nature of politics, yet equally valuable and entirely compatible, then the world would be capacious enough to allow for both. For Sugita Gempaku, Europe’s medical expertise did not imply the political expertise and virtue that his colleague Maeno RyÖtaku had imagined. The idea that Japan’s ethical and political knowledge could be preserved, despite the addition of Western scientific and technical knowledge, was codified by Sakuma ShÖzan’s (1811–64) famous phrase “tÖyÖ no dÖtoku, seiyÖ no geijutsu” (Eastern morality, Western technology),72 from Seikenroku (Reflections on my errors).73 ShÖzan believed that investigation, by which he meant both experiments in the natural and physical sciences and investigation into social principles, led to universal truths. The West had discovered the truth of the physical world, while China and Japan had apprehended the truth of social ethics as exemplified in the “five relationships” with their hierarchies of gender, age, and power in families and in politics. In short, there were two disparate forms of nature, and the knowledge of each was necessary but circumscribed. The natural order of bakufu politics was to be preserved by absorbing a new understanding of physical nature, particularly the knowledge necessary to build effective fortifications and manufacture firearms to repel the foreigners entreating for trade and diplomacy with alarming insistence. During the tumultuous years at mid-century, ShÖzan’s misplaced confidence in the political neutrality of Western knowledge eased the appropriation of science and technology. However, both logically and practically, it was difficult to sustain two such fundamentally divergent “natures” within one system. The static, fully realized, human-centered, universal natural order authorizing bakufu structures of power was not subject to experimentation. Knowledge of this social form of nature rested 72. “Geijutsu” is sometimes translated as “science,” but I have followed Hirakawa Sukehiro in using “technology.” See Hirakawa, “Japan’s Turn to the West,” trans. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, in The Nineteenth Century, ed. Marius B. Jansen, vol. 5 of The Cambridge History of Japan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 442. 73. Sakuma ShÖzan, Seikenroku (Reflections on My Errors), in Nihon kokushi zensho (Tokyo: Soengaku insatsu, 1922), 21: 8.

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on received wisdom. The opposite was the case with the nature investigated by Western science and with the knowledge garnered by vigorous experiment. Even though much of the interest in “geijutsu” was intensely practical, the inherent tension between the two forms of nature could not be obviated because technology is not socially or politically neutral. As Langdon Winner convincingly argues, “Technical things have political qualities . . . they can embody specific forms of power and authority.”74 Even if the scientific and philosophical principles underlying physics and mechanics are ignored, the use and production of technology transforms human relations. It was impossible, for instance, to use the impersonal technologies of modern warfare and maintain, at the same time, the samurai warrior cult of individual valor. Like the armies of England and France at Agincourt, who learned that battles were won with the grime and sweat of anonymous archers rather than the glory and showmanship of knights,75 the Japanese army too grew necessarily more egalitarian and anonymous as they employed guns and cannon rather than swords.76 Science and technology posed a threat to Japan’s ideal of a natural political order as it had to the West’s. The curious intellectual amalgam of “Eastern morality, Western technology” had been developed to achieve conservative political ends through radically new means, but it increased the instability that led to the downfall of the Tokugawa bakufu. Harry Harootunian argues that although Yokoi ShÖnan and Sakuma ShÖzan attempted to combine scientific knowledge with Neo-Confucian philosophy, “their ultimate solution was to lay the foundation for the subsequent dismissal of nature in favor of history that was crucial to later Meiji efforts to establish a system of useful and instrumental knowledge.”77 I would suggest that this analysis overstates the contrast between nature and history as alternatives in mid-nineteenth-century Japan. Instead, nature, through the work of Yokoi ShÖnan and Sakuma ShÖzan, was represented as having two forms, the old anti-historical form and a 74. Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 19. 75. See John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (New York: Penguin Books, 1976). 76. Early experiments allowing commoners to participate in military training began before the end of the Tokugawa period in some domains. This development not only struck a blow at the crucial class division between warriors and non-warriors, but also foreshadowed the Meiji conscript army that drew from all social groups. 77. Harry D. Harootunian, “Late Tokugawa Culture and Thought,” in The Nineteenth Century, ed. Marius B. Jansen, vol. 5 of The Cambridge History of Japan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 241.

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newer historicized form. Building on the work of Mito scholars, they saw nature itself and knowledge about nature as changing, subject to the vicissitudes of time. Through their work, nature was not so much “dismissed” as temporalized, becoming itself a form of history. Ironically, in this, ShÖnan and ShÖzan were in tune with the wider world. In the Meiji period, the international community was discovered by the Japanese not to have banished nature for history, but instead to have historicized nature through the geology of Lyell, the biology of Darwin, and the social theory of Spencer. The intellectual movement of late Tokugawa was not from nature to history, but rather, no less radically, from a spatial concept of nature to a temporalized one. After the early dislocations of the new era, time, rather than space, would become the medium through which nature’s lessons for politics were expressed.

chapter 3

Early Meiji’s Contentious Natures

The spatial, hierarchical cosmopolis developed in Tokugawa writings lay in ruins by the first decade of the Meiji period. No longer did it appear axiomatic that political rectitude and geographic centrality were paired in some definable locale, be it China, Edo, Kyoto, rural villages, or the purportedly perfect Dutch nation. Nevertheless, even as the relationship between politics and nature was destabilized in the upheavals of the 1860s and 1870s, writers continued to believe that nature was a politically potent idea. The sheer number of references to nature demonstrates that they imagined they could wring rhetorical advantage from the concept, although precisely what that advantage was is often hard to decipher. This chapter attempts to provide a rough guide to nature’s chaotic career in the early Meiji period in order to underscore how volatile conditions were. My argument is that the contentious efforts to reconstruct the relationship between politics and nature demonstrate how deeply and completely Japan’s cosmopolis was being reconfigured during these years. In the Tokugawa period, the variegated concepts of nature had all achieved a modicum of structural similarity within the parameters of the Tokugawa bakufu and the political debates on the foundation of knowledge, the possibilities for action, and the justifications for power. In the early years of Meiji, however, these older parameters dissolved as Japan expanded physically and intellectually. National boundaries bulged when Japan officially annexed Okinawa in 1872, regularized national claims 60

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to Hokkaido, and attacked Formosa (Taiwan) in 1874. Intellectual horizons swelled to encompass Europe, America, and other parts of Asia through travel and study. Furthermore, the territory embraced within these shifting boundaries did not lie unperturbed. The Tokugawa bakufu was dismantled and the emperor “restored,” but the proper structure for the government was still in dispute. In a memorial presented to the emperor in June of 1877, the petitioners point to “the outbreaks that have recently taken place” within Japan: Those who have misunderstood the intention of the poll-tax; those who have suffered by the reform of the land-tax; those who insisted on an invasion of Korea; those who favoured a return to the feudal system; those who wished the dismissal of certain officials surrounding the Imperial throne; all these fomented disturbances. If any one, who in the future may write the history of the first ten years of Meiji, shall say that wars ceased not for a day, and that the country was brought to the verge of ruin, he will fairly well describe the actual condition of affairs.1

With this “ceaseless” confusion, it is hardly surprising that definitions of nature, too, underwent kaleidoscopic changes in the 1860s and 1870s. Despite its lack of precision, or perhaps because of it, nature remained a powerful and blustering term in early Meiji. The contest over its meaning did not congeal immediately into discrete “sides”; instead, nature was brought to the aid of myriad positions in official government documents and in the writings of those anxious to influence the government. Although a complete inventory of nature in early Meiji documents would produce little more than tedium, an examination of a few documents— both governmental and non-governmental—will give some sense of the texture of the concept in these years. Two issues, broadly conceived, organize my choices: the question of whether nature’s laws are universal and uniform or regional and variegated, and the question of what basic political units, what political bodies, have nature’s imprimatur. I will examine the question of natural law in relation to Kido KÖin, author of the Charter Oath of 1868, and government architect ItÖ Hirobumi, and will examine the question of natural political bodies in the work of educator Fukuzawa Yukichi and Liberal Party leader Itagaki Taisuke. I will then turn to the larger question of why, if the meaning of nature was so indeterminate in these years, writers continued to appeal to its authority. 1. Walter Wallace McLaren, ed., “Japanese Government Documents,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 42 (May 1914), 460.

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Natural Forms of Contention: Laws and Bodies Natural Law: Universal versus Local One of the first documents of the new government was the GokajÖ no seimon, or Charter Oath, of 1868. Promulgated in the fraught early months of the “restoration” while the civil conflict known as the Boshin War still raged, the Charter Oath attempted to create national unity by redirecting samurai loyalty toward the new government in Tokyo and hinting at this government’s new vision of Japan. The Charter Oath appears cautious and elliptical at first reading, yet it was not casually produced. By mid-March 1868 it had already undergone two drafts when unexpected opposition arose from Iwakura Tomomi (1825–83), a politically active court noble, and others who felt that the early versions had a flavor reminiscent of Chinese military rule. This approach to governance, they insisted, was at odds with Japanese imperial tradition emphasizing the priestly functions of the throne.2 At this juncture, Kido KÖin (1833–77), a samurai from ChÖshÜ active throughout his life in education and political centralization, stepped in to revise the document and create consensus. Whittling down the draft’s ten articles to five, Kido imparted to the oath a lofty generality that avoided too many concrete promises. He also introduced a reference to “nature.” At Kido’s particular insistence, the fourth of the oath’s five articles proclaims that “Evil customs of the past shall be broken off and everything based upon the just laws of nature.”3 The pivotal phrase, “the just laws of nature,” itself underwent scrutiny and revision. The idea was first expressed by the phrase “uchÜ no tsÜgi,” which might also be translated as “the general principles of the universe” or “the cosmos.” In the final version, however, this wording was changed to “tenchi no kÖdÖ” or, more literally, “the just way of heaven-and-earth.” This adjustment in terminology has been dismissed as irrelevant. Osatake Takeo, in his 1928 commentary on the oath, insists that “‘uchÜ no tsÜgi’ and ‘tenchi no kÖdÖ’ mean the same thing.”4 He argues that both phrases underscore the new government’s commitment to foreign intercourse and its determination to reject the bakumatsu jÖi demand that foreign barbarians be expelled from Japan. There is certainly a good deal 2. Osatake Takeo, “GokajÖ no seimon,” in Meiji boshin (Tokyo: Bunmei kyÖkai, 1928), 63. 3. This translation is from William Theodore de Bary, ed., Sources of Japanese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 2: 137. 4. Osatake, “GokajÖ no seimon,” 80.

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of truth to Osatake’s argument. Kido embraced the necessity of careful international engagement and wished to enunciate this general principle in the oath. However, if both phrases “mean the same thing,” openness to foreign intercourse does not explain why Kido would have bothered to revise the terminology of the oath’s fourth article. Kido, in his careful crafting of the language, may instead have seen consequential differences between the nature referred to by “uchÜ” and the nature referred to by “tenchi.” The shift in terms can be read as a conciliatory move toward a more familiar and specific language in which to express nature’s rules for politics. The phrase “uchÜ no tsÜgi” suggests remote, cold, objective inquiry into the universe. It neither describes the structure of nature beyond its inclusiveness nor comments on the ethical and political principles to be found therein. “Tenchi,” literally “heaven-and-earth,” suggests a nature structured by hierarchy and, when coupled with “kÖdÖ” (literally “the public way”), gives assurance that this nature provides a code for just, but faintly autocratic, rule rather than mere “general principles.” Kido’s revision implies that while the whole world may be a laboratory for researching new principles, the principles discovered are likely to retain a Confucian flavor. This is not to say that Kido intends a reactionary return to Neo-Confucian doctrine. The first part of the article—“evil customs of the past shall be broken off”—disallows such an interpretation. Furthermore, had Kido wished to inscribe a more traditional view of nature in the nation’s charter, he could have chosen terms perhaps even more redolent of NeoConfucian ideology, such as “ri”and “tenri.” Instead, there seems to have been a delicate negotiation of terms, gesturing both to the old familiar idea of a principled nature, but also asserting that nature comprises a wider universe than previously imagined in Tokugawa usage, universal though its conception of nature was. Kido’s expanded form of nature’s universality provides for and indeed insists upon Japan’s participation in a global order. In his revision, the oath suggests that by going out and discovering this universal order, Japan will be supplied with rules, albeit unspecified, for domestic governance. Kido’s use of the concept imparts a vital newness without making precise commitments as to what this particular “tenchi no kÖdÖ” might entail.5 The Charter Oath was deemed satisfactory enough to be recycled the following June, becoming the pre-

5. Maruyama Masao points out that the concept of “tenchi no kÖdÖ” was not accepted even by those interested in Western ideas. For instance, Fukuzawa Yukichi, as early as 1875, rejected the universalism of such a concept. Maruyama believes that Fukuzawa, like Okakura

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amble of the Constitution of 1868. Indeed, in 1946, in the New Year’s Day Imperial Rescript denying the emperor’s divinity, the five articles of the Meiji Charter Oath were once again resurrected as the basis for the nation. The emperor declared that he wished to “make this oath anew” and reaffirmed “the principles embodied in the charter.”6 While Kido suggested that nature’s laws are universal, other writers cautioned that nature’s universal precepts are always mitigated by local exigencies. Proponents of the view that nature’s laws are not uniform drew support from Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws, translated in Meiroku zasshi by legal scholar Mitsukuri RinshÖ (1846–97). ItÖ Hirobumi (1841–1909), the architect of Japan’s constitutional system and its first prime minister (1885–88), subscribed to the idea that nature’s laws differ in different places. In 1873, ItÖ wrote that “a government which conforms with our country’s geography, customs and sentiments of the people and the spirit of the times” would necessarily limit democracy.7 For ItÖ, the specifics of national geography and climate combined with history dictate the governmental form appropriate to a particular locale. ItÖ’s view, however, was not widely embraced in early Meiji. Concern for a non-universal natural law harkened to a regionalism reminiscent of Tokugawa times and the semi-independence of daimyo domains.8 Since such regionalism was antithetical to the goals of the newly centralizing national government, the theme of nature’s local differences seems to have been downplayed in the 1860s and 1870s. Historian Minami Hiroshi argues that it was not until late Meiji that a new view of climate as national appeared, in part because of the cohesion created by the construction of a national railway system.9 The issue here is whether the laws of nature dictate a universal model for all governments or whether nature holds court in various jurisdictions with different laws in each locality. This question was revisited in many forms as Japan modernized because, at root, it is a question about

Tenshin and Uchimura KanzÖ, used resistance to universal concepts as part of “Japan’s self-assertion towards the world [that] was restrained by their sense of Japan’s position in the world.” See Maruyama, “Fukuzawa, Uchimura, and Okakura: Meiji Intellectuals and Westernization,” The Developing Economies 4, no. 4 (1966), 596–97. 6. Reprint of official English translation reproduced in the United States Department of Publication, No. 2671, in Kokutai no hongi, trans. John Owen Gaunlett (Newton, Mass.: Crofton Publishing, 1974), 196–97. 7. Quoted in de Bary, Sources of Japanese Tradition, 2: 159. 8. Minami Hiroshi, Nihonjinron no keifu (The Genealogy of Nihonjinron) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1980). Chapter 2, “Fudo to nihonjin,” discusses this issue. 9. Ibid., 45.

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the relationship between Japanese national identity and modernity’s historical expansion around the world. Those writers who believe that the laws of nature are universal suggest that Japan must seek its identity within the universal modern narrative from nature to freedom. Since there is only one form of modernity in this analysis, Japan must understand itself in relation to a “West” that is deemed to be more successful in fulfilling modernity’s (paradoxically natural) dictates. Maruyama Masao’s analysis, as we have seen, falls into this category. His view that modernity arises in antithesis to nature can be traced to Hegel, who argues that “the History of the World begins with its general aim—the realization of the Idea of Spirit—only in an implicit form (an sich) that is, as Nature; a hidden, most profoundly hidden, unconscious instinct; and the whole process of History (as already observed), is directed to rendering this unconscious impulse a conscious one.”10 If this is the universal historical relationship between nature and spirit and if the West has already realized the “Idea of Spirit,” then Japan axiomatically needs to “catch up” with the West. The only question is how fast it can obey the universal natural laws of history and politics.11 On the other hand, those who wish to distinguish Japanese identity from that of the West seek local laws of nature that reinforce Japan’s distinctiveness, sometimes even conceding claims to modernity in the process, but this concession, as I will argue in Chapter 7, comes only after considerable modernization. The important point here is that arguments about the universality of nature’s laws reproduce the problem of Japan’s relation to the West in the Meiji period. Unlike the expansive cosmopolitan form of nature in the Tokugawa period, which was universal in a different way, the modern form of universal nature challenged national identity directly.

Natural Bodies: The Governmental Body versus the Democratic Leviathan When Kido and ItÖ turn to nature for political lessons, they search for laws and regularities governing institutional structures. When Fukuzawa Yukichi and Itagaki Taisuke elaborate nature’s politics, they use the idea of a natural political “body.” There are many ways of relying on nature

10. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 25. 11. Sebastian Conrad discusses this issue in “What Time is Japan?” History and Theory, 38, no. 1 (February 1999).

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to define political bodies. One of the most familiar is to treat the political entity packaged by the flesh and bones of each human being as the basic unit of government. Proceeding from the naturally ordained individual, theories (like those of Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau) weave narratives about relations among individuals before societies were formed, the development of societies and ultimately of governments, governments that may or may not respond to the “natural rights” said to be inherent in individual bodies. Another way of using nature to define the fundamental political unit is to ignore the individual body for the sake of a collective one, relying on concepts of organic community, race, or geography to constitute “the people” as a natural entity. For instance, the organic community (kyÖdÖtai, the Japanese translation of Gemeinschaft) with racial overtones sanctioned by biology and the physical environment played a powerful role in twentieth-century Japanese ideology. Both these forms of “the people,” whether as individuals or as a collective, have served as natural political units and the starting point for political narratives of justice and hope. However, as I will argue here, neither version of “the people” is particularly important in the early years of Meiji. In my view, despite the influx of European Enlightenment ideas, racial theories, and versions of geographical determinism that entered Japanese thought in the first years after the bakufu, the most important political body was neither the individual’s nor the community’s. Instead, early Meiji usage is distinguished from European and later Japanese ideas of the political body by its emphasis on the government itself as the ultimate, and sometimes the only, political body. In early Meiji documents, whether government pronouncements or opposition pleas, the government’s natural, incorporated wholeness is the presumed starting point of a great many discussions. Indeed, sometimes the writers imply that the governmental body predates the bodies of its subjects, mere people individually and collectively. Such a view is decidedly authoritarian, premodern in its blindness to the populace. By contrast, even the most conservative modern imaginations in Japan and in Europe have embraced forms of populism, seeking to involve the masses, though not to empower them. The Japanese image of the organic family state (kazoku kokka), developed after the turn of the nineteenth century, could not have existed without a populace of putative children, and the 1930s idea of the kokutai, literally the national body, rested on a particular celebration of the Japanese people. In Europe, even Hobbes’s none-too-liberal leviathan incorporates all people

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within its massive frame. In early Meiji discourse, however, a new concept of nature linking the people, the nation, and the government had yet to be developed to replace the previous Tokugawa ideas of natural hierarchy, so many theorists of government simply commandeered nature’s authority for political institutions alone, denaturing the people. However, as the following examples will show, even when the primary natural political body is the government, variations in its relationship with the people are possible, ranging from the avidly oligarchic to the mildly populist. I will turn first to the most conservative uses of this image, dwelling particularly on Fukuzawa Yukichi and his dubious claim to be a proponent of democracy, and then to the slightly more democratic attempt by Itagaki Taisuke to include some version of the people within the governmental corpus. The Governmental Body At its most anti-populist, the image of the government alone as the natural national body enabled officials to disregard the individual interests and wishes of their subjects. For instance, Matsukata Masayoshi, the hard-headed Minister of Finance who drastically reduced inflation in the 1880s, suggests such an image in his September 1881 memorial to the DajÖkan, the highest executive organ of the state:12 “Finance is to a state what blood circulation is to a human being. Without the circulation of blood, death follows; without finances in good order, the decline of the state must follow.”13 With his stringent monetary controls, Matsuoka was perfectly willing to sacrifice the bodies of individual farmers to strengthen the government’s finances. The resulting rural distress caused flamboyant but unsuccessful uprisings.14 The uneven effects of Matsukata’s policies also pitted tenants against small landowners, successfully splitting rural support for opposition parties.15 Many writers, however, have credited his draconian measures with protecting Japan from the threats posed by international commerce and finance. The state as the primary political entity survived. Other images of the government as the natural political body par ex12. From 1868 to 1885, Japan’s government was based on the DajÖkan system, which originated in 702. The DajÖkan controlled all non-religious affairs of state; religious affairs were controlled by the Jingikan, which theoretically was above the DajÖkan. 13. Ike Nobutaka, The Beginnings of Political Democracy in Japan (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950), 139. 14. For discussion of rural uprisings in the Meiji period, see Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982). 15. For the argument on the relation between rural distress and the demise of the Liberal Party, see Ike, The Beginnings of Political Democracy in Japan.

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cellence accommodated some people, at least those most necessary to it. During the radical transition to a conscript military from the Tokugawa class-based army in which only samurai were allowed arms, the government created images that engulfed reluctant peasant recruits within the national body. When the stern warnings about lack of discipline voiced in 1878 by Gunjin Kunkai (Admonition to Soldiers and Sailors) required reinforcement, the 1882 Gunjin Chokuyu (Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors) addressed military men in the voice of the emperor: “Soldiers and Sailors, We are your Supreme Commander-in-Chief. Our relations with you will be most intimate when We rely on you as Our limbs and you look up to Us as your head.”16 Ideologically, the figure of an “imperial leviathan” enforced an organic chain of command from the emperor down. The Gunjin Chokuyu incorporated peasant soldiers within the state’s anatomy but still precluded the vast majority of the people.17 Surprisingly, government oligarchs were not the only ones to use the figure of government as natural body. Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), whose best-selling works are often categorized as liberal and who prided himself on his refusal of government posts, also resorts to this usage. For instance, in Gakumon no susume (An Encouragement of Learning), first published serially between 1872 and 1876, Fukuzawa declares that “every day the health of the body [ jinshin] must be preserved. It is the same with the country [kuni].” One might assume here that “the country” includes the people, but Fukuzawa goes on to portray the people as mere gadflies buzzing around their leaders’ incorporated state. “The government,” he insists, “is the living force [of this body] and the people are the outside stimulus.”18 Compared with Thomas Hobbes, who included even the most lowly within his leviathan, Fukuzawa’s view in this instance imputes a corporeal quality to the government alone. The people are relegated to an oddly disembodied role, mere stimuli on the body governmental. Of course, this is only one example of Fukuzawa’s numerous, incon16. De Bary, Sources of Japanese Tradition, 2: 198–99. 17. Later, this figure of the imperial leviathan was taken up by legal scholar Minobe Tatsukichi (1873–1948), who described the emperor as the chief organ of the constitutional state, a view that was attacked by Hozumi Yatsuka and was eventually declared an act of lese majesty in the 1930s. In 1935, Minobe’s books were banned. Frank O. Miller, Minobe Tatsukichi: Interpreter of Constitutionalism in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965). 18. Fukuzawa Yukichi, Gakumon no susume, in Nihon no meichÖ, ed. Nagai Michio (Tokyo: ChÜÖ kÖronsha, 1969), 66–67.

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sistent uses of “nature.” In his many works re-envisioning Japan, there is a confused tension between his democratic impulses and his classconscious support for state control. Nature can be discovered in support of both positions in his writings, sometimes even within the same text. Despite the sentiment noted above, other parts of Gakumon no susume offer succor to the people’s rights movement, reinforcing the widely held view of Fukuzawa as a “natural rights” advocate.19 Fukuzawa insists, for instance, that “ten (heaven or nature) does not create one person above another person; it does not create one person below another.”20 Although this position is radically different from the Neo-Confucian view that “ten” is the source of virtue and order because it produces a strict hierarchy, Fukuzawa’s egalitarianism is, at best, unreliable.21 The confused impulses in Fukuzawa’s writings have been noted by many historians. Maruyama Masao glosses them positively as fluid values, a form of situational thinking responsive to changing times. Indeed, Maruyama takes Fukuzawa’s approach as a model for postwar thought because of its lack of dogmatism. He argues that “Fukuzawa Yukichi is a Meiji thinker. But at the same time he is a thinker for today.”22 Other historians take a less charitable view of Fukuzawa’s waffling. Irokawa Daikichi argues that had Fukuzawa followed the egalitarianism of his own argument to its logical conclusion, it would “have led directly to a linkup with the nationalism of the advocates of the people’s rights,” but that Fukuzawa, unfortunately in Irokawa’s view, compromised with the government.23 Ienaga SaburÖ is even less sympathetic to Fukuzawa, seeing him as devoid of guiding ideals. This lack of absolutes, argues Ienaga, ultimately prevents him from securing a basis for the realization of individualism, freedom, and equality.24 Like Ienaga, I think that the “fluidity” of Fukuzawa’s values disqualifies him as a proponent of pop-

19. See the editors’ characterization in Sources in Japanese Tradition, 2: 117. Irokawa Daikichi discusses Fukuzawa’s influence on the people’s rights movement in Culture of the Meiji Period, 59–68. 20. Fukuzawa, Gakumon no susume, 1. 21. For a discussion of this passage, see Carmen Blacker, The Japanese Enlightenment: A Study of the Writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 101–6. 22. Maruyama Masao, “Fukuzawa Yukichi in okeru chitsujo to ningen” (Human Beings and Order in Fukuzawa Yukichi) in Gendai Nihon shisÖ taikei, ed. Hidaka RokurÖ, vol. 34 of Kindaishugi (Tokyo: Chikuma shobÖ, 1964), 55. 23. Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period, ed. Marius B. Jansen (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 62. 24. Ienaga SaburÖ, Kindai seishin to sono genkai (The Modern Spirit and Its Limitations) (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1950), 202–4.

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ular government, despite his personal popularity.25 The slippage in Fukuzawa’s use of “nature” exemplifies his inability to imagine a stable point of resistance to government power. Nature instead appears to find its true expression in modern national government itself rather than in the people, however equal they may sometimes appear to be. Just how fundamentally Fukuzawa’s concept of nature disallows individual freedom can be seen in Bunmeiron no gairyaku (An Outline of a Theory of Civilization), published in 1875, which traces the stages of human development from the beginning of time. Fukuzawa begins with the first stage of barbarism or yaban. Barbarianism, far from being a “state of nature” either in the sense of being pre-social or in the sense of according with spontaneous human characteristics, is in fact less natural than what will come later. In barbarity, humanity is at odds with its internal nature and with the fearsome powers of physical nature outside itself (tenzen no chikara o osore). Only the gradual evolution of civilization or bunmei allows for the realization both of human nature (jinsei no tenzen) and of natural forces (shizen no sei).26 Civilization becomes the expression of nature and not the product of choice or will on the part of individuals. According to Fukuzawa, human beings are social animals by nature, and no moment of rupture exists between barbarity and civilization.27 This being the case, people have no need to negotiate contracts among themselves to produce a community or a government. Rather, when Fukuzawa writes of “contracts” (yakusoku), he refers to arrangements between the government and the people, not the agreements among people to produce a government.28 Whatever rights inhere in individual bodies are quickly engulfed in the rights of larger political entities. Fukuzawa argues in TsÜzoku minkenron (1878) that “rights are tied to each person’s body, and if there are rights in each person, then there are rights in each village and town and there are rights in each district and prefecture and if each nation is a collection of prefectures, each nation has rights.”29 In other words, the rights of the body do not function as

25. When Fukuzawa died in 1901, his funeral procession in Mita drew 1,500 students and 10,000 mourners from the admiring public. Carmen Blacker, The Japanese Enlightenment, 13. 26. Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, in Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshÜ, ed. Tomita Masafumi, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1980), 26–27. 27. Ibid., 47. 28. Fukuzawa, Gakumon no susume 3, 78; Fukuzawa, TsÜzoku minkenron (The Common Peoples’ Rights), in Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshÜ, ed. Tomita Masafumi, vol. 5 (Toyko: Iwanami shoten, 1981), 92. 29. Fukuzawa, TsÜzoku minkenron, 90–91.

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inalienable armor protecting individuals from the demands of others either at the moment of the origins of government or afterwards. Instead, the individual’s rights slide off his or her body into larger and larger corporeal formations until, inevitably, it is the national body, the government, that commands inalienable obedience as the most natural of entities. Interestingly, this series of mergers ends with the nation rather than with some international body. For Fukuzawa, the ultimate, indissoluble organic political body is the nation itself, and thus the rights inherent in individual bodies accrue ultimately to it alone. Fukuzawa’s concept of nature thus serves to distinguish and protect Japan from the rest of the world rather than to distinguish and protect individuals from their government. Even before the 1880s, when he publicly dissociated himself from the popular rights movement, Fukuzawa provided little in the way of compelling conceptual support for democratic government. Itagaki Taisuke’s “Democratic Leviathan” Political thinkers more dedicated to popular rights than Fukuzawa also accepted the premise of government as the nation’s body. Their goal was to graft the populace onto the governmental body, creating what might be called a “democratic leviathan” in which the people would be an anatomical part of the whole rather than mere “outside stimulus.” This tricky bit of surgery would result, they hoped, in a national body inhabited by both government and governed. Itagaki Taisuke (1837–1919), the founder of the JiyÜtÖ, or Liberal Party, used this image of organic wholeness to support appeals for popular participation. Although it should be noted that the claims of former samurai, especially those suffering from the misfortune of not coming from one of the four dominant domains, were foremost in Itagaki’s mind in the early 1870s, his demands for participatory government gradually broadened to include more and more of the male citizenry.30 In a petition submitted January 17, 1874, Itagaki and eight associates called for a representative assembly, insisting that “The establishment of a council chamber chosen by the people will create community of feeling between the government and the people, and they will unite into one body. Then and only then will the government 30. J. Mark Ramseyer and Frances M. Rosenbluth portray the gradual extension of democratic privileges as the ploy of oligarchs seeking to bolster their power within their own unstable coterie rather than as a result of their ideological commitment or desire to imitate European and American forms of government. Ramseyer and Rosenbluth, The Politics of Oligarchy: Institutional Choice in Imperial Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). On Itagaki in particular, see pp. 23–24.

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become strong.”31 This single body, this democratic leviathan, draws its strength not from being an expression of popular will but from creating an emotional bond between government and governed. Though hardly liberal or even truly democratic, the “community of feeling” in “one body” at least acknowledged that the populace had some place in national political life. To advocate this union of the people with the government is not to reclaim a wholeness that existed in the past. When Itagaki promotes his “democratic leviathan” as the future structure of the Japanese nation, he does not do so on the basis that it recaptures halcyon days in communal antiquity, as AndÖ ShÖeki proposed. Even less does Itagaki suggest that a just government is created by the people coming together in a pre-social state of nature and agreeing, through contract, on the proper form of government. Like Fukuzawa, Itagaki eschews any imaginary anthropology of prelapsarian humankind that so enthralled thinkers such as Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau. Indeed, the European (and American) enthusiasm for leapfrogging back over millennia to recapture rights held by human beings in a pre-social state found few adherents, even among Japanese seeking a basis for claims against their government. Without the West’s peculiar terms and obsessions—without the biblical creator of the natural world, without a Garden of Eden left behind through sin, without pastoral images of the archaic shepherd, without the fear of the solitary savage howling in the wilderness, without the voyages of discovery charting a return to nature—the vision of individuals subsisting alone and independent of all other human beings held little resonance in the non-West. For all the new ways in which nature was used to understand Japan’s new circumstances, nothing in those circumstances suggested that political theorists consider human beings in a “state of nature.” Rather, Itagaki’s position, and that of many other popular rights advocates, begins with the premise that not only society but also government already exists naturally. Their historical analysis is rooted in the immediate past of the Tokugawa period, rather than in conditions beyond memory. In a lecture delivered in 1882 around the time when the JiyÜtÖ was founded, Itagaki develops a narrative beginning with individuals not in a state of nature but under the bakufu. He describes the country’s history this way: “When the country was under the feudal system the people 31. Quoted in McLaren, “Japanese Government Documents,” 430, and de Bary, Sources of Japanese Tradition, 177.

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were kept in submission to the military power of their lords. . . . The people were like slaves, so they felt remote from the nation and lacked the slightest sense of community among themselves. . . . Each harbored a spirit of individuality, and all were lacking in a feeling of community. They were aware of their personal freedom, but they knew nothing of public freedom.”32 The problem, as he puts it, is to incorporate these persons who retained a “spirit of individuality” and “personal freedom” despite slavelike conditions into the new government where they can enjoy “public freedom.” Examined in light of the narrative assumptions of European natural rights theory, Itagaki’s is a twisted tale. It begins with a government rather than a state of nature, yet it suggests that people retain some private realm of freedom despite harsh conditions. To supply the people with public freedom, the government is called upon to create popular rights rather than being a popular creation itself. The only element of this description that echoes liberal European natural rights theory is that each person is accorded individuality and private freedom. While Itagaki’s insistence that natural individual bodies be allowed to join the public political body of the nation marks his views as more democratic than those of Fukuzawa, the problem for him, as for many other Japanese populists, is how to conceive of fair dealings between the government’s body and individual ones, given the natural frailty and powerlessness of the latter.

The Historiography of Meiji Ideologies The above examples are far from being comprehensive, but they are enough to suggest the array of meanings given the concept of nature in early Meiji political writings—nature defined as the world’s fundamental structure or law, as the natural forces governing the future, and as the primary political body of the national government. In some of these instances, nature is static; in some, it has temporal force. Terms are not always used consistently within the books and articles of single writers like Fukuzawa and Itagaki, or even within single documents. Clearly nature no longer automatically sanctions the existing government, but it is not the predestined ally of any other particular political position. Nature, instead, gyrates unpredictably across the political spectrum. And yet, strangely, intellectual historians of Japan have generally failed 32. McLaren, “Japanese Government Documents,” 605; Itagaki Taisuke, JiyÜtÖshi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1971), 2: 442–48.

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to stop and wonder at this prodigious fecundity. In an effort to stabilize meaning, the message of undecidability is forgotten and the contingency of early Meiji neatly obscured. As W. B. Gallie suggests, historians have always had difficulty depicting contingency, and yet it is this very contingency, the moment of uncertain meaning, that is the fundament of history. Gallie, however, absolves historians from making the effort to represent indeterminacy because he believes that the force of narrative inevitably smoothes its jagged edges.33 But Gallie, I believe, gives up too easily. Histories can suggest the flirtation with incoherence that lurks behind our attempts to make sense of the past. In the case of the early years of Meiji, we should neither ignore nor make too tidy the riot of nature. The very volatility of this discourse evinces a contest of the keenest sort over the basic structure of society and the world, the principles of political justice, and the possibilities of change. It seems to me, in short, that this fervent experimentation with possible forms of nature’s politicality suggests an ideological debate of expansive proportions in the early years of Meiji. In Japan’s Modern Myths, Carol Gluck has argued otherwise, suggesting that early Meiji political leaders were engaged with “pragmatic” issues rather than “ideological” ones. Gluck describes the first two decades as a period of delay where ideology is concerned: the early Meiji elite was “too caught up in the demanding work of modernization,” too busy with social change—the legal leveling of classes, compulsory education, industrialization, and all the national infrastructure of railroads, communications, and financial institutions—to concern themselves with ideology.34 Gluck argues that in comparison with the first two decades of the Meiji period, “the late 1880s marked an upsurge in ideological activity.”35 While I agree that it was not until the late 1880s that the “emperor-system” (tennosei) ideology of the Meiji state began to coalesce and develop full institutional expression, it seems to me that the documents and debates of early Meiji are nonetheless deeply ideological, and furthermore that late Meiji ideological debates were decisively shaped by those of the earlier period. Since the vexed term “ideology” is at issue here, a few words should be said about it. If this term is used as Gluck herself defines it to mean 33. W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 103. 34. Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 17. 35. Ibid., 18.

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the values that “render social life significant” and give individuals a meaningful sense of place within society,36 then it seems precisely these ideological values that are being articulated in documents such as the Charter Oath, the Imperial Rescript to the military, and memorials for a national assembly. Furthermore, I would argue that the values that render social life meaningful are being enacted through the legal leveling of classes, compulsory education, industrialization, and the other early Meiji policies of which she writes. If the term “ideology” means, in the phrase of Louis Althusser’s quoted by Gluck, “the lived relationship between men and their world,”37 then the lived relationship between early Meiji leaders and their world would have been no less ideological for embracing a wider range of ideas. Prior to the late 1880s, they simply lived a world of greater possibilities and greater confusion. Used in the Althusserian sense, “ideology” cannot be quantified; there cannot be more or less of it in a particular period. However, in particular periods, particular ideologies can become more clearly articulated, more widely agreed upon, more hegemonic. When that happens, as Gluck decisively illustrates for the late Meiji period, an established ideology is created, bolstered, and disseminated through social institutions of all kinds. Clearly, in this sense, there was in the early Meiji period less of the “emperor-system” ideology, less of an established ideology, but this does not mean there was less ideology, less concern to render social life meaningful, less of a “lived relationship between men and their world.” Indeed, the absence of an established ideology, the lack of intellectual closure, is precisely what makes these early Meiji decades ideologically important. As historian Irokawa Daikichi argues, “for a period of two decades [in the 1860s and 1870s] constant disputes centered on the vision of what modernized Japan should be.”38 The debates during these years about social value, justification of power, the identity of Japan in its expanded world—debates no less ideological for being fluid and wide-ranging— created the parameters within which the emperor system (tennosei), and the ideological consensus it represents, was finally developed in late Meiji. Of course, to accept the ideological importance of these debates is not

36. Ibid., 6–8. Here Gluck follows the definition of Clifford Geertz. 37. Quoted in Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, 7. 38. Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 52. Eugene Soviak concurs with Irokawa in Soviak, “An Early Meiji Intellectual in Politics: Baba Tatsui and the JiyÜtÖ,” in Modern Japanese Leadership: Transition and Change, ed. Bernard S. Silberman and Harry D. Harootunian (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1966), 128.

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to understand the role of “nature” within them. We must return to the problem of nature’s potency in political discourse posed at the beginning of this chapter. Why was nature so much a part of the ideological experiments of these years? Why was there such interest and energy devoted to trying to define nature in relation to society and to individuals? What explains the constant if often contradictory recourse to nature in, for instance, the Charter Oath and the work of Fukuzawa? A great many writers have suggested that the primary or only reason was the force and prestige of Western thought, which stood behind the concept of nature in these years. In describing the moment “after 1874 [when] works on human liberty and rights appeared like a flood,”39 historian Kada Tetsuji insists that tenpu jinkenron or natural rights theory “was not an idea which the Japanese of this period invented or created. As with many of the new ideas of the time it was a political concept of European heritage.”40 The trauma of contact with Europe and America disrupted Japanese culture to the extent that new ideas could be imported in toto either out of respect for or as a defensive action against an enemy camp.41 One of the most cohesive presentations of the idea that early Meiji politics imported Western “natures” wholesale can be found in the work of historian Albert Craig. According to Craig, early Meiji Japan experienced an accelerated replay of European ideas on nature. He tells us that “the Confucian ri was replaced by Enlightenment natural law in the 1870’s,” and then “the kindly natural law of the 1870’s was replaced by the amoral, struggle-for-survival natural law of the 1880’s.”42 In other words, Japan experienced Europe’s seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in a mere two decades: it was blessed with an intellectual efficiency fueled by nationalism.

39. Kada Tetsuji, Meiji shoki shakai keizai shisoshi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1937), 605–6. 40. Ibid., 603. 41. Postwar historian Irokawa Daikichi concurs with Kada Tetsuji’s sentiment that Japan was “engulfed” by the influence of European and American civilization. The intellectual exchange between the cultures is described as an effort by the Japanese leaders “to penetrate the enemies’ camp, grasp their weapons of civilization for use against them, and then turn to use them in the national interest.” The Culture of the Meiji Period, 51. Among these “weapons of civilization” were ideas of natural rights and natural equality. However, Irokawa argues that a new, indigenous popular consciousness of rights rose up to meet these imported ideas. 42. Albert M. Craig, “Fukuzawa Yukichi: The Philosophical Foundations of Meiji Nationalism,” in Political Development in Modern Japan, ed. Robert E. Ward (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 147.

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Japan’s accomplishment of this apparently inevitable evolution of ideas does not seem, in Craig’s account, to have been fraught by the paradoxes, subtleties, and competing arguments that fueled Western debates and that might be assumed to accompany the introduction of centuries of alien ideas to Japan. Instead, argues Craig, the introduction of “kindly natural law” from Mill, Rousseau, and Blackstone “led at times to intellectual confusion” only because the works were not translated in chronological order. “But in general,” Craig continues, “the basic notions of European natural rights were simplified and taken in as a single system.” 43 In other words, the acceleration of European time is accompanied by a condensation of European concepts into a “single system.” Given Mill’s contempt for “nature” in political and philosophical discourse,44 Rousseau’s ecstatic view of the state of nature, and Blackstone’s stout Tory defense of King and Parliament as naturally supreme, it was surely more than the order in which books were translated that created intellectual confusion. The contradictions among the ideas available from Europe cannot be resolved by an appeal to chronology. Craig does not explain how these competing concepts of “natural rights” could be boiled down to a “single system” or what this system looked like in the context of Japan, but he insists that it was able to provide Japan with a new ethic in the 1870s. This single system of ethics held sway for a decade, only to be overturned in the late 1870s and 1880s by “the more diverse tendencies of the later nineteenth century”45—the “amoral” influences of “positivism, materialism, utilitarianism and particularly Spencer’s Social Darwinism,” which have no “positive social values.”46 According to this type of analysis, ideas of nature remain recognizably “Western” in the context of Japan despite, or rather because of, Japan’s destiny to reenact the Western narrative. Problems of translation do not readily arise. Other historians, although also conscious of the prestige of the West in early Meiji, are more sensitive to the difficulties of translating from one tradition to another. Western concepts, they argue, were not swallowed whole. Earl Kinmouth, for instance, has explored the pitfalls that beset American and European works translated for Japanese readers. Kinmouth persuasively argues that “at the opening point of contact ideas between two cultures cannot be trans43. Ibid., 105. Rousseau, Mill, and Blackstone are the writers mentioned by Craig. 44. See John Stuart Mill, “Nature,” in Nature and Utility of Religion (New York: BobbsMerrill, 1958). 45. Craig, Political Development, 105. 46. Ibid., 121.

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mitted totally unaltered from one to another. The translator may not even try such a transmission but may use the translation as a form of disguise for his own thoughts or seek to wrap his own ideas in the aura and prestige of a foreign work.”47 One technique in dealing with the problem of translation is to concentrate on particular terms. With specific reference to the problem of nature, historian Matsumoto Sannosuke argues that, “when a nation which has already developed a highly sophisticated culture encounters and begins to absorb another from outside, the preexisting culture intervenes to provide a frame of reference. Foreign cultural components are selected and digested in terms of familiar concepts and vocabulary.” 48 According to Matsumoto, the concept of ten (heaven or nature) from the Confucian tradition provided a means for absorbing natural rights theory because over the course of the Tokugawa period it had accrued the meaning of “life” granted by heaven and therefore deserving of respect. In the bakumatsu and early Meiji periods, it is thus available to translate “natural rights.” As Matsumoto describes it, ten “figures prominently in the fusion of Western ideas and principles and serves as an effective bridge to understanding.”49 While ten is a widely used and important term in discussions of nature’s politics, Matsumoto is, I believe, overly optimistic in his assurance that the term was able to transfer the full radicality of European natural rights theory to Japan. The idea that individual life is “heaven-granted” augments its value and prestige, but, as we have seen, many Japanese texts treat not only individual existence but also society as a whole as “heavengranted.” This being the case, individual rights obtain no privileged leverage over society’s rights simply on account of their naturalness. As we observed in the work of Itagaki and Fukuzawa—who Matsumoto believes was particularly adept at introducing Western ideas50—individual rights merge with society’s rights with great ease. To speak of ten even within the changing Confucian tradition described by Matsumoto is not to speak of a time antecedent to all government. To enjoy life granted by 47. Earl H. Kinmouth, “Nakamura Keiu and Samuel Smiles: A Victorian Confucian and a Confucian Victorian,” American Historical Review 85 (June 1980), 555. 48. Matsumoto Sannosuke, “The Idea of Heaven: A Tokugawa Foundation for Natural Rights Theory,” in Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period, eds. Tetsuo Najita and Irwin Scheiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 181. 49. Ibid. 50. Matsumoto Sannosuke, Kindai Nihon seiji to ningen (The Politics and People of Modern Japan) (Tokyo: SÖbunsha, 1966), 61. He calls Fukuzawa and KatÖ Hiroyuki “a pair of matchless jewels [sÖheki], or the two greatest authorities of the enlightenment movement.”

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ten is not to revel in a pre-social state of nature, nor do Meiji thinkers use the concept to attempt to construct such a phantasm. Thus the effectiveness of ten as a bridge and its facility at “fusing” Western and Japanese ideas is questionable. Historian Ishida Takeshi also takes issue with Matsumoto’s view that Confucian terms readily conveyed Western theories. In fact, he argues that “in the end, to the extent that our country did absorb the ideas of natural law, they became distorted by Confucianism and, with this foundation of Confucian ideas of natural order, nature and logic, existence and standards were easily unified in the name of fundamental modern scientific positivism.”51 As Ishida makes clear, it is not natural rights theory that ten is adept at transmitting but the more communitarian visions of the organic state. Certainly international pressures and perspectives broadened the scope of intellectual experimentation in the Meiji period, and the coincidence of Japanese and non-Japanese uses of “nature” as a guide to human political behavior added to nature’s prestige. My argument that ten and related terms do not convey the full radicality of some uses of “natural rights” in western Europe and America does not negate the possibility that ten was used to ends quite radical in the Japanese context. And that is the point. Focusing on the West and problems of translation deflects attention from the context of debate within Meiji. While comparisons with European and American traditions may help those of us familiar with them to understand distinctive uses in the Japanese case, the éclat of the West is insufficient to explain the many references to nature in Meiji Japan. Ishida, who counters Matsumoto’s optimism on the score of translation of terms, also points out that “enlightenment natural law ideas were at an ebb tide” in Europe, so their use in Meiji Japan could hardly have been a matter of mindless reflection.52 Japanese authors had to go out of their way to discover this form of “nature” in contemporary Europe. They chose to employ concepts of nature for their own purposes, not because it was the destiny of Meiji debates to replay European debates in pale or belated reflection. In order to understand the power of nature, it is necessary to look beyond issues of translation to the function of this concept in the political environment of the time. 51. Ishida Takeshi, Meiji seiji shisÖshi kenkyÜ (Studies in the History of Meiji Political Thought) (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1954), 68–69. 52. Ibid., 69.

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Nature’s Indeterminate Determinism The question of why nature was so much a part of the ideological experiments of these years can best be answered by looking at the concept’s own paradoxical force in political argument. On the one hand, it had become unmoored from its Tokugawa uses and thus was open to reinterpretation; on the other hand, it remained cloaked in the guise of an infallible, irreproachable guide for politics. Although there was no consensus on where this guide would lead, both the Tokugawa heritage and the writings of some newly discovered European and American authors presented nature as a reliable authority in turbulent times. Because of this deterministic quality, nature became a powerful tool in the hands of early Meiji authors when they wished to evoke an unchallengeable standard outside the exigencies of the moment. Whether nature was understood to determine the optimal standard for fairness and justice or merely the inevitable cruelties of life, its dictates must perforce be acknowledged. However, as the examples discussed above demonstrate, precisely what nature determines was wide open to interpretation. In other words, nature determines indeterminately in the early Meiji discourse. It is this paradoxical quality, this unstable determinism fixed neither by Tokugawa history nor Western transmission and certainly not yet by the Meiji state, which places the concept in contention. This paradox explains both nature’s power and its volatility in early Meiji debates. As I discussed in Chapter 1, Maruyama Masao is deeply suspicious of “nature” in political discourse precisely because of this deterministic quality. What he fails to take into account are the specific historical circumstances of the early Meiji debate that made this determinism subversive because it was not contained within an established ideology supporting an existing government. In other words, despite Maruyama’s admiration for Fukuzawa Yukichi’s “fluid values” and resistance to categorical thinking, he fails to register the historical fluidity of the concept of nature. In the early Meiji period, when the government had not yet wrested control of the concept, nature could become a place of refuge for the political imagination. The concept did not inhibit invention but, rather, gave writers license to reinvent the world. Shizen could underwrite sakui as a support for popular participation and alternative forms of community. Meiji writers looked to systems of natural law, to natural forces acting in history and government, to the natural political bodies participating in society. In some senses, these two decades saw a liberation not from

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nature, as Maruyama would have wished, but to nature as a standard for the correctness, justice, or inevitability outside government control. If nature had not carried the force of necessity, it would not have been credited as a basis for political intervention. It could subvert precisely because it seemed deterministic. Many scholars have seen the Meiji Ishin as a period of controlled transformation during which the oligarchic leadership, prescient in its grasp of the requirements of modernization, set about making the necessary institutional and economic changes to secure wealth and power for the nation. Historian William Beasley, for instance, argues that “what is particularly impressive about the statecraft of the Japanese leaders is the clarity with which they understood the historical process through which they were leading the nation.”53 However, the indeterminate determinism of nature testifies to a revolutionary situation in early Meiji ideology where there was much less prescience and cohesive autocratic control than Beasley suggests. Instead of a single vision of the political future, there were multiple, contending ideas of Japan’s goals. Even among the Meiji oligarchs, as the recent scholarship of Igarashi Akio demonstrates, there was more than one perception of the goals of the “ishin” or “restoration.”54 Among the greater population, the plotting of bakumatsu history ranged even more widely. Historian George Wilson shows that “the” end of bakufu was not a single story of cause and effect but several “coincident struggles” that can be delineated along at least four major and incompatible plot lines, from the millenarianism of peasants cavorting in the streets to the romantic loyalism of imperial supporters.55 As Wilson’s study indicates, the Meiji transformation resembled a free-forall more than it did a corporation’s managed expansion. The indeterminacy of a basic concept such as nature is a measure of just how radically open the political possibilities were in the early Meiji period. The radical reconfiguration of ideas within Japan during this period bears some resemblance to American revolutionary rhetoric one hundred years earlier, at least as far as the explosive potential of nature is con53. William Beasley, “Meiji Political Institutions,” in The Nineteenth Century, vol. 5 of The Cambridge History of Japan, ed. Marius B. Jansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 697. Earlier modernization theorists took the same view of the oligarchs, stressing their single-minded aim of placing Japan “in the family of advanced, respected, and civilized nations.” George Akita, Foundations of Constitutional Government in Modern Japan: 1868–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 172. 54. Igarashi Akio, Meiji ishin no shisÖ (Yokohama: Seiori shobÖ, 1996). 55. George Wilson, Patriots and Redeemers in Japan: Motives in the Meiji Restoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 10.

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cerned. American patriots also justified reordering the world through reference to “nature” and to “natural rights.” For them as well the concept of nature was potent and potentially dangerous. Indeed, historian Daniel Rodgers argues that “of all the big and booming terms to come out of the American Revolution, the most powerful and least containable was Natural Rights.”56 The colonists, grasping all available ammunition in their struggle against the British, combined their peculiar position in the “new” world—a mere two hundred years of English habitation—with the legal concept of rights, fusing, as Rodgers argues, “the state of nature and the wilds of America . . . for the urgent purposes of argument.”57 Reasoning from a position “antecedent to all earthly government” was fine in revolutionary circumstances, but it created a permanent reservoir of claims against the existing government. Commenting on this predicament, Rodgers observes, “As long as the words [“natural rights”] gave men license to look backward, past the screen of law and custom to the origins of political justice, the rhetoric of rights was bound to be unstable and unpredictable.”58 For this reason, as American independence was achieved and the new government was formed, those who had happily brandished nature against the British began to worry about its volatility within the newly constituted nation. Rodgers contends that, “For those on the inside of the new governments in 1776, the pressing talk was the containment and employment of power. From talk of Natural Rights the patriot leaders turned quickly to the construction of constitutions and alliances, cashing in their pre-independence citations of Locke for the soberer maxims of Montesquieu. In this setting the centripetal impulses in the language of Natural Rights became a liability.”59 During both the American Revolution and the Meiji Ishin, different though they were, the concept of nature provided ammunition for destroying the old form of government because of the quality of indeterminate determinism that it acquired in revolutionary circumstances. After these revolutions, it became a liability to those in power for exactly the same reason. Just as American post-revolutionary leaders had done, the Meiji oligarchy, the small group of leaders primarily from the domains of ChÖshÜ and Satsuma, also became increasingly wary of nature’s subversive po56. Daniel T. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 45. 57. Ibid., 55. 58. Ibid., 60. 59. Ibid., 57.

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tential as they grew more certain of their power. While appeals to nature had been useful in their arsenal against the old regime of the bakufu and against each other in internal power struggles, nature’s restless fecundity needed to be tamed and controlled, suppressed where it could not be fashioned to fit governmental needs. Phrases such as “tenchi no kÖdÖ,” which Kido KÖin had inserted in the 1868 Charter Oath, began to appear dangerous rather than as the safe compromises they initially seemed. To Fukuzawa Yukichi, as early as 1875, such language, implying as it did a commitment to universal standards, erased grounds for differentiating Japan from the rest of the world. Fukuzawa feared nature in this universal form. As Maruyama Masao observes, Fukuzawa instead “preferred patriotism which he took upon himself to call ‘prejudice’ as against the universalist corollary of the concepts of ‘tenchi no kÖdÖ’ (universal justice) or ‘benri’ (reason).”60 Toward the end of the 1870s and early 1880s, government officials and their supporters began to make a concerted effort to corral the concept of nature and contain its energies. As I shall argue in the following chapters, the variety of contentious natures in the early Meiji period was gradually pared down. Oligarchic ideologues, KatÖ Hiroyuki primary among them, sought to wrest control of the concept. In so doing, they transformed the old Tokugawa conception stressing nature’s spatial qualities into one that envisioned nature as a temporal force operating through society and the state much as it did through geology and biology. The trigger for this shift from space to time was the influx of writings on social evolution, but it also accorded with the keen sense of change that in various forms had been the matrix of the redemptory movements of the bakumatsu period.61 In response to the vast energies that had been unleashed during that upheaval, the Meiji leadership attempted, briefly and not entirely successfully, to develop a cosmopological vision of Japan geared to a relentless progressive tempo. 60. Maruyama, “Fukuzawa, Uchimura, and Okakura,” 596. 61. Wilson, Patriots and Redeemers, 13–28.

chapter 4

KatÖ Hiroyuki: Turning Nature into Time

More clearly and more decisively than anyone else, KatÖ Hiroyuki threw down the gauntlet on behalf of the government in the fight over nature’s political standards.1 In 1881, KatÖ turned decidedly in favor of autocratic control, relying in large part on social Darwinism. He claimed, in short, that oligarchic rule was the correct form of government for Meiji Japan according to the dictates of natural evolution. His challenge was met by Baba Tatsui, Ueki Emori, and others who found in nature a tool against KatÖ and against oligarchic power. This fierce debate, raging from 1881 to 1883, was the turning point in the development of the Meiji state, distilling definitions of nature and clarifying what was at stake. Whereas during the preceding two decades concepts of nature ricocheted throughout the volatile political world, they now began to crystallize in positions both favorable and unfavorable to the government.2 The conventional way of understanding the thrust of KatÖ’s argument is to see it as an attack on liberal democratic natural rights (tenpu).3 This 1. KatÖ’s announcement that he no longer supported the people’s rights movement was broadcast through a government notice issued to all prefectures by the Ministry of Home Affairs. See Matsumoto Sannosuke, Kindai Nihon seiji to ningen (Tokyo: SÖbunsha, 1966), 61. 2. The debate instigated by KatÖ electrified not only the elite. Irokawa Daikichi argues that “this controversy was not confined to the highest intellectual circles; it spread to the local activists of the liberal movement and on down to long-forgotten young men in the countryside.” The Culture of the Meiji Period, ed. Marius B. Jansen (Princton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 65. 3. See, for example, Kada Tetsuji, Meiji shoki shakai keizai shisÖshi (Tokyo: Iwanami

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view relies, of course, on the belief that natural rights theory as defined by European and American thinkers penetrated Japanese intellectual circles. For Matsumoto Sannosuke, who contends that this foreign philosophy was widely adopted, KatÖ’s attack on it is a prescient blow against a real threat to oligarchic clan government.4 Even Ishida Takeshi, who doubts the extent to which this philosophy could be translated into Japan, still defines “natural rights” as a major threat to the oligarchy and views the theory of natural evolution as the “ultimate weapon” against natural rights theory.5 By the majority of commentators, KatÖ’s opponents are seen as partisans of European Enlightenment philosophy. As for KatÖ’s own views, the conventional perspective describes him as purveying reactionary ideas derived from the West alone or in some combination with indigenous philosophy. Those who see KatÖ’s theory as purely “Western” include historians David Abosch, who claims that “the organic-evolutionary concept of the state in [Meiji] Japan was entirely of nineteenth-century Austro-German derivation,”6 and Albert Craig, who sees the 1880s as the time when “kindly natural rights theory” was replaced with another set of Western theories, particularly the harsh views of social evolution. For these historians, the ideological struggle in Meiji Japan is a replay of a previous European and American skirmish. For those who see KatÖ’s position as a combination of Western and Japanese ideas, the struggle is slightly more nuanced. Ishida argues that in order to oppose natural rights, Confucian revivalists sought an alliance with Western organic social evolutionary theories.7 Through this shotgun marriage between Confucianism and Western social evolution, the government moved to consolidate its control over nature and other ideological concepts. The 1881–83 debate in Ishida’s interpretation thus becomes a case of a traditionalist Eastern philosophy combining with a reactionary

shoten, 1937), 626; Hagihara Nobutoshi, Baba Tatsui (Tokyo: ChÜÖ kÖronsha, 1967), 185; and Irokawa, Culture of the Meiji Period, 65. 4. Matsumoto Sannosuke, “KatÖ Hiroyuki—tenkÖ ni tsuite,” ShisÖ no kagaku (May 1962), 34–39. 5. Ishida Takeshi, Meiji seiji shisÖshi kenkyÜ (Studies in the History of Meiji Political Thought) (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1954), 67. 6. David Abosch goes even further than Craig, claiming that organic social theory was purely non-Japanese. Abosch pinpoints the origins of this idea precisely: “In the period we are considering, 1868–1890, the organic-evolutionary concept of the state in Japan was entirely of nineteenth-century Austro-German derivation.” Abosch, “KatÖ Hiroyuki and the Introduction of German Political Thought” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1964), 11. 7. Ishida’s argument is far more nuanced than any synopsis can convey. For his argument, see Meiji seiji shisÖshi kenkyÜ, chapter 1, part 3.

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Western social theory in order to battle imported progressive ideas on Japanese soil. Ishida writes that “in order to retain Confucianism— especially its moral teachings, it was necessary to exclude natural law theories. . . . In this case, the ultimate weapon used was nothing other than the theory of organic society absorbed from the West.”8 Like his teacher Maruyama, Ishida reads “natural rights” as invention or sakui.9 Therefore, the so-called supporters of “natural rights” like Baba and Ueki are deemed to have dissociated politics from nature and to have moved Japan closer to modernity. For Ishida, KatÖ represents the oppressive force of nature in both its Confucian and Western forms against the liberal thinkers like Baba Tatsui and Ueki Emori who have freed themselves from nature’s determinism and are trying to create a new, more democratic Japan on non-natural grounds. Following Maruyama’s lead, Ishida reads the Meiji debates as a replay of the controversy pitting nature against invention, that core element of modern consciousness. I disagree with the conventional views of this debate in their characterizations both of KatÖ’s position and of those of his opponents. KatÖ’s position, it seems to me, is a nuanced defense of oligarchic power that combines elements of social Darwinism and organic social theory with the promotion of an inventive elite transcending evolution and capable of directing it. In fact, as I will demonstrate, KatÖ deploys several forms of nature as he seeks to convince his readers of three points: 1) the naturalness of social cohesion, 2) the natural and unrelenting thrust of social evolution, and 3) the necessity of a non-natural elite to guide society in this dangerous, changing world. KatÖ is neither a mere reactionary traditionalist, nor a supporter of organic social harmony, nor a pure social Darwinian. The form of nature he foregrounds is relentless and changing, but his political response to this nature is not to bow before its dictates. Indeed, he combines shizen and sakui to support the existing government in ways contrary to Maruyama’s either-or prescription. On the other hand, those activists and writers arguing against KatÖ agree neither with each other—as the works of Baba Tatsui and Ueki Emori as well as the constantly fracturing party coalitions indicate—nor 8. Ishida, Meiji seiji shisÖshi kenkyÜ, 67. 9. Maruyama Masao argues that since “the rights of men are natural rights, it would seem superficially that we should classify [natural rights theory] as a theory of natural order. But a more careful examination shows directly that the opposite is true. The ‘rights of man’ in question are not those embedded in any actually existing social order. On the contrary, they are the concrete embodiments of the autonomy of man, who can establish a positive social order.” Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, and Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), 313.

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with a single tradition borrowed from the West. Tenpu jinken (natural rights) becomes a code for opposition in general rather than the basis of philosophical consensus among progressives. Indeed, as I will demonstrate by focusing on their uses of the concept of nature, neither Baba nor Ueki actually advocated positions akin to any of the various views of “natural rights” promulgated in Enlightenment thought. Baba, like KatÖ himself, was in fact deeply indebted to the social Darwinian theories of Herbert Spencer, and Ueki highlights the physical qualities of the human body in his demands for political participation in a manner akin to some kokugakusha (nativist) writers and even akin to the populism of the dancing “ee ja nai ka” masses who filled the streets in the bakumatsu period. I argue that the 1881–83 debate, instead of being a replay of Western disputes between natural rights and social Darwinism or between invention and nature, was a contest over definitions of nature, with all sides seeking to assert “nature” as they defined it. At stake was the development of a natural standard against which the existing government could be measured. While KatÖ moved on behalf of the oligarchic government to secure “nature” as its intellectual prerogative, Baba and Ueki sought to secure nature’s authority for greater democracy. In my view, instead of failing to free themselves sufficiently from nature, opponents of KatÖ failed to construct a sufficiently nuanced alliance between nature and individualism.

KatÖ Hiroyuki and TenkÖ It is difficult to feel for KatÖ Hiroyuki the retrospective affection that historians sometimes develop for their subjects. Arrogant and self-serving, this samurai from Tajima (now HyÖgo prefecture) exhibits an overbearing confidence in himself and his ideas.10 He manages to maintain this pose, if that is what it is, even when he changes his mind. Although he claimed years later in his autobiography, KatÖ Hiroyuki jijoden (1916), that the angry debate of the early 1880s shook his confidence,11

10. According to Ienaga SaburÖ, lack of self-doubt was characteristic of the Meiji generation, including not only KatÖ but also Fukuzawa Yukichi, Ueki Emori, and many others. See Robert N. Bellah, “Ienaga Saburo and the Search for Meaning in Modern Japan,” in Japanese Attitudes toward Modernization, ed. Marius B. Jansen (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1965), 420–22. 11. Tabata Shinobu, KatÖ Hiroyuki, 3rd ed. (Tokyo: Furukawa kÖbunkan, 1969), 92. Tabata points out that whatever self-assurance KatÖ may have lacked in the face of the rebuttals to Jinken shinsetsu, he ultimately relished the debate.

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his self-doubt is well hidden during this period as he berates his opponents for their “delusions,” “wild fancies,” and “daydreams.”12 Despite these expressions of contempt for the views of others, KatÖ’s writings bear the mark of a vigorous and honest interest in ideas. Even his flights of sarcasm and bursts of ridicule do not obscure an attractive intellectual intensity. He was a man of strong mind, a voracious scholar well read in many traditions and fearless in his breadth of conception. If not affection, KatÖ certainly commands admiration.13 KatÖ Hiroyuki began his career of political commentary by privately circulating a manuscript called Tonarigusa (Neighboring Grasses) in 1860. Although it purported to criticize China, its implicit target was the bakufu’s inability to meet the challenge of the West. In the published works that followed, Seiyo kakkoku seisui kyojaku ichiranhyÖ (A Table of the Rise and Fall, Strengths and Weaknesses of Various Western Nations, 1865), KÖeki mondÖ (Questions and Answers on Commerce, 1865), and Rikken seitai ryaku (An Outline of Constitutional Government, 1868), KatÖ tried to enlighten his compatriots on Western practices. He advocated not only trade with Western nations, but even a constitutional government for Japan. This bold recommendation was augmented by Shinsei tai’i (An Outline of True Government) in 1870 and Kokutai shinron (A New Theory of National Polity) in 1874, the two works that he later repudiated. The civilization-and-enlightenment movement or bunmei kaika—Baba and Ueki included—took KatÖ for one of themselves, slightly older and slightly more cautious perhaps, but nonetheless in the same camp, seeking to remodel Japanese government on the precepts of democratic civilizations they took to be more advanced. Then, on November 22, 1881,14 the intellectual and political world was rattled by KatÖ’s famous tenkÖ, or great change of principle.15 An

12. KatÖ uses terms such as mÖsÖ and kÜsÖ. See, for instance, KatÖ Hiroyuki, Jinken shinsetsu, in Nishi Amane, KatÖ Hiroyuki, ed. Uete Michiari (Tokyo: ChÜÖ kÖronsha, 1984), 413. 13. KatÖ himself is interested in the relationship between individual temperament and intellectual position. For instance, in chapter 4 of Jinken shinsetsu, he mentions Rousseau’s personal characteristics as one of the causes of his “unfortunate” doctrines in Contrat Social (414–15). 14. The dates I have used are those found in Shimoide Hayayoshi, “Kokutai shinron kaidai” (Explanatory Notes on Kokutai shinron), in Meiji bunka zenshÜ, vol. 5, ed. Yoshino SakuzÖ (Tokyo: Nihon hyÖronsha, 1927), 12–15, in which the government notice and KatÖ’s newspaper advertisement are reprinted. The date is erroneously given as October 1881 in Hagihara, Baba Tatsui, 182, and as January 1882 in Matsumoto Sannosuke, “KatÖ Hiroyuki no tenkÖ,” in Kindai Nihon seiji to ningen (Tokyo: SÖbunsha, 1966), 61. 15. The term tenkÖ is sometimes translated as “conversion” (see Bob T. Wakabayashi,

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official government notice from the Ministry of Home Affairs (NaimushÖ) sent to all prefectures announced that KatÖ’s former support for popular rights had ended. The gist of the message was that KatÖ’s previous works Shinsei tai’i and Kokutai shinron were based on “mistaken points of view.” The government, fearing the influence of these subversive documents, declared them “out-of-print” and ordered prefectural governments to forbid future sales of the books.16 Unlike many efforts at the time to suppress dissent, this government notice was produced with the full sanction and approval of the suppressed author.17 Two days later, on November 24, 1881, in a public notice in the YÜbin Hochi newspaper,18 KatÖ himself declared his own volumes no longer fit for public consumption. He would, he promised, soon produce a detailed explanation of the new truth that he had acquired, and in the advertisement he grandiosely names “Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and lately Lamarck, Goethe, and Darwin” as among the sources for his new ideas.19 Eleven months later, in October 1882, KatÖ fulfilled his public promise by publishing Jinken shinsetsu (A Reconsideration of Human Rights), attacking his previous position and those who still held it. This tenkÖ of KatÖ can be seen as a renunciation of one form of nature in politics for another. In fact, as KatÖ himself put it, he had exchanged tenpu jinkenron—natural rights theory—for shinkaron—evolutionary theory.20 TenkÖ, the dramatic reversals of opinion that mark modern Japanese intellectual and political history, have rightfully attracted a good deal of attention.21 During the 1930s in particular, leftists and liberals were fre-

“KatÖ Hiroyuki and Confucian Natural Rights, 1861–1870,” Harvard Journal of Asian Studies 44 [1984], 469, and Robert H. Mitchell, Thought Control in Prewar Japan [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976]), but I have generally used the Japanese term. “Conversion” is unsatisfactory to me because it implies a sudden change of religious belief rather than a public reneging of principle. Terms like “apostate” or “turncoat” are also inappropriate because, viewed from the mainstream of Japanese politics, tenkÖ invariably marks renunciation of a dissident position in favor of one acceptable to the government. 16. This notice is reprinted in Shimoide, “Kokutai shinron kaidai,” 14–15. 17. Previously, KatÖ had argued that the freedom to write and publish was entirely outside government jurisdiction. See KatÖ, Kokutai shinron (A New Theory of National Polity), in Kindai Nihon shisÖ taikei, vol. 1 of Meiji shisÖshÜ, ed. Matsumoto Sannosuke (Tokyo: Chikuma shobÖ, 1976), 92. 18. Maejima Hisoka founded YÜbin Hochi in 1872 as a national newspaper using postal employees to gather information. By the mid-1880s, the paper floundered financially and was revived by none other than one of KatÖ’s critics, Yano Fumio. 19. The advertisement is reprinted in Shimoide, “Kokutai shinron kaidai,” 15. 20. KatÖ, Jinken shinsetsu, 416. For a discussion of KatÖ’s tenkÖ in these terms, see Hagihara, Baba Tatsui, 183, and Kada, Meiji shoki shakai keizai shisÖshi, 607. 21. Most research on tenkÖ deals primarily with the 1930s. See Mitchell, Thought Control in Prewar Japan; Patricia Steinhoff, TenkÖ: Ideology and Societal Integration in Prewar

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quently persuaded to abandon their criticism of the government and embrace compliance. The demoralization of government critics was standardized in 1931 when the government created a five-step scale of repentance to achieve a full purge of radical thought. Ideally, the suspect would be induced not only to give up all ideas contrary to government policy, but also to renounce involvement even in legal social movements. This “administration of tenkÖ” was based on the belief that, after all, “the suspects were Japanese too.”22 In general, the pattern of tenkÖ in the Meiji period was far less regularized. Matsumoto Sannosuke points out that KatÖ Hiroyuki and others at the time cannot be said to have been directly coerced in the way that later thinkers were. Instead, he describes their actions as “adaptations to circumstances” under gentle pressure.23 KatÖ’s tenkÖ has produced a great deal of dissension among modern scholars, and it is worth examining their differences. On the one hand, there are those who dismiss absolutely the idea that KatÖ really shifted his political position. Bob T. Wakabayashi and David Abosch both contend that KatÖ’s position in Jinken shinsetsu is more a continuation of his previous views than a radical break with them. Wakabayashi examines the Confucian-laced draught served up in KatÖ’s writings from the 1860s and 1870s and declares that “it is untenable, if not meaningless, to argue that KatÖ underwent a simple ‘conversion.’ . . . ”24 David Abosch takes much the same view, arguing that KatÖ’s earlier works were Confucian in tone and supportive of state prerogative from the beginning.25 On the other hand, Jinken shinsetsu has also been read as a radical reversal of position. The great point of contention here is between those who detect liberalism in KatÖ’s early works and those who do not. Prewar Japanese historians seem particularly taken with KatÖ’s liberal cre-

Japan (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991); Kazuko Tsurumi, Social Change and the Individual: Japan Before and After Defeat in World War II (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970); and the three-volume TenkÖ: shisÖ no kagaku kenkyÜkai (TenkÖ: Association for the Scientific Study of Thought) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1959–62). For a discussion of postwar tenkÖ, see Rikki Kersten, “Diverging Discourses: Shimizu IkutarÖ, Maruyama Masao and Postwar TenkÖ,” Nissan Occasional Paper Series, no. 20 (Oxford: Nissan Institute, 1994), especially pp. 5–11. 22. Mitchell, Thought Control in Prewar Japan, 127. 23. See Matsumoto Sannosuke’s comments on KatÖ in the six-person roundtable discussion, Odagiri Hideo et al., “Nihon shisÖshi to tenkÖ,” in TenkÖ: ShisÖ no kagaku kenkyÜkai, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1962), 372–74. 24. Wakabayashi, “KatÖ Hiroyuki,” 491. 25. Abosch, “KatÖ Hiroyuki,” 390–94.

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dentials. Kawahara JikichirÖ in his 1934 study of Shinsei tai’i writes that “the KatÖ of that time was deeply tinted with liberalism and individualism. Although he speaks of the Golden Mean, he is fundamentally liberal, and one would certainly say that his kind of thinking is entirely at odds with the regulatory system of today.”26 Yoshino SakuzÖ, a liberal historian in the 1920s, points out that it was KatÖ who first introduced the terms for “communism” and “socialism” into Japan’s political vocabulary in 1870, but Yoshino recognizes that KatÖ was not a partisan of those doctrines. Instead, Yoshino declares, KatÖ “believed in natural rights (tenpu jinken); he gloried in the English concepts of individualism and liberal politics.”27 This characterization of KatÖ’s early writings creates a narrative of dramatic change. A contemporary scholar, Hagihara Nobutoshi, also says that KatÖ’s move was an “unmistakable” (magiremonaku) tenkÖ, but he appreciates the candor with which KatÖ adopted his new stance. The step of declaring his change of conviction in the newspapers strikes Hagihara as “refreshing” (sawayakasa),28 and indeed there was nothing secretive about KatÖ’s public move. A middle position of sorts has been staked out by those who believe that KatÖ broke with his former progressive ideas but see the change happening earlier. Matsumoto Sannosuke and Ishida Takeshi both view KatÖ’s change of heart as a genuine reversal of opinion, but both detect the seeds of his renunciation in earlier work. As Ishida argues, “The foreshadowing of KatÖ’s tenkÖ is discoverable from the very beginning in his dazzling works on natural rights.”29 Matsumoto points to KatÖ’s negative response to the 1874 proposal of Soejima Taneomi, GÖtÖ ShÖjirÖ, Itagaki Taisuke, and others advocating a representative assembly.30 Given that KatÖ had advocated constitutional government, Matsumoto writes, his leading role denouncing this proposal “struck observers as unexpected. It was at this point that KatÖ first appeared before the public as a chÖchin mochi [an apologist or, literally, a ‘lantern carrier’] for 26. Kawahara JikichirÖ, “Shinsei tai’i ni okeru seiji seisakuron,” Meiji bunka kenkyÜ 4 (December 1934), 55. 27. Yoshino SakuzÖ, “KatÖ Hiroyuki to conmyunizumu” (KatÖ Hiroyuki and Communism), in Minshu shugiron shÜ, vol. 8 of Meiji bunka kenkyÜ, ed. Yoshino SakuzÖ (Tokyo: Shinkigen shapan, 1948), 322. 28. Hagihara, Baba Tatsui, 181. 29. Ishida, Meiji seiji shisÖshi kenkyÜ, 71. 30. For the full text of the proposal, “Memorial on the Establishment of a Representative Assembly,” and KatÖ’s response to this memorial, “Objections to the Establishment of a Deliberative Assembly Chosen by the People (January 26, 1874),” see Walter Wallace McLaren, ed., “Japanese Government Documents,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society 42 (May 1914), 426–39.

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the government.”31 As Matsumoto further makes clear, KatÖ’s support of the government was not personally disinterested. In 1875 KatÖ took responsibility as counselor of the first rank (itto gikan) to the Meiji cabinet.32 Matsumoto might also have noted that on July 6, 1881, only a few months before his tenkÖ, KatÖ had become sÖri or president of the premier university in the country, Tokyo Imperial University. In such a position, he must have felt pressured to assume the role of quasi–government spokesperson. Extensive connections to the bureaucratic elite through his sons and sons-in-law may also have persuaded KatÖ to demonstrate clearly his support for the Meiji oligarchy.33 While I agree with those who do not see a revolutionary intellectual shift in KatÖ’s position, judging his tenkÖ on a purely intellectual level neglects the broader social and political context of the action. Those who focus solely on the postulates within KatÖ’s writings ignore the family, career, and social pressures that pushed KatÖ into the role of government ideologue, pressures obvious to his contemporaries.34 Certainly in both KatÖ’s mind and in the minds of his readers, he was reversing course in a drastic way; twentieth-century readers should not readily discount this contemporary perception. In the newspaper advertisement of November 24, 1881, KatÖ himself fervently hopes that readers of his earlier books “will not take the views expressed therein to be those that I now hold”35 and thus indicates the contrast he sees between his present and past positions. In Jinken shinsetsu he acknowledges having been an advocate of natural rights theory in Shinsei tai’i and Kokutai shinron,36 and in chapter 22 dates his own disillusionment with natural rights from 1879, claiming that he made at least two public speeches to that effect. The vitriolic reactions to Jinken shinsetsu confirm the sense of betrayal felt by readers who were shocked that KatÖ would serve as spokesperson for an increasingly autocratic government. It was no coincidence that KatÖ’s public disavowal takes place in 1881. 31. Matsumoto, “KatÖ Hiroyuki—tenkÖ ni tsuite,” 35. Matsumoto makes much the same argument in “KatÖ Hiroyuki no tenkÖ,” 62. Bob T. Wakabayshi points out that Matsumoto traces KatÖ’s change of heart only to 1879. Wakabayashi, “KatÖ Hiroyuki,” 470. 32. Matsumoto, “KatÖ Hiroyuki—tenkÖ ni tsuite,” 35. It should also be noted that KatÖ was at this time serving as tutor to the young emperor Meiji. 33. Eventually KatÖ could boast of three sons and five sons-in-law with prestigious connections. For an impressive list, see A. M. Pooley, Japan at the Cross Roads (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1917), 93. 34. Baba Tatsui, for instance, directly questions KatÖ’s motives, suggesting government pressure rather than genuine belief in evolutionary theory. See Hagihara, Baba Tatsui, 196. 35. See the reprint in Yoshino, ed., Meiji bunka zenshÜ, 15. 36. KatÖ, Jinken shinsetsu, 438.

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In the fall of that year, the long-brewing political crisis came to a head.37 The government, besieged by demands for a representative assembly, had been dismayed when one of its leading statesmen, Ñkuma Shigenobu (1838–1922), joined the swelling chorus demanding broader political participation. Hoping to mollify its critics, the government in its canny Imperial Decree of October 12, 1881, promised a constitution and a parliament. Although, as Ike Nobutaka says, “the autumn of 1881 marked a divide in the history of the democratic movement,”38 the extent of the victory achieved, the ground gained for democratic rights, is debatable.39 The emperor was not scheduled to bestow the promised constitution until 1889 or open parliament until 1890. In fact, as many observers noted, the imperial promise diffused the popular rights movement, giving the government nearly a decade to consolidate its grip.40 The institutional consolidation of power was accompanied by gradual ideological consolidation. The government moved to promulgate its own conception of the national polity and sponsored the translation and distribution of conservative doctrines, including abbreviated versions of Edmund Burke and Thomas Hobbes.41 KatÖ was a key early figure in this ideological consolidation. As head of the Imperial University, it was impossible for him to remain neutral or even idiosyncratic in his views. A clear choice had to be made as the political dynamics became clear, and KatÖ chose the government. As historian Eugene Soviak puts it, “the

37. For discussion of the Meiji 14 political crisis, see Ike Nobutake, The Beginnings of Political Democracy in Japan (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950); Sandra Davis, “Ono Azusa and the Political Change of 1881,” Monumenta Nipponica 25: 137–54; Takahashi Shingo, “Meiji jÜyonen no seihen ni tsuite” (On the Political Crisis of 1881), Waseda seiji keizaigaku zasshi 61 (October 1938); Watanabe Kuriyama, “Meiji jÜyonen seihen ni tsuite” (On the Political Crisis of 1881), Meiji bunka kenkyÜ no. 2 (May 1934), 2–26. 38. Ike Nobutaka, The Beginnings of Political Democracy in Japan (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950), 138. 39. For instance, Sandra Davis argues that it was a victory for the people’s rights movement, while Bernard Silberman says that it “failed in its major objective: breaking the hold of the few men from the clans of Satsuma and Choshu.” Sandra Davis, “Ono Azusa and the Political Change of 1881,” 154, and Silberman, “The Political Theory and Program of Yoshino SakuzÖ,” Journal of Modern History 31 (1959), 311. 40. The debate over the causes and implications of the granting of a constitution has been a long and heated one. For a review of Japanese literature on this issue, see Joseph Pittau, S.J., “The Meiji Political System: Different Interpretations,” in Studies in Japanese Culture, ed. Joseph Roggendorf (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1963), 99–122. 41. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was translated by Kaneko KentarÖ as Seiji ronryaku in 1881. A version of Hobbes’s Leviathan was translated as Shukenron by the Ministry of Education in 1883. Portions of Machiavelli translated by Nagai Osamu were issued under the title of Kunshu in 1886. For a discussion of these titles, see Kada, Meiji shoki shakai keizai shisÖshi, 606.

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Meiji government had found its intellectual voice in the person of KatÖ Hiroyuki.”42 Although KatÖ’s choice is unmistakably clear in the lexicon of the 1881 debate, his earlier position cannot be understood in the same terms. As I argued in Chapter 3, early Meiji politics in the 1870s was more like a sprawling free-for-all than a corporately managed transfer or even a focused sporting event. Many small contests were held amid the jostling crowd, not a single match with uniformed opposing teams. Only in the 1880s does the contest become defined. This being the case, the so-called “liberalism” of KatÖ’s earlier positions in Shinsei tai’i and Kokutai shinron becomes identified as dangerous to the government retrospectively when the multiple contests resolve themselves into a single match between oligarchic and more open government. When these books were first published in 1870 and 1874, KatÖ was engaged not primarily in the fray between democrats and autocrats but instead in one between reactionaries and revisionists. His antagonists were most particularly the kokugakusha, and therefore his tactics and positions were chosen in response to their views rather than government views or populist pleas. KatÖ’s position in Shinsei tai’i and Kokutai shinron cannot be understood without situating his work in this specific debate. In keeping with my argument on the indeterminacy of the meanings of “nature” in early Meiji political discussions, it took some time for semantic referents to be established, and only gradually did it become apparent that some of KatÖ’s earlier language carried a populist charge. It is as though KatÖ traversed the intellectual landscape of early Meiji like a boatman on a floodplain. Only around 1880, when the waters recede and the contours of the land emerge, does he realize that he has floated to the wrong riverbank. At this point, KatÖ paddles furiously to tie his vessel firmly to the right wharf. I suggest we understand KatÖ’s tenkÖ as a definite commitment to the government’s position made in the changed circumstances of the early 1880s, which retrospectively cast his previous work in a more populist light than he intended.43 42. Eugene Soviak, “An Early Meiji Intellectual in Politics: Baba Tatsui and the JiyÜtÖ,” in Modern Japanese Leadership: Transition and Change, eds. Bernard S. Silberman and Harry D. Harootunian (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1966), 148. 43. My interpretation of KatÖ’s tenkÖ accords with Maruyama Masao’s analysis of the decided change that occurred in 1881 when Ñkuma was forced from the government. Before 1881, Maruyama argues, the people’s rights movement (minken) and the drive for national strength (kokken) had been fused. After 1881, the remaining leaders repudiated minken ideas. See Maruyama, “Meiji kokka no shisÖ,” in Nihon shakai no shiteki kyÜmei (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1959), 181–236.

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Shinsei tai’i and Kokutai shinron None of this is to say that KatÖ’s earlier arguments in the banned books, Shinsei tai’i (An Outline of True Government) and Kokutai shinron (A New Theory of National Polity), are irrelevant to our understanding of his later position or the broader uses of nature in Meiji politics. In fact, these suppressed works reveal a great deal about both. As KatÖ’s texts make plain, the adversaries whom he engages are the kokugakusha and their allies the nÖhonshugisha,44 who preached Japan’s unique position in the world, the divine inspiration of the imperial government, and the perfection of archaic economic and political modes. In Shinsei tai’i, KatÖ sneers at those who desire an impossible return to ancient simplicity and subsistence farming.45 In Kokutai shinron, he declares that “the explanations of the kokugakusha are fundamentally opposed to the truth.”46 To counter the kokugakusha and nÖhonshugisha positions, KatÖ redefines the purpose of kokutai (national polity) and rescues “nature” from the ideological grasp of kokugakusha and nÖhonshugisha so that it can be used to authorize the engagement with the world that Japanese leaders felt crucial to national survival. In these early works, KatÖ is not arguing for the popular rights movement against Meiji oligarchs, but for a new Japan against those whose only answer to modern problems is to attempt to reinstate ancient harmonies. KatÖ’s sharp insistence on the force of change and on economic liberty is coupled with learned references to Western authors from Aristotle to Rousseau and to Western problems from America’s recent civil war to British colonialism in India.47 This openness to new ideas was easily mistaken in the confused atmosphere of early Meiji for an openness to popular participation in government. It is not difficult to see how KatÖ’s attacks on the nativists and agrarianists might have been interpreted as evidence of progressive sympathies. In defense of a new Japan, KatÖ found it necessary to construct a new origin and a new rationale for government. The nativists had embraced

44. Thomas Havens describes nÖhonshugi as “a loose body of beliefs in physiocratic economics, rural communalism, and the unique qualities of Japan’s national essence (kokutai).” Havens, “KatÖ Kanji (1884–1965) and the Spirit of Agriculture in Modern Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica 25 (1970), 249. 45. KatÖ Hiroyuki, Shinsei tai’i, reprinted in Nishi Amane, KatÖ Hiroyuki, ed. Uete Michiari, vol. 34 of Nihon no meicho (Tokyo: ChÜÖ kÖronsha, 1984), 367–68. 46. KatÖ, Kokutai shinron, 77. 47. KatÖ was quite approving of British colonial power in India. See KatÖ, Shinsei tai’i, 356.

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as gospel truth the ancient story of Japan’s divine origin. For them, Japan, chosen above all other nations, rejoiced in the divine guidance of the emperor, a direct descendent of the sun goddess Amaterasu. If Japan’s national origins are conceived of in this way, it militates against engagement with the broader world and impels Japan to seek solace in ancient simplicity and pure obedience to imperial will. Arguing that such a course would critically weaken the nation,48 KatÖ presents an alternative concept of nationhood resting on distinctions between the ideas of kokka (country), seitai (government), and kokutai (national polity). In discussing KatÖ’s distinctions between these three entities I will collapse the arguments made in his two banned books, which are quite consistent with one another. The foundation of the kokka, argues KatÖ, cannot be located by reliance on the ridiculous and unknowable myths of the gods.49 Rather, the origin of Japan and all other countries lies “in the nature (tensei) of all human beings.” With a nod to Aristotle, KatÖ asserts that “people live together naturally (tenzen ni) like the birds and the beasts; they are unable to live individually.”50 KatÖ allows that divine will created human nature (tensei) such that people automatically live in communities, but he carefully distinguishes the divine creation of human nature from the creation of the kokka. The kokka is a human manifestation rather than a direct creation of the gods.51 With his claim that primary communities are bonded by nature and not by the Kojiki’s gods or by human will, KatÖ discounts both the uniqueness of Japan’s origins as well as any Western notion of a presocial state of nature.52 Like other Japanese thinkers I have discussed, KatÖ never embraces the Western concept of an original social contract created among individuals who had hitherto roamed the forests alone.53

48. KatÖ in fact argues that humble obedience will harm the nation. See Kokutai shinron, 92 49. KatÖ makes this argument in both Shinsei tai’i, 354, and Kokutai shinron, 79. In Shinsei tai’i, his rationale against the myth of Amaterasu is that it privileges the emperor, making the people exist for his sake rather than vice versa. In Kokutai shinron, KatÖ emphasizes the impossibility of knowing the heavenly code of which Motoori Norinaga and Hirata Atsutane speak. Since the kokka exists in human world, says KatÖ, the codes pertaining to it must be knowable by human beings. 50. KatÖ, Kokutai shinron, 80. 51. Ibid., 81. 52. KatÖ in fact considers five different theories of the origins of human community but discounts them all. Kokutai shinron, 79–80. 53. Bob T. Wakabayashi points out that there is some similarity between the ideas of Western natural rights theorists and kokugakusha: “Norinaga’s faith in the absurd Kojiki

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For KatÖ, consciousness and will enter politics later as these communities move through stages of barbarism towards civilization. Gradually human societies will become more complex and more sophisticated— driven, argues KatÖ, by the force of nature (shizen no sei) and the unfolding of natural principle (tenri).54 As societies and the individuals within them progress, they both achieve the capacity to exercise greater will. Already, and without reference to social Darwinism, KatÖ is using concepts of historical progress akin to evolution.55 Moving from the general community of the kokka to the more formal levels of national polity and government structure, KatÖ distinguishes between kokutai and seitai as follows: “the kokutai is the end (ganmoku) and seitai is the means for attaining that end. Therefore, although it is unthinkable that the kokutai would be different in each nation . . . , the seitai is not necessarily the same in each one. There may be monarchical governments or democratic governments. If they are capable of fostering and maintaining a fair and just kokutai, then we cannot question their rightness and wrongness.”56 As with the origins of nations, so too with their ultimate purpose: all nations share the same beginnings in natural communities (kokka) and the same ends in the kokutai of justice and fairness (kÖmei seidai). According to KatÖ, only the seitai or the form of the government differs from nation to nation. Although KatÖ is willing to grant that as a matter of natural right (tenri no tÖzen) the ideal form of government is a republic (kyÖwa seiji), he argues that the form of government must correspond to the nation’s history, customs, and, most crucially, the level of enlightenment among the people.57 KatÖ repeatedly expresses his belief in Japan’s incomplete achievement of civilization in these early writings. He emphatically states, “because the people cannot be entrusted [with power], the government must unavoidably take responsibility. . . . As I have I said many times, although

myths was not dissimilar to arguments made by Western natural rights theorists—at least in terms of logic.” See Wakabayashi, “KatÖ Hiroyuki,” 492. 54. KatÖ, Shinsei tai’i, 361. 55. Bob T. Wakabayashi argues KatÖ’s use of such terms as ten’i (the will of heaven), jisei (the trend of the times), and shizen no sei (the force of nature) is “characteristic of late-Tokugawa Confucians” and stresses the historical determinism implied by these terms. It seems to me, rather, that KatÖ undercuts the determinism of these concepts with his belief in the power of the elite to respond either in good or bad ways to changing times. In fact, KatÖ’s Confucian ethics preclude an entirely predetermined view of history because such a view would prevent rulers from acting virtuously. See Wakabayashi, “KatÖ Hiroyuki,” 476. 56. KatÖ, Kokutai shinron, 93. 57. Ibid., 93.

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government has no other purpose than the peace of the people, indiscriminately weakening the power of the government and entrusting matters to the people is contrary to the natural principle (tenri) from which government arises.”58 In the final analysis, KatÖ argues in the best Confucian tradition for a paternalistic government on ethical rather than pragmatic grounds. He breaks with tradition only in his strong emphasis on change and on the need for the mindful creation of a constitution in order that the government may better protect and care for (hogo) its people. KatÖ’s program to revamp the Japanese seitai would hardly be complete without reference to the emperor, of whom KatÖ gives a somewhat confused account. While KatÖ does not wish to dispel imperial majesty, since this very quality serves as the centerpiece of the tenuous restoration government, he very much wants to erase the tincture of absolute divinity with which the kokugakusha color the emperor. The result is a tortured argument whereby KatÖ acknowledges that the emperor is a descendent of the gods but insists that he does not rule according to heavenly commands and is in fact a human being. KatÖ might have cited firsthand evidence for this claim, because he served as tutor to the emperor, but his argument gives us no eyewitness account of the tribulations of Meiji as a young man learning his lessons. Instead, KatÖ ridicules the nativists’ version of the divine emperor by saying that making the emperor divine is like insisting he is a different species (jinchiku). If the emperor is treated as a different species of being, argues KatÖ, it creates a gulf between His Majesty and his subjects as wide as the gulf between barnyard animals and human beings. Since people are not like chickens and cows divided from their master by natural rank, the emperor does not own his subjects the way a farmer does his livestock. In short, declares KatÖ, “the tennÖ is a human being the same as we are.”59 It follows, he argues, that the government is for the sake of all its people, not just the emperor, despite the great difference in social rank between them. In countering the nativist longing for archaic simplicity, KatÖ does not wish to forgo the authority of nature as he redefines the kokutai, the seitai, and the emperor. Instead, he makes repeated use of ideas of nature as the bond of community and especially as the force of change. This nature (shizen no sei) is a dynamic and universal force, and it is overwhelmingly secular. In fact, it seems impossible to understand KatÖ’s work fully without recognizing his effort to uncouple secular nature 58. KatÖ, Shinsei tai’i, 365. 59. KatÖ, Kokutai shinron, 78.

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(shizen) from divine nature (ten). This uncoupling is crucial to KatÖ’s work because it is through this distinction that he creates the possibility of conscious political action, at least for the enlightened elite.60 KatÖ’s willful actors are not completely autonomous subjects divorced from nature— individuals by their very nature (tensei) and by natural law (tenri) are already part of social groups that restrict most of them rather severely— but they can and must act consciously and conscientiously for the sake of the nation. They do so, I want to argue, on the basis of a secularized nature that KatÖ has created by distinguishing shizen, a term he uses abundantly, from ten, an idea of which he is skeptical despite his own occasional use of it. KatÖ’s intense concern to understand the political lessons of nature is evident in two discussions: his lengthy disquisition on economics in Shinsei tai’i, to which I will now turn, and his direct attack on the idea of ten in Kokutai shinron. The entire second half of Shinsei tai’i argues for economic liberalism. The strictest free trader could not wish for a more sustained and heated defense of laissez-faire economics.61 It is here, in economic rather than political policy, that KatÖ attains “liberalism,” and it is a liberalism encoded by the term shizen: market determination of prices is in accord with the rightful law of nature (shizen no dÖri); commodity and stock prices have a natural value (shizen no atai) that should not be manipulated since artificial prices (jinsaku no atai) will weaken the nation;62 economic competition leads to a natural (shizen) condition of popular contentment; 63 and the rightful path of nature (shizen no dÖri) leads to industrial prosperity in all nations.64 The target of this diatribe is nÖhonshugisha and kokugakusha support for a national economy based on agriculture and nostalgia for the supposedly halcyon days of equal paddy-land distribution.65 Referring

60. As KatÖ indicates in a Nichi shinbun article, this elite is very small. He writes that representative assemblies are impossible in Japan because, “I think that there would not be more than sixty or seventy men of distinguished ability or knowledge in the whole nation.” Quoted in Pooley, Japan at the Cross Roads, 79. 61. KatÖ is not, of course, alone in his embrace of capitalism. Ienaga SaburÖ argues that the basic limitation of Meiji leaders, including the four men he studies in Kindai seishin to sono genkai, was their insistence that “‘modernization’ meant nothing other than ‘capitalism.’ ” See Ienaga, Kindai seishiin to sono genkai (The Modern Spirit and Its Limitations) (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1950), 173–74. (The four men whom Ienaga examines are Kitamura TÖkoku, Uchimura KanzÖ, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and Taguchi Ukichi.) 62. KatÖ, Shinsei tai’i, 373. 63. Ibid., 369. 64. Ibid., 367. 65. The ideal of equal land distribution was introduced along with the other Chinese-

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to communism and socialism as well as indigenous beliefs, KatÖ argues that equalizing wealth “may sound at first like benevolence, but, because it represses rights and the spirit of independence, it results in those with talent being unable to express their abilities.”66 People as economic actors require freedom not just for their own sakes but also for the sake of the nation. KatÖ firmly reiterates points he had made in KÖeki mondÖ (1865). “As our world expands and our knowledge increases, the desires of the people multiply spontaneously (onozukara). Following the multiplying desires of today is the rightful path of nature (shizen no dÖri). . . . It is natural (tÖzen) that as our current desires multiply, industry and commerce will prosper; there is certainly nothing grievous in this. Rather, it is something to be celebrated for the sake of the nation.”67 Desire, the multiplication of wants, and the increase in goods are anathema to ancient ideas of an ordered and stable regime; they are tokens not just of worldly vanity but of fundamental moral degeneracy according not only to the tenets of nativism but also to Confucian notions of economy. In the face of tradition, KatÖ is arguing that worldly desire accords with shizen, a secular nature that is ultimately virtuous in its effects although it may not immediately seem so. Like Adam Smith, KatÖ does not willingly forgo public virtue, but he is willing to see it produced indirectly through private desires and the natural fluctuations (shizen no teikÖ) of the market. Four years later, in Kokutai shinron, KatÖ continues his antagonism to a controlled economy in a lower key. As he mentions, a new law promulgated since the publication of Shinsei tai’i has made private landownership legally possible in Japan for the first time in centuries.68 However, the kokugaku insistence that Japan is the personal property of the emperor continues to trouble KatÖ. KatÖ argues in no uncertain terms that “the land-below-heaven (tenka) is not the property of one ruler. Since there is no natural (tenzen) owner of the land, mountains, and rivers, ownership was a matter of first occupancy.”69 Despite this direct plea

inspired Taika Reforms of the seventh century. The administrative difficulties of such an undertaking, which required regular and accurate census-taking and standardization of paddy fields for easy reassignment in response to births and deaths, were immense, and the extent to which the ideal was enacted has attracted much painstaking research. However, equal land distribution remained the ideal for many centuries. For an excellent discussion of these problems, see William Wayne Farris, Population, Disease, and Land in Early Japan, 645–900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). 66. KatÖ, Shinsei tai’i, 369. 67. Ibid., 370–71. 68. KatÖ, Kokutai shinron, 82. 69. Ibid., 82.

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for property rights, KatÖ is careful to separate economic from political rights. He says that “the right to own land and the right of jurisdiction are entirely separate. The authority (ken) of ownership exists in the landowners, and the authority of jurisdiction must be understood as the very reason for the existence of the government.”70 In other words, property ownership should be respected by the government, but owners have no basis in land to demand participation or representation in government. In short, despite references to the English philosopher John Locke in KatÖ’s earlier works,71 ruler-subject relations in KatÖ’s Japan are undisturbed by Locke’s ideas of possessive individualism. More important, however, than economic issues in Kokutai shinron is KatÖ’s direct assault on the concept of ten as it is used by his opponents. He condemns as unenlightened the explanation of government affairs as acts of the Heavenly Deities (tenjin) foretold by oracles or as obeisance to heavenly commands (tenmei). “In China,” KatÖ scoffs, “they call the sovereign the child of Heaven (tenshi), they call the throne the throne of Heaven (ten’i), or if there is a punitive uprising against a faithless ruler, they call it the punishment of heaven.”72 After listing several more uses of ten, KatÖ exclaims that he has not the time to describe them all. However, they are, he says, “all human artifacts. As such they have no relationship to Heavenly Deities, and it is fundamentally illogical that they appear to refer to Heavenly Deities (tenjin).”73 KatÖ further points out that uses of the divine in this manner are not peculiar to China and Japan but can also be discovered in Western countries with their “crazy idea” of the divine right of kings. As enlightenment progressed in the West, he argues, these ridiculous notions were abandoned and a secular view of nature emerged. This demystified nature then became the foundation of politics and economics in the West, as it should in Japan.74 The reason that the idea of ten so repels KatÖ is that it is linked to the older ideas of kokutai that he wants replaced for the sake of a new Japan. In feudal Japan, as in feudal Europe, the kokutai used to be seen as the property of the ruler under heaven. However, KatÖ optimistically declares, “Recently, at long last, the consciousness of the people has opened

70. Ibid., 83. 71. See KatÖ Hiroyuki, Rikken seitai ryaku (An Outline of Constitutional Government), in KatÖ Hiroyuki bunsho, eds. Ueda Katsumi, Fukushima Hirotaka, and Yoshida KÖichi (Kyoto: DÖhÖsha, 1990), vol. 1, 40–51. 72. KatÖ, Kokutai shinron, 78. 73. Ibid., 78. 74. Ibid., 77–79.

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up and the true relationship between ruler and subject has become clear for the first time. The old, base, and vulgar (rÖretsu yahi) order of the kokutai decayed and the just and fair (kÖmei seidai) kokutai of today emerged.”75 Liberating politics from the feudal notion of ten permits a new politics and a new kokutai in accord with shizen. Shizen licenses the play of economic desire, and a rejection of ten licenses the active role of the elite in creating a new form of government in response to the spirit of the age (jisei). Nature is indeed essential to the configuration of power in the new, just kokutai that KatÖ envisions. KatÖ’s elevation of an areligious shizen in place of the feudalistic and divine ten seems to have been largely ignored by modern scholars. Certainly KatÖ does not seek to convey Western concepts of natural rights with the term ten, a task that Matsumoto Sannosuke sees the term performing in early Meiji discourse. In fact, as we have seen, ten for KatÖ more often designates feudal concepts than modern ones. Comparing KatÖ’s use of these terms with the work of Maruyama Masao demonstrates a similarity of approach despite a verbal difference. Whereas Maruyama attacks shizen with sakui, KatÖ attacks ten with shizen as both authors attempt to introduce some form of conscious action into politics. The difference in terminology illuminates the different extent of their hopes for this free political subject: Maruyama yearns for completely autonomous actors while KatÖ desires grounds for supporting innovative leadership within limits. KatÖ’s privileging of the word shizen foreshadows the move by which the variety of terms for nature are replaced by shizen in the late 1800s, making it the preferred term in such twentiethcentury analyses as Maruyama’s. Despite some new ideas, Shinsei tai’i and Kokutai shinron hardly seem like radical documents. KatÖ’s few expansive comments on the right to happiness and peace and the value of liberty are immediately undercut by his low evaluation of the Japanese populace’s level of civilization. “In a country of shallow enlightenment, we must unavoidably have an autocratic form of government,” he argues in 1870.76 At best, the so-called “natural rights” of the people are a promise held in trust by the government.77 The principal right of the populace is government protection, for which they owe the duties of obedience, paying taxes, and military

75. Ibid., 78. 76. KatÖ, Shinsei tai’i, 363. 77. Ibid. KatÖ insists that in limiting the people’s rights, the government is actually fulfilling them.

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service.78 But even this conservative defense of the new Japan in the 1870s needs retooling to become a defense of the ruling oligarchy of the 1880s.

Jinken shinsetsu The great difference between KatÖ’s position in the works that he suppressed, Shinsei tai’i and Kokutai shinron, and the work Jinken shinsetsu, in which he rationalizes his tenkÖ, is the object of his attack. Previously he had combated the threat posed by nativists and agrarianists to the new government; in 1881–82, he turns against the people’s rights movement ( jiyÜ minken undÖ) with a will. To this battle KatÖ brings new allies garnered from his extensive reading of English conservatism and German theories of the state. These new allies bring ammunition in abundance, but the old desideratum of his previous work remains recognizable: the primacy of a paternalistic government elite who can respond to the forces of a secularized nature. KatÖ opens Jinken shinsetsu, published in October 1882, by calling natural rights theory a delusion (mÖsÖ) and extolling the new research that has begun “on the actual principles that govern human affairs.”79 Lauding the work of “Draper, Buckle, Paine, Lecky, Bagehot, Spencer, Strausz, Buechner, Carneri, Radenhausen, Lilienfeld, Schäffle, and Ihering,” whose names and works he proudly lists,80 KatÖ claims that they “all have profited from an intimate knowledge of physical principles; most have learned much from the laws of evolution discovered by Darwin.”81

78. In Shinsei tai’i, three types of rights are discussed: the rights of the government, which are extensive; the right of the people to government protection; and the right of the people to make financial arrangements (KatÖ, Shinsei tai’i, 352). Kokutai shinron reiterates these same rights and duties (KatÖ, Kokutai shinron, 87–88). Despite mention of the natural right of liberty (tenpu no jiyÜken), it is abundantly clear that except in matters of the economy, the government’s rights take precedence (Kokutai shinron, 91). 79. KatÖ, Jinken shinsetsu, in Nishi Amane, KatÖ Hiroyuki, ed. Uete Michiari (Tokyo: ChÜÖ kÖronsha, 1984), 411. Subsequent references are to this edition, except where noted. I gratefully acknowledge the unpublished translation of Jinken shinsetsu by J. Victor Koschmann. Some of the quotations here are taken from Koschmann’s translation; others I have re-translated. 80. See the appendix to the third edition of Jinken shinsetsu (reprinted in Matsumoto Sannosuke, ed., Kindai Nihon shisÖ taikei, vol. 1 of Meiji shisÖshÜ [ Tokyo: Chikuma shobÖ, 1976], 132–35). The list of English and German works in this appendix is impressive. Regardless of the pressures impinging on KatÖ’s intellectual and political commitments, he was a serious scholar whose work goes well beyond stock propaganda. 81. KatÖ, Jinken shinsetsu, 411. KatÖ’s reading list draws heavily from German and Austrian authors. Alfred Kelly describes the popular permutations of Darwinism in Germany in The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).

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Discovery of the “actual principles of human affairs” may be aided by physical and biological science, but it is important to understand that science, for KatÖ as for most Meiji intellectuals, serves only as a handmaiden to their chief muse, politics. Science in general, both in its indigenous manifestations and in its importation, was used to bolster bureaucratic aims in Japan; it did not provide an alternative foundation of truth with an independent intellectual and institutional tradition.82 Since science was not generally perceived as having an autonomous epistemological base, it could be used selectively for social purposes without undermining social traditions. Thus Herbert Spencer received the approbation of a full Japanese translation years before Darwin, whose science was deemed secondary to Spencer’s social theory. Although KatÖ uses Darwinian principles to bolster his political views, scientific evolution is deftly subordinated wherever it deviates from his political aims. The Japanese reception of evolutionary theory (shinkaron) exemplifies Maruyama Masao’s observation about new ideas in Meiji Japan. As he says, “Many of these ideas in their European countries of origin had been expressions of desperate opposition to tradition. When the ideas were transplanted to Japan, however, they dovetailed perfectly with certain already accepted, traditional Japanese concepts.”83 As we have seen, KatÖ already employed ideas of historical change, such as shizen no sei and shizen no dÖri, premised on natural development. In the absence of Christian theories of creation, adapting Darwinian principles to social theory in Japan was virtually painless. Although Westerners in Japan squabbled over Darwin—for instance, Tokyo University zoology professor Edward S. Morse bitterly opposed dogmatic Christian missionaries bent on excluding the study of evolutionary theory in Japanese universities84—there

82. The treatment of science as a tool of the bureaucracy was not just a phenomenon of the Meiji period. For an excellent discussion of this problem, see James R. Bartholomew, “Science, Bureaucracy, and Freedom in Meiji and TaishÖ Japan,” in Tetsuo Najita and J. Victor Koschmann, eds., Conflict in Modern Japanese History: The Neglected Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 295–341. See also John Fairbank et al., “The Influence of Modern Western Science and Technology on Japan and China,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 7 (1955), 189–204; Hiroshige Tetsu, “The Role of the Government in the Development of Science,” Cahiers d’histoire mondiale 9 (1965), 320–39; and Yuasa Mitsumoto, “The Scientific Revolution and the Age of Technology,” Cahiers d’histoire mondiale 9 (1965), 187–207. 83. Maruyama Masao, “Japanese Thought,” Journal of Social and Political Ideas in Japan 2 (April 1964), 42. 84. Nagazumi Akira, “The Diffusion of the Idea of Social Darwinism,” Historica Scientiarum 24–25 (1983), 2. See also Robert S. Schwantes, “Christianity versus Science: A Conflict of Ideas in Meiji Japan,” Far Eastern Quarterly 12 (1953), 123–32. Missionary to Japan Dr. Henry Faulds of the (Scottish) United Presbyterian Church attempted to counter

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were few native intellectual and institutional barriers to the idea. The greatest impediment in Japanese tradition to forms of social Darwinism was the kokugakusha faith in Japan’s sui generis creation by the gods and peculiar national purpose. Neither Darwinism nor social Darwinism allowed for such uniqueness. As we have seen, KatÖ, in stressing universal precepts, felt no compunction about alienating this group. KatÖ explains social evolution in the following terms: “The universe (uchÜ) is a great battleground. All living things struggle incessantly upon it, each in order to preserve its own existence and live longer. Nothing occurs that is inconsistent with the law of survival of the fittest (yÜshÖ reppai).”85 Although this synopsis of Darwin’s theory—including the neglect of reproductive success as the real measure of “fitness”—sounds fairly standard, the “struggle for survival” takes some peculiar turns in KatÖ’s text. In a striking passage, which I will quote at length for its marvelous flavor, the Ancient Sages renowned in Confucianism are described as directing the social Darwinian contests. KatÖ writes, To my way of thinking, the lifelong effort of the Ancient Sages was to avoid the harm done to man by the operation of the survival of the fittest and to promote the good. In other words, to bring about the favorable operation of the survival of the fittest. That meant honoring the gentlemen, but despising the lout; employing the wise man while avoiding the rascal; . . . expounding the Way and expelling heresies. The Sages did not confuse rectitude with error, or indiscriminately lump gentlemen with common men, thereby stopping the beneficial operation of the survival of the fittest.86

The Sages are not alone in this effort to achieve the beneficial operation of the struggle for survival. Shakaymuni, Jesus, Mohammed, the Early Kings, Confucius, and Mencius are all portrayed as entering the “publicspirited competition to promote the interests and happiness of society at large.”87 To describe natural selection (shizen tÖta) as a “public-spirited competition” is, to say the least, idiosyncratic. Although popularized German versions of social Darwinism tended to downplay nature’s brutal-

the most egregious aspect of Darwinism by showing “how it was possible to interpret the Bible in a way that accorded with a modified version of Darwin’s theory. His efforts [published in Japanese] were clearly appreciated within Japanese Christian circles; however, it is not clear how broad his overall influence was. Certainly, Western science was still being used as a weapon against Christianity when he left Japan in 1885.” Helen Ballhatchet, “British Missionaries in Meiji Japan,” in Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, ed. Ian Nish (Folkestone, Kent: Japan Library, 1994), 38. 85. KatÖ, Jinken shinsetsu, 421. 86. Ibid., 461. 87. Ibid., 427.

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ity, the European effort to accommodate Darwinian evolution and Christian ethics failed. In 1882, while KatÖ is anointing Jesus a leading player in the struggle for survival, Prussian schools, finding such reconciliation impossible, eliminate biology entirely from the secondary school curricula.88 However, even KatÖ cannot completely defang nature’s treacherous process of natural selection. His “public-spirited competition” is only one of two forms of natural contention. KatÖ emphatically believes that there are two different types of the struggle for survival: one, directed by wise rulers like the Ancient Sages, leading to good ends, and another leading to evil. This second, harmful type, based on the selfish desire to surpass others, leads to a condition in which inferiors may dominate superiors. Whereas in Darwin’s theory the survivors are by definition “the fittest,” in KatÖ’s theory it is possible for a struggle for survival to produce false victors, rather like workers afflicted with false consciousness.89 The unfit, the inferior, the unruly masses may be wrongly catapulted into power. Looking over his shoulder at the abuses of the fixed Tokugawa hierarchy and forward with dread to a possible seizure of power by the people’s rights movement, KatÖ warns, “It is not always certain that superior individuals will occupy the highest positions.”90 Compounding these domestic worries is the looming threat of Western imperialism. Logically, given that KatÖ admits the superiority of Western civilization, he must submit to the conquest of Japan or else find a way to describe some victories, even by acknowledged superiors, as examples of the harmful type of struggle for survival. At this point, argument fails him and he simply asserts that countries should be independent (despite his approval of Britain’s colonial policies in India). “It is certainly morally unjustifiable,” he announces, “for any of [the Western powers] to claim world suzerainty.”91 Despite all that KatÖ says about the inexorable laws of nature (banbutsuhÖ) and evolution (shinka), and his further assurances that “nothing is exempt” from them,92 he firmly believes that “natural law does not exist for the purposes of benefitting mankind, and therefore the forces of fire and water, which are part of that natural law, will sometimes harm

88. Kelly, The Descent of Darwin, 64. 89. As Ishida Takeshi observes, it is at this juncture that KatÖ “exposes his own logical self-contradiction” in insisting on upper-class dominance while arguing for competition for survival. See Ishida, Meiji seiji shisÖshi kenkyÜ, 74. 90. KatÖ, Jinken shinsetsu, 429. 91. Ibid., 429. 92. Ibid., 460.

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mankind. The law of survival of the fittest as well, which also has its origins in natural law, is occasionally harmful. . . . The smart way to proceed is to avoid the harm originating in natural law while exploiting the good.”93 In order to avoid the harm that arises from random competition among all members of society, the struggle must be directed from above by a modern enlightened elite as it was by the Ancient Sages. In short, KatÖ advocates an orchestrated “struggle for survival” that maintains domestic calm and international peace. Nature (shizen) in the form of evolution (shinka) necessitates an elite, but the origins of this elite are not specified. KatÖ does not portray them as a manifestation of nature in themselves; rather, they are the means by which politics coordinates with inexorable nature. Knowledge of nature and the laws of evolution, particularly the knowledge that human beings (like plants and animals) progress only very gradually, allows the elite to control ruthless, bloodthirsty tangents to social evolution’s mainly progressive thrust. As KatÖ puts it, “It takes one process of the survival of the fittest to control the other.”94 Because nature’s aims and human aims are not entirely compatible, a place for action by a knowledgeable elite is created. As an ethicist KatÖ cannot simply allow nature to have its say.95 In accord with KatÖ’s earlier attempts to separate shizen and ten to create room for elite action, he again uses a form of shizen to permit modified freedom for a tiny moral elite in Jinken shinsetsu. In KatÖ’s previous works, shizen challenged the inherited idea of ten or the heavenly dictates that so paralyzed the political imagination of nativists; in Jinken shinsetsu, KatÖ uses shizen in the form of shinka to challenge the desire for tenpu jinken or broad-based natural rights and democratic liberties. Ten must be banished from the political battlefield in both instances because, ironically, it grants too much power to tradition on the one hand and too much power to democratic forces on the other. Shizen, then, becomes the basis of operation for the new political elite not as continuation of Tokugawa ideas, but in a radically different form. In less complex applications of Darwinian theory to society, the existing elite is always the natural elite; there can be no false victors in the struggle for survival. KatÖ’s social Darwinism is more complex. His recognition that nature’s aims are not automatically commensurate with

93. Ibid., 461. 94. Ibid., 446. 95. As we will see, Baba Tatsui was much more optimistic about nature’s ultimate morality.

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human well-being necessitates a political elite who transcend nature.96 Government leadership requires too much will and intellect to be itself a blind manifestation of the forces of nature. KatÖ justifies the existing Meiji order by claiming that it is necessary to respond to the natural forces of change in beneficial rather than detrimental ways, but he does not say that the existing Meiji order itself is natural. Ironically, as we shall find in the next chapter, KatÖ’s more democratic antagonist Baba Tatsui has greater faith in natural selection than KatÖ proves to have. We can begin to see, then, that if appropriate attention is paid to the concept of nature, the Political Crisis of 1881 cannot be characterized as a simple contest between tradition, justified by appeals to nature, and modernity, supported by appeals to autonomy, as some have argued. In the early 1880s, KatÖ’s modified social Darwinism creates a mode of liberated subjectivity even as he attacks democratic activists.

The Reaction to Jinken shinsetsu As a career move, KatÖ’s tenkÖ was brilliant. He would enjoy a long tenure as president of Tokyo Imperial University (1881–93) and go on to become a member of the GenrÖ, the Privy Council, and the House of Peers as well as advisor to the emperor. KatÖ had done well for himself and for his government. Of course, to those who had considered him an ally in the fight for a more inclusive and open government—those like Baba Tatsui and Ueki Emori—KatÖ had not done well. In newspapers, magazine articles, and then in books, they responded immediately to his challenge, refuting his views and refining their own arguments. In a 1959 biography of KatÖ, Tabata Shinobu describes the response as a “refutation boom” (hanbakuron bÜmu), almost like a fashionable enthusiasm.97 KatÖ’s contemporary, Yano Fumio, a leading KaishintÖ (Progressive Party) member who had been instrumental in encouraging Ñkuma Shigenobu to propose broadening the electorate, describes KatÖ’s tenkÖ as “the problem of the day,” with everyone debating the issue in Tokyo newspapers.98 96. The necessity of a knowledgeable elite can be traced to Confucian political theory, and Bob T. Wakabayshi does so. However, it seems to me that KatÖ’s embrace of an elite is supported both by Confucian theory and by the European writers whom KatÖ enlists. Certainly authors whom KatÖ cites, such as Walter Bagehot (Physics and Politics and The English Constitution) and Carneri (Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus), believe in the need for upper-class rule. 97. Tabata, KatÖ Hiroyuki, 90. 98. Yano Fumio, Jinken shinsetsu bakuron, reprinted in JiyÜ minkenhen, vol. 2 of Meiji bunka zenshÜ, ed. Yoshino SakuzÖ (Tokyo: Nihon hyÖronsha, 1967–74), 391.

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Attesting to the interest it aroused, the third edition of Jinken shinsetsu99 appeared January 1, 1883, less than seventy days after the first edition. In the preface to this edition, KatÖ lists four edited collections and two volumes of rebuttals that had already attracted his notice.100 The list includes Ishikawa Masami, ed., Jinken shinsetsu bakugeki shinron (New Theories Refuting Jinken shinsetsu); Kajiki JinzÖ, ed., Jinken shinsetsu bakuron (Refutations of Jinken shinsetsu); Nakamura Naoki, ed., Jinken shinsetsu bakuronshÜ (A Collection of Refutations of Jinken shinsetsu); Yano Fumio, Jinken shinsetsu bakuron (A Refutation of Jinken shinsetsu); and Ueki Emori, Tenpu jinkenben (In Defense of Natural Rights). In the fluid world of Meiji publishing these volumes cannibalized each other. For instance, Nakamura’s volume contains pieces by Yano Fumio and Baba Tatsui, both of which were published separately within weeks. Authors also published and republished pieces in various formats—speeches delivered before crowds would appear as newspaper articles only to be transposed into books, sometimes with very little change in substance or form. For instance, Baba Tatsui’s response to Jinken shinsetsu began as an editorial in Asa no shinbun and was collected in Nakamura’s volume before being published in a separate volume as Tenpu jinkenron, all within a very short period of time.101 The focus of the furor was KatÖ’s attack on so-called natural rights, and the responses ranged from democratic forms of social evolution to concepts of inherent individual rights. On all sides, the debate was between contending definitions of nature in politics. The two respondents whom I wish to discuss in depth are very different from one another philosophically, and yet their backgrounds are nearly identical. One of them, Baba Tatsui, lived a mere thirty-eight years, from 1850 to 1888. The other, Ueki Emori, was a bit younger, living from 1857 to 1892. These two men were both from Tosa, both from samurai families, both part of the “civilization and enlightenment” or bunmei kaika movement of early Meiji, both supporters of JiyÜtÖ—the ill-fated Liberal Party of the early 1880s—and both interested in Western thought and philosophy. And then, in the early 1880s, they both responded to KatÖ’s tenkÖ. 99. Reprinted in Matsumoto, ed., Kindai Nihon shisÖ taikei, 95–135. 100. Ibid., 95. See also Tabata, KatÖ Hiroyuki, 93–94. 101. For a discussion of the various publishing permutations of rebuttals to KatÖ’s tenkÖ, see Kawahara JikichirÖ, “Jinken shinsetsu bakuronshÜ kaidai” (A Bibliographical Introduction to Jinken shinsetsu bakuronshÜ), in JiyÜ minkenben, ed. Yoshino SakuzÖ, vol. 2 of Meiji bunka zenshÜ (Tokyo: Nihon hyÖronsha, 1927), 50–58.

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Despite their similarities and despite both taking sides against KatÖ, their views of nature in politics are entirely at odds, which is why they are of such interest to this study. On the one hand, as I will show in the next chapter, Baba echoes much of the same social Darwinism found in KatÖ’s work. For Baba, too, evolutionary nature is the guide to politics; but for Baba, unlike KatÖ, evolutionary nature teaches us to build a democratic state immediately. On the other hand, Ueki Emori, the subject of Chapter 6, defines nature primarily as the living, dancing human body. For him, it is first and foremost this body that harbors political liberty. These two views of nature point vividly to the possibilities and difficulties of constructing a concept of nature useful to opposition forces in Meiji Japan.

chapter 5

Baba Tatsui: Natural Laws and Willful Natures

Torn between antinomies, the life of Baba Tatsui (1850–88) bears a Romantic aspect. Indeed, given Baba’s early, lonely death in a strange land (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), his biographers have seldom resisted the trope of Romantic tragedy in describing his turbulent career and sad demise. Nakae ChÖmin’s touching reminiscence of his friend and fellow JiyÜtÖ (Liberal Party) member begins by evoking Baba’s death in the “Meriken” hospital.1 Yasunaga GÖro starts his rather hagiographic narrative at Baba’s tall grave marker in the Woodlands Cemetery.2 The opening pages of Hagihara Nobutoshi’s 1967 biography continue this convention, inviting the reader to imagine Baba’s almost barren final resting place close by the University of Pennsylvania. In case we ourselves might wish to retrace his pilgrimage, Hagihara assures us that “although it is not an extraordinary marker, because it is the only grave of a Japanese, you will easily find it if you ask the caretaker of the cemetery.”3 Bringing us to the grave marker itself, he observes that along with the Japanese inscription, “Dai Nihon, Baba Tatsui no haka” (Greater Japan, The Grave of Baba Tatsui), there are also the English words “Tatsui Baba/ Died Nov. 1, 1888/ Aged 38 Years” and in large letters underneath,

1. Nakae ChÖmin, “Baba Tatsui kun,” in ChÖmin bunshÜ (An Anthology of ChÖmin) (Tokyo: Bunka shiryÖ chÖsakai, 1909), 511. 2. Yasunaga GÖro, Baba Tatsui (Tokyo: Tokyodo, 1897), 1. 3. Hagihara Nobutoshi, Baba Tatsui (Tokyo: ChÜÖ kÖronsha, 1967), 3.

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“JAPAN.” As Hagihara comments, by Japanese reckoning Baba was not thirty-eight but thirty-nine. The mixture of Japanese and English, the dual perspectives on Baba’s age, the tall marker in a melancholy, distant graveyard make a fitting memorial to this man of opposing impulses. How do we reconcile Baba’s enormous energy with his fragile health, his arrogant elitism with his democratic pedagogy, his allegiance to both Japan and England, his passionate intelligence and his logical extremism? The photographs portray a handsome man with sensual lips and stylish mustache, yet Nakae ChÖmin speaks of Baba’s solemnity and of his forswearing drink.4 One senses this austerity and commitment in Baba’s intense study of British law and yet, when he was living in England, he ran afoul of the very law he so respected. Baba’s was “a case,” as Hagihara suggests, “in which the ideas that were not exorbitant (gekihatsu) in their content became exorbitant in action.”5 Hagihara argues that Baba’s exorbitant actions were necessitated by an unyielding political climate. Certainly, the antinomies in Baba’s makeup were exacerbated by the tensions of the early Meiji period, when Baba undertook to discover the laws governing nature and politics. But it was not simply “the times” or governmental obstinacy that precipitated Baba’s extremism. His own stormy nature created the Romantic trajectory of his life, though his goals were neo-Classical: a government commensurate with natural order guided by reason. As a young man, Baba was sent from Tosa to study first in Tokyo with Fukuzawa Yukichi and later in Nagasaki. Then, after the overthrow of the bakufu, he was chosen along with other talented students for study abroad to bring back Western learning to advance Japan. Baba began to study British law during his first trip to Britain from 1870 to 1874. After returning to Japan briefly in December 1874 and flirting with but not joining the people’s rights movement, he left for London again in June 1875 and remained there until he was involuntarily expelled in March 1878. The cause of this second, dramatic homecoming was a quarrel with a fellow Japanese, Manabe Kaisaku, whom Baba attacked and badly wounded on January 7, 1878.6 Although he stood trial and was convicted by a British court, connections in the embassy secured his release on the 4. Nakae, “Baba Tatsui kun,” 513. 5. Hagihara, Baba Tatsui, 111–12. 6. Before Baba attacked Manabe Kaisaku, Baba had challenged him to a duel in France, a challenge that Manabe refused. In “KettÖ ron” (On Dueling), published in KokuyÜ zasshi 31 (August 28, 1881) and 32 (September 16, 1881), Baba expresses his admiration for dueling.

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condition that he embark immediately for Tokyo. His study of law and the workings of parliament ignominiously interrupted, Baba returned to Japan to agitate for representative government. His political writings, especially those in response to KatÖ Hiroyuki, during this period of residency in Tokyo will be the major focus of this chapter. Afterward, in 1885, following seven years of earnest political engagement, Baba’s life was once again abruptly and dramatically interrupted by arrest, this time on the charge of illegally buying explosives. After six months in jail and an acquittal, he left for the United States on June 12, 1886. There Baba eked out a living lecturing on samurai weaponry, all the while writing furious diatribes against the Japanese government until his early death.7 Throughout his life, Baba wrote. He wrote a diary and an autobiography; he wrote pamphlets for the English and Americans about the Japanese and books for the Japanese about the English, the Americans, and the ancient Romans; he wrote political speeches to stir the country folk and books to sway the intellectuals. And everywhere, as he articulated democratic political beliefs, he brought concepts of nature to bear. Again and again Baba looked to nature to discover law. Once discovered, this law was applied directly to politics, since nature’s order and political order were, for Baba as they had been for Tokugawa Neo-Confucianists, one and the same. Again and again he introduced his arguments for people’s rights with a description of laws in nature. Again and again politics and nature are used as precise metaphors for each other, one figuring the other in uncanny exactitude. But what sort of lawful order inheres in nature for Baba? If we press him, we find that the orderliness he discovers in nature is of two different varieties. On the one hand, he insists on the order of equilibrium represented by physics and chemistry: nature is an equation adding up to stasis. On the other hand, he insists upon the order of progressive change represented by evolutionary biology: nature plots a trajectory through history. The tension resulting from these opposing concepts of nature

7. Baba’s life is covered in detail in both Yasunaga, Baba Tatsui, and Hagihara, Baba Tatsui, as well as in Hagihara Nobutoshi, “Baba Tatsui: An Early Japanese Liberal,” Far Eastern Affairs, ed. G. F. Hudson, St. Anthony’s Papers, vol. 3, no. 14 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), and in three pieces by Eugene Soviak: “Baba Tatsui: A Study of Intellectual Acculturation in the Early Meiji Period” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1962), 2; “The Case of Baba Tatsui: Western Enlightenment, Social Change and the Early Meiji Intellectual,” Monumenta Nipponica 18 (1963), 191–235; and “An Early Meiji Intellectual in Politics: Baba Tatsui and the JiyÜtÖ,” in Modern Japanese Leadership, eds. Bernard S. Silberman and Harry D. Harootunian (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1966).

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comes to the fore in the series of books and articles Baba wrote between 1879 and 1883, which culminate in his attack on KatÖ’s Jinken shinsetsu. Before turning to Baba’s rebuttal of KatÖ, let us consider the ways in which his earlier works prepared him for that debate.

The Equilibrium of Forces in Nature and History Immediately after arriving home from London in 1878, quite au courant with English intellectual life, Baba wrote two articles directly relating the physical laws of nature to politics: “Heikin ryoku no setsu” (An Explanation of the Force of Equilibrium)8 and “Shinka bunri no niryoku” (The Dual Forces of Union and Disunion).9 Both pieces were published in 1879 in KyÖson zasshi, the magazine of a group called KyÖson DÖshÜ, dedicated to the study of public issues. Baba’s audience, therefore, was a circle of intellectuals in government, education, law, religion (Buddhism), and related fields. Members included Kaneko KentarÖ, Taguchi Ukichi, Shimada SaburÖ, and the founder of the group, Ono Azusa.10 “Heikin ryoku no setsu” begins with the assertion that “the equilibrium of things is an inevitable force.”11 Baba presents evidence for this idea by referring to the process of temperature transference between hot and cold substances and the circulation of air between the steamy equator and the frigid poles. Hot and cold find a middling warmth; air currents flow equally north and south. Proceeding from this physical evidence of equilibrium or “equilibration,” as he sometimes calls it, Baba insists that “this force does not stop with only a few things, but flourishes in human society in general.”12 He applies the lessons of physical equilibrium directly to political history. Rather than point to a balance of power achieved through opposing interests as one might expect, Baba describes the equilibrium of human affairs in terms of a balance of compassion, one that may take centuries to achieve. Baba suggests, oddly, that, “If you desire to see an example

8. Baba Tatsui, “Heikin ryoku no setsu” (An Explanation of the Force of Equilibrium), originally published in KyÖson zasshi no. 14 (March 1879). References are to Ñi KentarÖ, Ueki Emori, Baba Tatsui, Ono Azusa shÜ, vol. 12 of Meiji bungaku zenshÜ, ed. Ienaga Saburo (Tokyo: Chikuma shobÖ, 1973). 9. Baba Tatsui, “Shinka bunri no niryoku” (The Dual Forces of Union and Disunion), originally published in KyÖson zasshi no. 42 (October 23, 1879) and no. 46 (November 19, 1879). References are to Ñi KentarÖ, Ueki Emori, Baba Tatsui, Ono Azusa shÜ. 10. Soviak, “The Case of Baba Tatsui,” 197. 11. Baba, “Heikin ryoku no setsu,” 236. 12. Ibid.

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of how the power of equilibrium raises the weak and suppresses the strong in human life, look at the history of the rise and fall of the Genji and the Heike.”13 In the ferocious battles of the early thirteenth century, the Genji may triumph, they may slaughter their enemies, they may dominate the country, but the retrospective sympathy evoked for the thoroughly defeated Heike equals the score. As the last members of the Heike clan cast themselves into the waters at Dan-no-ura, committing suicide rather than be killed, they counter the force of the victors with their victimhood. In short, the strong—the Genji—lose the sympathy of their historical audience. Their victory remains. Their victims, the Heike, are not saved through grace as in the Christian promise of redemption, or through superior knowledge as in Hegel’s master-slave parable, or through status as martyrs to a true political cause. The victims attain parity with the victors only because, in the backward glance of future generations, the look of empathy is reserved for the drowned. In an equation that requires six hundred years to reach its resolution, this equilibrium of compassion levels the score. After presenting this “evidence” of the inevitability of equilibrium in the physical sciences and in history, “Heikin ryoku no setsu” foretells the whirlwind of disaster attendant on disequilibrium. In describing this force, Baba conducts a mental experiment in global cataclysm. He imagines building two walls paralleling the equator and holding in all the hot air of the tropics. Inevitably, the pressure of the heated air inside the walls would increase until its tremendous force “would rip the walls down, destroy homes, bring evil to the people of the world and create extraordinary disasters.”14 Disequilibrium, like equilibrium, is as applicable to politics as to physics. In a tone of somewhat sinister glee, Baba warns, “When oppressive governments take away the rights of the people, obstruct speech, and prohibit party formation, and when those who make a stand against the doctrines of the government are all suppressed, although the government may be preserved by the use of extreme force, if this disequilibrium lasts too long, the force of equilibrium will destroy this extreme, artificial power. In order for there to be a basic recovery, the [situation] will give rise to a great rebellion which those who occupy high positions will clearly regret.”15 According to Baba, rebellion as an eruption against oppression is sanctioned and indeed predicted by natural laws of physical science. “Shinka bunri no niryoku” (The Dual Forces of Union and Disunion),

13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid.

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published later the same year, in 1879, duplicates the mode of argument that moves from observations in the physical sciences to pronouncements on politics. Touching on bonding between metals, the chemistry of rice cooking, and the properties of magnets, Baba finds his way once again to Japanese history. In all of these processes, the countervailing tension between forces of union and forces of disunion determines the outcome. In Japanese history, argues Baba, the force of union gradually prevailed during the sixteenth century when Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and finally Tokugawa Ieyasu supplied sufficient magnetism to subdue the fractious country. As Baba sees it, over the next two hundred years the unity forged by the Tokugawa became too rigid, creating an imbalance. Consequently, the “inevitable forces of nature” (seijÖ hisshi no ri) began to reassert disunion. “As we have discussed before,” Baba assures us, “when things reach an extreme, there will certainly arise an opposition movement, and when there is an extreme level of unity, the opposition of a disunifying force will certainly arise.”16 The violence and disruption of the Kaei period (1848–53) demonstrates the force of nature and of history against the deadening solidity of Tokugawa rule. Unlike the retrospective sympathy evoked in the case of the Heike, the equalization of forces from Momoyama to Tokugawa and from Tokugawa to Meiji takes place not in the realm of compassion but on the grounds of actual political power. In these essays produced soon after his return from England, Baba reads the rules of physics rather than biology into history and politics. Baba’s founding metaphors in these pieces are not germinating biological tropes, but chemical and physical equations—and his arithmetic always results in equilibrium, a zero-sum game. Although the idea of retrospective empathy for the Heike is idiosyncratic, the choice of physics and chemistry as primary natural guides to politics is not unique. As a recent returnee from the British metropolis, Baba sought to translate for the benefit of his native land the best of the foreign lessons he had learned. The best available wisdom, in the minds of many, was that of Herbert Spencer, whose own work first concentrates on the physical sciences rather than biology.17 When Baba sought to transpose Spencer’s ideas 16. Baba, “Shinka bunri no niryoku,” 241. 17. Spencer did not incorporate Darwin’s ideas of natural selection until his second book in the Synthetic Philosophy series, entitled Principles of Biology, begun in the autumn of 1862. Even then he never believed that natural selection could fully account for evolution. Robert Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 293.

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into Japan both through direct translation18 and appropriation in his own work, he recreated many of the problems that Spencer himself produced in applying physical laws to human values. Therefore, a digression through Spencer is necessary in order to understand Baba.

The Death Wishes of Baba Tatsui and Herbert Spencer It may seem startling to us today that Baba could have turned to Herbert Spencer in support of progressive democratic views. Evoking Spencer today is a bit like evoking the forces of darkness: Spencer is generally regarded as a flint-hearted, second-rate philosopher and virtually never as a progressive, even utopian, social thinker.19 For us it is easy, and perhaps agreeable, to forget that Spencer was the West’s greatest intellectual export to Japan in the late nineteenth century. Between 1877 and 1890 there were at least thirty-two translations of Spencer’s work published in Japan; Spencer was, in fact, preeminent among all European political thinkers translated into Japanese.20 But we find it convenient to forget more than just Spencer’s popularity; we also fail to remember that Spencer, particularly in his youth, was true to the nonconformist, forward-thinking traditions of his family. Spencer’s early works, such as Social Statics (1851), advocate what historian of science Robert Richards calls “a socialist’s utopia achieved through an evolutionary process.”21 For Spencer, evolution leads ultimately to the withering away of government as individuals become per-

18. Baba’s translation of the first chapter of Spencer’s First Principles appeared in January 1884 as “Supensaru shi tetsugaku ron” (On the Philosophy of Spencer), KokyÜ sÖdan 1 (January 9, 1884). 19. Robert J. Richards has collected a set of truly scathing comments on Spencer made by historians of science. See Richards, Darwin, 243. 20. For information on Spencer and social Darwinism in Japan, see Mori IchirÖ, “KyÖkasho ni arawareta ‘shinkaron’ no henka ni tsuite” (The Theory of Evolution in Secondary School Textbooks and its Historical Change), Kagakushi kenkyÜ 10, no. 100 (1971), 229–32; Nagai Michio, “Herbert Spencer in Meiji Japan,” The Far Eastern Quarterly 14, no. 1 (November 1954), 55–64; Akira Nagazumi, “The Diffusion of the Idea of Social Darwinism in East and Southeast Asia,” Historia Scientiarum 24 (1983), 1–18; Shimao Eikoh, “Darwinism in Japan, 1877–1927,” Annals of Science 38 (1981), 93–102; Shimoide Junkichi, “Miru to Supensa-” (Mill and Spencer), in Shimoide Junkichi, Meiji shakai shisÖ kenkyÜ (Tokyo: Asano shoten, 1932), 34–59; Tsu-chou Peng, “NichichÜ ryokoku no shoki minken shisÖ to shinkaron” (The Theory of Evolution and the Early Ideas of Popular Rights in Japan and China), Shirin 54, no. 2 (n.d.), 1–27; and Watanabe Masao and Ose YÖko, “General Academic Trend [sic] and the Evolution Theory in Late Nineteenth-Century Japan: A Statistical Analysis of the Contemporary Periodicals,” Japanese Studies in the History of Science 7–8 (1968–69), 129–42. 21. Richards, Darwin, 261.

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fectly constituted for living together without infringing upon one another’s prerogatives. Principles of Psychology (1855), a book much admired by Baba, argues that the “passion for liberty” that fuels this evolutionary progress can brook no government interference, since to interfere would arrest “that grand progression which is now bearing humanity onwards toward perfection.”22 As Spencer advanced in years, this stateless utopian society receded into the future, but his early writings continued to win him admirers among liberal humanists and early Marxists, whose praise he later strenuously disavowed. Spencer’s early vision of society influenced and affirmed the hopes that young Baba Tatsui held for Japan. Spencer’s ambitious goal in his multivolume Synthetic Philosophy, of which First Principles is the first volume, is to comprehend the whole world—material, political, and spiritual—in one moral system. The key to such catholic understanding is the seemingly oxymoronic concept of “evolutionary equilibration.” Although, according to Spencer, all things are now continually in process, one day all processes will cease in a perfection that he defines as the absolutely stable balance among all entities, organic and non-organic, and their environment. On the way to reaching this perfect stasis, each entity reacts to disturbances in its surroundings by better adapting itself. Spencer insists that each adjustment between the entity’s internal structure and its external environment is a slight improvement, bringing the entity closer to the perfection of absolute balance. This same process of continual adjustment is discoverable as well in the social and political world. Spencer argues, “the adaption of man’s nature to the conditions of his existence, cannot cease until the internal forces which we know as feelings are in equilibrium with the external forces they encounter. And the establishment of this equilibrium, is the arrival at a state of human nature and social organization, such that the individual has no desires but those which may be satisfied without exceeding his proper sphere of action, while society maintains no restraints but those which the individual voluntarily respects.”23 All things— human and non-human—are engaged in fine-tuning their increasing harmony until the moment when perfection or equilibration is achieved. This theory of equilibration, however, presents problems for morality that Spencer never resolves. As he himself argues, the concept of “equilibration” heralds quiescence in both non-organic and organic realms: 22. Quoted in ibid., 287. 23. Quoted in ibid., 291.

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“In all cases then, there is a progress toward equilibration. That universal co-existence of antagonistic forces which, as we before saw, necessitates . . . the decomposition of every force into divergent forces, at the same time necessitates the ultimate establishment of a balance.”24 While there can be no moral objection to the description of electrical or chemical reactions working “themselves out in producing sensible or insensible movements, that are dissipated as before; until quiescence is eventually reached,”25 Spencer’s prognostication of ultimate quiescence in the organic realm takes on a nightshade hue. A completely quiescent non-organic object is still an object; a completely quiescent organic being is not a being; it is simply dead. In one instance, Spencer forthrightly confronts the horror he has conjured: “if equilibration must end in complete rest . . . are we not manifestly progressing towards omnipresent death? That such a state must be the outcome of the processes everywhere going on, seems beyond doubt.”26 If perfection is equilibration, and equilibration is omnipresent death, then the “perfection” toward which the world necessarily tends is not moral or immoral, but amoral. As Spencer seems to realize in this fleeting moment of doubt, his philosophical attempt to reconcile physical properties with human values fails. Spencer, however, refuses the path his own logic dictates and denies the problem of “omnipresent death” a couple pages after recognizing it. His utopian faith reappears unshaken as he summarizes his arguments at the end of First Principles: “The changes which Evolution presents, cannot end until equilibrium is reached; and that equilibrium must at last be reached. . . . After finding that from [the persistence of force] are deducible the various characteristics of Evolution, we finally draw from it a warrant for the belief, that Evolution can end only in the establishment of the greatest perfection and the most complete happiness.”27 Unless death is happiness, equilibration cannot lead to happiness. Unless death can be understood as the perfect moral state, then equilibration cannot support moral theory or guide us toward political perfection. I cannot agree with Robert Richards that “in matters of logic, Spencer had few peers.”28 The influence of First Principles on Baba Tatsui is evident in “Heikin 24. Herbert Spencer, First Principles, vol. 1 of A System of Synthetic Philosophy, 5th ed. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1890), 484. 25. Ibid. 26. Spencer, First Principles, 514. 27. Ibid., 516–17. 28. Richards, Darwin, 294.

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ryoku no setsu” and “Shinka bunri no niryoku.” Like Spencer, Baba initially uses analogies from physical rather than biological sciences, and he directly plagiarizes Spencer’s concepts such as “equilibration” without citation. This shared predilection for non-organic sciences arises, perhaps, from their early engineering training. Spencer began his working life as a railroad company engineer. Similarly, Baba at fifteen was designated by the Tosa clan to study naval engineering, first in Japan and then abroad. Only after two years of studying engineering in London was Baba granted permission to change to legal studies when the Iwakura Mission arrived in England in 1872. He did so because “he had come to believe that the study of its political and legal ideas was more important for the new Japan.”29 Although both Spencer and Baba transformed themselves into social and political commentators, convinced of the primacy of social over scientific questions, ideas and habits garnered from their mechanical training linger in their early political writings. Greatly indebted though Baba is to Spencer’s early ideas, he diverges from the English philosopher in his headstrong commitment to change and even chaotic struggle.30 This difference arises because Spencer, in First Principles, sees imminent equilibrium in Britain’s two-party system, which is “now so far advanced among us that the oscillations are comparatively unobtrusive.”31 Baba, on the other hand, fears a premature and forced equilibrium in Japan and worries that the government will not be structured according to evolution’s ultimate dictates. All of Baba’s energies, therefore, go into fighting stasis and the stultifying forces of union. In “Shinka bunri no niryoku,” for instance, Baba argues, “When there is easy unification, because the life force of the molecules is lost, then all things stop the work of growing and moving. Evaporated water congeals into clouds and then changes into water in the form of rain or ice. Plants wither and die in the end. Animals also stop living. Like the sun, as things discharge heat, they increase the solidity of each. Finally, everything dies and becomes ashes.”32 Death here is associated solely with

29. Hagihara, “Baba Tatsui: An Early Japanese Liberal,” 127. 30. As Eugene Soviak says, Baba is hardly gracious in his acknowledgment of Spencer. Indeed, he at times commits flagrant plagiarism, but Baba seems to me to be deliberately stretching Spencer’s arguments, not just preaching them as a “convert.” Eugene Soviak, “An Early Meiji Intellectual in Politics: Baba Tatsui and the JiyÜtÖ,” 121. This idea of Baba as convert to Spencerian ideas is also discussed in Soviak’s dissertation. 31. Spencer, First Principles, 512. Baba, on the other hand, likens the two-party system in Britain to a “two-headed centipede moving left and right,” able to move forward but only with a great deal of “wasted effort.” Baba, “Shinka bunri no niryoku,” 242. 32. Baba, “Shinka bunri no niryoku,” 240.

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the forces of unification, rather than the forces of disunity or the final equilibration as it had been, briefly, by Spencer. Applied to Japanese history, Baba’s association of unification with death causes him to celebrate the fratricide of the Momoyama period and disparage the relative peace of Tokugawa control. Baba insists that after enduring years of bakufu rule, “the imperial country of Japan was turned into a single solid lump and became nothing but a dead country in the Pacific ocean.”33 Only the strong opposition movement of the 1840s rescued the nation from stultification. What Japan continues to require under the Meiji emperor is not stability, Baba insists, but rather the free play of progressive forces. However, there are and should be limits to these forces of disunion. “As you may observe, the politics of oppression loses by fettering society and making it become a dead thing,” writes Baba, once again evoking the image of death. “But,” he asks rhetorically, “is it not also true that free politics (jiyÜ seiji), in accordance with the operations of particular social enterprises, takes the path of [military] developments and loses through disunion?”34 Like Spencer, Baba takes some form of natural equilibrium, a balanced utopia of liberty, to be the foreordained outcome of competing physical and historical forces. The difference between the two thinkers is that Baba’s Japan is much further away from that “impassable limit” of “evolutionary equilibration” than the young Spencer’s England. For Baba, the Japanese environment pulsates with such swift change that only constant permutation can keep pace with its demands.

Tenpu jinkenron: The Reply to KatÖ Baba’s characteristic impatience and belligerence made it difficult for him to find allies in Meiji politics. In September 1879, he published a piece praising the “group of reformers who desire our independence” (wareware jishu o kinbÖsuru kaishin no zoku),35 but exactly whom he meant was unclear in that he also used this occasion to declare the Japanese people’s rights movement “despicable.”36 He joined the JiyÜtÖ when it was officially formed in October 1881, but the following year he resigned in disgust when Itagaki Taisuke, the head of the party, left on an extended

33. Ibid., 241. 34. Ibid., 242. 35. Baba, “Mono wa miru tokoro ni yotte kotonaru,” 238. 36. Hagihara also discusses this passage in Baba Tatsui, 105.

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European tour financed, suspiciously, by the government anxious to undermine organized opposition. Baba also joined the staff of the JiyÜtÖ’s official paper, JiyÜ shinbun, but he simultaneously held a staff position on the official paper of the rival popular rights movement party, the KaishintÖ or Progressive Party. Despite these problems of affiliation, Baba remained committed to finding an ideological bulwark against antidemocratic forces. In the summer of 1882, Baba set himself the task of systematically expounding the meaning of freedom in an extensive essay entitled “Honron” (Basic Principles), published in numbers 2 through 27 of JiyÜ shinbun.37 Responding to the general mood of the nation, Baba writes, “Today when people attempt to discuss freedom, they make futile generalizations. Since these [discussions] are not based on a thorough intellectual analysis of freedom, the idea in the end wavers like an undulating water plant.”38 Baba strives to define freedom more precisely, not only in its political sense, but also in general. According to Baba, cribbing once again from Spencer, human consciousness develops not by self-examination or abstract speculation but through reciprocal interactions with the external world. Through intense engagement with animals, plants, and the physical environment as well as constant social contact, human consciousness grows ever more complex, being transformed itself as it transforms the world. Baba insists that in order for consciousness to reach its maximum potential, its engagement with the world must be free and unfettered. Historian Nishida Taketoshi recaps Baba’s views concisely. “Unless these important interactions are free, true consciousness cannot develop. Only with correct cognition of things can individuals and societies evolve. Thus, freedom of spirit (kokoro) is the most necessary condition for individual and social evolution. The necessity for freedom of thought, speech, and action is therefore clear.”39 When freedom is defined in this way, political freedom becomes merely a specific instance of an all-encompassing moral project spurred by gritty encounters with the concrete world rather than by abstract or transcendent phenomena. Freedom is necessary not because it is natural, but because it allows true nature to emerge. By the fall of 1882, the freedom Baba saw as necessary for natural 37. References are to Baba Tatsui, “Honron” (Basic Principles), in Ñi KentarÖ, Ueki Emori, Baba Tatsui, Ono Azusa shÜ. 38. Baba, “Honron,” 201. 39. Nishida Taketoshi, “Baba Tatsui,” in Minkenron kara nashonarizumu e (From People’s Rights to Nationalism) (Tokyo: Meijishi kenkyÜ sosho, 1957), 158.

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and social evolution was increasingly under assault. Although he felt estranged from the main currents of Japanese politics, Baba refused, despite his own financial difficulties, to give up the fight. When KatÖ’s Jinken shinsetsu appeared in October 1882, Baba’s response was unhesitating. He presented the first version of his rebuttal at a meeting of the KokuyÜkai a few weeks later on November 11, 1882. Subsequently this rebuttal was published in ChÖya shinbun in eleven installments under the title “Homi KatÖ HirÖyuki kun Jinken shinsetsu”40 and then, differently organized, as a book, Tenpu jinkenron, in January 1883.41 Baba claims that KatÖ’s ideas in themselves do not deserve a response. He avers that if the writer were a hermit, an oddball, or a petty official, his ideas “could be dismissed with a laugh . . . but instead the author . . . is KatÖ Hiroyuki who has responsibilities as university president specially selected at the Emperor’s pleasure.”42 Although Baba insists that it is KatÖ’s institutional rather than intellectual position that makes rebuttal necessary, Baba brings all his theoretical and rhetorical talents to bear in Tenpu jinkenron. In the words of Hagihara, “The legal and political scholarship which Baba had accumulated and his acute critical spirit flowered splendidly in this controversy.”43 The particular intensity of the clash between KatÖ and Baba arises from their shared premises. Both men are social evolutionists concerned with encompassing the physical and biological sciences in their theories of political and social progress. They use Spencer’s idea of “equilibrium of forces” and the social Darwinian concept of “the survival of the fittest” to explain the impetus toward a better world. They both proceed from the view that nature is a universal, progressive force and assume that Japanese politics is not sui generis but under the influence of natural laws operating everywhere.44 With so much foregone agreement, the antagonism between KatÖ and Baba is especially striking. The root of their disagreement, in my view, is that while KatÖ does not always trust nature as the ultimate guide for politics, Baba attempts to naturalize politics completely. KatÖ, as we have 40. “Homi KatÖ Hiroyuki kun Jinken shinsetsu” is reprinted in Matsumoto Sannosuke, ed., Meiji shisÖshÜ, vol. 30 of Nihon shisÖ taikei (Tokyo: Chikuma shobÖ: 1976). 41. References are to Tenpu jinkenron, reprinted in Yoshino SakuzÖ, ed., JiyÜ minkenron, vol. 5 of Meiji bunka zenshÜ (Tokyo: Nihon hyÖronsha, 1927). 42. Baba, Tenpu jinkenron, 442. 43. Hagihara, Baba Tatsui, 185. 44. Baba’s refutation of KatÖ is not “based on the teachings of Bentham,” as KatÖ’s biographer Tabata Shinobu would have it. Tabata, KatÖ Hiroyuki, 3rd ed. (Tokyo: Furukawa kÖbunkan, 1969), 96.

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seen, believes that the forces of natural evolution are, in general, progressive and ultimately democratic. However, in the course of development, evolutionary outcomes occasionally diverge from human aims, and natural selection may occasionally result in evil. KatÖ’s doubts about evolution open the way for an unnatural, transcendent oligarchy to direct, and curb, evolutionary competition. Baba, on the other hand, denies that evolution ever results in evil. He writes, “Essentially evolution means that the superior is able to win and to restrain the inferior. This survival of the fittest is known as evolution and is recognized from the very beginning by all nature (tenzenjo). In this world of competition, how can it be beneficial to divide competition into the good and right versus the notgood and not-right?”45 Baba argues that if KatÖ truly believes in social evolution, he cannot selectively deny its results, especially the burgeoning popular rights movement. When democracy succeeds, it is never a “false survival” at odds with nature’s laws. Although Baba admits that good and bad are occasionally indistinct during the struggle for survival, in his view the evolutionary process consistently moves the world toward perfection.46 In sum, Baba aims to naturalize politics more completely than KatÖ. KatÖ’s and Baba’s different assessments of evolution shape their views on a question essential to the formation of modern subjectivity: is freedom itself natural? Their answers revolve around the issue of “natural rights.” KatÖ, as we have seen, denounces natural rights as a “wild idea” incompatible with social evolution. Rights, according to KatÖ, are granted by the state when society achieves a certain level of evolution and not before. Thus, freedom, for KatÖ, is not natural in the sense of being part and parcel of the individual’s original prerogatives; freedom is, however, the proper outcome of social evolution. Baba, on the other hand, insists that social evolution and natural rights (variously expressed as tenpu jinken or shizen no kenri) are coexistent manifestations of nature and necessary to one another from the beginning. As he puts it, “The desire to follow natural reason (shizen no dÖri) and extend rights in accordance with the struggle for existence is compatible with evolutionary thought.”47 Since natural rights are permanent and evolution is preeminently changeful, Baba faces a certain logical difficulty. Baba tries to finesse this problem as he had in “Honron” by defining freedom as nec-

45. Baba, Tenpu jinkenron, 446. 46. Ibid., 460. 47. Ibid., 457.

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essary to the development of consciousness, but this attempt to harmonize eternal rights with constant change is not entirely successful. Baba argues: We call the rights which must be demanded in order to follow natural law (shizen hÖ) “natural rights” (shizen no kenri). For this reason when people seek natural rights, they are seeking equality and liberty. When they seek equality and liberty, they are seeking the path with the fewest obstacles to human existence (jinrui no seizon). . . . When they seek human existence, they are seeking human happiness. When they seek human happiness, they are striving to attain the purpose of human life. When they desire to attain the purpose of human life, they desire to complete the naturally powered transformation (shizen ryoku no henka).48

In other words, in order to pursue liberty, people must have liberty. Through this somewhat shaky logic, natural rights precede, are part of, and result from the natural struggle for survival. One historian, applying European natural rights theory to Japan, has suggested that “if [Baba’s] ideas are taken to their logical conclusion, it is fairly clear that he would approve of Rousseau’s social contract.”49 On the contrary, Baba has no interest in social contract theory or in imagining a moment when natural rights existed outside society. Rather, Baba’s human beings are originally and eternally in society in the same way that KatÖ’s are. Neither man defines “nature” in opposition to society; rather, society is itself an organic form. As Baba himself explains, “wandering alone in mountain recesses and communing with wild beasts cannot be considered the appropriate path for the achievement of freedom. . . . These three freedoms [thought, speech, and action] certainly cannot develop among completely separate individuals. . . . They can only find a way to develop within social organizations.”50 For Baba, individual freedom, past, present, and future, is possible only within society, and all political discussions begin and end with natural community rather than social contract. Baba does not need to stress the naturalness of society in Tenpu jinkenron, since, on this point, he is in strong agreement with KatÖ. A few months earlier, he had broadcast this view in a speech in Tochigiken, later printed without a title as an editorial in JiyÜ shinbun in September 1882. According to Baba, societies—or nations, since Baba does not distinguish

48. Ibid., 451. 49. Nishida, “Baba Tatsui,” 177. 50. Quoted in Soviak, “An Early Meiji Intellectual,” 133.

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between the two—evolve in the same organic way that their citizens do: through the competition for survival. Nations, like individuals, necessarily seek to expand their consciousness by expanding their fields of action. Through this reasoning, Baba hints at support for active intervention on the Asian mainland.51 Like other JiyÜtÖ members, Ñi KentarÖ in particular, Baba combines radical individualism and strong nationalism. Rather than being “logically contradictory,” as some have claimed,52 Baba’s imperial designs draw support from his theory of natural evolution wherein both individuals and nations are naturally competing entities with natural rights. A problem arises from Baba’s tendency to naturalize all political actions and all political actors as much as possible. This problem is how to distinguish good actions from bad and good actors from bad if all are natural. It is on this issue that Baba begins backsliding from his naturalizing impulse, because he wishes to preserve “nature” as a term of approbation. Although he claims that all actions influence nature’s inevitable development toward perfection, only some of these actions are themselves natural. These natural actions are described as good, while the others are deemed artificial (jin-i) in a pejorative sense. As Baba defines the term, “artificial” refers to people and, particularly, to governments that retard the natural tendency toward democratic equality. “Artificial” (jin-i) is not used to mean “created by human beings”; if it were, Baba might also describe desirable actions—those in accord with nature’s progressive narrative—as “jin-i,” and he does not. Only negative actions are artificial. In other words, Baba defines nature as that which accords with the ultimate natural equilibrium of human liberty as opposed to that which does not. Therefore, individuals, governments, and their activities alike can be natural insofar as they work toward nature’s (and Baba’s) ends. Thus, if we could ask Baba what he considers “unnatural,” his answer would not be “jin-i,” human creation as such, but only those actions promoting reactionary or anti-democratic policies. When it comes to political actors as well, Baba also backslides into distinctions between those who are truly natural and those who are less so. Here Baba wavers between populism and elitism. His earliest writings appear more populist, but ultimately he opts for a mindful, progressive, natural elite as the true stewards of political nature. They can and should perform actions in congruence with natural forces. The 51. Soviak, “Baba Tatsui: A Study of Intellectual Acculturation,” 242. 52. Nishida, “Baba Tatsui,” 183.

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people, the great mass to whom he lectures in his excursions from Tokyo, embody nature’s tendency toward liberty, but they do so as unconscious representatives of its force; only the intellectual elite are capable of consciously bringing society into peaceful compliance with nature. Baba’s prevaricating attitude toward natural actors can be traced in all his writings before his reply to KatÖ. In his Autobiography, written but never published in English, Baba is in a populist mood, predicting the reaction to the assassination of Ñkubo Toshimichi (1830–78), the leading architect of the Meiji Restoration. This sad blow to moderate political hopes in Japan occurred only three days before Baba’s boat docked on his final return from England in 1878. Baba writes in the third person, “He saw or rather knew from the laws of nature that Japan was gradually approaching a crisis which is found in the history of all civilized nations, that is to say, the mass of the people were gradually forming an element in politics which statesmen would be obliged to take into consideration when they tried to govern their country.”53 In this passage, Baba envisions the people moving with quiet insistence to take their public and rightful position in accord with the laws of nature. In “Heikin ryoku no setsu,” Baba warns that political oppression will cause the natural forces of popular discontent to erupt. Subsequent articles such as “Mono wa miru tokoro ni yotte kotonaru” (Things Change Depending on from Where They Are Seen),54 “Nairan no gai wa kakumeika no ayamachi ni arazu” (The Evil of Internal Turmoil Is Not the Fault of Revolutionaries),55 and “Enkaku ron” (On Hatred)56 as well as Tenpu jinkenron all reiterate the theme of popular revolution as the inevitable consequence of oppression. In these works, the French Revolution and the beheading of King Charles I of England become familiar examples of the inevitable horrors of thwarting nature’s progressive law. In these articles and books, Baba’s primary reason for evoking the

53. Baba’s unpublished Autobiography, 343, quoted in Eugene Soviak, “Baba Tatsui: A Study of Intellectual Acculturation in the Early Meiji Period,” 112. 54. Baba Tatsui, “Mono wa miru tokoro ni yotte kotonaru” (Things Change Depending on from Where They Are Seen), originally published in KyÖson zasshi, no. 38 (September 17, 1879) and no. 39 (September 24, 1879). References are to the reprint in Ñi KentarÖ, Ueki Emori, Baba Tatsui, Ono Azusa shÜ. 55. Baba Tatsui, “Nairan no gai wa kakumeika no ayamachi ni arazu” (The Evil of Internal Turmoil Is Not the Fault of Revolutionaries), originally published in JiyÜ shinbun, no. 20 (July 21, 1882) and 21 (July 22, 1882). Reprinted in Ñi KentarÖ, Ueki Emori, Baba Tatsui, Ono Azusa shÜ, 248–51. 56. Baba Tatsui, “Enkaku ron” (On Hatred), KokuyÜ zasshi 54 (December 19, 1882).

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people’s fury appears to be his desire to threaten recalcitrant Meiji oligarchs with popular revolution, but at heart he is not a populist. Instead, he wants an enlightened, knowledgeable leadership that will liberalize government restrictions and allow the democratic force of nature to find expression. If this leadership embraces nature’s ultimate end, violence need not erupt. “It is possible to escape bias and preserve the equilibrium of things in motion,” Baba believes. “Looking back on it now, I know that in the affairs of society the advances in regions of civilization and freedom are made when results are planned in accord with the actions of these two forces.”57 The active elite capable of such planning is variously described as a single hero and as a group. In “Shinka bunri no niryoku,” the hero (eiyÜ), the one who “led society gradually in the direction of union,”58 is Oda Nobunaga. In later pieces such as “Ron soshiki naikaku no shinan” (On the Difficulties of Cabinet Organization), a lecture printed in KokuyÜ zasshi in November 1882, Baba suggests that contemporary Japan as well requires a hero, “an ideal statesman, a superlative political figure.”59 This figure, however, commands less of Baba’s attention than the elite group. He places this small elect above both the “filth of the commoners,” whom he describes as “worms,” and the hated government bureaucrats. Baba plainly includes himself in this group, but other members remain obscure. One feels that this elite might best be defined as those who agree with Baba and understand nature as he does. By the time Baba publishes Tenpu jinkenron, his vision of those who enjoy the capacity to act for freedom has narrowed. Indeed, Baba relegates whole categories of people—including the emperor—to the status of those who should not be permitted to participate in the natural arena of politics. “Although we would like somehow to have universal suffrage throughout the world,” writes Baba, “those without ordinary general feelings (jinjÖ ippan no kankaku) like women and children or imbeciles and the insane should be excluded.”60 The relegation of women to an unnatural and apolitical position in Tenpu jinkenron contradicts Baba’s earlier statements. In 1875 he had harangued his readers about the need to elevate Japanese women.61 Two 57. Baba, “Shinka bunri no niryoku,” 240. 58. Ibid. 59. Soviak, “An Early Meiji Intellectual in Politics,” 148. 60. Baba, Tenpu jinkenron, 459. 61. Baba Tatsui, “Hongo joshi no arisama” (The Condition of Japanese Women), KyÖson zasshi 5 (April 1875).

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months later, in order make the point that Japanese customs socially segregating men and women should be changed, he dragged his painfully shy younger sister, Komako, to the farewell party thrown in his honor on the eve of his second trip to London. (Poor Komako does not appear to have enjoyed the evening.)62 A few months prior to writing Tenpu jinkenron, Baba had proposed a radical revision of marriage. Baba urged that couples not submit to the tradition of arranged marriages but instead mutually agree upon contracts viable for three years only.63 In Tenpu jinkenron, this feminism evaporates. Baba seems to go out of his way to efface women in society and politics. Even when turning to Britain for evidence that liberty does not preclude patriotic reverence for the ruler, he speaks not of Queen Victoria’s popularity but of the public rejoicing “when the crown prince, who will occupy the place of king at the nation’s head, was recovering from a dangerous illness.”64 Baba’s argument against female participation in politics rests on an unusual dichotomy between the naturalness of men and the unnaturalness of women. This set of antonyms reverses what anthropologist Sherry Ortner sees as the universal cultural logic that subordinates women through the reasoning that “female is to male as nature is to culture.”65 Higuchi Tadahiko and Augustin Berque have agreed with Ortner, suggesting that Japan replicates this pattern of equating nature with the feminine. More specifically, Berque argues, “nature, in Japan, is fraught with motherliness.”66 Baba’s view repudiates the assumption that there are universal gender dichotomies by making not only nature and politics but also “ordinary feelings” masculine rather than feminine. This is not to say that nature is always masculine in Meiji discourse. However, because Meiji Japan engendered nature less than did European and American cultures, indeed, because Japan lacks the tradition of a strong nature– 62. Hagihara, “Baba Tatsui: An Early Japanese Liberal,” 133. 63. Discussed in Nishida, “Baba Tatsui,” 162. Nishida identifies this article as “Konin no keiyaku ni nengen o sadamuru,” published in JiyÜ shinbun 22 (July 25, 1882). Soviak refers to this piece under a different title and dates it 1884. 64. Baba, Tenpu jinkenron, 460. 65. Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” in Women, Culture & Society, eds. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1974), 67–87. For further discussion, see also Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), and Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). 66. Augustin Berque, “The Sense of Nature and Its Relation to Space in Japan,” in Interpreting Japanese Society: Anthropological Approaches, eds. Joy Hendry and Jonathan Webber (Gurdridge, Southampton: Ashford Press, 1986), 104.

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culture opposition and many writers treat culture and society as forms of nature, nature’s gender is easily manipulated. In his debate with KatÖ, Baba plays with the concept, projecting women as unnatural in order to protect the privileged concept of nature from too burdensome a political task. Strategy, then, in hard-pressed circumstances, may have caused Baba to abandon women’s rights in Tenpu jinkenron Strategy may have also dictated Baba’s treatment of the emperor. In response to KatÖ’s attack on JiyÜtÖ patriotism, Baba hotly defends the compatibility of liberty and reverence for the tennÖ, using the example of British monarchy cited above. With masterful understatement, Nishida observes, “If you look in Tenpu jinkenron where [Baba] uses phrases such as ‘the fulfillment of the precious Imperial House above’ and ‘His Imperial Majesty who is our sovereign of Japan,’ you cannot think that he sweepingly rejects the Imperial system.”67 Whether Baba believed that the emperor was necessary to a democratic Japan or whether he supported the emperor as a matter of political expediency, the quality of the emperor’s relationship with nature is indistinct. Does Baba consider the emperor an expression of the nation’s organic unity? If so, what is the emperor’s relationship to the natural political liberty of his subjects? Or, is the emperor himself a natural person possessed of the same right of self-determination as any other man? Like KatÖ, Baba insists that the emperor is human, but, in Baba’s work, his Majesty seems suspended awkwardly above the struggle for existence. Seemingly without irony, Baba appears to group the emperor with women, imbeciles, the insane, and children, excluding them all from the category of natural entities capable of fulfilling their roles through “naturally-powered transformation.” In Tenpu jinkenron at least, all other able-minded adult males except His Imperial Majesty and the nation itself are potential allies of the force of nature. It is these entities who are, by nature, free.

Catalyzing Nature: The Role of Will in Baba’s Social Evolution Maruyama Masao’s poignant analysis of Japan’s struggle toward modernity contrasted nature (shizen), the deadening force of the actually existing state, with invention (sakui), the understanding that laws were fabricated by human beings. As Maruyama admits, “it would seem superficially

67. Nishida, “Baba Tatsui,” 176.

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that we should classify [natural rights] as a theory of natural order. But a more careful examination shows directly that the opposite is true. The ‘rights of man’ in question are not rights embedded in any actually existing social order. On the contrary, they are concrete embodiments of the autonomy of man, who can establish a positive social order.”68 Thus, according to Maruyama, “natural rights” activists such as Baba embody the promise of modernity, defined (along with Louis Dupré) as “selfchoice” unrestricted by any given. Indeed, Maruyama argues that because both KatÖ and Baba agree that “existing norms are valid because they were initially invented by man,” they are both advocates of sakui.69 As I have tried to suggest, however, this either-or quality fails to capture the amalgamation of nature and invention on both sides. Contrary to the expectations created by Maruyama’s analysis, the debate between KatÖ and Baba does not pit nature (shizen) against invention (sakui), because both men ultimately see themselves on the side of nature (shizen). The difference between Baba’s leaders and KatÖ’s elite is that Baba expects natural leaders to spur political development in order to quicken natural evolution, while KatÖ sees an elite rising above nature, pacing natural evolution to accord with human values. In other words, both theorists introduce sakui, but to different purposes: Baba to catalyze natural reactions and KatÖ to restrain evolution from going astray. Both men believe that nature’s laws are universal, but Baba believes that the gap between Japan’s fulfillment of natural evolution and that of the West can be quickly overcome by the intellectual and intuitive powers of the Japanese leadership. Parity with the West is within Japan’s immediate grasp if it learns from the West rather than replaying the West’s laborious experience of revolutions and disruptions. Pointing to scenes of popular uprisings in Europe once again, Baba writes, “If we had to step down the same path that [Europeans] experienced in ancient times, it would mean that our country would have to experience scenes of tragic carnage like England and France. Why does the author [KatÖ] desire the unhappiness of our emperor and our society?”70 In other words, catalyzing evolution to achieve instant democracy will allow Japan to equal the West without bloodshed.

68. Maruyama Masao, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, and Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), 313. 69. Ibid., 314. 70. Baba, Tenpu jinkenron, 457.

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One way to understand the function of mind and emotion in Baba’s work is through analogy to the mechanism of “inherited adaptation.” Before the discovery of genes, not only Lamarck and Spencer but also occasionally Darwin himself believed that it was possible for the habits of parents to become the instinct of offspring. Unlike the ponderous mechanism of natural selection, inherited adaptation permitted rapid change. For those working for a complete transformation of Japanese society, this biological mechanism provided grounds for optimism: acquired political ideas—free thought, speech, and action—could be embodied in the next generation. For Baba, representative government can become an instantly acquired inheritance permitting Japan to shed its past. While KatÖ maintains that Japan’s social evolution in this dangerous world must be slow, guided by transcendent wise men like himself, Baba argues that social evolution allows Japan to see a future that it can begin to grasp in the present. Japan can leap over evolutionary stages and embrace the democracy that certainly lies ahead of it. It does not have to wallow in pre-democratic backwaters or trail Europe on the road of progress. Ironically, given the usual argument that a naturalized politics is right wing, Baba’s progressive politics relies on nature more thoroughly than does KatÖ’s conservatism. Baba’s theory of swift social evolution did not carry the day in convincing the government to allow popular representation. Within three years of this debate, he was arrested on the charge of illegally buying explosives. In 1886, he was on his way to exile in America. It may have been a kindness that he never lived to hear the man whose thought he so admired, Herbert Spencer, denounce the arch-conservative Meiji Constitution as “far too large an installment of freedom” for a place like Japan.71 71. Nagai Michio, “Herbert Spencer in Meiji Japan,” Far Eastern Quarterly 14 (November 1954), 58. See also conclusion, n. 5.

chapter 6

Ueki Emori: Singing the Body Electric

Ueki Emori (1857–92), in concluding his response to KatÖ Hiroyuki, declares, “I have turned the bones-and-flesh of Jinken shinsetsu into a mix of salad greens. Although there may still be knots in the lumber [of my argument], I have no leisure today to feed healthy rabbits.”1 This gleeful flourish of mixed metaphors serves as an introduction to Ueki as well as a conclusion to his book Tenpu jinkenben (In Defense of Natural Rights), published in January 1883. The exuberant puckishness exhibited in this passage is part and parcel of Ueki’s attitude toward the political authority that he challenged repeatedly on behalf of a democratic constitution and a bill of rights. The very metaphors used in this passage— physically specific and theatrical—underscore the materiality and playfulness so important in Ueki’s political philosophy. As I will argue, this physicality in motion is the fundamental basis of Ueki’s approach to relations of power and also the ultimate limit of his political vision. Ueki had a journalist’s quick and prolific pen—his response to KatÖ was published within three months of the appearance of Jinken shinsetsu— and he had an eager energy that made him a dynamic operator in antioligarchic circles. Born to a Tosa samurai family of moderate means, he 1. Ueki Emori, Tenpu jinkenben (In Defense of Natural Rights), reprinted in JiyÜ minkenron, vol. 5 of Meiji bunka zenshÜ, ed. Yoshino SakuzÖ (Tokyo: Nihon hyÖronsha, 1927), 481. Ueki is responding, somewhat flamboyantly, to KatÖ’s assertion that human beings evolve just as do plants and animals. Ueki chooses for the sake of rhetorical advantage to stress the botanical side of KatÖ’s equation, and, thus, he makes salad greens of KatÖ’s argument.

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was an only child, doted upon by his parents as he brags in one of his two autobiographies.2 In his teens he went to live with Itagaki Taisuke and within a few years became an important advisor to the progressive leader, writing petitions, speeches, and newspaper articles in support of popular rights. Ueki organized political societies, including the Osaka Kokkai Ganbo Kai (Society for a National Assembly), and was instrumental in the formation of the JiyÜtÖ (Liberal Party), with Itagaki at its head, in October 1881. In support of these efforts, Ueki traveled extensively within Japan, although he never had the opportunity for study abroad.3 He remained engaged in journalism and politics until his early death at the age of thirty-five. For many years after he died in 1892, Ueki Emori was forgotten. When Ike Nobutaka devoted a special section to Ueki in his 1950 study, The Beginnings of Political Democracy in Japan, he noted that Ueki “has never been the subject of a full length biography. Nor has his ‘zenshu’ or ‘complete works’ ever been issued.”4 Historian Hijikata Kazuo commented in 1962 that the reason for this neglect was not that Ueki had been an “obscure thinker,” but rather that he had been an “obscured” one.5 Written out of official histories by the Ministry of Education, Ueki Emori was revived only in the 1950s through the scholarly labors of Ienaga SaburÖ, who combined fervor and expertise in an effort to recover an “undistorted view” of Japanese history after the distortions of the war years. Among his other projects, Ienaga has continued research on Ueki and has published his complete works, Ueki Emori shÜ, numbering an impressive ten volumes.6 2. Jijoden, in Ueki Emori senshÜ, ed. Ienaga SaburÖ (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1974), 205. Ueki left a detailed record of his own life, writing two autobiographies, the one in Japanese cited above and another in Kanbun. He also kept a daily diary from 1874 to the year of his death, 1892, and a miscellany. See Ueki Emori, Ueki Emori nikki, vols. 7, 8, and 9 of Ueki Emori shÜ, ed. Ienaga SaburÖ (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1991), and Ueki Emori, Muten zatsuroku, ed. Ienaga SaburÖ and Sotozaki Mitsuhiro (Tokyo: HÖsei daigaku shuppan kyoku, 1974). 3. Ueki’s travels have been mapped in Matsunaga ShÖzÖ, JiyÜ byÖdÖ o mezashite: Nakae ChÖmin to Ueki Emori (Aiming at Liberty and Equality: Nakae ChÖmin and Ueki Emori) (Tokyo: Shimizu shoin, 1984), 8. Ueki himself gives his speaking schedule from 1876 to February 8, 1890, in Jijoden, 240. 4. Ike Nobutaka, The Beginnings of Political Democracy in Japan (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950), 170. 5. Hijikata Kazuo, “Ueki Emori: Jinken shuken no shuchÖ” (Ueki Emori: Advocate of People’s Rights), in Nihon shisÖka, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1962), 173. 6. Ienaga SaburÖ originally published Kakumei shisÖ no senkusha: Ueki Emori no hito to shiso (Forerunner of Revolutionary Thought: Ueki Emori, the Person and the Thought) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1971) in 1955. In the preface, he voices his belief that the postwar period will permit “scientific history” to excavate the thought of many like Ueki in

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Whereas Baba Tatsui, Ueki’s colleague in the JiyÜtÖ, displayed conflicting impulses—on the one hand toward law, order, and stasis and, on the other, toward will, violence, and progress—Ueki seems to have been endowed with a less paradoxical temperament. He runs full tilt at life, never flirting with the frozen moment of equilibrium that so perversely attracts Baba and Spencer. Ueki’s writings never suggest a decadent longing for death’s perfect closure. Instead, servile obedience, ignorance, and powerlessness are consistently associated with death.7 Ueki berates “those who advocate bureaucratic despotism and those politicians who create autocracy” because they “have the habit of considering the people of the nation from the very beginning as though they were dead objects.”8 Ueki demands instead a government that responds to the moving bodies of its citizens. Freedom is not the moment of static, balanced perfection it seems to be for Baba. Rather, Ueki’s version of freedom is intimately associated with activity, not of the mind as much as of the living body and the beating heart. Even in a somber political disquisition like Minken jiyÜron (The Theory of Popular Rights), published in March 1879, Ueki breaks into song, chanting democratic rhythms, marking time for the dancing bodies of a free people.9 Rarely does Ueki’s work exhibit systematic scholarship or in-depth efforts to grapple with intellectual conundrums; he thinks and acts according to passionate, visceral faith, which serves him well in the conditions in which he had to operate. This optimistic, less introspective temperament allowed Ueki to play the political game at the outskirts of power for more than fifteen years. While KatÖ inhabited the hushed inner sanctum of oligarchic power and Baba was exiled across the Pacific for a radicalism beyond acceptable

the practical service of liberty. Ienaga has also published Ueki Emori kenkyÜ (The Study of Ueki Emori) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1960) and edited Ueki Emori senshÜ (Selected Works of Ueki Emori) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1974) and the ten-volume Ueki Emori shÜ (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1990–91). With Sotozaki Mitsuhiro, he edited Ueki’s Muten zatsuroku (Tokyo: HÖsei daigaku shuppan kyoku, 1974). 7. For example see Minken jiyÜron, in Meiji shisÖ shi, ed. Matsumoto Sannosuke, vol. 30 of Kindai Nihon shisÖ taikei (Tokyo: Chikuma shobÖ, 1976), 138. 8. Ueki, Tenpu jinkenben, 476. 9. See the supplement at the end of Minken jiyÜron for the song entitled “Minken inaka uta” (Country Song of Popular Rights). The rhythms of Ueki’s writing and the pre-Freudian character of his emphasis on the bodies and movements of ordinary people recall, at least to my mind, the poetry of Walt Whitman. Some of the language I use here to describe Ueki is borrowed from Whitman, who died the same year as Ueki. For further discussion of this song, see Roger W. Bowen, Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan: A Study of Commoners in the Popular Rights Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 206–8, and William W. Kelly, Deference and Defiance in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 259.

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limits, Ueki managed the difficult maneuver of being in “the loyal opposition” in a society where such a concept was oxymoronic. In 1890, when the first diet was opened, Ueki was the elected representative from Kochi prefecture. Unlike either KatÖ’s or Baba’s, Ueki’s populism withstood the pressures of an increasingly conservative political environment with élan. Ienaga SaburÖ, taking a more skeptical view than I do, interprets Ueki’s self-assurance as “self-deification” (jikÖ shinka). Ienaga levels this charge not as a biographical aside to the study of Ueki’s politics but as emblematic of a fundamental flaw in his political philosophy, which “inclined towards a simplistic optimism assuming direct, continual progress” rather than progress achieved through dialectical engagement with the contradictions of modernity.10 Since Ienaga believes that “there is absolutely no difference between his political thought and his philosophy of life,”11 Ueki’s lack of self-criticism reveals more than the absoluteness of a single ego. Instead it is symptomatic of the failure of the popular rights movement to amend its approach after the defeats of the 1880s. When the movement ran into trouble, argues Ienaga, “there was no way to correct failures, because self-criticism was lacking.”12 Ienaga’s emphasis on self-criticism or negation as a necessary part of the dialectic in both personal growth and public progress arises from his analysis of Japan’s failure to achieve democracy. For Ienaga, the lack of self-criticism in Ueki and the democratic movement of his generation was far more than a strategic blunder in the practical politics of the moment; rather, it contributed to the inability of Japan to transcend its past and achieve modern freedom. In other words, Ienaga searches within Ueki for a moment of negation that he sees as seriously missing not just from Ueki and his generation, but from Japan’s modern history as a whole. Without this moment of negation or self-conscious critique, there can be no “dialectical development through sublimating the ego and surmounting its limits through self-examination.”13 Without the moment of negation that ultimately creates the possibility of transcendence, regression both personal and political is inevitable. Although Ueki certainly radiates confidence—one might indeed say a youthful confidence, given his short life—Ienaga’s judgment of “selfdeification” seems too harsh and is belied by a tinge of self-irony, a strain

10. Ienaga, Ueki Emori kenkyÜ, 402. 11. Ibid., 396. 12. Ibid., 402. 13. Ibid.

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of humor in Ueki’s writings. Would a man who was god to himself end his autobiography (partially destroyed by mice) with the following lines? “The Ueki of [ ] has become the Ueki of liberalism. The Ueki of [ ] has become the Ueki of patriotism. The Ueki of society has become the Ueki of revolution. The Ueki of the Woman Problem has become the Ueki of the theory of women’s rights. The Ueki of a family has become the Ueki of a father and mother and no wife. The Ueki of the year Meiji 22 has become the Ueki who is thirty-three.”14 Is there not a touch of playfulness in the last line about his age, a bit of ruefulness about the absence of a wife, a lack of glory in his self-definition? Ueki neglects the offices of trust he has held, the publications issued, the organizations founded, and instead lists three ideals to which he adhered—liberalism, patriotism, and equal rights for women. Like Thomas Jefferson, whose epitaph for himself neglects to mention his presidency, Ueki sums up his life with graceful simplicity. One can only read this final passage of his autobiography (these few lines constitute the entire last chapter) as the words of someone committed not solely to himself but to things outside himself. Rather than negotiating the contradictions in life cerebrally, Ueki nimbly takes the path of defiant, aggressive humor. And it should be remembered that humor itself provides a certain transcendence. Ienaga not only misses the element of humor that ameliorates the absoluteness of Ueki’s ego, but he also, I believe, slights the intense pressure under which Ueki labored for his cause. Judging actors operating under the constraints of political repression is always a delicate matter.15 If history has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that the role of critic in a repressive regime is psychologically fraught, a high-wire balancing act in which the maintenance of self requires deft maneuvering. Under such conditions, intense self-criticism may be difficult if not impossible, and it is rarely a first priority for those with the bravado to remain publicly engaged. The Meiji government did not lag in its efforts to still dissent through both punishments and bribes.16 Along with limitations on

14. Ueki, Jijoden, 292. According to the editor of the manuscript, the missing words in this passage are due to “mouse damage.” 15. Ienaga’s failure to consider more fully the oppositional context in which Ueki struggled is ironic given his own remorse for his silence during the 1930s and 1940s. In part, his immense effort to recuperate Ueki arises from his regret that he did not speak out on behalf of liberty and truth during the war. Even more spectacularly, Ienaga waged a decadeslong legal battle to correct systematic omissions in Japanese textbooks that ignored Japan’s militarism and the actions of its armies on the continent. 16. For a discussion of Meiji press censorship from 1875, see Richard H. Mitchell, Thought Control in Prewar Japan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976), 22–23.

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his freedom of movement and the censorship of his publications, Ueki also braved imprisonment and physical punishment. His article “Enjin seifu” (Monkey Government), published in the YÜbin HÖchi Shinbun, was rewarded by a two-month stint in jail. Upon release in June 1876, Ueki, who was then just twenty years old, defiantly published another piece declaring “jiyÜ wa senketsu o motte kawazaru bekarazaru ron” (liberty must be purchased at the price of life’s blood).17 In these conditions of government repression, Ueki’s continued public engagement required immense self-confidence. Surely his optimist’s faith in himself and “limitless progress” (mugen shinpo) helped him surmount the difficulties of imprisonment and the grinding struggle for a more democratic government. Ueki’s worldliness and spontaneity, like his humor, enabled his work of active social critique, but they also limited its intellectual rigor, as Ienaga suggests. Ueki’s role as a political organizer and publicist required a temperament not entirely compatible with the role of theoretician and intellectual, but it was as both an activist and a theoretician that Ueki responded in January 1883 to KatÖ’s Jinken shinsetsu. While in the former role he seems to have been moderately successful in keeping the pressure on the government to respond at least in a limited way to popular demands, in the intellectual pursuit of remolding the Japanese cosmopolis to accommodate liberty and equality, he was a failure.

The Basic Body of Tenpu jinkenben In Tenpu jinkenben (In Defense of Natural Rights), Ueki Emori responds to KatÖ Hiroyuki’s attack on “natural rights” with the same fervor as Baba Tatsui, but he employs a different concept of nature. In diametric opposition to Baba as well as to KatÖ, Ueki argues that “there is no relationship between survival of the fittest and fundamental human rights.”18 Social evolution is anathema to Ueki. Instead, fundamental human rights exist regardless of history and social conditions. Where nature—as ten, tenzen, or shizen—grants individual life, it grants equal individual rights. Unlike Baba, who sees rights as part of the unfolding progress of natural evolution, and unlike KatÖ, who believes that rights only come into existence as they are actually acquired within nation-states, Ueki sees natural rights as eternal and unchanging. He argues in his characteristic 17. Hijikata, “Ueki Emori,” 174–75. 18. Ueki, Tenpu jinkenben, 471.

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singsong style that “the rights of ancient times are the rights of today. The rights of today are the rights of ancient times. With true rights you have neither progression nor regression.”19 Ueki’s rebuttal of KatÖ is not as complex and nuanced as Baba’s. Stylistically, Tenpu jinkenben is patchwork. Ueki proceeds by reproducing page-long quotes from Jinken shinsetsu followed at times by a mere oneor two-line rebuttal. He also introduces long passages from the authors to whom KatÖ refers, particularly Bartholomaus von Carneri (1821– 1909) and Herbert Spencer. These lengthy interpolations leave the impression that Ueki finds KatÖ’s position and KatÖ’s sources so ridiculous that they are self-damning; merely reproducing them demonstrates their weakness. This casual, almost irresponsible, style in Tenpu jinkenben is due partly to the fact that it is a summary of the more thorough arguments for popular rights made in Ueki’s earlier works such as Minken jiyÜron (The Theory of Popular Rights), published in March 1879, and Minken jiyÜron nihen kangÖ (The Theory of Popular Rights, Part II), published in May of the following year. I will rely on these two works, as well as Ueki’s 1888 defense of women’s rights, to supplement my analysis of Tenpu jinkenben, which in itself does not do justice to Ueki’s position. Ueki’s less than comprehensive rebuttal of KatÖ cannot be entirely explained by previous publications. The real cause appears to lie in the lack of common ground shared by the two men. Unlike the engagement between Baba and KatÖ, with its many shared terms and assumptions, Ueki and KatÖ are arguing from disparate spheres of faith. KatÖ’s view of rights is so different from Ueki’s that their arguments bypass one another. Describing KatÖ’s wrongheadedness in characteristically metaphorical terms, Ueki conveys something of the enormous distance between them: “it is as though he decides to stop the southern flow of a river by obstructing its northern tributary or that he desires to get plums by shaking a pine tree.”20 For Ueki, KatÖ’s long scholarly defense of evolution is beside the point; Ueki happily concedes the fact of evolution, believing that it has nothing to do with rights. Although at times rights seem lost in the vagaries of historical struggle, argues Ueki, they always exist no matter what the circumstances. Ueki insists on separating the “exis-

19. Ueki, Tenpu jinkenben, 479. Roger Bowen argues that Ueki’s primary intellectual commitment is to Herbert Spencer’s early writings, but even these were imbued with a teleological faith that I do not see Ueki sharing. See Bowen, Rebellion and Democracy, 202–6. 20. Ueki, Tenpu jinkenben, 466.

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tence of rights from the preservation of rights.”21 KatÖ believes just as firmly that rights exist only when circumstances permit their expression. In other words, this contest pits Ueki’s belief that rights are an unverifiable, immutable essence against KatÖ’s belief that rights are actually existing claims against a real, functioning government. As such, this contest pits principle against positivism. Despite its failure to grapple in depth with KatÖ’s position, Tenpu jinkenben, when read with Ueki’s other works, provides a clear picture of Ueki’s reliance on a very different sort of natural authority in politics. As I have said, Ueki equates nature primarily with the individual human body, rather than with environmental forces, in seeking support for democratic rights. Ueki argues that the very fact of inhabiting a body, not the attributes of the body or mind, provides an individual with political rights. The insistent physicality in Ueki’s political philosophy defies most conventional conceptions of individuality, in which particular attributes both shared and idiosyncratic make up the texture of specific personalities. Whereas many European and American theorists argue for individual rights in order to protect the celebrated variety of individual experience, particularly in intellectual and religious realms, Ueki refuses to discuss attributes that might differ from individual to individual. For him, nature is not the wellspring of infinite variety but the great equalizer. This is nature in the form of undifferentiated bodies, in the face of which political, social, and gender hierarchies such as those developed by Baba vanish. Strikingly, Ueki may be said to argue for individual rights but not for individualism. Ueki focuses relentlessly on the basic physicality of bodies, repeatedly using phrases like “the right to bodily freedom” (jinshin jiyÜ no kenri) that underscore his sense of the visceral nature of rights.22 At one point he argues that “the rights of human liberty [ jinsei jiyÜ] can be described as the right to move hearts and bodies freely [shinshin dÖsa no jiyÜ].”23 Ueki’s reasoning moves from the fact that humans have tongues, teeth, and cheeks to the right to free speech,24 from the fact that human beings have the capacity for movement to the right to move, from the bodily 21. Ibid., 472. 22. Ibid., 469. 23. Ueki, Minken jiyÜ nihen kangÖ, in Meiji shisÖ shi, ed. Matsumoto Sannosuke, vol. 30 of Kindai Nihon shisÖ taikei (Tokyo: Chikuma shobÖ, 1976), 157. 24. See Genron jiyÜron (On Freedom of Expression), originally published 1880, discussed in Ike, The Beginnings of Political Democracy, 136.

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investment in labor to the right to sufficient goods to feed and clothe the body,25 from the separateness of individual bodies in relation to the cosmos to the right to freedom of religion,26 from the fact of life to the right to live. Although these rights are corporeal, they are also abstract. As Ueki says in Tenpu jinkenben, “A person’s rights are not goods [shinamono] with a fundamental kind of substance. They are without shape, length, width, or thickness. Instead, they exist entirely within a person.”27 Because the right of living (seikatsu no kenri) comes directly from heaven (tenzen) or nature (shizen) to individuals, its foundation is beyond human interference, and thus these rights are absolute, at least in theory. Ueki’s emphasis on the body may at first glance seem akin to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European and American theories about the origin of human rights in a state of nature, but there are two crucial differences. First, because rights for Ueki inhere in the human body without regard for its attributes and capacities, nothing about the body except its sheer existence may be taken into account in delineating political possibilities. For instance, Ueki is not concerned with the ability to reason. In fact, he insists that “rights exist with a person and die with that person; they are not won or lost according to intellectual strength. Where there is a person there are rights; where there is no person there are no rights. Variations in intellectual ability make no difference.”28 Nor does Ueki consider the body a first-order form of property through which subsequent rights to property can be asserted. He makes no attempt to suggest that through exploiting one’s ownership of one’s own limbs and their labor one can demand protection for property. Physical goods are justified on the basis that they support the body, not the other way around (that is, on the basis that the bodily action creates physical goods). Nor does Ueki consider sex a fundamental attribute of the body in relation to political rights: male bodies and female bodies have the same rights. Nor does physical strength make any difference. As Ueki points out, if rights were awarded “on the basis of bodily strength, then a rickshaw driver ought to have more rights than a philosopher, a boatman greater

25. Property and material goods are seen not as ends in themselves by Ueki but as necessary accoutrements attained through the body for the protection of the body. Ueki does not wish to make wealth a prerequisite of patriotism or political rights. Ueki, Minken jiyÜ nihen kangÖ, 155. 26. Ueki draws a chart to illustrate this belief in Minken jiyÜron nihen kangÖ, 159. 27. Ueki, Tenpu jinkenben, 470. 28. Ueki, Danjo no dÖken, 156.

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rights than a legal scholar, a sumo wrestler wider rights than a university professor.”29 In short, as Ueki sees it, all bodies are just bodies; our equality is as absolute as are our rights, which rest neither on reason, labor, gender, nor physical strength. Ueki’s is a radical and startling vision of humanity, quite at odds with that of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury European thinkers, who even in their most benevolent conceptions of humanity still focused on our natural capacities and deficiencies. In a second contrast with Enlightenment thinking, Ueki does not see these rights-bearing human bodies as preceding society and existing prior to the state. Individual natural rights coexist with the state from their inception. Although Ueki’s stress is on the rights granted by heaven and nature to individual bodies, he also assumes that heaven and nature have always already provided the community—for which Ueki indiscriminately uses both the terms “society” (shakai) and “nation” (kokka)—in which these bodies exist. From the beginning, this community also has prerogatives and rights just as do individuals. The “freedom of society” or shakai no jiyÜ is coterminous with the individual’s natural liberty or shizen no jiyÜ. There is no Garden of Eden, no state of nature, from which individual human beings set forth on the journey toward the state. While Ueki’s lack of interest in a natural, pre-state form of society is hardly surprising given that such a theoretical moment has little support in the religious, mythical, or intellectual traditions of Japan, it deters the development in his theory of a social space independent of the state. Indeed, it seems to me that Ueki’s theory occludes the space of “civil society” precisely because his version of “natural rights” compels no narrative of human development from nature to the state and therefore creates no trajectory through alternative forms of sociality that precede and impinge upon state power. There are natural bodies and a natural state, and neither one has a claim to precedence. Let me elaborate on the importance of this original state of nature to Western concepts of the state and civil society. As John Keane has pointed out, “Until the middle of the eighteenth century, European political writers without exception used the term civil society to describe a type of political association which placed its members under the influence of its laws and thereby ensured peaceful order and good government. . . . In 29. Ibid., 155. Ignoring KatÖ’s twisted distinction between good and bad forms of the struggle for survival, Ueki asks rhetorically, “If KatÖ met a superior person and this person were capable of taking KatÖ’s life, does it mean that KatÖ would have no right to life?” (Tenpu jinkenben, 472). Besides which, Ueki argues, bodily strength changes daily (Danjo no dÖken, 155).

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this old European tradition, civil society was coterminous with the state.”30 During the second half of the eighteenth century, these terms become decoupled through the elaboration of theories of natural law. Civil society is separated from the state becoming, argues Keane, a bastion against despotism as the increasingly numerous, articulate, and educated professional class come to fear the irrational lawlessness, waste, and confusion of pure blind power. In erecting rational limits to state power, theorists of civil society compellingly describe what precedes that state by right and in time. Italian political theorist Norberto Bobbio concurs, arguing that between 1750 and 1850 the state was rationalized “through the constant use of a dichotomic model, where the state is conceived as a positive moment in contrast to a pre-state or anti-state society, which is relegated to a negative moment.”31 Bobbio insists, “Modern political thought from Hobbes to Hegel is marked by a constant tendency—though expressed in contrasting ways—to consider the state or political society, in relation to the state of nature (or natural society), as the supreme and definitive stage in the common and collective life of humanity perceived as a rational entity, as the most perfect or least imperfect result of that process of rationalization of instincts or passions or interests via which the rule of uncoordinated force is transformed into one of co-ordinated liberty.”32 In conceiving of the state in contrast to nature, Adam Ferguson, Thomas Paine, Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Kant, Hegel, and others created a narrative defamiliarizing the state, questioning its presumptive right to exist and suggesting that human beings formed social relations for better 30. John Keane, “Despotism and Democracy: The Origins and Development of the Distinction Between Civil Society and the State 1750–1850,” in Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives, ed. John Keane (London: Verso, 1988, reprint 1993), 35. 31. Norberto Bobbio distinguishes: “three principal variants of this model: the political state as a radical negation which therefore eliminates and overthrows the state of nature, that is as a renewal, or restauratio ab imis, compared to the phase of human development which precedes the state (Hobbes–Rousseau); the state as a conservation—regulation of natural society and therefore no longer seen as an alternative to the phase which precedes it, but as something which actualizes or perfects it (Locke–Kant); the state as the conservation and transcendence of pre-state society (Hegel), in the sense that the state is a new moment and does not only perfect the earlier phase . . . without constituting an absolute negation. . . . While the state of Hobbes and Rousseau definitively excludes the state of nature, Hegel’s state contains civil society (which is the historicization of the state of nature or the natural society of the philosophers of law) . . . and transcends it.” Bobbio, “Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society,” in Civil Society and the State, 74. 32. Ibid., 73.

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or worse prior to its existence. This narrative of origins—a moment when humanity was in a state of nature or natural society—created the theoretical space for renegotiating the state on positive, rational grounds. This “dichotomic model” suggested that there was a bond among human beings preceding the bonds of state allegiance to which critics could appeal. For those who found natural society and natural human attributes good (for instance, Paine’s belief in our mutual affection or Locke’s insistence on our innate sense of rational propriety) or at least not bad (as did Hobbes and Rousseau), the concept of natural society prior to and independent of the state could be used to counter state demands and state interference. The actual state could be measured against the promise and failures of the natural state with “civil society,” described by Bobbio as “the historicization of the state of nature or the natural society of the philosophers of natural law,”33 serving as the middle space and arbiter between them. Ueki, by contrast, does not provide his individual bodies with capacities that will permit them to negotiate with one another, nor does he suggest that their relations with one another take temporal precedence over their relation with the state. He thus provides neither the means nor the moment during which interested, articulate individuals can negotiate the creation of a positive, rational, and restrained state that will protect the best aspects of community; in other words, he does not conceive of a “civil society” independent of or preceding state power. Since he does not separate society from the state, it cannot mediate between government power and the individual. Indeed there seems no arbiter, no intermediate ground, no mediating moment between the individual and the state, and therefore no theoretical obstruction to sliding into despotism and the rule of unrestricted power. While limbs that dance and move, lips that sing, and loins that make love are what matter to Ueki, the raw fact of bodiliness, unlike strength, property rights, and the ability to reason, provides no means for political negotiation.34 It is instructive to contrast some of the vast recent literature on the body with Ueki’s views. For instance, in addressing the social sciences’ neglect of the body, Bryan Turner comments that “embodiment is a necessary condition of man’s sensuous appropriation of nature; embodiment 33. Ibid., 74. 34. Many passages in Ueki’s writing catalogue movements and sensations. The song entitled “Minken inaka uta” (Country Song of Popular Rights), which ends Minken jiyÜron, dwells on physical movement, equating free movement with political liberty. An earlier passage in the same book, pp. 152–53, describes each of the senses.

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is a precondition for practice.”35 Turner seems to be proposing this view as an unobjectionable starting point, expecting wide agreement. Ueki, however, would reject the notion that embodiment is a precondition. Put starkly, Ueki believes that bodies are themselves practice. Turner expands on the relationship between self and body, writing that “In exercising control through embodiment, I have immediate and first-order possession over my body in a way which I do not experience with respect to other objects. I possess my body, but there is a sense also in which it possesses me, since the demise of my body is also (at least for all practical purposes) my demise.”36 Turner’s argument in many ways restates that of Simone de Beauvoir, who suggests that “If the body is not a thing, it is a situation. . . . It is the instrument of our grasp upon the world, a limiting factor of our projects.”37 The radical difference of Ueki’s position is apparent; Ueki suggests no distance between the hand that grasps the world and the “I” who desires to understand it. In Ueki’s theory, one inhabits one’s body, one does not have a relationship with it. The possessed and the possessor are one; the movement and the mover are united. The body is not the instrument of knowledge but knowledge itself. In this formulation, the mystery of incarnation, the otherness of physical being, is dispelled not in transcendence, which implies levels of being, but in what might be called the archaic simplicity of ordinary being. Since the body lacks mystery, there is no call to interrogate it. It harbors no secrets. In the context of Ueki’s thought, calls like that of feminist scholar Luce Irigaray, in The Speculum of the Other Woman, for plumbing the depths of the (female) body to shatter the mystery of otherness are incoherent.38 The body as described by Ueki seems strangely two-dimensional, having neither states to transcend nor depths to plumb. Perhaps as Ueki intended, the resilience of the body he describes arises from its status as a brute given, ruthlessly resistant to attempts to problematize it. Despite the many theoretical difficulties that arise from such an unmediated embrace of the body, Ueki’s emphasis on bodiliness per se enables his eloquent support of women’s equality. The sex of a body does 35. Bryan S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 232. 36. Ibid., 233. 37. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1989), 34. 38. See especially Luce Irigaray, “Any Theory of the ‘Subject’ Has Always Been Masculine,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974).

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not matter—in fact, cannot logically matter—to Ueki. His 1888 work, Danjo no dÖken (Equal Rights for Men and Women), expands his political agenda to include equal rights for women as “the rightful path of original nature” (ganrai shizen no dÖri).39 Ueki relishes the revolutionary change that such a course would inspire in Japanese homes: “If we employ the principles of freedom within our houses, it will be like a big house-cleaning; then each household will become truly happy and the nation will become truly happy.”40 Although actual house-cleaning continues to be the chore of women rather than men in Ueki’s vision, he urges a new system in which household decisions will no longer be dictated by the patriarch, since “orders dissipate affection; orders destroy harmony.”41 Rather, he argues, couples should live by “natural affection” (shizen no aijÖ). Ueki’s faith in the possibility of this harmony that is simultaneously domestic and national does not arise from an analysis of history; he does not insist that the achievement of harmony fulfills a natural teleology. Whereas Baba projects a perfected and equal society at the end of history, Ueki suggests that such a society can arise at any time once hierarchy is relaxed. His description leaves the impression that harmony is always there underneath the corruption of artifice. Remove the artificial hierarchies, embrace the truth of bodiliness, and discord will disappear. Quoting Herbert Spencer in support, Ueki argues that all differences can be leveled by equal educational opportunity and responsibility.42 In the last analysis, men and women are all human beings (jinrui), Ueki writes, and “once we conclude that they are all part of humanity, they are not in the least different.”43 Indeed, sex and any other differences among bodies are subsumed under the undifferentiated category of “all with human bodies.”

The Political Problems of Ueki’s Bodies Ueki’s radical theory of unmediated bodiliness creates three related problems. First, he must find a way to separate human embodiment from that of animals. After all, since animals also have bodies, why are they not endowed with political rights? Second, Ueki must explain the standing of individual bodily rights in the collective. In other words, what is the 39. Ueki, Danjo no dÖken, 154. 40. Ibid., 180. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 158–59. 43. Ibid., 153.

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relationship between individual bodies and social bodies if both are equally natural? Third, Ueki must find some way to speak of the particular collective body of Japan. All three of these problems are related by Ueki’s refusal to permit “consciousness” to mediate bodiliness. Once Ueki denies the political relevance of reason, labor, or strength, neither conscious will nor desire can be used to mediate between mind and body or between one individual and the others, and therefore Ueki cannot explain how people can reform a government. I will return to this problem of consciousness after discussing the three more specific problems. Differentiating human beings from animals was one of the most interesting problems in the politics of nature for Europeans and Americans. In fact, in the debates about the legal and moral rights of endangered species and in the socio-biological positions analogizing human and non-human societies, the issue continues to attract attention. In general, in nineteenth-century Europe and America, the line was drawn according to mental faculties. Such an approach created the anxious need to discover just who or what might have the ability to reason. Lines demarcating nature from culture based on mental capacity were also drawn among human groups defined by gender, race, ethnicity, and sanity. Selfconscious reason, particularly the ability to formulate interests to be protected, allowed those so blessed to enter and maintain political society. Conscious reason bridged the gap between the givenness of the natural condition of humankind and its chosen condition of society. In general, animals, men with darker skin, and all women and children remained close to the “natural” condition. As we have seen, Meiji Japan did not inherit the high anxiety felt in Europe about the demarcation between nature and culture, and this is reflected in the lack of anxiety about the relation between animals and human beings. Nevertheless, Ueki feels called upon because of his reliance on the body to say something to distinguish animal bodies from human bodies. Since Ueki is unwilling to rely on mental capacities, he distinguishes humans from animals on the basis of happiness: “We human beings are the animals who can enjoy the greatest happiness.”44 The notion of “happiness” (kÖfuku) might seem to echo utilitarianism; indeed, Ike and Ienaga suggest that Ueki was too much under the sway of this theory.45 However, it seems to me that Ueki divests the term of the cal-

44. Ibid., 151. 45. Ienaga SaburÖ writes that “the Meiji Enlightenment thinkers (keimÖshisÖka) were apt to run in the direction of a utilitarianism which makes the individual’s pleasure his

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culus of pleasure by which British theorists created a hierarchy honoring the more intellectual delights. John Stuart Mill supports liberty in order to produce happiness, but unlike Ueki, Mill defines the greatest happiness as facilitating mental and moral development of the highest order. Liberty, Mill writes, is necessary to create those rare exalted creatures of “genius” who so promote human development.46 The Englishman’s greatest happiness for the greatest number is predicated on the understanding that the greatest happiness will most emphatically not consist of an orgiastic bacchanalia. In Ueki’s vision, happiness merrily slides in precisely that direction. True to his vision of bodily happiness, Ueki emphasizes the fundamental right to freedom of the body for its own sake, without distinguishing between moral and immoral desires. When “we govern our bodies [wareshin] in accord with our bodies,”47 as he suggests, we allow our desires to run freely: “As long as your heart is robust you can do anything; without freedom there is nothing.”48 He mentions that this natural freedom (shizen jiyÜ) might tend toward evil, but this eventuality does not thwart Ueki’s confidence in desire’s ultimate goodness. The machinations of the wicked appear remote from the straightforward physicality of which he sings in “Country Song of Popular Rights”: The freedom to eat, the freedom to live, Thinking with the heart, speaking with the mouth, Moving our bodies, walking with our legs, Looking and hearing, everyone is free, The rights of freedom are held by everyone.49

These freedoms, innate as a layer of skin, are depicted as entirely innocuous, unlikely to thwart the freedoms of others. Certainly these simple pleasures are remote from instrumentality, innocent of willful purpose, and therefore, Ueki seems to imply, never likely to provoke conflict. Sexual desire, instead of being seen as bestial, is easily incorporated

highest value. They were unable to establish an ethical individualism which makes individual moral duty its absolutely highest thing.” Quoted in Robert Bellah, “Ienaga SaburÖ and the Search for Meaning in Modern Japan,” in Changing Japanese Attitudes toward Modernization (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1965), 411. It should be noted that personally Ueki seems to have been a dutiful individual, not guided solely by pleasure and advantage. See also Ike, Beginnings of Political Democracy, 137. 46. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Northbrook, Ill.: AHM Publishing, 1947), 65. 47. Ueki, Minken jiyÜron nihen kangÖ, 152. 48. Ibid.,153. 49. From “Minken inaka uta,” in Minken jiyÜron, 150.

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within the sphere of human activity by Ueki. At times, sexual desire even melds with political desire, becoming the same thing. In Minken jiyÜron, Ueki conflates happiness, sex, and politics: “We make people’s rights the pillow and hug the beautiful person of freedom. If we can sleep with a constitutional assembly, then our delight will be manifold.”50 In a similar metaphor Ueki equates the shame of refusing to demand natural rights from the government with the shame of being a secret lover.51 Sexual expression and political expression alike should be open, recognized as good. In the final analysis, desire is never “lack,” as Platonic theory would have it,52 but rather life itself. Just as he resists the conceptual distancing of mind from body, Ueki renounces the gulf between desire—carnal, political, or otherwise—and object of desire. The natural subject is complete and contained within its bodily form, already possessed of all its desires including political rights. Even if we grant that a superb visceral capacity for happiness is enough to separate humans from other creatures, Ueki’s account of happiness provides few guidelines for engaging with society. Linking individual rights to so embodied a definition of happiness democratizes both rights and pleasures, but it creates no mechanism for organizing and protecting rights and pleasures, sexual and otherwise, within society. In Ueki’s description of the human body, neither possession (even the first-order possession of one’s own body parts) nor desire (as an acknowledgment of lack) are introduced as basic components of the individual. Without modes of possessing or desiring, the individual as described by Ueki appears bereft of any fundamental ability or need to reach out to others. Configuring vibrant human bodies into a structured society is the second major theoretical problem in Ueki’s work. It is here that the problem of consciousness becomes most acute. Ueki himself is not entirely oblivious to the problem created by his theoretical use of nature as the self-contained body. In Minken jiyÜron nihen kangÖ, he tries to confront the difficulty directly by making a distinction between shizen no jiyÜ (the freedom of nature), by which he means individual rights, and shakai no jiyÜ (the freedom of society), by which he means the prerogatives of the national community.53 Ueki is 50. Ueki, Minken jiyÜron, 152. 51. Ibid., 139. 52. Plato famously defines desire in this way in the Symposium. For an eloquent discussion of desire, see Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986). 53. Ueki, Minken jiyÜron, 152.

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quite clear on the desired relationship between these two freedoms: he states emphatically that society’s freedoms should not suppress nature’s freedoms. Ienaga accurately describes Ueki’s views as follows: “In order to be able to exhibit [human beings’] independent abilities to the maximum, maximum liberty must be guaranteed by society. The kokka must be organized to permit the operation of the people’s independent abilities.”54 Ueki praises already existing constitutions—American, French, Dutch, English, and even Prussian—delineating their particular guarantees of liberty.55 There can be little doubt about the type of restrained, constitutional government that Ueki would like to see. The problem, both practical and theoretical, is that although we can understand where Ueki wishes to end up, it is difficult to see how he gets there. In other words, Ueki fails to describe the mechanism that enables these two sets of freedoms—natural and social—to be negotiated. His own barely conscious natural actors are endowed with neither the initiative nor the need to form a constitutional government where one does not already exist. Without relying on conscious action to transcend the individual physical body and create the collective social body, it is difficult to discern the means by which natural and civic desires can be balanced. Ienaga SaburÖ’s critique of Ueki on this score is correct: Ueki’s absolute faith in the limitless powers of human independence is not an adequate base for creating independent political subjects. However, as I will argue in the next few pages, what the subject in Ueki’s theory lacks is not the radical self-doubt proposed by Ienaga. Rather, Ueki’s vision of political subjectivity provides no theoretical, temporal, or institutional space for a conditioned consciousness that can negotiate with society without denying the nature of its own embodiment. Such a subject, combining nature and non-nature, never emerges in Ueki’s description of how social and natural freedoms interact. In formulating the problem in terms of these two sets of freedoms, Ueki does not give natural rights temporal priority over social rights. Nature’s liberties (shizen no jiyÜ) and society’s liberties (shakai no jiyÜ) emerge simultaneously without reference to a state of nature. As Ueki declares in Minken jiyÜron nihen kangÖ, “You cannot be endowed with a body without receiving political rights from heaven [ten].”56 Thus, the political subject is always at the same time completely natural and com-

54. Ienaga, Ueki Emori kenkyÜ, 396. 55. Ueki, Minken jiyÜron, 155–56. 56. Ibid., 165.

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pletely social; there is not even an imagined moment in which the subject of natural rights is not also the subject of political rights. The instantaneous rights described by Ueki include a broad range of prerogatives such as the rights to participate in politics, to petition the government, to take legal action against the government, to become a government clerk, and to receive protection from the government. Interestingly, this list from the 1880 Minken jiyÜron nihen kangÖ does not include the right to vote. Later, in Danjo no dÖken, Ueki forthrightly states his belief that suffrage rights are not in fact “naturally inherent” (tenzen koyÜ), although they are necessary for those who help organize the kokka.57 This statement might be interpreted as a plea for voting rights for the male members of the former samurai class, whose interests greatly concerned Ueki and who might claim to have contributed to the nation. But the issue is confused a few pages later when Ueki declares that both men and women should have the right to vote so that they may achieve happiness.58 In short order Ueki changes the rationale for voting rights from a retrospective reward for past services to a tool for prospective happiness.59 The problem of negotiation and the principles of that negotiation between nature’s liberties and society’s remains unresolved. The relationship between societal and individual rights is as unstable in Tenpu jinkenben as elsewhere in Ueki’s writings. In responding to KatÖ, Ueki admits that “to say that natural rights inhere within people is not to say that when people combine together they will necessarily protect those rights. . . . In times like today, one must admit that the people have not yet been able to securely attain their rights.” Although he adds a wistful amendment to this surrender—“but you cannot say that there are no rights”60—Ueki seems at a loss as to how to guarantee particular rights for the body in society. Without the aid of some attribute or condition to mediate between individuals and community, his theory fails to protect the individuals he claims to fight for. Despite his fervent attack on KatÖ’s idea that the only rights that exist are those bestowed by the state, Ueki offers no logical basis on which the state must recognize, or can be forced to recognize, those natural rights he declares to be inherent in hu57. Ueki, Danjo no dÖken, 168. 58. Ibid., 169–70. 59. In a proposed constitution, Ueki suggests that everyone paying taxes except minors, convicts, and priests be given the right to vote. Ike, The Beginnings of Political Democracy, 134. 60. Ueki, Tenpu jinkenben, 472.

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man beings. Both individuals and the state mutely confront one another, armed with foreordained rights but without the means for a truce. Ultimately, the state, due to superior organization and power, must prevail in any dispute. I realize that I am pressing Ueki on theoretical matters that were of secondary importance to his activist polemics. His hope of forcing recognition for broader political rights depended less on logical clarity than insistent agitation, but the failure of his theory to lay adequate groundwork for democratic authority makes it necessary to take Ueki’s solipsistic concept of the natural body seriously in order to understand its limitations. When we do, it appears that the body and the natural rights that inhere within it as described by Ueki can flourish only outside society; to really enjoy the freedoms of this natural body would be to live alone, a yamabushi (mountain ascetic) removed from society. As soon as the natural body is located within society, where Ueki always assumes it will be, it is subject to the penetrating demands of the state without means to defend itself. There seems no moment or instrument of negotiation between the body of the individual on the one hand and the kokutai, or the body of the nation, on the other: one body negates the other. This form of the “logic of negation” dead-ends without the possibility of transcendence through cognition and consciousness. I have purposely used the analogy to yamabushi and the phrase “the logic of negation” in reference to Ienaga SaburÖ’s discussion of nature in Nihon shisÖshi ni okeru shÜkyÖteki shizenkan no tenkai (The Development of the Religious View of Nature in Japanese Thought), published in 1944. Before studying Ueki Emori and his political ideas, which he did not do until after the war, Ienaga SaburÖ focused on religious questions, including the religious concept of nature. In this wartime work, Ienaga claims that Japan is unique both in its search for solace in nature and in the strength of community ties that pull individual Japanese back from nature. Ienaga gives a compelling description of nature as the antithesis of society and the locus for denying or negating (shizen no mu) all the structures and ties of human society. Through retreat into shizen or yamazato (mountain villages), human beings engage in the first step of a dialectic leading to transcendence of both the social and natural worlds. These natural places of quiet retreat, instead of producing tranquility in the hermit, produce a longing for society, even though society has never been able to provide spiritual solace. Indeed, neither the hubbub of the human community nor the utter loneliness of nature provides relief for the spirit. “At this point,” writes Ienaga,

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[the hermit] reaches an insoluble difficulty. However, this contradiction is broken not by neutralizing it but rather by a seemingly paradoxical accepting the contradiction as a contradiction in a higher frame of mind. That is to say, an absolute contradiction causes the self to open up through absolute negation. To explain more concretely, a special frame of mind opens up in which the loneliness (sabishisa) of the yamazato in its loneliness itself is conversely the highest joy and becomes the salvation of the spirit.61

In Ienaga’s work, the absolute contradiction between society and nature creates the possibility of transcendence for the religious truth-seeker. The antithesis between society and nature in Ienaga’s religious theory echoes Ueki’s political antithesis between shakai no jiyÜ and shizen no jiyÜ. In both cases, the two categories are defined as opposites but are necessary to each other. The great difference is that after Ienaga’s hermit rejects society completely and grasps the utter aloneness of a mountain retreat, he can transcend to “a higher frame of mind.” Ueki’s individuals, on the other hand, are utterly lonely within society before ever reaching a mountain fastness; they remained trapped in their bodies, unable to transcend them, able only to enjoy the inarticulately shared pleasures of the flesh. We are “not born orphans into this world,”62 as Ueki says, and yet we are ill equipped by his definition for social engagement. Ienaga’s hermit chooses to engage the “logic of negation” when he moves away from society into nature; Ueki’s individual, by virtue of inhabiting his or her natural body, engages in a form of the “logic of negation” unwittingly and without choosing to do so. Ueki’s vision of the body arguably finds its equivalent in Ienaga’s yamazato, but without the dialectical means of overcoming loneliness. In the terms employed by Ienaga, Ueki’s body is an antithesis from which no synthesis—or liberal political state—can emerge. If mediation between the individual and society in accord with Ueki’s theory is difficult, understanding Japan as a nation through his bodies is nearly impossible. This third major conundrum in Ueki’s work does not arise from any inherent resistance to nationalism on the part of theories of the body in general. In much of kokugaku (nativist) literature, the body contributes to the creation of the nation through work, which is synonymous with worship of Japan’s particular ancestors. However, the body as described by Ueki refuses the specificity of any 61. Ienaga SaburÖ, Nihon shisÖshi ni okeru shÜkyÖteki shizenkan (Tokyo: SaitÖ shoten, 1944), 60–61. I am indebted for the translation of this passage to Bellah, “Ienaga SaburÖ,” 392. 62. Ueki, Danjo no dÖken, 154.

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particular cultural practice. There is some irony in this. Despite Ueki’s disparaging comments about Motoori Norinaga, nativist prefiguring of Ueki’s emphasis on the body seems plausible in many aspects. In both Ueki’s work and nativist writing, the body seems complete and sufficient unto itself: within the body is located all necessary knowledge for creating the natural and correct political form. Ueki’s emphasis on motion and dancing recalls the seasonal rhythms praised in nativist literature in which the ordinary folk work the land or dance in the hope of world renewal (yonaoshi). Ueki’s insistent location of speech within the body—as in cheeks and tongues giving the right to speak—brings to mind the nativist effort to bridge the gap between word and action. In its archaic simplicity and completeness, the body in Ueki’s writing at times appears to mimic the body of “the folk” as described by Hirata Atsutane.63 Despite the general debt Ueki appears to owe to kokugaku thought— though specific textual links are difficult to find—the way the human body is understood is ultimately quite different. Ueki’s body is a body common to the human species, with all traces of culture and history, even the marks of ethnicity and gender, rubbed away. People, as Ueki speaks of them, are like polished stones emerging from a gem spinner, each smoothed to uniform size and roundness with all traces of the dust and dirt of their particular origins removed. Simply put, no recognizably Japanese body distinguishes itself. Again, in his polemics Ueki may have felt no need to dwell on the theoretical foundation of Japan as nation. In an atmosphere in which, as Ienaga puts it, “not human beings in themselves, but an independent and strong nation became the final aim of Meiji Japan,”64 Ueki’s own demand that people be treated as ends rather than means (without any overt reference to Kant) simply assumed the existence of government and of nation. The constant clamor of nationalism surrounding him may have deflected any desire on his part to add to the discussion of what makes Japan Japan. Nevertheless, Ueki was not uninterested in nationhood. Though universalist in his thinking, Ueki considered himself a committed patriot and constantly summoned “the good of the nation” to sup63. For a discussion of the body in nativist texts, see Harry D. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), especially 407–9. 64. Quoted in Joseph Pittau, S.J., “The Meiji Political System: Different Interpretations,” in Studies in Japanese Culture, ed. Joseph Roggendorf (Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1963), 121.

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port his arguments for individual rights, as did Baba. Without popular autonomy, Ueki writes, the country is mired in endless, grinding cycles of riots and oppression. “In order to heal,” he recommends, “a constitution and liberty are the primary medicines.”65 Like Baba, Ueki believes that only a free people can produce the necessary patriotism to ensure a free nation. He warns that “under despotism there is only one patriot, and he is the monarch.”66 Women’s rights are also supported by arguments based on patriotism: “Women are responsible for educating the household. If these women do not have patriotism, and do not think about politics, then they cannot awaken appropriate national sentiments in their children. . . . If mothers can raise their children in the national spirit it will bring great justice and benefits to all.”67 Undoubtedly, Ueki did what he did for the sake of the nation, but he never tells us how or why nationhood exists. Here as elsewhere, Ueki’s optimism and lack of theoretical intensity sweep away all intellectual conundrums. One can almost sense his impatient response to quibbles about theoretical inconsistency. He might be imagined to say, “Of course Japan as a nation exists, patriotism is good, and, if the undifferentiated, self-contained bodies in my theory make nationhood logically incoherent, forget the problem, join the dance, embrace oneself, one’s rights, one’s nation.” In his attempt to enlist the support of nature for a liberated subject—as a human body separate from animals, as endowed with political rights, and as part of the Japanese nation—Ueki fails to make a convincing case.

A Dance of Loneliness Ueki tried to reshape the cosmopolis of Meiji Japan so that both society and individuals would exemplify the perfect liberties of natural law and positive law simultaneously. He wanted his readers to see through existing conditions to the fundamental natural truth of equality and rights and to embrace this truth with simple confidence. At this underlying level of reality—a reality invisible and unmanifest everywhere in Japan— political prerogatives are an embodied birthright rather than the result of crafting of institutions; they are at once absolutely present yet completely abstract. Since neither the individual nor the nation truly lacks

65. Ueki, Minken jiyÜron, 147. 66. Ueki, Danjo no dÖken, 185. 67. Ibid., 186.

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anything at this unrealized level of reality, neither needs to negotiate or transform itself in order to obtain these rights.68 Such being the case, political rights are not premised on conscious thought, will, or action, but on sensations that Ueki describes as “beyond thought, beyond language.”69 In the end, as his own rather plaintive conclusions reveal, Ueki’s reliance on this type of unconscious and inarticulate sensuality provides only a flimsy basis for constitutional government as well as a flimsy defense against the ravages of autocracy. The conundrum facing Ueki is central to all theorists of liberty: how do we square nature and freedom within the individual and within society? How do we protect or accommodate what is natural and given while retaining choice and volition? Maruyama found it impossible to accommodate nature at all and instead embraced absolute freedom in the form of sakui (invention). Ueki’s solution is quite different. He tries to make nature and freedom both absolute in themselves and absolutely compatible with each other. The individual may claim both perfect natural equality and freedom and perfect social equality and freedom. Ultimately the entire edifice of Ueki’s thinking rests on an unarticulated faith in the harmony of these forms. It is no wonder then that his theory lacks any conceptual elaboration of the role of will, since that mode of consciousness denotes critical distance from circumstances rather than harmony with them. The lack of differentiation between mind and body in the individual is played out in Ueki’s theory as a lack of critical distance between individual and government and between nature and culture. In absorbing the authority of nature in this way, Ueki champions egalitarian democracy—at least theoretically. Unlike both KatÖ and Baba, he so distrusts hierarchies of ability or traditional power that he dismisses all aspects of mindful creation in proposing the fundaments of a democratic state. Unlike both KatÖ and Baba, he projects no natural teleology. On the other hand, the characterization of Ueki’s thought as liberalism, while assumed in most commentaries, is questionable. Although

68. A comparison between Ueki’s view of nature and that of Henri Lefebvre underscores the relationship between conceiving of nature as imperfect and opening up the possibilities for action. For Ueki, nature authorizes perfect individual liberty and perfect social arrangements so that there is no need or possibility for action because nothing is lacking. By contrast, when Henri Lefebvre writes about nature, he underscores the paradoxical way in which nature is both identity and complete otherness. This core paradox produces a condition of insurmountable lack that, Lefebvre argues, makes praxis possible and indeed inevitable. Ueki’s vision, in providing only essence, provides no space for political action, for action of any kind, because there is no lack. 69. Ueki, Tenpu jinkenben, 467.

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the jiyÜshugi (liberal) philosophy he espoused,70 the JiyÜtÖ party of which he was a leading member, and his formal demands for a constitution and voting rights71 have all been accounted as proof of his liberalism, the political subjectivity he advocates hardly resembles the liberal individualism of either his own day or later. From Enlightenment liberalism through utilitarianism to modern formulations, liberalism is premised on an anti-utopian consciousness that individuals’ rights, hopes, and prerogatives conflict with one another and that government arrangements necessary to adjudicate the resulting conflict pose the danger of limiting liberty too much in their imposition of order. Judith Shklar, for instance, argues that “the original and only defensible meaning of liberalism” focuses on the quest “to secure the political conditions that are necessary for the exercise of personal freedom. Every adult should be able to make as many effective decisions without fear or favor about as many aspects of her or his life as is compatible with the like freedom of every other adult.”72 Suspicious both of unbounded individual interests and the communal requirements for order, liberalism tends to propose political arrangements that will balance competing hopes rather than satisfy them all completely. Ueki believes that complete satisfaction is not only right but also possible. As the focus on nature permits us to see, Ueki’s vision of modernity is utopian and populist without being liberal. 70. Ueki, Jijoden, 292. 71. Ueki Emori, Nihon kokka kokken an (Draft Constitution of the Japanese Nation), originally published August 1881 in Ueki Emori senshÜ, ed. Ienaga, 89–111. 72. Judith Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989), 21.

chapter 7

The Acculturation of Japanese Nature

The preceding chapters highlighted the centrality of nature in early Meiji political thought through the mid-1880s; this chapter explores a hiatus in nature’s overt political presence, extending until the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. In contrast to early Meiji documents—the Charter Oath, the Constitution of 1868, and the books and articles by KatÖ, Baba, and Ueki during the Crisis of 1881—the major documents of Meiji state formation produced around 1890, including the Meiji Constitution, hardly mention nature in any form. Nature fades from political prominence just when Japan acquires its modern governmental structures, a modern educational system, national autonomy over tariffs, increased international stature with the defeat of China in 1895 and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, and the symbols of modern statehood such as a national anthem. This fact poses a problem for my argument. If nature is eclipsed in government documents just as Japan gains the institutions of modern statehood, does this not indicate that modernity is in fact anti-natural? Does this not suggest that Japan became a modern state, at least in part, because it rid itself of concepts of nature in political ideology? And would this not imply that although Maruyama and others may have overlooked a crucial moment in Japan’s development, the basic premise of their analyses is correct? I do not think so. Instead, this chapter will argue that the social Darwinian concept of nature, stressing universal evolutionary stages, proved so detrimental to nationalistic aspirations that it was disregarded during the 1890s while another, more nationalistic and useful 158

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concept of nature was developed, not in political discourse per se but in the discourses on Japanese culture. The brief hiatus of nature from major state documents is not what made Japan modern; rather, this suppression marked a particularly charged moment in Japan’s confrontation with modernity, when government supporters realized that social Darwinism would always imply that Japan lagged behind “the West,” and would always suggest that social and political turmoil was a natural and necessary part of public life. Meiji oligarchs began to look for another form of modernity, resting on another form of nature, that could supply the necessary ideological ballast for a nation in international competition and an elite striving to maintain domestic control. Given the dominance of social evolution in political theory, however, nature’s reformulation occurred not in that arena but in the cultural realm. Changes in vocabulary, literature, and approaches to landscape nationalized the concept of nature, destroying its universalist and progressive implications. In other words, I argue that it was nature’s political potency, not its lack of power, that deterred second generation Meiji leaders from using the social Darwinian concepts at hand, waiting instead until nature could be redefined more serviceably for national ideology as a form of Japanese culture. This momentary but crucial deflection of nature from government to culture created the basis for the third formulation of nature and politics. The spatial cosmopolis of the Tokugawa period had proved inadequate to understanding historical change, and the historicized cosmopolis of social Darwinism had proved inadequate to founding nationalism. In the third cosmopolis (discussed in the next chapter), the Japanese nation itself, not the natural order of the universe, or the evolving human species, or the liberated individual, emerged as the natural political subject par excellence. My argument has been that modernity in Japan and elsewhere is marked by the radical reformulation of the cosmopolis so that a new, conscious form of subjectivity emerges. The acculturation of nature in the 1890s created the tools for this radical reformulation in the early twentieth century so that Japan could become fully modern. Those who argue that modernity is defined by its anti-naturalness assume a trajectory or a dialectic away from nature. Perhaps if Maruyama and Ishida had attended to the late-Meiji government documents’ silence on the topic of nature, their categories might have compelled them to suggest an impulse on the part of the Meiji oligarchs toward the antinatural, liberatory modernity that they themselves so desired. And, of course, the Meiji oligarchs had no such impulse. Those who argue, con-

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versely, that modernity expresses a natural pattern of growth maintain that Meiji Japan replayed evolutionary historical processes first experienced in Europe. Meiji figures are placed along a European spectrum, from conservative to liberal to radical. In both cases, Japan’s nineteenthcentury experience is deradicalized and defined as belated modernity, deformed modernity, or incomplete modernity in comparison with Europe. In both cases, there is only one form of nature and one form of modernity, and Europe lays prior claim to them both. If we reframe this issue, asking not whether Japan became modern like Europe, escaping nature’s thrall or expressing nature’s proper history, but in what ways Japanese thinkers sought to realign nature and politics, the positions of the Meiji players become more complex, and the relation between Japan’s experience and that of other nations is altered. Indeed, recognizing multiple forms of nature reveals that there are multiple forms of modernity, further “provincializing” Europe’s experience as only one of many.1 Reframing the question also permits us to recognize the full extent of the turmoil in nineteenth-century Japan. This turmoil is not a matter of revolution according to Western models or of incremental steps taken toward the West. Instead, Japanese thought underwent a fundamental intellectual upheaval. As the analysis of nature as a political concept demonstrates, it is this massive, mindful reconfiguration of polis and cosmos that aligns Japan’s experience with that of much of the world. This chapter is devoted, first, to discussing the limited success of the evolutionary cosmopolis; second, to the reasons for its failure; and finally, to exploring how a more ideologically potent vision of nature was produced, not in political discussions where social evolution dominated, but through changes in language and the arts.

Social Evolution’s Victory Let me briefly recap the story thus far. In the bakumatsu period, the Tokugawa cosmopolis was abandoned. That form of nature—spatial, centered, non-progressive, and hierarchical—no longer provided sufficient explanatory force or ideological power for anyone, whether they were supporters of the shogunate or of the emperor, peasants of the yonaoshi

1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), and “Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the Critique of History,” Cultural Studies 6 (1992), 337–57.

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movements, or rangaku scholars intent on gathering intelligence from European nations. Activists and writers at all levels of society sought to realign nature and polis to accommodate the expanded world of early Meiji Japan. During the intellectual ferment of these years, the power to determine what nature meant slipped from the hands of government supporters and ricocheted all over the political map.2 KatÖ Hiroyuki was one of the first to recognize this instability as a danger. In Jinken shinsetsu, he attempted to refashion nature as a bulwark of state authority on the basis of evolution’s political lessons. His attack on government critics structured the debate as one between shizen, meaning a secular, objectifiable nature that intelligent political leaders needed to study and understand, and tenpu, the “absurd” belief that nature per se provided an infallible moral guide for politics. The term tenpu with its moral overtones became the rallying cry of progressive democrats Baba and Ueki, both of whom used the term in the titles of their books, although, as we have seen, they did not understand the same thing by it. Since KatÖ’s reliance on the term shizen foreshadows the increasing use of that word in preference to all others by the 1890s,3 it might appear that he successfully stabilized the terminology of nature and reclaimed the concept for state purposes. Cautiously distancing himself from the early radical ideas of Herbert Spencer,4 KatÖ articulated a view of social Darwinism that made him the ideal spokesperson for an autocratic nation in the eyes of many commentators. Indeed, historian Kada Tetsuji believes that the views of Jinken shinsetsu “became the philosophy of nationalism for future generations.”5 The views of Jinken shinsetsu certainly struck a cord in an intellectual world greatly enamored of the theory of social evolution as expressed by Herbert Spencer. Not only was Spencer one of the most imposing intellectual figures of his generation to his European and American contemporaries, but, as we have seen, he was predominant among the West2. See Chapter 3. 3. For a discussion of when shizen becomes the standard term for “nature” in Japanese, see Yoshida Tadashi, “Shizen to kagaku,” p. 342, and Sagara TÖru, “Hajime ni” (Preface), p. iii, both in Shizen, eds. Sagara TÖru, BitÖ Masahide, and Akiyama Ken, vol. 1 of Nihon shisÖ (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1983); and also Minamoto RyÖen, “Komento,” in Shizen no shisÖ (Tokyo: KenkyÜsha, 1974), 42–55. 4. KatÖ includes Spencer in a list of “deluded” Western thinkers who believe in natural rights. He bases his judgment on Spencer’s quite radical Social Statics, which so impressed Baba. Jinken shinsetsu, in Nishi Amane, KatÖ Hiroyuki, ed. Uete Michiari, vol. 24 of Nihon no meicho (Tokyo: ChÜÖ kÖronsha, 1984), 438. 5. Kada Tetsuji, Meiji shoki shakai keizai shisÖshi (The Intellectual, Economic, and Social History of Early Meiji) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1937), 606.

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ern social and political theorists translated into Japanese.6 It was Spencer rather than Darwin whose view of evolution got top billing, and it was the social implications of evolutionary theory rather than the biological ones that caused the greatest stir. A new Japanese cosmopolis was constructed not by science but by sociology. So revered was the Spencerian image that his name was evoked by advocates of democracy such as Baba Tatsui,7 as well as by advocates of imperial oligarchy. Socialists, too, found inspiration in Spencer, as a respectful 1903 death notice in the December 27 issue of Heimin shinbun demonstrates. The educational establishments from elementary schools to the new imperial universities adopted this great systematic view of the world. Social Darwinism crept into educational theory as Japanese children were taught to see the different peoples of the world climbing the trail of progress, with Europeans and Asians on top moving down through Arabs to Africans and aborigines.8 University professors, both imported and native, and public lecturers extolled natural and, especially, social evolution, much to the frustration of Christian missionaries and their supporters.9 Indeed, historian of philosophy Gino Piovesana claims that “the first years of Tokyo University were known as the time of Daigaku Shinkaron (literally University Evolutionism), so much was this institution a center of diffusion of ideas on evolution.”10 Along with KatÖ, who served as president of Tokyo Imperial University from 1881 to 1893, Professor Toyama Mazakazu (ShÖichi, 1848–1900) sponsored Spencer’s 6. Nagai Michio, “Herbert Spencer in Meiji Japan,” Far Eastern Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1954), 55. Contemporary lack of respect for Spencer’s theories and dismay over sociobiology jointly constrain our ability to see these theories in the context of their day. For a thorough discussion of Spencer’s position in nineteenth-century thought, see Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 295–330. 7. As discussed in Chapter 5, Baba translated the first chapter of Spencer’s First Principles as “Supensaru shi tetsugaku ron” (On the Philosophy of Spencer) (1884) and advocated Spencerian ideas in “Heikin ryoku no setsu” (An Explanation of the Force of Equilibrium, 1879) and “Shinka bunri no niryoku” (The Dual Forces of Union and Disunion, 1879). Baba’s use of Spencer in direct response to KatÖ Hiroyuki’s attack on the people’s rights movement can be found in “Homi KatÖ Hiroyuki kun Jinken Shinsetsu” (Reading Mr. Kato Hiroyuki’s New Explanation of Human Rights, 1881–82) and Tenpu jinkenron (1883). 8. Herbert Spencer’s Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (1861) was translated into Japanese in 1880. For examples of its use in textbooks, see Yamazumi Masami, KyÖkasho (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1970), 21. 9. RikugÖ Zasshi, a Christian publication, consistently criticized such advocacy. See, for instance, their response to Edward S. Morse’s public lectures on evolution. RikugÖ Zasshi (1882), 35–41. 10. Gino Piovesana, Recent Japanese Philosophical Thought, 1862–1996 (Richmond, Surrey: Japan Library / Curzon Press, 1997), 25.

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ideas of evolution, teaching Spencer’s Principles of Psychology and founding the first chair of sociology in Japan in 1893. Ernest Fenollosa, who arrived at the university in August 1878 to hold the first chair in philosophy, had founded the Spencer Club as an undergraduate at Harvard a few years earlier.11 Outside educational institutions, serious commentaries and the popular press alike promoted social Darwinism. Journalist and historian Tokutomi SohÖ (IchirÖ, 1863–1957) used Spencerian educational theory to promote moral training in Shin Nihon no Seinen (Youth of the New Japan, 1886), Spencerian historical theory in ShÖrai no Nihon (The Future Japan, 1886), and the theory of the survival of the fittest (yÜshÖ reppai) to exhort young men to economic enterprise. Periodicals such as TÖyÖ Gakugei Zasshi and Gakugei Shirin were crammed with articles demonstrating the extraordinary interest in evolution that, as Watanabe Masao and Ose YÖko point out, “was discussed mainly on the ground of social science rather than natural science.”12 Most famously, Japan’s envoy to Britain, Mori Arinori (1847–89), felt it appropriate to approach the great Spencer himself for comment on the Meiji Constitution.13 To an extraordinary extent, Meiji intellectuals refocused their understanding of society and politics through the lens of Spencer’s evolutionary sociology. KatÖ’s triumph, brief though it was, consisted of clearly articulating the principles of the evolutionary state wherein the true essence of nature and of politics was expressed through time rather than in space.

Social Evolution’s Defeat: The Political Inadequacy of a Progressive Cosmopolis History, however, plays tricks on apparent victors. In the long run, despite KatÖ’s influence and exalted career, he did not successfully delineate a usable concept of cosmopolis for the Meiji state; KatÖ was not, as Tanaka Hiroshi calls him, “the forerunner of conservatism [hoshu shugi] in Japan.”14 The evolutionary state of nature and of politics propounded by KatÖ was neither conservative in the sense of rev11. Kenneth Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems in Cultural Identity, 1885–1895 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969), 60. 12. Watanabe Masao and Ose Yoko, “General Academic Trend [sic] and the Evolution Theory in Late Nineteenth-Century Japan,” Japanese Studies in the History of Science 7–8 (1968–69), 141. 13. J. D. Y. Peel, ed., Herbert Spencer: On Social Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 253–57. 14. Tanaka Hiroshi, Kindai Nihon to riberarizumu (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1993), 55.

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erence for older forms of society and government, nor conservative in the sense of relying on traditional texts for guidance and support, nor, most surprisingly, conservative in its hopes for the future. It was a stark new way of coming to terms with the world, but it only briefly served the interests of the Japanese elite. Instead, KatÖ’s primary contribution was in demonstrating the ideological potency of nature, not in shaping an evolutionary cosmopolis for Japan in the twentieth century. The principal reason that an ideology based on social evolution failed was that it proved to be insufficiently nationalistic and only partially controllable. In other words, it sanctioned neither Japan’s claims to international equality nor the tight domestic authority sought by the Meiji oligarchy. As such, the evolutionary cosmopolis was inadequate for Meiji and, later, TaishÖ and ShÖwa governments’ purposes. It is easy to see why. According to KatÖ’s view of social evolution, nature was a universal process of which Japan was a particular instance, a less than supremely fit national organism struggling to comply with evolutionary forces.15 As Baba eagerly points out, unless democracy as the highest evolutionary state was immediately adopted by Japan, nature in KatÖ’s sense created an international hierarchy in which Japan perpetually trailed the West. Followers of Spencerian principles who felt it impossible for Japan to leapfrog over the intervening stages of evolution and catch up with the West felt Japan’s inferiority and vulnerability keenly. For instance, philosopher Inoue TetsujirÖ (1855–1944) feared that allowing mixed residence throughout Japan would inevitably result in Westerners gaining control of all commerce and government because of their superior intelligence, physique, and spirit of independence. Inoue urged a frank admission of “our weak and inferior civilization” for the sake of national security on social Darwinian grounds.16 Such a picture was bleak. When Japanese leaders accepted the social Darwinian definition of nature, they became vulnerable not only to fears of naturally ordained conquest but also to the sententious patronizing of Herbert Spencer himself. Spencer, instead of rejoicing in the work of his followers when asked his opinion of the Meiji Constitution, had expressed his dismay over “the miscarriage of your constitution” to both Mori Arinori (1847–89), Japan’s ambassador to Britain from 1879 to 1884, and to Kaneko Ken15. KatÖ compares Japan unfavorably with Europe, which he describes as the most superior civilization. Jinken shinsetsu, 449–50. 16. Inoue TetsujirÖ, “Wagakuni ni okeru rÖdÖ mondai” (The Labor Problem in Our Country) [1889], in Meiji benka zenshÜ, 3rd edition, eds. Kimura Ki et al. (Tokyo: Nihon hyÖronsha, 1968), vol. 6, 508.

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tarÖ (1853–1942), one of the drafters of the document.17 Spencer’s pronouncement that at least six to eight generations would need to elapse before Japan could enjoy even the limited representative government permitted by imperial decree in the 1889 constitution exemplified the grandiose condescension of many Europeans and Americans (and even some Japanese) toward Japan. By 1893, Tokutomi SohÖ, among others, reacted with disgust to this threatening presumption of naturally determined Western hegemony. From his former acceptance of Spencer, particularly Spencer’s view that developed industrial societies were necessarily pacifist, Tokutomi moved to embrace a militarily assertive Japan. The 1895 victory over China, he said, showed that Japanese, too, had a “character suitable for great achievements in the world.”18 A decade later, Japan’s victory in the RussoJapanese War dramatically overturned the international model of nations arrayed in strict, unchanging order on the evolutionary ladder. For the impatient nationalists of the new generation of Meiji Japan, as Kenneth Pyle has demonstrated, social evolution forecast no imminent equality with the West. In practical terms, then, KatÖ’s particular view of nature may have been useful in dampening domestic hopes for immediate popular representation in the early 1880s, but it created ideological difficulties for the government, which was seeking to define the Japanese polity in a way that would win it international power and recognition on the basis of equality. The ideology of social evolution eventually created domestic difficulties as well because of its partially independent status. Although KatÖ had attempted to commandeer nature for the oligarchic state, his premise that the political lessons of nature were universal and progressive accorded with the views of democrats and socialists. KatÖ may have stressed the slowness of natural political evolution and the possibility that it might not always redound to human benefit, but he believed that eventually, with skillful leadership, society would evolve democratic forms that would finally culminate in a “great universal community where all the countries of the world abide by a central institutional framework and uniform laws.”19 That this utopia, mandated by nature, would result from a managed struggle for the survival of the fittest made it no less free and 17. J. D. Y. Peel, ed., Herbert Spencer, 253–57. 18. Quoted in W. G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 1894–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 31. 19. KatÖ, Jinken shinsetsu, 451. Translation by J. Victor Koschmann (Department of History, Cornell University, photocopy).

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egalitarian. Both Baba and Ueki recognized the paradox of KatÖ’s approach. As Ueki complains, “KatÖ builds the castle of conservatism with the ideas of progress.”20 Conservative commentators also complained. Looked at from KatÖ’s perspective, nature functioned as an independent standard by which to measure political progress. In the final analysis, this concept of an evolutionary state prescribed an open-ended, forwardlooking politics with the ultimate standards outside elite control. Even more striking, KatÖ’s politics of nature perversely undermined the current power of the GenrÖ, the informally constituted group manipulating power behind the throne. Since natural evolution was, according to KatÖ, only fitfully moral, he asserted the need for a knowledgeable leadership to guide the nation when national goals were at variance with natural processes. At first glance, this justification for an autocratic elite overseeing the social struggle might seem favorable to the GenrÖ. However, if we look more closely, it is possible to see that KatÖ is suggesting a new basis for political subjectivity, at least for a limited minority. His logic works this way: since nature and politics do not coincide completely until the attainment of utopia, there arises the need for mindful actors who can weigh the rights and wrongs of particular propositions. These inventive political actors must take responsibility for creating intermediate standards since not all standards at the current stage of development are naturally determined. The elite who have the right to engage in politics are poised, to use Maruyama’s terms, between nature’s standards and their own inventions. This political leadership is, therefore, in the position to negotiate with both nature and society. For the leadership, this meant that they would always be held accountable both to nature’s ultimate utopia and to human standards of justice. Rather than creating a concept of nature guaranteeing the GenrÖ’s hegemony, KatÖ has envisioned a form of cosmopolis that leaves them exposed, insecure, and responsible. They would be unable to mask decisions as inevitable, natural occurrences. For KatÖ, this inventive political subjectivity necessarily emerges where nature’s problematic ethics, its unrelenting materiality, and its stress on ruthless competition to fuel material progress need restraint and guidance.21 Although KatÖ himself would not have relished the thought, the form of political subjectivity he envisions for the elite comes closer to that of clas20. Ueki Emori, Tenpu jinkenben, reprinted in JiyÜ minkenron, vol. 5 of Meiji bunka zenshÜ, ed. Yoshino SakuzÖ (Tokyo: Nihon hyÖronsha, 1927), 482. 21. As we have seen, KatÖ had been concerned with the ethical problems of shinkaron (evolutionary theory) even when he first trumpeted his embrace of the concept in Jinken shinsetsu, 416. The promise of future social good achieved through years of misery and

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sic liberalism than did the forms of political subjectivity advocated by Baba or Ueki. For all his allegiance to the conservative Meiji state, it is KatÖ rather than Baba or Ueki who embraces a creative, partially natural subjectivity, even if only for a few. Paradoxically, KatÖ develops this mode of subjectivity as a believer in nature’s necessary influence on politics, not as an opponent of this influence as predicated in Maruyama’s theory. As a result of social Darwinism’s inadequacies as a state ideology, official Japan began to distance itself not only from KatÖ’s evolutionary view of nature but from nature altogether. Despite the great outpouring of tracts on social Darwinism, the state remained aloof. The constitution promulgated by the emperor on February 11, 1889, does not mention nature in any form.22 The Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890, meant to inculcate the values of the new state in all schoolchildren, also ignores nature, except for an oblique, ritualized reference to the imperial throne as “coeval with heaven-and-earth.” Furthermore, the government rejected calls by Shiga Shigetaka (1863–1927) among others for Japan’s national anthem to evoke the love of Japan’s mountains, streams, and valleys. Instead, they chose “Kimi ga yo,” which, as Hiroaka Toshio points out, safely avoids references to the landscape.23 The government threw its energies into gearing up for the industrial use of natural resources, not into transforming nature into a national symbol.24 In other words, ideological nature was too hot to handle even after KatÖ tempered it in the debate of 1881–83. As it was during the American Revolution, though for different reasons, nature following the Meiji Restora-

strife was insufficient to him, if not immoral. After 1905, KatÖ expressed his increasingly keen doubts about social evolution’s ethical ramifications in a series of lengthy publications, including Shizenkai no mujun to shinka (The Contradictions of the Natural World and Progress, 1906), Shizen to rinri (Nature and Ethics, 1912), and Jinsei no shizen to gohÖ no zento (Human Nature and the Future Prospects of Our Country, 1916). 22. For a reprint of the constitution in the Japanese language, see Matsunami, N., The Constitution of Japan (Tokyo: Maruzen, 1930), 125–32. 23. “Kimi ga yo,” however, does use the peculiar image of pebbles growing into rocks: “Kimi ga yo wa, / Chiyo no yachiyo no, / Sazare ishi no Iwao to nari te, / Koke no musu made,” translated by Basil H. Chamberlain as “Thousands of years of happy reign be thine; / Rule on, my lord, till what are pebbles now, / By age united to mighty rocks shall grow, / Whose venerable sides the moss doth line.” Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan, vol. 5, p. 336. 24. The ruthless industrial use of nature, as the Ashio Copper Mine pollution case demonstrates, made evoking nature for nationalistic purposes difficult until after industrialization had progressed to the point of no return. For discussion of the Ashio Copper Mine struggle, which galvanized so many liberal and left-wing activists, see F. G. Notehelfer, “Between Tradition and Modernity: Labor and the Ashio Copper Mine,” Monumenta Nipponica 39, no. 1 (1984), 11–24; Kenneth Strong, Ox against the Storm: A Biography of Tanaka ShÖzÖ, Japan’s Conservationist Pioneer (Vancouver: University of British Columbia

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tion was a charged and dangerously uncontained concept.25 Because of its tendency to refer to the entire world and provide an independent standard, nature, I would suggest, was squeezed out of major state pronouncements for at least two decades after KatÖ’s failed attempt in Jinken shinsetsu to ensure its imperial allegiance.

Nature as Japanese Culture: Bringing the Outside In Environmental theorist and Earth First! activist Christopher Manes has argued that “the natural world stands as a limit to the manipulative power of social control, an ‘outside’ that allows people to see they are ‘inside’ a particular culture that need not be the way it is.”26 In much the same way, the concept of nature functioned as an “outside” to the Meiji state for KatÖ, Baba, Ueki, and others including Kido KÖin, with his concern for uchÜ no tsugi and tenchi no kÖdÖ. Nature was an arena from which existing conditions could be critiqued. The great difference between nature as an “outside” in Meiji Japan and Manes’s view of nature as an “outside” today is that for Meiji Japan this “outside” nature did not appear culturally neutral. In early Meiji political discourse, the West frequently appears to have laid implicit or explicit claim to universal nature, whether nature meant constitutionally insured natural rights or evolution toward the full expression of nature’s political, economic, and social goals. For Inoue TetsujirÖ, despairing that Westerners’ superiority was manifest even in the shape of their craniums, the peoples of Europe seemed nature’s favorites.27 For this reason, the concept of nature had to be brought inside Japanese culture and reclaimed before it could serve the national political agenda. Following the 1881–83 debate, even while discussions of social evolution raged in universities and the press, some writers, especially Shiga Shigetaka (1836–1927), insistently displaced nature from the terrain of Press, 1977); and Kenneth Pyle, F. G. Notehelfer, and Alan Stone, “Symposium: The Ashio Copper Mine Pollution Incident,” Journal of Japanese Studies 12 (1975), 347–408. 25. Daniel Rodgers argues that “independence was still far from secure before many of the patriots rushed to lock up their words and trim their implications.” Contested Truths: Key Words in American Politics since Independence (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 47. 26. Christopher Manes, Greenrage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), 221. Nature in this sense performs the obverse function of nature in Maruyama’s sense. 27. Inoue’s indebtedness to social evolution and Spencer’s early works is particularly evident in Rinri shinsetsu (A New Theory of Ethics), published in 1883, in which he argued that ethics must be based on an understanding of nature and the essence of the universe (Üchu no hontai).

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international politics onto the terrain of Japanese culture. Through diffuse and uncoordinated efforts, nature was acculturated and sacramentalized. Only by the end of the Meiji period would it again be useful as state ideology. Subsuming the category of nature under the rubric of Japanese culture required two related transformations: first, nature had to be reinterpreted as immanent rather than as external, and, second, it had to be stripped of its universal connotations and made to refer to Japan in particular. These changes occurred in several venues. Even the sport of mountaineering, newly introduced from Europe, helped reshape the idea of nature. Although these cultural transformations ended with the “discovery” of a particularly Japanese form of nature, most revelations of “Japanese nature” seem to have emerged through an engagement with European and American ideas, images, and activities. Overall, this acculturation of nature eroded its polyvalence and universality and destroyed its capacity to refer to a moral and political code outside the particularities of Japan. I will turn first to the dramatic reduction in vocabulary before examining the slow constriction of nature’s connotations in other cultural spheres. If vocabulary indicates the scope of one’s ideas, the capacious vocabularies of the Tokugawa and early Meiji periods betoken a cosmic sense of nature. Even a partial list of words for nature in the Tokugawa period indicates the wide-ranging topographical imagination of those centuries. The same is true in the early Meiji period. Dictionaries attempting to collate foreign terms with the Japanese language suggest many terms for the English “nature.”28 Although shizen was among these words, it was far from the only one. For instance, the 1873 English-Japanese dictionary Eigo ji’i suggests tenchi, manbutsu, uchÜ, hinshu, hontai, tenri, seishitsu, and zÖbutsusha as well as shizen.29 A few years later, in 1881, the philosophical dictionary Tetsugaku ji’i adds words such as ban’yÜ and zoka to the above list, but it does not include shizen at all.30 Ironically, KatÖ at just that moment was emphasizing shizen in response to the use of the idea of tenpu by the popular rights movement. Gradually,

28. From early Meiji, shizen had been used occasionally to translate European terms. According to Minamoto RyÖen, Nishi Amane was the first to use shizen as a translation for “nature,” in 1873 (Minamoto, “Komento,” 45). 29. Ibid. 30. This dictionary was initially produced by Inoue TetsujirÖ. Revised editions appeared in 1882 and again in 1912, with the subtitle Dictionary of English, German and French Philosophical Terms.

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though, the number of terms in general use for “nature” decreased. Linguist Sagara TÖru gives us a precise date for the standardization of shizen, arguing that “the use of ‘shizen’ as in ‘shizenkan’ (view of nature), ‘shizen kankyÖ’ (natural environment), ‘shizen kagaku’ (natural science) was fixed around Meiji 30 (1897).”31 Yoshida Tadashi and Minamoto RyÖen corroborate the idea that in the 1890s the complex terminology for referring to nature was reduced, by and large, to this one word, used both as the standard Japanese term and as the standard translation from other languages.32 By the end of the nineteenth century, the abundant richness and flexibility of Tokugawa and early Meiji vocabulary were lost in the stolidity of the single word shizen.33 This chary terminology narrowed conceptual horizons, eliminating competing terms for nature and abetting the trend toward a non-universal concept of nature particularly tied to Japan. Although historian Hino Tatsuo points to the Chinese Taoist origins of shizen as meaning “idleness” or “purposelessness” (mui),34 and linguist Yanabu Akira argues that the modern meaning of shizen compounds both pre-modern Japanese and Western senses,35 the term came to be thought of as expressing a particularly Japanese sensibility. Many Japanese scholars have emphasized “spontaneity” in defining shizen.36 Needless to say, accentuating “spontaneity” rather than, say, “the environment” as the root meaning of the term diffuses its power to refer to things outside an individual or outside a culture and highlights its reference to inherent, unmanipulated qualities. This shizen is best represented by impulses and feelings. Nature bubbles up from within, unsullied by second thoughts or reconsid31. Sagara, “Hajime ni,” iii. 32. Minamoto, “Komento,” 46. 33. See Augustin Berque, “Sense of Nature and its Relation to Space in Japan,” in Interpreting Japanese Society: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Joy Hendry and Jonathan Webber (Curdgridge, Southhampton: Ashford Press, 1986); Sagara, “Hajime ni”; Saigusa Hiroto, “Shizen to iu yobina no rekishi” (A History of the Terms for Nature), originally in ShisÖ 405 (March 1958), reprinted in Saigusa Hiroto chosakushÜ, vol. 12 (Tokyo: ChÜÖ kÖron, 1973); Suzuki Takao, Words in Context: A Japanese Perspective on Language and Culture, trans. Miura Akira (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1978); Yanabu Akira, Hon’yaku no shisÖ: ‘shizen’ to ‘nature’ (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1977) and Hon’yaku go seiritsu jijÖ (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1982); proceedings of TÖzai bunka hikaku kenkyÜ semina 4 (Center for Comparative Research of East-West Cultures, Seminar 4), Shizen no shisÖ (Ideas of Nature) (Tokyo: KenkyÜsha, 1974). 34. Hino Tatsuo, “Soraigaku ni okeru shizen to sakui,” in Shizen, eds. Sagara TÖru, BitÖ Masahide, and Akiyama Ken, vol. 1 of KÖza: Nihon shisÖ (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1983), 194. Hino suggests that Sorai used shizen as an adjective while Taoism generally treated it as a noun. 35. Yanabu, Hon’yaku no shisÖ, 32–34. 36. Sagara “Hajime ni,” viii.

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eration, by comparison or analysis. Read as spontaneity, shizen serves as a fulcrum to distinguish Japanese nature from Western nature. Japan’s nature, it has been said, reveals a mode of subjectivity while the West’s nature refers to objects. As shizen, nature came to be neither universal nor the particular domain of the West. This linguistic transformation, brought on in part by engaging European and American ideas of nature and then repressing the memory of that impure encounter, was replayed in the field of literature. By 1887, the meaning of shizen had become the focus of a running public argument between novelist Mori Ñgai (1862–1922) and Iwamoto Zenji (also known as Iwamoto Yoshiharu, 1863–1942) in the pages of Iwamoto’s journal, Onnagaku zasshi (Women’s Education Magazine). Iwamoto argued, in an article entitled “Bungaku to shizen” (Literature and Nature), that style (iki) and spirit (seishin) are expressions of nature and that “literature is that which copies nature as nature is itself.”37 From Iwamoto’s perspective, literary expression is not a discipline but a direct revelation of nature, particularly nature in the sense of the author’s unmediated emotions and experiences. Iwamoto was attempting, as linguist Yanabu Akira points out, to construct a particularly Japanese style of shizen against the Western-style definitions used by his opponent in the debate, Mori Ñgai. Mori, on the other hand, drew on the German distinction between Natur and Kunst, maintaining that culture is not a mere copy of nature but a crafted representation of life.38 Mori’s position separating nature and culture and emphasizing the craft of fiction rather than its documentary qualities became the minority view. Mori’s critics instead praised and underscored the supposed transparent naturalness and immediacy of shishÖsetsu (I-novel) literature. As the critical distance between nature and Japanese literature was bridged, so too was the critical distance between nature and Japanese culture in general. “Landscape” both actual and metaphoric became the site of national self-discovery. Older works such as Jikokushi (The History of Land and People), first published in 1701, had tied land and custom together. These books had enjoyed immense popularity during the Tokugawa period, but, as historian Minami Hiroshi points out, people lost interest in this earlier view of landscape during the bakumatsu.39 By

37. Quoted in Yanabu, Hon’yaku no shisÖ, 9. 38. Yanabu, Hon’yaku no shisÖ, 10. 39. Minami Hiroshi, Nihonjinron no keifu (The Genealogy of Nihonjinron) (Tokyo: KÖdansha, 1980), 43.

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the 1890s, however, the Tokugawa genre was rediscovered and imitated in similar works on modern Japan. Shiga Shigetaka, Miyake YÜjirÖ (also known by his pen name Miyake Setsurei, 1860–1945), and others led the way in promoting the rediscovered wonders and beauties of Japan’s physical environment.40 Shiga was particularly desirous that Japan recover its rightful feeling for its native landscape and argued that in doing so it would recover its rightful feeling of national pride.41 After training in botany and other natural sciences at Sapporo NÖgakkÖ (Sapporo Agricultural School),42 he traveled not to Europe but around the Pacific, asserting in NanyÖ jiji (Conditions in the South Seas) that Japan’s destiny was tied to her fortuitous geography. Shiga argued that, like England, Japan must build on the natural advantages of being an island nation.43 Shiga continued to advance this idea when he became editor of Nihonjin, a magazine established in 1888 to revive national confidence.44 In the first issue, Shiga insists that “the greatest issue today is the relationship of the Japanese people and the Japanese land.”45 In the second issue, Shiga specifies the natural and historical factors that create Japan’s kokusui, a term he glosses in English as “nationality” but that might better be translated as “national essence.” Shiga writes, “The influence of all environmental factors of Japan—her climate and her weather conditions, her temperature and humidity, the nature of her soil, the configuration of her land and water, her animal and plant life and her landscape, as well as the interaction of all these factors, the habits and customs, the experiences, the

40. Kenneth Pyle discusses this generation and these men in particular in The New Generation in Meiji Japan, 55–75. 41. For biographical information, see Iwai Tadakuma, “Shiga Shigetaka ron,” Ritsumeikan bungaku 186 (1960), 1–22; 194 (1961), 28–46; 198 (1961), 35–56. 42. Uchimura KanzÖ (1861–1930) was a couple of years ahead of Shiga at Sapporo. Uchimura became a Christian under the influence of William Clark, then head of the school, and eventually the founder of the non-church Christian movement in Japan. Like Shiga, Uchimura was deeply concerned with the tension between the universal and the national and, again like Shiga, his concern filtered into his explorations of Japan’s relationship with nature. See his collected writings on this subject: Uchimura KanzÖ, Shizen to jinsei (Nature and Human Life), in Uchimura KanzÖ zenshÜ, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1990). 43. Shiga Shigetaka, NanyÖ jiji, in Shiga Shigetaka zenshÜ, compiled by Shiga Shigetaka zenshÜ kankÖkai, vol. 3, 54–55. 44. Kenneth Pyle carefully underscores the point that Nihonjin and other members of the SeikyÖsha were not blindly anti-Western. He quotes Shiga to this effect: “I enthusiastically urge the importation of Western ways, but I cannot agree with the argument that there is nothing of beauty, no special talent, nothing refined in Japanese civilization and that we must therefore imitate Western styles, uproot the whole of Western civilization and transplant it in Japanese soil.” Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan, 56. 45. Minami, Nihonjinron no keifu, 46.

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history, and development of thousands of years—the totality of all these factors has gradually, imperceptibly, developed in the Japanese race inhabiting this environment a unique kokusui.”46 As the complex syntactic structure indicates, Shiga (and indeed Miyake and others as well) experienced difficulties in determining the exact cause and quality of this kokusui, so pure and so in need of preservation yet so elusive. The tension between historical and environmental factors is indicative of a general uncertainty as to what, precisely, guarantees the “unique kokusui.” This passage refers to “the development of thousands of years” and even, a little further on, to “evolution” (shinka), but history seems a more doubtful support for unwavering national characteristics than does the land itself. This distrust of history is evident in Shiga’s treatment of the ancient Mediterranean world. Along with other educated men of his generation, Shiga had a general interest in ancient Greek and Roman history (Baba prided himself as “the first who gave the Japanese people some idea of Roman Laws”).47 But while classical history seems to have provided many British readers with a sense of enduring value confirming their own views, Shiga feels that this history demonstrates time’s treachery and the erosion of greatness. One particular danger revealed by history was the way cultural exchange and intermarriage damaged national character, as in the Africanization of the Greeks or Roman imitation of Greece.48 From Shiga’s perspective, it would seem that the natural environment in pristine isolation provides better surety of national identity than does history with its intermingled currents. Shiga’s vision of the unity existing between Japan’s physical geography and its national culture flowers in his most famous work, Nihon fÜkeiron (Japanese Landscape), published in 1894. Boasting of Japan’s uniquely beautiful scenery, this work draws on the lineage of Tokugawa writings described by Minami.49 Paradoxically, it also employs imported

46. Shiga Shigetaka, “Nihonjin ga kaihÖ suru tokoro,” Nihonjin, April 18, 1888, in Shiga Shigetaka zenshÜ, vol. 1, 1. Kenneth Pyle translates and discusses this passage in The New Generation in Meiji Japan, 68. 47. Baba Tatsui, “The Life of Tatui [sic] Baba,” in Baba Tatsui zenshÜ, ed. Nishida Taketoshi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1988), 173. See also Ochi Haruo, Yamada YÜsaku, and Maida Ai, Meiji seiji shÖsetsu shÜ, vol. 2 of Nihon kindai bungaku taikei (An Outline of Modern Japanese Literature) (Kadokawa shoten, 1974) for an annotated edition of a Meiji-era novel set in the ancient Mediterranean world, Yano RyÜkei’s Keikoku bidan: Young Politicians of Thebes (A Beautiful Episode of Statesmanship: Young Politicians of Thebes). The English-language subtitle is on the original cover. 48. Shiga Shigetaka, “Nihon zento no ni daitÖha,” Nihonjin, June 18, 1888, in Shiga Shigetaka zenshÜ, vol. 1, 28. 49. Peter Dale claims that Shiga Shigetaka initiated “the fashion for discussing East-

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biological and physical sciences to provide proof of Japan’s sui generis nature, and it uses European analogies to promote Japan’s sui generis beauties. For instance, Shiga displaces his enthusiasm for the high Romance of German cliffs and crags onto the Kiso River between Inuyama and Minokamo, proclaiming it “The Japan Rhine.” The discovery of Japan’s mountains as a source of spiritual uplift and physical challenges, both dear to Shiga’s heart, was abetted by the work of missionary and mountain climber Reverend Walter Weston, and his classic Mountaineering and Exploration in the Japanese Alps.50 Through incorporating imported science, aesthetics, and even athletics, Shiga drew on the authority of Europe to redefine nature as an identity through which Japan could engage the world. In short, as with the word shizen and the promotion of naturalistic literature, this new consciousness of nature as Japanese landscape emerged after the encounter with Western ideas. Contemporary literary critic Karatani KÖjin makes a similar assessment, arguing that the impetus behind the Japanese “discovery of landscape” (fÜkei no hakken) (as opposed to traditional “famous places”) was the importation of European and American landscape painting. The discovery of landscape was accompanied by the discovery of interiority (naimen no hakken) because, argues Karatani, external scenery creates a philosophical standpoint that produces consciousness not only of objects but of the self as well. While this “landscape” or “epistemological constellation” might appear to function as an “outside” to culture, this possibility, according to Karatani, is swiftly negated as fÜkei is instantly absorbed within culture and its origins “suppressed as soon as it was produced.”51 Indeed, fÜkei, far from being outside, independent of, or prior

West differences in terms of geoclimatic influences.” Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 41. 50. Reverend Walter Weston, Mountaineering and Exploration in the Japanese Alps (London: John Murray Publisher, 1896), reprinted in facsimile edition by Taishukan Publishing Company, 1975, was translated into Japanese, inspiring the development of mountaineering as a recreation. In 1926, Weston, who had been the British Chaplain at Yokohama and the first honorary member of the Japanese Alpine Club, reflected that “until thirty or forty years ago these mountain regions were virtually terra incognita, not only to Western people but to the large majority of Japanese themselves. They then attracted the attention of English explorers, who began to penetrate into the hidden recesses of their wild and romantic fastnesses year by year. . . . Today, however, their mysteries are being unveiled” and their peaks scaled by, among others, the Prince Regent Hirohito and his brother Prince Chichibu. Weston, A Wayfarer in Unfamiliar Japan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 157–58. 51. Karatani KÖjin, “FÜkei no hakken” (The Discovery of Landscape), in Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1980); translated by Brett de Bary as Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Raleigh, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 22.

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to culture, develops as part and parcel of modern culture in Japan. “The most significant development of the third decade of the Meiji period,” argues Karatani, was “the consolidation of modern systems and the emergence of ‘landscape,’ not so much as a phenomenon contesting such systems, but as itself a system.”52 Japan’s discovery of landscape in the late 1880s and 1890s is simultaneously a discovery of its modern self. In another essay, Kotoba to higeki (Language and Tragedy), Karatani again plays out a dialectic between nature (in a particular form) and culture. Here, Karatani argues for a complete reconciliation between shizen (nature) and sakui (invention), the same pair posed by Maruyama Masao. Just as the collaboration between the “discovery of landscape” (fÜkei no hakken) and the “discovery of interiority” (naimen no hakken) enables the consolidation of modern systems that then erase consciousness of the interplay between exteriority and interiority, nature (shizen) and invention (sakui) are ultimately united in the concept of jinen, defined as “spontaneous practice” and denoting the totality of culture. In choosing the word “jinen,” which is an alternative pronunciation of the characters for shizen, Karatani could also be said to claim that the dialectic always brings us back to nature in its subjective form, merely absorbing creativity in the process. Unlike the discovery of fÜkei, which Karatani locates specifically within Japan in the late 1880s and 1890s, the synthesis of nature and invention he finds in jinen operates as part of the totalizing effect of modern cultures everywhere. Karatani claims that Japanese culture’s subordination of nature (shizen) is not unique but that “all communities . . . have the concept of jinen.”53 His is an interesting perspective. In contrast to Maruyama, who defines modernity in opposition to shizen, Karatani defines modernity as jinen, the same term pronounced differently. Whereas Maruyama defines modernity in terms of absolute subjectivity, Karatani defines modernity in terms of its capacity to absorb entirely the distinction between subject and object, interiority and exteriority, nature and culture. Just as I take issue with Maruyama’s view, I also take issue with Karatani’s form of analysis, an analysis through elision.54 His insistence that modernity be understood primarily through 52. Ibid., 38. 53. Karatani, Kotoba to higeki (Language and Tragedy) (Tokyo: Daisan bumei, 1989), 171. 54. Brett de Bary argues, “Karatani’s fÜkei confuses the distinction between ‘natural’ object and representation—what the contemporary reader takes as the designation of an ‘external’ scene began as the designation of a representation.” Brett de Bary, “Origins of

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its totalizing effects obfuscates the precise ideological payoff in Japan of appropriating a particular form of nature as culture at the turn of the century. Furthermore, it naturalizes, so to speak, the strenuous efforts required to unify culture and nature by suggesting that the same thing happened automatically wherever modernity was established. Karatani (like Maruyama) does not care to investigate the differences in concepts of nature. I would suggest that rather than define “nature” as the antimodern or as the ultimate expression of modernity, critical attention to the type of nature and the way it structures the possibilities for contending positions within the modern state would reveal that nature helped structure a particular form of modern subjectivity in Japan, that of the nation as a whole. By the 1890s, nature had begun to acquire the reflective surface that would make it a narcissistic mirror for the nation. Although this cultural landscape as formulated by Iwamoto or Shiga had not yet become the “property of the state,” as it would by the 1930s,55 it was on its way to becoming synonymous with Japanese culture. Japanese culture could begin to love nature without having to look outside itself.

The Last Vestiges of Social Darwinism This effort to acculturate nature was not masterminded by state ideologues. Instead, the coordinating factor, such as it was, was aversion to social Darwinism because its emphasis on competition and change contributed to social disturbance and its universalism undercut national identity. As Nihonjin contributor Kunitomo Shigeaki (1861–1909) complained about Spencerian advocates such as Tokutomi and the Min’yÜsha group, “In their theory there is ‘humankind’ but not ‘nation,’ ‘world’ but not ‘state.’ ”56 But social Darwinism did not vanish as its ideological insufficiency became apparent; it only became more morose. Just as Spencer had done in his old age, his Japanese followers became less and less optimistic about the rapid evolution of the world.

Modern Japanese Literature,” South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (Postmodernism and Japan) (Summer 1988), 599. 55. On the role of Kuki ShÜzÖ in this transformation, see Leslie Pincus, especially the “Epilogue: How the Cultural Landscape Became the Property of the State,” in Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki ShÜzÖ and the Rise of National Aesthetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 209–47. 56. Kunitomo Shigeaki, “Nihon seiji shakai no ichi shin genshÖ,” Nihonjin 1 (May 3, 1888), 99.

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After 1905, even KatÖ expressed his increasingly keen doubts about social evolution’s ethical ramifications in a series of lengthy publications, including Shizenkai no mujun to shinka (The Contradictions of the Natural World and Progress, 1906), Shizen to rinri (Nature and Ethics, 1912), and Jinsei no shizen to gohÖ no zento (Human Nature and the Future Prospects of Our Country, 1916). These works, while still deeply indebted to Spencerian ideas, focus increasingly on means to ease nature’s harsh prescriptions.57 Other Japanese social Darwinists also lost their optimism. In 1912, physiologist Oka AsajirÖ (1868–1944) made the case for Darwinian struggle only as a grim alternative to complete destruction. Human beings struggled for survival against a recalcitrant nature that responded to economic development with floods and polluted rivers, with tuberculosis in “quiet revenge” against modern medicine, and with increasing strains in the social system as gaps between rich and poor widened. And yet, as Oka warned, “international competition was so cut-throat that to stop material progress would invite conquest and suffering worse even than ‘nature’s revenge.’ ”58 Although social Darwinism held on in Japan for many years,59 nature’s evolutionary promise seemed increasingly double-edged to many Japanese. In the late Meiji period, then, the ideal of Japan as an evolutionary cosmopolis was contested inside politics by a government increasingly suspicious of nature’s infinite mutations, outside politics by those interested in nature as an expression of culture, and even by social Darwin-

57. KatÖ Hiroyuki, Shizenkai no mujun to shinka (The Contradictions of the Natural World and Progress) (Tokyo: KanekÖdÖ shoseki, 1906); Shizen to rinri (Nature and Ethics) (Tokyo: ShÜeisha, 1912); and Jinsei no shizen to gohÖ no zento (Human Nature and the Future Prospects of Our Country) (Tokyo: ShÜeisha, 1916). Winston Davis discusses KatÖ’s later career in The Moral and Political Naturalism of Baron KatÖ Hiroyuki (University of California, Berkeley, Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, Japan Research Monographs, 1996). 58. Quoted in Alan Stone, “The Japanese Muckrakers,” Journal of Japanese Studies 1, no. 2 (1975), 405. Oka AsajirÖ, “Jinrui no seifuku ni taisuru shizen no fukushÜ,” ChÜÖ kÖron 27, no. 1, 13–20. 59. See, for instance, Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s discussion of Kita Sadakichi’s use of Darwinian competition in a 1929 tract in order to claim that “Japanese culture was unrivaled precisely because it had been forged by this multicultural process of natural selection” whereby outsiders such as Ainu, Koreans, and Taiwanese would gradually be “melted into the single Japanese minzoku.” Morris-Suzuki, “Becoming Japanese: Imperial Expansion and Identity Crises in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900–1930, ed. Sharon Minichiello (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), 175. Ethnologist Yanagita Kunio’s work also drew heavily on Darwinist ideas in his search for “vestiges” and “survivals” of ancient ways among the mountain people and in Okinawa.

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ists themselves, many of whom came to doubt its ultimate beneficence.60 These sharp disagreements about the meaning of nature belie the smoother narrative of historian Ishida Takeshi. For Ishida, nature remains a constant feature of conservative state ideology throughout the Meiji period. As Ishida sees it, imported theories of organic society are grafted onto Neo-Confucian ideas about filial piety and grassroots family structures to produce the family-state system (kazoku kokka) after 1900.61 He ignores various utopian and egalitarian ways of construing the organic state such as Baba’s, the government’s reservations about deploying social Darwinian ideology, and the movement, spearheaded by Shiga, to reclaim nature from Western-tinged universalism. For Ishida, Japan’s twentieth-century concept of nature developed through accretion, and its most telling attributes are continuity with the past and constant allegiance to undemocratic politics. Nature, in this light, remains the mark of tradition. I argue instead that Japan’s twentieth-century sense of nature, far from being a traditional or premodern holdover, was a new creation, configured in reaction against social Darwinism and in conformity with the requirements of national pride. During the closing decade of the nineteenth century, the government, far from relying on nature to authorize new state institutions, distanced itself in its official pronouncements. Only after the turn of the century, when the concept had been acculturated, were state agents willing to propagate a naturalized vision of Japan that was neither traditional nor evolutionary. Their efforts formed the basis for Japan’s twentieth-century “love of nature,” a love simultaneously cultural and political. 60. Indeed, Spencer himself falls in the latter camp, becoming more and more gloomy not just about social evolution’s power for good in Japan, but in general. 61. Ishida Takeshi, Meiji seiji shisÖshi kenkyÜ (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1954), 4.

chapter 8

Ultranational Nature: Dead Time and Dead Space

By the 1930s, nature had been wrapped in the mantle of Japanese culture and was fully deployed once more in the political arena. It was no longer, as it was in the 1890s, a suspect concept in governmental documents, but instead had become a mainstay of national, indeed ultranational, ideology. This chapter begins by describing the ultranational nature of wartime Japan and then traces the origins of this concept to the decade after the Russo-Japanese War, when culture, politics, nation, and nature were welded together in a new way. If we credit Kokutai no hongi, that odd bricolage of ultranationalist propaganda published by the Ministry of Education in March of 1937, the first consideration in understanding the inherent character of the Japanese people is to understand Japan’s physical environment. The chapter entitled “Kokuminsei” explicates national character by referring, first of all, to Japan’s superlative natural environment. It opens with the declaration of Tokugawa Neo-Confucian Yamaga SokÖ (1622–85) that “the land [suido] of the central kingdom [meaning Japan in this instance] surpasses that of all other nations,”1 and quickly becomes a paean to Japan’s physical circumstances. The country’s “temperate climate,” its “beautiful mountains and rivers,” the “spring flowers, autumn tints, and the scenic changes accompanying the seasons” all garner praise. From time to

1. Kokutai no hongi (Tokyo: MonbushÖ, 1937), 91.

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time, the authors admit, natural calamities (shizen no saika) occur in Japan, but the Japanese people respond to such disasters with fortitude, never with fear or despair. Indeed, the people repay nature’s destructive rampages with ever-greater devotion, unlike “the West,” which mythologizes its clashes with nature. The islands of Japan provide, this chapter insists, a veritable paradise (rakudo) in which to live. Poetry on cherry blossoms is adduced as evidence. From claims about actual climatic conditions to aesthetic appreciation, this chapter works to substantiate the particularities of the Japanese people on the basis of Japan’s physical environment. The intensity of the relationship between the Japanese people and shizen described here has some of the marks of first passion in the rapturous insistence on the uniqueness of the object of love. Kokutai no hongi declares that Japan relishes a “beautiful nature not seen in other countries” (takoku ni wa mirarenai utsukushi shizen). But even “love” seems a weak-kneed, inadequate term to describe the bond with nature, though loving nature (shizen o aisuru) is something all Japanese people are said to do.2 The section of Kokutai no hongi on “Harmony between the People and Nature” (Hito to shizen to no wa) pushes the ascribed attachment beyond first love to an even more intense state of faithful intimacy. The daily lives of the people, annual festivals, family crests, architecture, and gardens all attest to an “exquisite harmony” (bimyÖ no chÖwa) with nature. This array of customs, however, captures only the outward manifestations of the people’s relationship with nature. Below the surface of daily life, the coalescent devotion between the Japanese people and nature unites consciousness itself with physical experience to such an extent that one cannot be separated from the other.3 At some mystical level, the nature of the Japanese islands and the nature of the awareness of those who live on them are the same thing. Moving from the physical environment through customary practices to consciousness itself, nature unifies all aspects of Japanese existence. As one commentary on Kokutai no hongi makes clear, this intimacy with nature is not a personal relationship akin to that of Romantic “naturalism” (shizenshugi) in Europe with its stress on individual consciousness (kojin no jikaku).4 Instead, the connection lies between na2. Ibid., 54. 3. Ibid., 55. 4. Sonda Hideharu and Hara Fusataka, Kokutai no hongi kaisetsu taisei (Tokyo: MombushÖ, 1941), 24. Sonda and Hara use Nietzsche here as representative of the “Western” emphasis on individualism.

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ture and the communal consciousness of Japanese people as a whole. Indeed, the unbroken “lineage of nature” (shizen no goikkei) and the unbroken “lineage of consciousness” (jikaku no goikkei) are united in the imperial line, demonstrating its worthiness to reign over the world.5 Nature moves from being defined in obliquely political ways to being the ultimate guarantor of national political culture and its international aspirations. Despite its emphasis on lineage, this political image of nature as national consciousness, this Japanese cosmopolis of the 1930s, is quite plainly not a traditional notion. It differs markedly from the universalism of most Tokugawa and Meiji conceptions in claiming that there is a form of nature unique to Japan. It also differs from the competitive changefulness of social Darwinism in claiming that nature is eternally harmonious with the people of Japan. As might be expected, however, the scholars and bureaucrats who created this image sought to root it in antiquity. By scavenging the past for examples of Japanese devotion to nature, such as Yamaga SokÖ’s praise of the Japanese land or the cherryblossom poetry of Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) and Fujita TÖko (1806–55), these authors craft a convincing aura of continuity. So convincing indeed is this vision of a Japan dominated by age-old Gemeinschaft (kyÖdÖtai) intimacies that it has been taken on face value and the turbulent history of recasting nature and nation forgotten. Claims to immemorial harmony with nature have become part of the evidence adduced by those who see Japan as “traditional” in the 1930s, and “tradition” has in turn been one of the touchstones in the debate over whether Japan’s ultranationalism should be characterized as “fascist.” For some scholars, Japan’s purported traditionalism marks it as “fascist before the word was invented,”6 while others argue, on the contrary, that this traditionalism bars Japan from the “mode of ‘permanent revolution’ ” that underlies true fascism.7 I am suggesting here that at least with regard to concepts of nature, the so-called “traditional” aspects of ultranational-

5. Ibid., 551. 6. Anthony James Joes, Fascism in the Contemporary World: Ideology, Evolution, Resurgence (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1978), 155. Joes argues that rapid late development under threat of Western imperialism combined with many traditional cultural forms produced a recognizable state of fascism in Japan. He draws on the suggestion of Barrington Moore that “fascism emerged much more ‘naturally’ in Japan” than in Germany and Italy. 7. Stanley G. Payne argues that in the 1930s “Japan had evolved a somewhat pluralistic authoritarian system which exhibited some of the characteristics of fascism, but it did not develop fascism’s most distinctive and revolutionary aspects.” Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 336.

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ist Japanese ideology are no more genuinely ancient than the claims of the Third Reich to the “landscape” of the Germanic soul.8 Undeniably, in more than just its claims to an antiquity, Japan’s ultranationalist image of shizen is akin to the ideas of nature that German national socialists used to authenticate the fascist state. The Japanese romanticization of rural life, for instance, resonates with German images of pristine völkisch farm communities. Heartfelt concern for maintaining rural ways of life was a mainstay of Japanese political rhetoric and often at odds with the urgent need to support industry including, of course, arms manufacture. In 1934 the War Ministry declared, “the most pressing problem of national welfare is to give relief to the farming, mountain, and fishing villages” suffering from poverty, and nine years later, in 1943, at the very height of the fighting, Premier TÖjÖ told the Diet that he believed “that the foundation of Japan lies in giving prime importance to agriculture.”9 In practical ways, such as the healthier, more pliable, recruits available to the army from rural areas,10 and in metaphorical ways, such as the image of the nation as one vast village cooperative,11 nature was often on the lips of the national political elite during the war years. Ideologies of race as well figured in Japanese thought as in German ideas. In his 1939 Principles of Thought for a New Japan, Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945) argues that “race is a whole that transcends economic classes, and the state is one moral whole that is established on the basis of race, as a natural and special thing, becoming aware that it is a universal and conceptual thing.”12 As Miki’s declaration makes clear, race is a complicated concept in Japanese nationalism, originating in biology but quickly becoming abstract. Philosopher Nishida KitarÖ (1870–1945)

8. See, for instance, Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, “Racial Soul, Landscape, and World Domination,” in Nazi Culture: A Documentary History, ed. George L. Mosses (New York: Schocken Books, 1966). 9. Maruyama Masao, “The Ideology and Dynamics of Japanese Fascism,” in Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, ed. Ivan Morris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 47–48. 10. R. P. Dore and Tsutomu Ñuchi argue that although rural areas were no more likely than urban areas to support ultranationalists such as the May 1932 conspirators, the army “sought to win rural support,” making efforts to improve health and employment opportunities. Dore and Ñuchi, “Rural Origins of Japanese Fascism,” in Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan, ed. James William Morley (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 196–98. 11. Dore and Ñuchi quote an extended passage on the nation as “village cooperative” from ItÖ Hakubun’s essay in Ñkuma Shigenobu’s Fifty Years of New Japan (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1909). Dore and Ñuchi, “Rural Origins of Japanese Fascism,” 208. 12. Miki Kiyoshi, “Shin Nihon no shisÖ genri, zokuhen—kyÖdÖshugi no tetsugakuteki kiso” (1939), in Miki Kiyoshi zenshÜ (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1968), vol. 17, 577.

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also uses the concept of race (minzoku) as the basis of world-historical nations in a 1944 essay, but, like Miki, he too is clear that the race of a people is not “merely biological” but, rather, an “abstract form” of the concrete historical nation that unites both nature (shizen) and history (rekishi).13 These elevated philosophies of race did not, however, obscure or mitigate the brutal racism enacted on battlefields and in conquered or colonized areas by the “leading race [shidÖ minzoku] of the world,” as the Japanese called themselves.14 There are, however, important differences between Japanese ultranationalist and German national socialist images of nature, particularly in their concepts of space (as environmental protection efforts show) and time (in the contrast between “being” and “becoming”). The Japanese government in the 1930s made some efforts to preserve the nation’s physical environment, creating, for instance, the first dozen national parks between 1934 and 1936. These parks were the fulfillment, ironically, of the proposals of a German, physician Erwin von Baelz (1849–1934), who in 1911, during his long residence in Japan, had initiated the first petition for a national park at Nikko.15 American conservationist John Muir also had an oblique hand in Japanese national parks through the continued efforts of his admirer Azuma RyÖzÖ, the mountaineer and government official who had met Muir in 1914, and Tobuse TarÖ, who translated Muir’s Travels in Alaska into Japanese, publishing it in 1942.16 Nevertheless, Japanese interest in environmental preservation was limited when compared with the efforts in Hitler’s Germany. Drawing on sixty years of Naturschutz efforts, the Nazi party quickly pushed through a series of animal and land protection measures. As historian Raymond Dominick reluctantly admits, “eighteen months into the Nazi regime, [Professor Dr. Walter] Schoenichen [former director of Prussia’s state con-

13. Nishida KitarÖ, untitled, supplement to the fourth collection of essays, Nishida KitarÖ zenshÜ (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966), 398–99. Originally written in 1944, this essay is called Kokutairon (On National Polity) and translated in David A. Dilworth and Valdo H. Viglielmo, eds., Sourcebook for Modern Japanese Philosophy (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998). 14. John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 203. 15. Alexander B. Adams, ed., First World Conference on National Parks (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, Department of the Interior, 1962), 409. Baelz wrote about his experiences in Japan in Das Leben eines deutschen Arztes im erwachenden Japan (Stuttgart: J. Engelhorns Nachf., 1931), translated into English as Awakening Japan (New York: Viking Press, 1932). 16. Maymie and William Kimes, “Ryozo Azuma, the John Muir of Japan,” Sierra 64 (July/August 1979), 42–44.

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servation agency] could claim with some justice that more had been achieved for conservation since the Nazi seizure of power than in the preceding decade.”17 Particularly comprehensive was the Imperial Conservation Law of 1935, which not only protected “plants, animals, special ‘monuments of nature,’ and official nature reserves, all of which had found some protection in various earlier laws,” but “also extended protection to the ‘remaining portions of landscape in free Nature whose preservation on account of rarity, beauty, distinctiveness or on account of scientific, ethnic, forest, or hunting significance lies in the general interest.’ ”18 The understanding of nature in ultranationalist Japan, on the other hand, was so abstract that, despite gestures toward the physical environment, seemingly concrete terms such as “climate” were often meant metaphysically, militating against protection of land, air, and water. Indeed, as the passages from Kokutai no hongi attest, discussions of nature in Japan move so quickly to the abstract realm of “unbroken consciousness” and the like that the conception of nature as the interlocking elements of the actual physical environment quickly gives way. Of even greater importance in differentiating Japanese concepts of nature from German ones during this period is the contrast between “being” and “becoming.” George Mosse, in his renowned essay defining fascism, describes how German national socialism sought to create a “New Man.” Incorporating the vision of mystics such as Jacob Böhme in their new “attitude towards life,” Nazi ideology urged human beings to overcome their baser selves and seek “harmony within nature.” Mosse underscores the “important emphasis on ‘becoming’ or joining the eternal spirit of the race rather than ‘being’; on the quest for the ‘genuine’ as exemplified first by nature and, later, by the ‘Volk’ itself.”19 In Japan, on the other hand, the emphasis was on “being,” not on “becoming.” Reaction against Western ideas such as social Darwinism and its valorization of change combined with the desire to anchor national identity be17. Raymond H. Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871–1971 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 106. 18. Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany, 108. In reviewing the history of nature preservation efforts in Germany, Dominick discusses the overlap between national socialist ideology and nature conservation efforts without equating them. As he points out, the Weimar constitution was remarkably progressive: “In what may well have been the world’s first constitutional mandate for conservation, Article 150 declared, ‘The monuments of history and Nature as well as the countryside enjoy the protection and care of the state.’ ” Ibid., 82. 19. George Mosse, “Introduction: Towards a General Theory of Fascism,” in International Fascism: New Thoughts and New Approaches, ed. George Mosse (London: SAGE Publications, 1979), 7.

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yond the vicissitudes of history made nature not something that one could become attuned to through hiking the mountains in loden green or farming organically. Rather it was something Japanese people were, something they could rely on without the effort of assimilation. While the German community was represented as “not enforced but ‘natural’, ‘genuine’, and with its own organic strength and life, analogous to nature,”20 the Japanese community was represented as nature itself. If we accept Mosse’s definition of “fascism” as a form of permanent revolution or “becoming,” one that may seek strategic compromises with bourgeois values of propriety but always insists upon the newness of its vision, Japanese ultranationalism was not fascist. Once the transformation of values was achieved in Japan, the decisive break with the past was carefully effaced rather than celebrated. The transformation in Japanese values was successfully effaced partly because it happened so early in the twentieth century. By the time Kokutai no hongi had been laboriously produced, much of the philosophy and policy that it cobbled together had been around for two decades. Its mode of production had been elaborate. An original draft by Tokyo Imperial University professor Hisamatsu Senichi was reworked by fourteen expert members of the Ministry of Education’s Compilation Committee, and was finally polished by ItÖ Enkichi, the volume’s chief editor and head of the Bureau of Thought Control. This combined effort produced little that was new. When copies of Kokutai no hongi (approximately 1,900,000 between 1937 and 1943) were delivered to schools and universities,21 only the comprehensiveness of its vision would have seemed particularly fresh. But this staleness depends on our frame of reference and our acceptance of the document’s own claims to represent Japan’s immemorial essence. If research on wartime ideology focuses only on the 1930s or incorporates only the late 1920s, when “TaishÖ democracy” is said to have petered out, concepts of nature do indeed appear unchanging.22 Even Maruyama Masao, who traces the origins of “Japanese fascism” as far back as “1919, just after the First World War,”23 does not, 20. Ibid., 37. Emphasis mine. 21. Robert King Hall, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Kokutai no hongi: Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of Japan, trans. John Owen Gauntlett (Newton, Mass.: Crofton Publishing, 1974), 10. 22. The analysis of Stanley Payne, for instance, only concerns Japan after 1930, arguing that Japan was not fascist because there was no revolutionary party or ideology. Payne, A History of Fascism, 328–37. 23. Maruyama argues that there were three stages of Japanese fascism: the “preparatory period” from 1919 to the Manchurian Incident of 1931, the “period of maturity

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it seems to me, extend the time frame sufficiently to recognize the ways in which Japan’s twentieth-century idea of nature was not merely a feudal holdover, the product of inertia or reaction, but an innovation. The crucial foundation for wartime ideology was not laid in the primordial past, or in the state ideology of the 1930s, or as “TaishÖ democracy” faded in the late 1920s, or in the post–World War I fascist movements after 1919. Instead, much of the revolutionary recasting of the national ideology of nature occurred in the decade after the RussoJapanese War (1904–5). It was during this period, and not later, that Japanese consciousness shifted in reaction to the strong emotions triggered by the conflict with Imperial Russia. Exaltation at Japan’s triumph over a “Western power” was followed by severe disappointment with the provisions of the Portsmouth Treaty. Defiance over a “stolen” victory that left Japan without possession of all of Sakhalin and without the expected indemnity compounded the sense that Japan was misunderstood, if not abused, by “the West.” Recognition of the right to full participation in the community of nations was now due Japan after its victory, but “the Occident” appeared reluctant to comply. Baron Suematsu KenchÖ (1855–1920), who had left Japan two days after the start of hostilities to explain Japanese actions to the United States and Europe, often felt frustrated by Western obtuseness. Although he was willing to “regard the Western nations as being our superiors,” he tells us in The Risen Sun that he felt “obliged now and then to make this kind of protest when calumnies are made against us by Occidental critics.”24 In September 1905 the Hibiya Riots in Tokyo, calling for the peace terms to be revoked, ushered in nearly three months of martial law and severe penalties, particularly for the working-class participants.25 During the decade after 1905, disappointment with the international situation and oligarchic consternation about working-class restiveness coincided with the death or retirement of Meiji-era leaders. These events, plus the High

extending from the Manchurian Incident until the February Incident of 1936,” and, finally, the period of consummation, “in which the military, now the open supporters of fascism from above, fashioned an unstable ruling coalition with the semi-feudal power of the bureaucracy and the Senior Retainers on the one hand, and with monopoly capital and the political parties on the other.” Maruyama Masao, “The Ideology and Dynamics of Japanese Fascism,” 26–27. 24. Baron Suyematsu (Suematsu KenchÖ), The Risen Sun (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1905), 346. 25. See, for instance, Shumpei Okamoto, The Japanese Oligarchy and the RussoJapanese War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

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Treason Incident, with its execution of left-wing radicals in 191126 and the pending death of Emperor Meiji himself, created both the need and the opportunity for a fresh assessment of the nation and its nature. As with other “traditions” invented at this moment—such as the “beautiful custom” (bifu) of paternal master-servant relations prescribed for Japanese industries in 1910 by ShÖda HeigorÖ, Director of the Mitsubishi Shipyard27—Japan’s particular harmony with nature also began to take shape. After 1905, the newly acculturated vision of nature created in the 1890s began to be used in political discourse, emerging piecemeal through a variety of government policies. In the remainder of this chapter, I will examine some of these policies, especially those related to the merger of ShintÖ shrines, to an economy based on frugality, and to education. I choose these examples not because they were the only sites of production of nature’s new image, but because, taken together, these policies chart the material referents and theoretical parameters of the new concept as it emerged in this decade. Through these policies, the literal and figurative foundation for the abstract, apotheosized, nationalized nature found in Kokutai no hongi and related wartime documents appears. On the basis of this groundwork, the relationship between nature and nation would then be fully articulated and systematized through the works of Kyoto School philosophers such as Nishida KitarÖ, Watsuji TetsurÖ (1889–1960), and Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962). Their emphasis on place, climate, and species provided the philosophical justifications that molded the earlier piecemeal production into a hegemonic ideology during the war years. Indeed, Watsuji served on the Ministry of Education’s Compilation Committee for Kokutai no hongi, and this document bears the imprint of his ideas directly. In other words, Japan’s “immemorial harmony with nature” is a twentieth-century product, created in reaction to the previous generation’s adaptations of social Darwinism and using the language and literature of a naturalized culture formulated before the turn of the century. Scavenging Japan’s past and European philosophy for resonant images of nature, bureaucrats and intellectuals be-

26. Twenty-four socialists and anarchists were sentenced to death for plotting to kill the emperor in Taigyaku jiken, or the High Treason Incident. On January 24, 1911, twelve of this group, including KÖtoku ShÜsui (1871–1911), were hanged. See F. G. Notehelfer, KÖtoku ShÜsui: Portrait of a Japanese Radical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). 27. Andrew Gordon, “The Invention of Japanese-Style Labor Management,” in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 21.

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got a coherent “New Japan” after the Russo-Japanese War that was then represented as immemorial.28

ShintÖ’s National Nature ShintÖ is often described as the form of primitive nature worship practiced in Japan prior to the introduction of written language, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism from the continent. Therefore, it is argued, ShintÖ practices reproduce the archaic relationship between “Japan”— if such an entity can be said to have existed in ancient times—and nature. This is certainly the image fostered by many twentieth-century writers, including Watsuji, and its pervasiveness has persuaded many observers to see ShintÖ as a stable repository of native religious concepts of nature. On closer examination, however, neither “ShintÖ” as a set of practices, “nature” as the object of those practices, nor the locus of the interaction between the two remains constant. Indeed, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the tension between local ShintÖ practices and State ShintÖ suggests two visions of nature in competition with each other. During the Meiji era, ShintÖ had undergone so many contortions that even calling it a “religion” touches on its disputed basic character. For a very brief period within the initial Meiji government structure, ShintÖ was established as the state faith and given precedence over other religions. By 1872, however, it was dislodged from this privileged position because of the objections of Buddhists and Christians, and because the varying practices designated “ShintÖ” provided little coherent support for government policy. After a lull, ShintÖ, around 1905, was adapted as a non-religious state ideology, a unique, patriotic practice wherein former priests became bureaucratic overseers of national ritual. In this way, rites encouraging national unity could be imposed on all people regardless of their professed religious beliefs. Although Christian missionaries could and did quibble at the transposition of ShintÖ from “religion” to “national ideology,” the reclassification held. In the words of Mizuno RentarÖ, Minister of Home Affairs, in May 1918, the “shrines are the unique institutions of our nation. They are the essence of our national organization. They are inseparably related to the state.”29 This un28. For the problem of creating a “new” Japan by rewriting the old, see Carol Gluck, “The Invention of Edo,” in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 29. D. C. Holtom, “The Political Philosophy of Modern Shinto: A Study of the State Religion of Japan,” in Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 49, part 2 (1922), 42.

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precedented use of ShintÖ as a national, non-religious, patriotic cult required a complete systemization and centralization of haphazard shrines, amorphous doctrines, and rites expressing local custom.30 The effort to nationalize ShintÖ had direct bearing on Japan’s understanding of nature since traditionally ShintÖ—if it is permissible to use this anachronistic term for the variety of practices and beliefs before Meiji31—had supported various ideas of nature and protected many natural sites. The simplicity of ShintÖ rites suggested spontaneous or natural reverence, the aversion to doctrine a natural faith, its wooded shrines and delight in waterfalls and other phenomena a deep appreciation for physical nature, its rites of family continuity a sacerdotal view of kinship and ancestral lineage. Ideologically and practically, ShintÖ in its new national role sloughed off some of these concepts of nature, especially the focus on nature as sacred space, while enlarging and reifying others. The physicality and rootedness of local places and things lost precedence. As ShintÖ was nationalized, emphasis fell increasingly on its sacerdotal view of the family as the most fundamental natural and national unit. D.C. Holtom, a scholar and contemporary observer of the new State ShintÖ, describes this reformulation of nature as the devaluation of tennen sÜhai (worship of physical nature) in favor of sosen sÜhai (worship of ancestors or human genealogical nature). Writing in 1922, Holtom notes “a marked tendency on the part of the modern directors of thought in Japan in religious, educational and political spheres alike, to emphasize the latter element as the more characteristic Japanese expression.”32 It is difficult to ignore the ideological utility of such a preference. An emphasis on ancestor worship disengaged ritual practice from particular places and, literally, mobilized it. Statements such as those in the 1914 government-issued prayers (norito) clearly equating family ancestors with kami (divine spirits) and enfolding these kami within the imperial household, were possible only if the particular, the local, the familial could be made national and imperial. The ancestral dead had an inherent metaphorical quality, permitting convenient analogy between the honor due to grandfather and that due to imperial deities. On the other hand, the neighborhood shrine’s tree, no matter how stately, retained a concreteness that hindered the play of tropes through which it could be linked

30. Helen Hardacre, ShintÖ and the State: 1868–1988 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 9–13. 31. Ibid., 18–19. 32. Holtom, “The Political Philosophy of Modern Shinto,” 5.

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with Tokyo. The delight in physical nature was downplayed, and the migratory dead achieved precedence over the stationary, local, rooted, living emblems of former practices. The de-emphasis on spatial nature also created a logic whereby ShintÖ could be transposed and imposed on colonial possessions. By 1937, for instance, there were 368 ShintÖ shrines in Korea, mostly dedicated to Amaterasu.33 Had nature’s sacredness not been abstracted from the soil, it would have moved less easily as national boundaries expanded. Of equal importance was the fact that while the genealogized, abstract quality of nature could move beyond the home islands, the reverse trajectory was impeded by lack of genealogical connection. In 1906, for instance, the annual meeting of ShintÖ priests considered enshrining in Yasukuni Jinja the Koreans who fell in the Russo-Japanese War and decided to restrict that privilege to “real” Japanese born of Japanese parents.34 This conception of natural connection prevented non-Japanese from claiming kinship. The distinction between ancestral divinities, who were metaphoricized and mobile, and the rooted divinity of place and organic forms enabled the government’s controversial policy of shrine mergers. Reaching its height between 1906 and 1912, this policy’s goal of one shrine per administrative village (isson issha) was intended, according to authorities, to lift the financial burden of supporting so many small shrines and to increase popular reverence by replacing shabby places of worship (sometimes used to store night soil, as one outraged official explained) with more awe-inspiring ones. In practice, this policy meant that tutelary shrines in the old customary villages (buraku, Öaza) were rent asunder. The concrete physical aspect of local ShintÖ was destroyed: the old shrine torn down, the often magnificent trees surrounding it sold for lumber, the fauna dispersed, the land plowed under or, in town, commercialized.35 The other, more metaphorical, aspect of the shrine, the shintai or kami-body in which the kami inhered, was carried by villagers, sometimes in great state, to the receiving shrine. Although, according to Wilbur Fridell, this policy primarily took the form of suggestions rather than formal directives from the central government, it was quite successful. Between 1903 and 1920, 33. Hardacre, Shinto and the State, 95. 34. Ibid. 35. Wilbur Fridell discusses some instances of resistance in which the old shrine was registered as private property but maintained as a shrine. Wilbur M. Fridell, Japanese Shrine Mergers, 1906–1912 (Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1973).

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no less than 52 percent of the small Ungraded Shrines and 13 percent of Village Shrines were merged.36 Needless to say, the isson issha policy did not find favor with communities that had for centuries expressed their fellowship through worship and festivals at their local shrines. Absurd situations developed. In one case, villagers had to travel by foot nearly twenty-five miles to the shrine housing their “local” deity.37 In at least one case, the men who bore the sad burden of the shintai away to its new resting place died unnatural, sudden deaths.38 Local dissatisfaction with the policy resulted in its uneven application throughout the country. Nationally, resistance to shrine mergers was articulated on the basis of both biology and folk custom. In 1911, Minakata Kumagusu (1867– 1941), the flamboyant microbiologist who traveled with an Italian circus in South America and published articles on algae in the famed British journal Nature, teamed up with folklorist and government official Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) to petition for an end to the mergers. Minakata’s vision of the ecological role played by shrines is particularly interesting for the way in which he emphasizes the connections among local political institutions, local environment patterns, and local shrines.39 Combining concern for village customs with concern for the flora and fauna of the immediate area, he suggests that the small, sometimes shabby,

36. Hardacre, ShintÖ and the State, 98; Fridell, Japanese Shrine Mergers, 19–20. 37. Fridell, Japanese Shrine Mergers, 85; Yanagita Kunio, Japanese Manners and Customs in the Meiji Era, trans. Charles S. Terry (Tokyo: Ñbunsha, 1957), 294. 38. Hardacre, Shinto and the State, 99. 39. For biographical information on Minakata, see Kasai Kiyoshi, Minakata Kumagusu (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kÖbunkan, 1967); Nishiana Goro, Minakata Kumagusu no shogai (Tokyo: Shin jinbutsu Öraisha, 1994); and Tsurumi Kazuko, “Mizu no maki: Minakata Kumagusu no kozumoroji,” in Korekushon Tsurumi Kazuko, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten, 1998). Carmen Blacker has two articles: “Minakata Kumagusu: A Neglected Japanese Genius,” Folklore 49, no. 2 (1983); and “Minakata Kumagusu, 1867–1941: A Genius Now Recognized,” in Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, ed. Ian Nish (Folkestone, Kent: Japan Library, 1994). Minakata’s encyclopedic knowledge of folklore, religion, and natural history permitted him to contribute hundreds of articles comparing European and Asian views on such topics as the mandrake plant, fingerprinting, constellations, and legless spirits. His universalism was rooted in concrete, eclectic knowledge rather than an all-encompassing theory. As did Baba Tatsui, Minakata ran into trouble due to violent outbursts during his years in London (1892–1900). Despite garnering generous, well-placed friends such as Sir Robert Douglas, Keeper of Oriental Books and Manuscripts and Professor of Chinese at King’s College, London, Minakata felt that he suffered ridicule from strangers on the street and even in the venerable Reading Room of the British Museum. On two separate occasions in 1897 he attacked women pedestrians whom he claimed were laughing at him. In 1898, he finally lost the privilege of using the Reading Room after several violent outbursts, again in response to perceived persecution.

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shrines are integral to all life. Without shrine trees to nest in, swallows and other birds can no longer keep the insect population in check. Growing insect populations destroy crops or force farmers to spend money for commercial insecticides, costing more and diminishing self-reliance within the village. Fresh water supplies, protected since shrines are often built near springs, are also threatened. According to Minakata, all things from rare fungi to fish to human hopes and ideals are endangered without local shrines.40 The natural community promoted by Minakata, and with even greater emphasis on human customs by Yanagita, is local, physical, and fecund in contrast to the apotheosized community of the ancestral dead abstracted to a national level. State ShintÖ emphasized death in a number of ways. Although government-prescribed rituals, such as 1914 prayers for the annual Harvest Festival, seek abundance for everyone from “the Imperial Princes and their offspring to the people of the land,” bureaucrats in Tokyo only begrudgingly countenanced the traditional shrine rites concerned with pregnancy and birth. The establishment of Yasukuni Shrine and its prefectural branches (places where the patriotic dead are enshrined) further deflected ShintÖ rites from life to death. Although resistance to the shrine merger policy ultimately led to its cancellation, the concept of nature promulgated by those opposing the policy remained marginalized. The transformation of nature through State ShintÖ may be expressed as a series of paradoxes. Nature in the small shrine sanctuaries all over the country was destroyed for the sake of naturalizing the nation. Traditional natural communities were reconfigured into artificial townships in order to support a newly naturalized center. Government policy rationalized shrine lands and trees, placing the formerly sacred on the market as commodities, in order to create mystical underpinnings for the nation. What had been chaotic, customary, and fertile became organized, bureaucratized, and restrained. The celebration of local life became remembrance of the national dead. However, to understand this transformation simply as paradoxical misses the political conflict between radically different concepts of nature. There was no one “nature” being manipulated by authorities to produce paradox but two natures in contention. Central authorities re-

40. Minakata Kumagusu, Minakata Kumagusu zenshÜ, vol. 7 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1971), 477–590; Tsurumi Kazuko, “Social Price of Pollution in Japan and the Role of Folk Beliefs,” paper delivered at Princeton University, March 8, 1977, and published in Series A-30 Institute of International Relations, 1977.

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sponded to the uncertainties of international politics and the dislocations of changing economic and social structures by delimiting and redefining nature as an abstract and unifying principle resonant with the mystical imperial center. “Nature” in this version was equated with national political culture. Resisting this centralized, abstracted version of nature, Minakata, Yanagita, and many villagers found a mystical resonance in local folk custom, insisting that nature was physical, fecund, and consonant with particular popular cultures. In both cases nature displays mystical qualities, but the mysticism is utilized by different groups for different purposes.

Economizing Nature Analyzing the ShintÖ shrine merger debate as being between concepts of nature, both of which retain something of the mystical, has important ramifications for our understanding of Japan’s new conceptualization of nature in relation to economic practice. One prominent model of modern political thought’s uses of nature takes sacral nature to be a form of false ideology always at odds with rationalizing modes of production. Therefore, as the economy moves from feudal modes of production to capitalist ones, nature retains the gloss of mystical values even as its use as natural resource belies the worshipful stance toward it. Terry Eagleton, for instance, argues that capitalistic societies “still feel the need to legitimate their activities at the altar of transcendental values, not least religious ones, while steadily undermining the credibility of those doctrines by their own ruthlessly rationalizing practices. The ‘base’ of modern capitalism is thus to some extent always at odds with its ‘superstructure.’ A social order for which truth means pragmatic calculation continues to cling to eternal verities; a form of life which in dominating Nature expels all mystery from the world still ritually invokes the sacred.”41 This model neatly encapsulates a powerful position in the analysis of Western cultures whereby highly efficient individual exploitation of natural resources is celebrated as divinely sanctioned.42 Nature is thus mere resource to entrepreneurs, while at the same time it symbolizes manifest destiny and divine blessing to the nation. Tension develops between

41. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York: Verso, 1991), 155. 42. Perhaps the most famous formulation of this position is in Lynn White’s attack on Christianity’s supposed sanction of environmental destruction. See Lynn T. White, “The Historical Origins of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science 155 (March 10, 1967), 1203–7.

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the “base,” an infinite nature prone before the grasping hands of economic “man,” and the “superstructure,” the national ideology of an untouchable, sanctified Truth of divine creation. This tension becomes particularly extreme when environmental limits are reached. While sacral nature became national ideology in twentieth-century Japan, its conceptual uses were not entirely at odds with its practical exploitation as in the model described above. This is not to say that capitalistic pragmatism never impinged on local and national mysticism or that there was no falsity in the Japanese national mythos. Rationalizing the exploitation of resources and rationalizing national ideology, in part through such capitalist practices as commodifying old shrines, were most definitely part of early-twentieth-century Japan. However, the central government’s ideological pronouncements and the practices it encouraged on the land partook of the same circumscribed, cautionary view of physical nature and the possibilities of exploiting it. Japan was represented as a small country, forever poor in resources. Beauty it might have, but this natural beauty was strictly non-commercial. Although Japan’s lack of natural resources is now taken as simple fact, a sense of dearth is relative rather than absolute and, more importantly for the study of ideology, linked to perceptions about who should control resources to what ends. In the Tokugawa period, Neo-Confucianists such as Kaibara Ekken, believing in the eternal stability of class relations and the possibility of harmony between them, also believed that the natural world would provide sufficiently to support this system if all people remained at their proper station. Some Tokugawa leaders even began to suspect that the “black ships” haunting Japanese waters and begging for trade were drawn by Japan’s extraordinary natural bounty. For instance, in 1838 the daimyo of the Mito domain, Tokugawa Nariaki, insisted that “Japan is a small island country, but it brims with rice, gold, and silver; so of course other lands envy our wealth.”43 Even after the Meiji Restoration, as John Whitney Hall points out, “what is now considered a scarcity of natural resources was not then a handicap, since in terms of the prevalent technology Japan was rich in land, water, sun, and manpower.”44 By late Meiji, however, Japan was represented as almost barren. In part, this was a realistic new assessment of what

43. Quoted in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, ed., “Introduction,” in Modern Japanese Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2. 44. John Whitney Hall, Japan: From Prehistory to Modern Times (Ann Arbor: Michigan Classics in Japanese Studies, 1991 reprint), 7.

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natural resources were wanted for: Japan had little of the metals, oil, and other natural assets important to modern industry under its soil.45 But this new emphasis on nature’s miserliness was ideologically deployed in support of the guiding hand not of the market but of government authorities. Individuals and local communities should not be left to parcel out the wealth among themselves; bureaucrats should. The limited productive capacities of physical nature had to be cherished for national, not individual, benefit. Where hopes were greatest for wealth from nature, as with ventures in Hokkaido or the Ashio Copper Mine in Tochigi Prefecture, they were disappointed. Hokkaido did not prosper as expected and remained an impoverished backwater until the 1930s. While by 1900 the Ashio Mine was producing 50 percent of Japan’s copper, and copper was Japan’s third most important export, behind silk and tea, the scandalous pollution it created chastened official hopes of nature’s bounty.46 Even where nature was cooperative, the means of exploiting it were suspect in the early twentieth century. As Tetsuo Najita argues, there was “a deeply felt concern regarding the aggressive pulls of technology [because] culture was not in ideological control of technology.”47 To suggest that nature as physical resource might provide infinite possibilities was to suggest that it might slip beyond the control of culture. Edicts promulgated during the century’s early decades reiterate the theme not of nature’s economic possibilities but of its limits. For instance, the Boshin Rescript of 1908 on Thrift and Diligence urges hard work and frugality on peasants and workers who are “to inure themselves to arduous toil without yielding to any degree of indulgence.” If they restrain their desires, promises the rescript, “the growing prosperity of Our Empire is assured.”48 The immediate aim of this injunction was to quash labor unrest and the 1908 run on the banks, but in broader terms it also insisted that natural resources are finite and individual engagement with them

45. Glenn T. Trewartha details the kinds of raw materials necessary for industrial production that Japan lacks. Trewartha, Japan: A Geography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 66–97. 46. See, F. G. Notehelfer, “Between Tradition and Modernity: Labor and the Ashio Copper Mine, Monumenta Nipponica 39, no. 1 (1984), 11–24; Kenneth Pyle, “Symposium: The Ashio Copper Mine Pollution Incident,” Journal of Japanese Studies 1, no. 2 (1975), 347–407; and Kenneth Strong, Ox Against the Storm: A Biography of Tanaka ShÖzÖ, Japan’s Conservationist Pioneer (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1977). 47. Tetsuo Najita, “On Culture and Technology in Postmodern Japan,” South Atlantic Quarterly (Special Issue: Postmodernism and Japan) 87, no. 3 (1988), 409. 48. Japan Year Book 1911, 496.

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should benefit the nation. In other words, the rescript suggests a view of nature’s beneficence far more pessimistic than that of either laissezfaire capitalists or social Darwinians. This pessimism was shared by the Local Improvement Movement (ChihÖ kairyÖ undÖ) inaugurated in 1909 by officials at the Ministry of Home Affairs to implement the Rescript on Thrift and Diligence.49 Great emphasis was placed on respect for superiors, including village headmen and landlords. Their slogan, “Accept your lot humbly and defer to superiors” (bundo suijÖ), is not only the antithesis of social Darwinism’s promise of social and economic gain for strong individuals, but also the antithesis of the modest self-improvement movements from the Tokugawa period onward, such as that of Ninomiya Sontoku (1787–1856), directed at increasing community prosperity. For officials of the Local Improvement Movement, the farmer’s engagement with nature promised no social or economic advancement; subsistence farming was an end in itself. As historian Stephen Vlastos argues, the image of Japan’s farm villages “as a reservoir of national culture, reproducing core values and habits that shape Japanese national character, is a relatively recent invention.”50 Nature was represented as limited in part because such a view of nature limited individual initiative and retained the village as a “reservoir” for the nation. Challengers to this dominant discourse also underscored Japan’s impoverished natural resources, but they sought to have this austerity locally controlled rather than nationally directed. For instance, agrarian radical Yokoi Tokiyoshi in his 1927 ShÖnÖ ni kansuru kenkyÜ draws a picture of a tightly circumscribed world of anti-commercial rural enterprise. “In Yokio’s imaginary world of Japanese ‘small farming,’ ” Vlastos tells us, “the utilization of farm labor was a moral imperative, not a strategy of profit maximizing, which rendered farming free of compulsion, strife, and alienation. Everyone ‘willingly puts out the maximum labor, takes pleasure in work, is in sympathy with the environment, and finds happiness in nurturing the growth of plants and animals.’ ”51 Agrarian radicalism offered not a vision of nature’s endless bounty or even

49. See Sheldon Garon, “Fashioning a Culture of Diligence and Thrift: Savings and Frugality Campaigns in Japan, 1900–1931,” in Japan’s Competing Modernities, ed. Sharon Minichiello (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), 312–34. 50. Stephen Vlastos, “Agrarianism without Tradition,” in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 80. 51. Ibid., 86.

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a genuine connection with tradition, but rather a new idea of smallscale utopias in harmony with austere nature. Demographics further conspired to certify this view of nature’s physical limits. While the Bureau of Shrines composed prayers for large families with many sons for the army, the Japanese population jumped from around 40 million in 1890 to 64 million in 1930, excluding overseas territories.52 The Malthusian limits of the land were strongly felt and strongly argued in international disputes over immigration policies.53 Optimistic industrialists, such as Fujihara GinjirÖ (1869–1960), head of the Ñji paper company, attempted to resist the gloomy forecasts predicated on the poverty of Japan’s natural resources and the pressures of its growing human population. In his 1935 Kogyo Nihon seishin (The spirit of Japanese industry), Fujihara reminded his readers that Japan was not the only country unable to be “self-supporting with respect to raw materials.” Given its excellent geographical position for trade with other nations and the disciplined spirit of the workforce, nothing, he insisted, should stand in the way of “our industrial expansion.” But Fujihara’s benign view of free trade was already out of date by that time, and some of the trading nations he mentions were already colonies of Japan. Both practically and ideologically, the oligarchy sought to make the physical world over to national purposes rather than local and individual ones. Economic practices exploiting nature and ideological practices nationalizing nature were not greatly at odds because there was no sharp contrast between a raw individual energy creating a progressive history through natural exploitation (since that was discouraged) and a transcendent, eternally stable natural sanction for nationhood. Unlike America and other Western nations, where nature remained tangible, for Japanese nationalism, the definition of nature as physical resource became secondary to a more abstract, acculturated concept of nature. The material natural world was represented as limited and unpromising, but the genealogized natural nation was far more expansive, requiring colonization, emigration, and centralized supervision. In other words, ide52. Janet E. Hunter, Concise Dictionary of Japanese History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 258. 53. Edward A. Olsen argues that “the pre-war period’s assumptions about Japan were almost universally Malthusian.” Olsen, Japan: Economic Growth, Resource Scarcity, and Environmental Constraints (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1978), 52. In 1931, Walter R. Crocker predicted that “Japanese foreign policy will be determined by her population problem.” Crocker, The Japanese Population Problem, Coming Crisis (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931), 214.

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ology did not grossly misrepresent the experience of nature as chary and ungenerous, and the lack of fundamental contradiction in this regard may have limited the avenues open to dissent.

Educating the National Family While shrine policies constructed an abstract, apotheosized nature and economic exhortations represented physical nature as limited in abundance and limiting in the opportunities it offered for individual advancement, educational policy defined nature as national family. Analogies between filial piety and patriotic imperial loyalty had been common, of course, before the twentieth century, but after 1900 and particularly by 1910 the kinship relationship between families, villages, and the imperial household was transformed from analogy to actuality. As one historian writes, “The nation was not like a family, it was a family by virtue of the fact that the distant ancestors of ordinary Japanese households were offshoots of the main imperial line.”54 Ethics textbooks consciously promoted this ideological transformation of Japan from historical nation into the natural nation of kazoku-kokka (family-state). In response to the variety of privately produced interpretations of the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education, the National Diet in 1897 decided that the government itself ought to issue textbooks that would propagate the desired view. Their ruling created a Ministry of Education committee with instructions to compile an official ethics series for school use. This committee was chaired by none other than KatÖ Hiroyuki. Under KatÖ’s direction, the initial set of textbooks was completed in 1903 and, as historian Ishida Takeshi points out, this set was not particularly concerned with nature as family.55 Indeed, these volumes retained a certain progressive emphasis in part because KatÖ had not shaken off his social Darwinian rhetoric.56 The focus remained on the prospects for improvement in Japan and the world. Only after the Russo-Japanese War and the social disturbances that followed were these ethics primers trans-

54. Wilbur M. Fridell, “Government Ethics Textbooks in Late Meiji Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 29, no. 4 (August 1970), 829. 55. Ishida Takeshi, Meiji seiji shisÖshi kenkyÜ (A Study of Meiji Political Thought) (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1954), 8. 56. Postwar historians of education defend this first government-produced ethics series as quite modern. See Fridell, “Government Ethics Textbooks,” 822–23; Karasawa TomitarÖ, KyÖkasho no rekishi (Tokyo: SÖbunsha, 1960); Miyata Takeo, ed., DÖtoku kyÖiku shiryÖ shÜsei, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Daiichi hÖki, 1959).

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formed into hard-hitting boosters of patriotism and sacrifice for the national family.57 By 1910, a new, more nationalistic series of ethics textbooks had been completed by a committee chaired this time by Hozumi Yatsuka (1860– 1912), dean of the Tokyo Imperial University Law School at the time. Hozumi’s conservatism was of an entirely different ilk than KatÖ’s. Although KatÖ advocated oligarchic control, he still believed in a world in progress, a changeable universe requiring skilled leadership. Hozumi, on the other hand, focused on the nation and national law as a set of eternal truths revolving around the “emperor system” (tennÖsei). “Progress” in any fundamental sense was anathema to Hozumi.58 The transformation in the nature of the nation is evident when the two textbook series by KatÖ and Hozumi are compared. As historian of education Karasawa TomitarÖ observes, “In the 1910 revision, the modern ethics of the 1903 texts were eliminated, and in their place a feudal family ethic was stressed. All lessons such as ‘Others’ Freedoms,’ ‘Social Progress,’ and ‘Rivalry’ were removed, and new lessons like ‘Ise Shrine,’ ‘The Founding of the Nation,’ ‘The National Essence’ [kokutai], ‘Guard the Prosperity of the Imperial Throne,’ . . . and ‘The Dying Instructions of our Imperial Ancestors’ were added in their place.”59 In other words, the new books eliminated lessons echoing social Darwinian ideas of social progress and competition. In their place were put not only the nationalistic lessons suggested by the titles above, but also an emphasis on the fatherly beneficence of the emperor for whom all Japanese should be willing to die. The fusion of filial piety and national loyalty expressed in the phrase

57. The post–Russo-Japanese War shift to a new, more cohesive national image was also evident in the 1911 textbook controversy over how to represent the two imperial courts of the fourteenth century (nanbokuchÖ seijun ron). The existence of two competing courts, north and south, between 1337 and 1392 undermined the claim of an unbroken imperial line, but the standard textbook issued by the Ministry of Education after 1903 acknowledged them both and left the question of legitimacy open. However, in the increasingly tense atmosphere of 1911, Kita Sadakichi, who had written the text, was attacked and, after heated controversy, the Meiji emperor (a descendent of the northern court) issued an edict on March 3 declaring the southern court alone to be legitimate. Margaret Mehl, History and the State in Nineteenth-Century Japan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 140–47. 58. It could also be said that at some fundamental level, “process” was also anathema to Hozumi. As the chief legal theorist of the “emperor system,” he clashed with his colleague Minobe Tatsukichi (1873–1948), who saw the emperor as an organ of the government rather than its transcendent embodiment. 59. Karasawa Tomitaro, KyÖkasho no rekishi (Tokyo: SÖbunsha, 1960), 286; quoted in Fridell, “Government Ethics Textbooks,” 827.

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“chÜkÖ no taigi” (the great principle of loyalty and filial piety) resounded in these school texts. Ninth graders were told, “It is only natural for children to love and respect their parents, and the great principle of loyalty and filial piety springs from this natural feeling. . . . Our country is based on the family system. The whole country is one great family, and the Imperial House is the Head Family [sÖka]. It is with the feeling of filial love and respect for parents that we Japanese people express our reverence toward the Throne of unbroken imperial line.”60 Like an algebraic proof, the passage neatly establishes the equivalence of family and nation. Historian Ishida Takeshi notes a similar trend in books explicating the Imperial Rescript on Education. He notes that a 1904 work, Chokugo no shishu ni moto (The Foundation and Purpose of the Imperial Rescript), shied away from mentioning nature, while a 1911 commentary, Kokumin dÖtokuron (Discussion of the People’s Morals), introduces nature (shizen) as the basis for filial piety, insisting at the same time that filial piety is particularly Japanese.61 As in textbooks after the RussoJapanese War, moral tracts united nature with righteous politics, family, and Japaneseness. Promoting a national family, however, did more than simply pull the periphery into the center to form an organized organic network. The kazoku-kokka was also a statement about the way nature could replace history as the guarantor of authentic culture. While Darwinian social progress treated human cultures as stages in a naturalized history, Japan’s new ideology insisted that culture was tangential to quotidian time even while it rested on the most quotidian of groups, the family. The eternal naturalness of the Japanese nation authenticated a culture that could not be transformed by pedestrian changes in daily life and yet, paradoxically and intangibly, was represented in the daily activities of each Japanese person. The ninth-grade ethics text cited above admonishes pupils that, “the state [kokka] exists independently forever, but the individual only for a time, and compared with the state his life is very brief. It is only natural that the people must conform to the purposes of the eternal state, and give no heed to personal interests.”62 According to this view, nature as family, nation, and culture was divorced from common life and almost from life itself. As the naturalized nation transcended the mundane, it

60. Miyata Takeo, ed., DÖtoku kyÖiku shiryÖ shÜsei (Compilation of Moral Educational Materials), vol 1. (Tokyo: Daiichi hÖki, 1959), 499. 61. Ishida Takeshi, Meiji seiji shisÖshi kenkyÜ, 8. 62. Miyata, DÖtoku kyÖiku, 494.

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took nature with it, leaving the quotidian as a form of half-life, a prelude to individual death and national eternity. As with the nationalized nature of ShintÖ and of economic exhortations, the nationalized nature of ethics primers absorbed the concrete local world of daily life within the excess of a timeless national nature where death and spiritual abundance cohered. Abstract, sacred, and limited in its tangible benefits but infinite through the imperial line, nature in this new form became identical to the consciousness of the Japanese nation and could spread to the “eight corners of the world,” washing over other peoples, cultures, and places that were necessarily less than natural. The natural practice of worship no longer took place in the living communities, economic growth was not available through the natural resources of local communities, the true family and the true self were found not amidst the living, but through connections with the ancestral dead. In the years after the Russo-Japanese War, the true ground of nature was not the soil and air of the living but the world of the deceased.

World-Historical Nature Full articulation of this newly chauvinistic nature can be traced through the wartime propaganda work of many of Japan’s most famous philosophers. Watsuji TetsurÖ, for instance, exemplifies both the jingoism and the engagement with German thought that underlay much of the philosophical writing from the 1920s through the war years.63 Watsuji first began to weave together the strains of nation and nature in 1920 when, as a young lecturer at TÖyÖ University, he published Nihon kodai bunka 63. Robert Bellah suggests that “Watsuji is a long way from the fanatical traditionalists” without seeming to realize that his “very abstract philosophical” approach to the emperor, his desire to establish “a more equitable social system which would overcome the weaknesses of capitalism and socialism” and his emphasis on culture hardly shield him from the charge of supporting the “fascist and militarist movement.” Indeed, Mosse defines German and Italian fascism precisely in terms of their concern for a “third way” between socialism and capitalism and their emphasis on culture. However, Bellah does not entirely absolve Watsuji from complicity in the war effort, admitting that he “made no effective resistance to the tendencies leading Japan to disaster.” Bellah further acknowledges that “when, as in Watsuji’s theory, the absolute is always actualized in groups, and most completely in the state, there is little basis for effective individual protest.” Bellah, “Japan’s Cultural Identity: Some Reflections on the Work of Watsuji TetsurÖ,” Journal of Asian Studies 24 (August 1965), 589. Yet even this seems to soft-pedal Watsuji’s active support of ultranationalism. He did, after all, not only participate in the government-sponsored production of Kokutai no hongi, but during the war years he also wrote such works as Nihon seishin (1934), in Watsuji TetsurÖ zenshÜ, vol. 4 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, third ed. 1980), 281–321; and pamphlets also collected in Watsuji TetsurÖ zenshÜ, “Nihon no shindÖ,” vol. 14, 1–31, and “Amerika no kokuminsei,” vol. 17, 451–81.

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(Ancient Japanese Culture). This study of the earliest historical chronicles, poetry collections, and archaeology claims that the ancient Japanese “loved nature, becoming one with its whirling life. . . . This intimate embrace with nature does not allow one to make nature into an object of thinking.”64 These assurances that the Japanese people had never approached nature with anything like scientific objectivity or economic instrumentality, had always lived without complaint in “the peaceful embrace of nature,” and enjoyed the “subtle harmony between body and mind” must have been balm to the leadership after the rice riots of 1919 and the continuing agitation for expanded suffrage. Upon Watsuji’s return from a brief period of study in Germany in 1928, he began what is perhaps his most important work concerning concepts of nature, FÜdo (Climate or, sometimes, Climate and Culture).65 This book was published in 1935, with a revised edition issued in 1943 to eliminate the “leftist traces” that Watsuji had, he claimed, inadvertently incorporated in the original treatise. FÜdo, a rebuttal to the Heideggerian emphasis on time, attempts to comprehend cultural difference through spatial analysis. The space that a people occupy is at once social (the relations among people, or aidagara) and environmental. A particular culture, instead of emerging through the dialectic of history, arises through the repetition exacted by nature’s annual cycles. Thus time is not progressive but sedimented, the layers of the passing years pressing down on one another to form the bedrock of cultural assurance. Elements of FÜdo, with its suggestion that the world had three basic climatic regions of monsoon, desert, and meadow, make their way into Kokutai no hongi. The weather and land of a country determine its culture: “India, for instance, is overpowered by her natural features, and in the Occident one senses the subjugation of nature by human beings, and there is not found a deep harmony between humanity and nature as in Our Country.”66 Climatic nature guarantees cultural difference and, at the same time, assures each culture’s continuity. As the war progressed, living culture with its embrace of nature’s “whirling life” is replaced in Watsuji’s writing by the stringencies of a culture only truly manifest in a state that demands complete self-sacrifice. This ultranational culture, while claiming to express nature in its high64. Quoted in Yuasa Yasuo, The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory, trans. T. P. Kasulis and Nagatomo Shigenori (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 46. 65. Geoffrey Bownas published his translation under the title Climate: A Philosophical Study (Tokyo: MonbushÖ, 1961), though he and Bellah preferred Climate and Culture. 66. Kokutai no hongi, 55.

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est form, requires the negation of the individual self and of the immediate natural environment. The standpoint of the Imperial State “transcends both death and life” (shishÖ o koeta tachiba), as Watsuji makes clear in his short treatise Nihon no shindÖ (The True Way of Japan), published in 1944. “In order to attain a pure and clear heart, it is necessary,” Watsuji argues, “to develop an awareness of the importance of one’s public duty, as participating in the august activities of the Emperor who manifests and unifies the three virtues of honesty, compassion, and wisdom on a national level. . . . The experience of transcending death and life, if actualized only in the moment of fighting an enemy, is, without doubt, a noble thing. However, when it permeates every aspect of one’s life and is lived as the constant pure and clear mind of one’s entire being—this is indeed the absolute state of mind to which I refer.”67 This “absolute state of mind,” this consciousness that relinquishes individuality and any egotistical desire for either life or martyrdom, ultimately expresses only the ethereal timelessness of the empire without regard for spatial boundaries, lived experience, or corporeal existence. For Watsuji at this stage, the Japanese state was the ultimate manifestation of nature, but it was a form of nature not found in quotidian space or quotidian time or in the bodies of the living. The plane on which the Japanese nation united nature and consciousness was highly abstract for most writers. Transmuting Hegelian theories of world history and Heideggerian concepts of time, Japanese intellectuals attempted to locate “Japan” outside developmental time that “the West” appeared to have already commandeered both as dialectic and as progressive linear chronology. These intellectuals also sought to define a place for Japan that transcended the physical limitations of its islands and its acquisitions on the Asian continent, ascending to a changeless arena of acculturated global, or at least Asian, brotherhood. Locating the nation on this different plane, in an “eternal present” where the “eight directions constitute one universe,” allowed Watsuji, Nishida, and others to envision a “world-historical mission” for Japan. The nation could “transcend itself while remaining thoroughly true to itself in the multi-world world,” or so Nishida urged in his 1943 Sekai no shinchitsujo no genri (Fundamental Principles of the New World Order).68 67. Watsuji TetsurÖ, Nihon no shindÖ (Tokyo: Chikuma shobÖ, 1944), 31. Translation from Sourcebook for Modern Japanese Philosophy, eds. David A. Dilworth and Valdo H. Viglielmo (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), 287. 68. Nishida KitarÖ, Sekai no shinchitsujo no genri (Fundamental Principles of the New World Order) (1943), in vol. 12, Nishida KitarÖ zenshÜ (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966), 428.

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Nishida argued that Japan, having grasped the fact that “reciprocal mediation of the immanent and transcendent is the essence of national polity,” could serve as a model for all other nations and for a form of world unity more exalted and holistic than that promised by the League of Nations.69 To some intellectuals, having consciously defined “Japan” in reaction against European presumptions about time and space and their conjunction in world history, war seemed like an inevitable development. In 1938, on the first anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Miki Kiyoshi urged the Showa KenkyÜkai, the study group advising Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro (1891–1945), to support further action in China: “If we consider Japan’s historic mission in spatial terms, it means the unification of Asia; if we consider it temporally, this mission means the resolution of the contradictions of capitalist societies. Each of these tasks must be realized by the China incident. This, it would seem, is the world historical meaning of the China incident.”70 The necrophilic nature of this ultranationalism demanded the sacrifice of actual lives for a transcendent life, gains in territory for an ethereal unity, physical nature for abstract nature. Although Nishida insisted that “the true essence of the Japanese spirit lies in the fact that in every respect that which is transcendent is immanent and that which is immanent is transcendent,”71 it would seem that in practice the transcendent goals of the nation always preempted the more immanent forms of being. Japan’s abstract embrace of shizen had practical ramifications as well. An ideology that entombs an unputrefied nature in the sepulcher of national essence transforms the threat posed by modern technology. Certainly anxiety about technology existed in Japan as elsewhere, but technology’s threat to nature defined as national culture was more keenly felt than technology’s threat to nature as environment. Little concern was spared for Japanese land, forests, and water in the all-out effort to project an empire across the vast Asian continent, but great effort was invested in insisting that technology never besmirched the purity of Japanese life.

69. Nishida KitarÖ, Sekai no shinchitsujo no genri, 434. Nishida, it should be noted, dismisses the family model (kazoku-kokka) of the state as irrelevant to Japan’s position as the guiding nation, since the family of nations is akin to the ideals of the League of Nations. 70. Quoted in James Crowley, “Intellectuals as Visionaries of the New Asian Order,” in Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan, ed. James William Morley (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 366. 71. Nishida KitarÖ, Sekai no shinchitsujo no genri, 434.

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Not only that, even the desire for technological improvement was declared absent from the Japanese heart. In 1933, novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirÖ claimed that “we Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent.”72 Famously eloquent on the darkness of Japanese homes and toilets, Tanizaki portrayed his fellow countrymen as neither requiring nor desiring the bright lights of the modern world, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary in the popularity of the new cafes.73 In the shadowed tranquility of a traditional Japanese room, Tanizaki suggests, “you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time” and emerge old and gray.74 Even those most immediately concerned with industrial production, such as the War Ministry, distrusted technology on ideological grounds. In Nazi Germany, on the other hand, modern technology was embraced ideologically as well as practically.75 There, anxiety about the threat of mechanization to the environment spawned efforts to discipline technology with the “‘consciousness of responsibility’ and ‘reverence for life in every form.’ ” As environmental historian Raymond Dominick points out, “Given the horrible destructiveness of the Third Reich, it is shocking how its minions could rattle on about reverence for life. Even during the war, with destruction all around him and apparently oblivious to the awful irony of his words, Schoenichen [who had been director of Prussia’s conservation agency] wrote that ‘the highest culture includes the highest responsibility for the preservation of Nature and all her creatures.’ He hoped that once the war was over, Germany would take the lead in establishing a pan-European Naturschutz.”76 The minions of the Japanese state muttered instead about death. In government publications, cherry blossoms represented young men perishing in

72. Tanizaki Jun’ichirÖ, In Praise of Shadows [1933] (New Haven, Conn.: Leete’s Island Books, 1977), 31. 73. Miriam Silverberg deftly portrays the new sexual and social interactions taking place in the cafes of TaishÖ Japan, institutions that became so popular that, in Osaka alone, there were 800 cafes by 1930. Silverberg, “The Cafe Waitress Serving Modern Japan,” in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 74. Tanizaki Jun’ichirÖ, In Praise of Shadows, 22. 75. Jeffrey Herf argues that Germany’s reactionary modernists embraced both technological advances and the “themes associated with the modernist vanguard.” Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 12. 76. Raymond H. Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany, 111.

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battle,77 mothers scolded their sons for not dying for the emperor, and those at home stripped pine trees in an attempt to produce fuel for warplanes. Japan’s vision of a postwar world under her leadership stressed harmony, but only on the level of human beings. When Japan had fulfilled its world-historical mission, it would lead a co-prosperity sphere where, according to Nishida, “the horizontally aligned races of peoples are reconfigured vertically to form a global consciousness.”78 This abstract, ultimately unified world would express a rarified nature, but one that had little to do with water protection or soil conservation. One of the most tantalizing questions of modern Japanese history is how the state was able to assimilate so much political and cultural production seemingly at odds with it. Increasing mechanization, commercialization, and urbanization might have destabilized Meiji and TaishÖ power structures and opened the way to greater democracy and a more independent civil society, but they did not. Instead, Japan followed neither modernization theory’s trajectory toward liberalism nor the Marxist thrust toward revolution; its confrontation with modernity led to a stronger imperial state that asserted itself as the ultimate modern subject, presiding over modernization’s material bounty. I have argued here that taking the politicality of “nature” seriously provides a new tool for understanding how this Japanese state emerged triumphant, hushing possible dissent. When the boundaries of the national culture were made coterminous with the form of nature described above, disagreeing became an act of perversion in its root sense: an abomination of nature. One was either natural and therefore what one said and did was in harmony with Japanese culture, or one was unnatural, at odds with the national body and, being as it were “disembodied,” ultimately invisible and inaudible. Almost any Japanese person’s particular commitments could be assimilated to the naturalized nation because that person’s natural identity and true consciousness was seen to trump his or her idiosyncratic choices. In other words, although conflicting interests and social visions were seen as unnatural, the individual Japanese was always naturally part of the state and could be assimilated on that basis despite “unnatural” ideas. Only in very extreme cases, such as that

77. Kai Kenzo, Sakura no kaori: The Fragrance of Cherry Blossoms (Tokyo: Foreign Affairs Association of Japan, 1933). 78. Nishida, untitled, supplement to the fourth collection of essays, 400. Translated in Dilworth and Viglielmo, eds., Sourcebook for Modern Japanese Philosophy, 79.

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of the radicals executed in 1911 after the High Treason Incident (taigayku jiken), was social and natural identity completely annihilated rather than absorbed and muffled. Confronting the hegemonic power of this naturalized nationalism was extremely difficult, but, as we have seen, there were attempts to redefine nature and nation in alternative ways. The efforts of Minakata and Yanagita to promote resistance by investing local custom with a naturalness preceding that of the state’s might be glossed as an instance of the classic conflict between the “‘local’ (leftist version of deep ecology) and that which is ‘national’ (right-wing version)” identified by Luc Ferry.79 Similarly, endeavors to pose the kokumin (the people) against the kokka (the state) identified by Kevin Doak can be read as attempts to question the inherent naturalness of the state as the primary political subject.80 Another potent means of leveraging local nature against the naturalized nation was through environmental struggles. Although village headman and Diet representative Tanaka ShÖzÖ (1841–1913) ended up without position, family, or home, his valiant fight against the Ashio Copper Mine’s devastating pollution should be remembered, relying as it did on a different view of the nation’s responsibilities for nature and community. Historian Kano Masanao argues that the fight against pollution in the late Meiji and TaishÖ periods was one of the strongest available tools for battering oligarchic power not just on the question of industrial policy but on the issue of greater democracy.81 However, these challenges were unsuccessful in redefining nature as local custom or as an independent environmental realm. In the end, the rhetoric of Japan’s uniquely natural polity continued to boost national morale and assimilate dissent throughout the war years and after. Nature had become Japanese culture and Japanese culture had become nature. Dissent could only mean exile from this closed circle. In summary, twentieth-century Japan did not inherit its concept of nature nor did it choose “nature” as such against the onslaught of Western culture; instead, in the early years of the century, intellectuals and

79. Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order, trans. Carol Volk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), xxvii. Ferry dismisses both kinds of natural political subject as antiliberal. 80. Kevin Doak, “What is a Nation and Who Belongs?” American Historical Review 102, no. 2 (April 1997), 283–309. 81. Kano Masanao, “Shakai mondai no hassei to shoki shakaishugi,” in Kindai Nihon seiji shisÖ shi, eds. Hashikawa BunsÖ and Matsumoto Sannosuke, vol. 1 (Tokyo: YÜhikaku, 1971), 334.

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bureaucrats crafted a particular concept of nature, partly in reaction to foreign ideas such as social Darwinism and events such as the RussoJapanese War, partly in reaction to domestic threats to oligarchic power, and partly through the creative use of past images and current philosophies. From this particular set of circumstances emerged an ultranational, ultranatural state that resolutely refused to recognize even the partial independence of either individuals or their physical environment.

chapter 9

Conclusion: Natural Freedom

In the first chapter, I posed two possible relationships between nature and modernity: one antithetical, the other cosmopological. It is now time to review these models and to ask how foregrounding the concept of nature has provided an alternative perspective on Japan’s place in what Maruyama, Weber, and so many others recognized as the problematic universal history of modernity.1 The most influential view for intellectual historians of Japan, Europe, and America defines modernity in opposition to nature, or, more precisely, as the separation of human consciousness from instinctive, physical, and material forms of nature so that human beings can attain the status of liberated subjects. In this model, enlightenment (whether achieved in seventeenth-century Cartesian rationalism, presaged by Confucian Sages, or, as Horkheimer and Adorno suggest, initiated in Homeric Greece) signals the individual’s emergence from the cocoon of myth, tradition, and, above all, nature to attain a self-conscious egoism and a capacity to de-

1. Maruyama speaks of the “confusion that still [in 1951] surrounds the country’s position in world history,” observing that “Neither practicing politicians nor political scientists have yet clearly seen the pattern and direction of Japan’s modern social and political development, a fact that suggests how difficult it is to assign Japan a place in world history.” Maruyama, “Nationalism in Japan: Its Theoretical Background and Prospects,” in Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, ed. Ivan Morris (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 135. Maruyama’s work was originally published in ChÜÖ kÖron in 1951.

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mystify the physical world and fabricate the social one. Through enlightenment (in whatever form it takes), nature—the unthought—gives way to history.2 The environment’s supposedly limitless capacity, rarely questioned or even acknowledged, undergirds this development toward freedom. The assumption has been that “mankind,” as Cambridge historian J. B. Bury put it, “has still myriads and myriads of years to live on this planet under physical conditions which need not hinder his development or impair his energies.”3 In short, while the natural environment is objectified and rendered endlessly more productive, human nature is seen to emerge in a new, self-conscious form, freed from all natural determinism. Some variant of this denatured subjectivity became the desideratum of Maruyama Masao and many of his generation during the sophisticated (and often poignant) postwar debates. These debates focused on the question of how or even whether Japan could attain the form of shutaisei (subjectivity) necessarily concomitant with democratic practice— whether democracy was understood as participation in a formal system of governance or as revolutionary practice.4 From the immediate postwar period to the late 1960s and early 1970s, a widespread assumption from moderates to Marxists was that Japanese people had not yet acquired a modern form of shutaisei—and that the need was pressing. Among those yearning for Japan’s wholehearted embrace of modern subjectivity was economic historian Ñtsuka Hisao (1907–96), Maruyama’s 2. For Hegel, history at its highest level (i.e., the Philosophical History through which the Absolute manifests itself) is distinct from nature and precedes even human history: “History in general is therefore the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of Idea in Space.” Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 72. R. G. Collingwood, drawing on Hegel, devalues nature for the sake of history in similar terms: “It is now clear why historians habitually restrict the field of historical knowledge to human affairs. A natural process is a process of events, an historical process is a process of thoughts. Man is regarded as the only animal that thinks, or thinks enough, and clearly enough, to render his actions the expression of his thoughts. . . . This at least is certain: that, so far as our scientific and historical knowledge goes, the processes of events which constitute the world of nature are altogether different in kind from the processes of thought which constitute the world of history.” Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: originally published by Clarendon Press, 1946; rpt., Oxford University Press, 1956), 216–17. 3. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (New York: Macmillan, 1932; rpt. 1987), xix. 4. Victor Koschmann’s study of postwar theorists of shutaisei distinguishes carefully between the conception of democracy as a thoroughgoing revolution to extend equality and liberty, and democracy as a formal system of rights and responsibilities in the public realm, i.e., between a way of living and a way of ruling, between a subjectivity formed through praxis and a subjectivity discovered in a form of being. Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. “Conclusion: The Subject of Modernity.”

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close colleague. Ñtsuka argued that geography and a monsoon climate had inhibited the development of a work ethic akin to Weber’s among Japanese farmers. Japanese people, he claimed, languished even in the mid-twentieth century at a stage comparable with English yeoman of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because they enjoyed abundantly fertile rice-producing lands requiring relatively little ingenuity to spark output. All was not lost, however, as Ñtsuka believed that it was possible for Japan to overcome the natural disadvantage of easy abundance and achieve the ethical yet instrumental sense of agency necessary to modernity.5 This sense that there was something critically deficient in the alignment between nature and consciousness in the Japanese sense of self extended even to those distrustful of modernity and of capitalism. For example, China specialist Takeuchi Yoshimi argued that theories of modernity failed to take the folk (minzoku) into account, but he also agreed that the Japanese had not yet achieved a truly modern sense of political subjectivity capable of a critical stance.6 Maruyama Masao continued to work and to hope for the emergence of modern subjectivity in Japan for at least twenty years after his 1944 essay on OgyÜ Sorai’s failure to secure invention (sakui) as the basis of political practice. Maruyama’s postwar position, eloquently summarized by historian Andrew Barshay, was as follows: For Maruyama, “interiority” or self-possession formed the normative core of subjectivity (shutaisei). To be modern was to exercise a transcendent, universal critical faculty in a particular social/national totality. A modern or “open” society, in turn, was one where the free and untrammeled association of individuals sets the norm, where politics was the creative space in which conflict was confronted and resolved in an ongoing history of “progress [in] the consciousness of freedom.” (Maruyama took the phrase from Hegel’s Philosophy of History.) It was a history made by human beings for human purposes not always—indeed seldom—understood or intuited with lasting clarity. Human society and institutions, therefore, were neither “natural” nor metaphysically guaranteed. Rather, they were vital fictions worked out by actors with some degree of self-consciousness: This Maruyama took as a key indicator of modernity. The modern consciousness did not contrast fiction to

5. Ñtsuka Hisao, “Seisan ryoku no okeru tÖyÖ to seiyÖ: Nishi-Ñ hÖken nÖmin no tokushitsu,” (May 1946) Ñtsuka Hisao chosakushÜ vol. 7 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1969). Ñtsuka, an economic historian at Tokyo University, a Christian, and a Weberian, worked closely with Maruyama. 6. Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Kindaishugi to minzoku no mondai,” Bungaku (Sept. 1951), reprinted in Takeuchi Yoshimi zenshÜ, vol. 7 (Tokyo: Chikuma shobÖ, 1981). The Japanese Communist Party (JCP) expressed skepticism at the obsession with “subjectivity” and attempted to move the debate to issues of nationhood and, of course, class.

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reality or truth but rather negated any “natural,” metaphysically guaranteed order that comprehended both the cosmic and human spheres.7

Drawing on Hegel, Marx, and Weber, Maruyama continued to argue that the problem with Japanese society was that “the spirit is not functionally independent of nature.”8 Maruyama Masao wished to extend full subjectivity to “the masses,” not just to bourgeois citizens, but, as critics pointed out, he was leery of the sensuality and self-indulgence of “the people.” Self-discipline (or selflegislation), Maruyama argued, was essential to transcend nature defined not only as the unthought environment but also as the body’s insistent needs and desires.9 In prescribing this self-regulating self, Maruyama sought to resolve the dilemma foreshadowed in his earlier work when he associated the “autonomous personality” (shutaiteki jinkaku) with times of decline and crisis.10 If fully achieved, this disciplined self might enjoy the complete, critical freedom of overcoming nature so that “no normative standards of any kind could be present in the background as the premise,”11 while still maintaining the values such as equality and democracy that can only be enacted within society and rely necessarily on a respectful orientation toward the world and others. In this way, Maruyama tried to resolve the tension between the individual and the nation (as the people [kokumin] rather than as the state [kokka]) and to embrace both negative and positive forms of liberty. Nature was not to be overcome just once, but disciplined and repressed continually. However, by the mid-1960s, Maruyama began to doubt that Japan could achieve modernity in these terms.12 Certain modes of political and social existence—“ancient substrata” (kosÖ) as he called them—appeared 7. Andrew E. Barshay, “Postwar Social and Political Thought, 1945–1990,” in Modern Japanese Thought, ed. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 299. 8. Maruyama, “From Carnal Literature to Carnal Politics,” in Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, ed. Ivan Morris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 252. 9. Self-discipline as the basis for liberty is analyzed in various essays. See, in particular, Maruyama Masao, “Nihon ni okeru jiyÜ ishiki no keisei to tokushitsu,” (orig. published Aug. 21, 1947) in Maruyama Masao, SenchÜ to sengo no aida, 1936–1957 (Tokyo: Misuzu shobÖ, 1976), in which Maruyama draws on the work of John Locke. 10. Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, and Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), 229. 11. Ibid., 210. 12. Andrew E. Barshay summarizes Maruyama’s intellectual trajectory in the 1960s as a process of “disenchantment.” Barshay, “Imagining Democracy in Postwar Japan: Reflections on Maruyama Masao and Modernism,” Journal of Japanese Studies 18, no. 2 (Summer 1992), 401–2.

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to Maruyama to endure with such stubborn persistence at such a deep level of consciousness that they seemed impermeable to change.13 Maruyama’s newfound pessimism differed from that of Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in that he did not denounce the entire project of modernity as fatally flawed from the beginning, as they had done. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno had portrayed the self-conscious subject, no longer enmeshed in the happiness of a “fluctuating relationship with nature,” as entering history like Odysseus with the mesmerizing song of the Sirens still ringing in his ears. Their Odysseus was destined to fall back into a more desperate form of unreason through the experience of rationality. Maruyama, on the other hand, willingly incorporates some modes of irrationalism within modern psychological structures, as demonstrated by his insistence that political and social practices should be viewed as fictional exercises, open to revision through imagination. In an essay from 1951, Maruyama suggests that democracy, if it is to be embraced by all classes within Japan and not remain a remote and foreign doctrine, cannot be advocated on strictly functionalist, rational grounds. “In order to unite nationalism and democracy effectively,” he argues, “nationalism must be rationalized to the same degree that democracy is irrationalized.”14 But the most relevant difference with Horkheimer and Adorno is Maruyama’s keen awareness of the weight of Japan’s particularity—those perduring structures of consciousness encoded as nature and tradition debarring, he argues, Japan’s entrance into universal history. It is not the contradictions inherent in modern rationality, but these “ancient substrata” that form the greatest stumbling block to Japan’s achievement of modernity in Maruyama’s view. Nor, in his newfound pessimism, did Maruyama argue that the project of modernity had run aground on the grandiosity of its own vision of absolute freedom. In this, he differs from Jürgen Habermas, who attacks the forms of social totality that haunt Hegelian and Marxian versions of modernity.15 Habermas seeks to rescue modernity through “the com13. Maruyama Masao, “Rekishi ishiki no ‘kosÖ,” in Rekishi shisÖ shÜ, ed. Maruyama (Tokyo: Chikuma shobÖ, 1972); “Genkei; kosÖ; shitsuyÖ tei’on: Nihon shisÖshi hÖhÖron no tsuite no watakushi no ayumi,” in Nihon bunka no kakureta ‘kata’, ed. Takeda Kiyoko (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1984); and “Nihon shisÖshi o meguru shomondao,” Hyakka (1985). 14. Ivan Morris, ed., Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 152. 15. Habermas claims that what Hegel produced was “a rationality puffed up into the absolute spirit [that] neutralizes the conditions under which modernity attained a

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plementary concepts of communicative action and lifeworld [that] introduce a difference that . . . is not reabsorbed into a higher unity.”16 Maruyama, on the other hand, grew increasingly convinced that the greatest problem lay not with the complete reconciliation promised by modernity and guaranteed in the ultimate totalities envisioned by Hegel or Marx, but with Japan’s seeming incapacity to escape its fixation with its own eternal particularities. Japan was the loser in not embracing a dialectic between national and universal values that would, from Habermas’s perspective, result in the globalized and totalized form of modernity.17 While Horkheimer and Adorno argued that modernity was a doomed project and Jürgen Habermas holds that it could be resurrected only as an “incomplete project,” Maruyama came to think of it as Japan’s as-yet-uncommenceable project. For Maruyama, Ñtsuka, and other intellectual historians of mid-twentieth-century Japan, it was not the totality of modernity that produced disaster and threatened freedom, but rather the totality of premodernity. Certainly, if modernity is defined as the separation of individual consciousness from nature in all its manifestations so that absolute liberation is attained—i.e., if modernity is defined as Maruyama Masao defined it—then Japan has never achieved modernity. Japanese political thinkers, throughout the long century explored here, have repeatedly laid claim to nature. As I have tried to show, the insistency and intimacy of this claim is manifest in each period. During the Tokugawa era, nature, understood to map the centralized, localized space of proper political practice, authorized some places and forms of community over others. During the first decades of the Meiji period, nature was transformed from a primarily spatial concept into a temporal one. Political practice became a form of natural history as individuals, political systems, and the natural world

consciousness of itself.” Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press), 43. Nor did Marx “escape the totality thinking of Hegel.” Habermas describes Marx’s prescription for a second nature fully self-realized through labor: “the process of the self-mediation of nature assumes into itself the self-realization of the acting subjects functioning within it. Both are processes of selfgeneration; they are produced out of their own products. Similarly, the society issuing from this praxis is conceived as a product of the forces and relationships of production created within it and by it. This figure of thought from praxis philosophy forces us to permit the moments of labor and nature—initially related distinctly to one another—to be absorbed into the totality of a self-referential process of reproduction.” Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 342. 16. Ibid. 17. Maruyama, “Kindai Nihon no chishikijin,” in KÖei no ichi kara (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1982), 127–30.

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all struggled for survival in a relentless universe. By the TaishÖ era, this perpetual drumbeat of natural, universal, evolutionary history was silenced by the perfected unity of nature and the Japanese nation. In order for the elite to preserve their power through this restructured identity, a new idea of nature emerged in which it was simultaneously constricted as a physical resource and expansive as a spiritual resource through an imperial genealogy that extended back to the beginning of time and was projected out in space to “the eight corners of the world.” Seeing how so much Japanese political thinking unfailingly resorts to nature for guidance and authority, it is possible to claim that the Japanese have always “loved nature,” always existed in the “coalescent intimacy” insisted upon by the wartime propaganda of Kokutai no hongi.18 However, as a statement of Japan’s true identity, lack of modernity, and distance from “the West” (meaning Western Europe and America), this trumpeted “love of nature” succeeds ideologically only in so far as it ignores two questions: is the assumption of an antithetical relationship between nature and modernity valid for the last four hundred years of European intellectual history? and, is the definition of nature deployed in Japanese political thinking consistent, so that nature, as a resolute core of national identity, forms an eternal counterpoint to modernity? As I have argued throughout this book, both questions must be answered in the negative. Reliance on concepts of nature was never forsworn quite so thoroughly as many modern European and American historians and political thinkers thought it had been, nor has a single concept of nature persisted as a constant source of identity in Japanese thought. As I have suggested, if modernity is defined through cosmopological tropes rather than as the antithesis of nature, the figuration of the modern world changes and Japan’s place within it is assured. Turning first to the question of nature in “Western” intellectual history, it is essential to note how our current ecological awareness alters our perspective so that cosmopological tropes come more easily to intellectual historians than they did before. In the early twenty-first century, environmentalism facilitates the retrospective reinsertion of human history into the world of natural processes. However, for centuries it appeared to European thinkers that the cosmos and the polis were, and should be, resolutely disparate realms. As Stephen Toulmin points out, enormous effort was expended in policing the border between human18. This phrase comes from the translation of Kokutai no hongi, Fundamentals of Our National Policy, by John Owen Gauntlett (Newton, Mass.: Crofton Publishing, 1974), 97.

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ity and nature: “From 1720 well into the 20th century, most philosophers and natural scientists continued to defend, in one way or another, their investment in keeping Humanity apart from Nature.” Nevertheless, Toulmin continues, “from Newton to Holbach, Kant, and Herder, and on to Darwin, Marx, and Freud, every basic change in accepted ideas about nature carried implications for accepted ideas about society as well.”19 Although the masters of modernity perceived themselves as participating in a historical trajectory away from natural necessity to freedom, in retrospect, modernity’s history can be rewritten as the play of resonances between various understandings of nature and of humanity. From this cosmopological perspective, Toulmin argues, Renaissance humanists’ modesty—their tolerance of plurality, ambiguity, and doubt informed by a general appreciation of nature as a collection of concrete, transitory, and specific phenomena—forms the first movement of European modernity. Even Cartesian modernity, the second movement, is not anti-natural, but rather the efflorescence of a particular relationship between rational “man” and nature, construed as orderly, stable, infinitely productive, and ultimately susceptible to human comprehension and designs. This rational “man” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not have stood alone without the presentiment of a systematic universe backing him up.20 Although Toulmin himself slights the transformed cosmopolis of the nineteenth century, the consequences of Lyell’s geology and Darwin’s biology for social and political theory (and religion) demonstrate the tenacious ties between modes of understanding nature and the way human society is viewed.21 In a different way, Romanticism as well forged links between humanity and nature. Finally, although the twentieth century tried to resurrect the division between modes of sci19. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 143. 20. Toulmin writes, “Between 1660 and 1720, few thinkers were only interested in accounting for mechanical phenomena in the physical world. For most people, just as much intellectual underpinning was required for the new patterns of social practice, and associated ideas about the polis. As a result, enticing new analogies entered social and political thought: if, from now on, ‘stability’ was the chief virtue of social organization, was it not possible to organize political ideas about Society along the same lines as scientific ideas about Nature? Could not the idea of social order, as much as that of order in nature, be modeled on the ‘systems’ of mathematics and formal logic?” Cosmopolis, 107. 21. Robert J. Richards, among others, makes a strong case for renewed attention to the serious political and cultural consequences of Darwinism. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). See also Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000).

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entific and humanistic knowledge,22 Bruno Latour and others have argued vigorously that if by modern we mean the “double task of domination [of nature] and emancipation [of humanity],” then “we have never been modern.”23 Latour insists that despite our categorical distinctions separating nature, politics, and discourse, we in fact talk about “things-inthemselves,” “humans-among-themselves,” and “rhetoric” simultaneously; it is only the assumption that these are absolutely distinct approaches that makes their interweaving seem “uncanny, unthinkable, unseemly.”24 If we now recognize the resonances between nature and polity in the Renaissance, again in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and once more in the nineteenth century, and further consider how current social theories are being shaped by environmental concerns, it becomes clear that “Western” thought never abandoned nature in quite the way many declared it had. At most, it managed to repress briefly the recognition that political philosophy, social theory, and our very conception of what it is to be human were intimately reliant on particular ideas of nature. And, almost always, with a strange wistfulness, the masters of modernity promised that at the end of the modern trajectory away from nature, a reunion with nature would again be celebrated in perfect form. Through the Hegelian dialectic, through Spencer’s ultimate union of natural evolution and social progress, through forms of Benthian managerial perfection, and through a Marxist “revolutionary (total) praxis [that] will reconstruct the true unity: nature rediscovered, controlled, recognized, and retrieved,”25 nature could ultimately be recuperated to the human project. Moreover, by the time Japanese society came to know Europe and America in the mid-nineteenth century, the most denatured, abstract form of modernity, Cartesian rationalism, had been much adulterated by so-

22. C. P. Snow bemoans this separation in his well-known essay, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1961). While also noting the “growing tension” between the natural sciences and the humanities, Isaiah Berlin dismisses Snow’s idea of “two cultures” in “The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities,” in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (London: Hogarth Press, 1979). Carl N. Degler explores America’s response to Darwinian concepts of hereditary disease and intelligence in Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 23. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 10. 24. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 5. 25. Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, trans. John Moore (New York: Verso, 1995), 170.

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cial Darwinism and its heavily biologized sense of subjectivity. For instance, it was the epiphany experienced by Yamagawa KenjirÖ (1854– 1931) when reading about Herbert Spencer that led him to become Japan’s first professor of physics and a strong advocate of science in the nation’s service. As a young student in 1872 just entering the Sheffield Scientific School associated with Yale University, Yamagawa chanced upon an article in Popular Scientific Monthly about Herbert Spencer’s newly published work. “I thought about [Spencer’s] teaching,” writes Yamagawa, “and came to the conclusion that Japan had to be brought to a position of prosperity and power, but to attain that would require an improvement of its politics. To improve its politics, society must be improved, which requires knowledge of sociology. Sociology in turn presupposes the study of biology and the other sciences. To make real the slogan ‘attain prosperity and strengthen the military,’ physics and chemistry are required. I therefore determined to study physics.”26 Through this chain of associations in response to a British form of cosmopolis, Yamagawa connects national strength, politics, society, and science in an effort to reconfigure Japan’s cosmopolis. If this “West” that Yamagawa came into contact with was modern, and if it also relied upon the resonances between nature and polis to know itself and others, then the efforts by Meiji thinkers to renew nature’s political authority in Japanese ideology hardly marks them as anti-modern. In retrospect, then, modernity can be redefined as the experience of multiple transformations of the cosmopolis rather than as a trajectory away from nature. This redefinition expands possibilities in that it permits the incorporation of Japan within modernity’s universal history, or, rather, disallows illusions about “the West’s” uniqueness. As we look back, modernity as an intellectual and political movement is no longer marked by the rise of unfettered freedom on the unnatural ground of Absolute self-realization (à la Hegel) or on the ground of a refabricated “second nature” (à la Marx). Rather, modernity can better be described as the process whereby previous conceptions of nature and polity were dissolved and consciously reconstructed on the basis of historically high levels of productivity and social organization, a process familiar in both Japan and “the West.” This cosmopological vision of modernity has anti-essentialist and anti-

26. Yamagawa KenjirÖ, Danshaku Yamagawa Sensei IkÖ (The Writings of Baron Yamagawa) (Tokyo: Danshaku Yamagawa sensei kinenkai [The Commemoration Committee of Baron Yamagawa], 1937), 53.

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teleological consequences. It is anti-essentialist in rendering it impossible to pose “the” Western view of nature against “the” Japanese view when both “sides” are seen to engage in dynamic reconfigurations of nature and polis. It is anti-teleological in rendering it impossible to insinuate a line of progress from Japan (nature, premodernity) to “the West” (culture, modernity). Indeed, as Latour has pointed out, the basis of crosscultural comparison is radically altered when our ideas of nature and culture are integrated. As he says, “the very notion of culture is an artifact created by bracketing Nature off. Cultures—different or universal— do not exist, any more than Nature does. There are only natures-cultures, and these offer the only possible basis for comparison.”27 It should be added, however, contra Latour, that not only “Westerners” have been complicit in the creation and maintenance of the nature-culture dichotomy. As the texts examined here demonstrate, the illusion of modernity’s transcendence over nature has served Japanese thinkers as well, sometimes with critical intent (as in the writings of Maruyama, Ienaga, and Matsumoto) and sometimes as a way of asserting a natural identity for Japan (as in the work of sociologist Shimizu IkutarÖ and historian of science Watanabe Masao.) However, the consequences of renaturalizing our understanding of modernity are not all positive. Such a move produces both losses and gains. If, on the one hand, a cosmopological vision provides a new “natures-cultures” basis for comparison that overrides the East-West divide, it also, simultaneously and necessarily, makes modernity a far more modest enterprise. Most especially, this renaturalization diminishes modernity’s grand vision of complete freedom.28 In a cosmopological version of modernity, nature is neither the antithesis of agency nor a broad stage for actors, but becomes instead constitutive of political activity. Freedom must therefore be redefined in terms less than absolute. The existential theologian Paul Ricoeur, in considering this problem, suggests that, “Freedom is not pure act, it is, in each of its moments, activity and receptivity. It constitutes itself in receiving what it does not produce: values, capacities, and sheer nature.”29 Ricoeur expresses the relationship between nature and will in terms of the involuntary and the 27. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 104. 28. Luc Ferry expresses deep concern over the ramifications of environmental thinking for just this reason. See Ferry, The New Ecological Order, trans. Carol Volk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 29. Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, trans. Erazim V. Kohák (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 484.

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voluntary, arguing that in order to understand relations between them “we must constantly reconquer the Cogito in the first person from the natural standpoint.”30 Describing freedom as emerging through an alliance between activity and receptivity, abstraction and physicality, locates it in the uncertain middle ground of irreconcilable contradictions and negotiated possibilities. If, as Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests, the subject of modernity emerges “through a long and heterogeneous history of the cultural training of our senses, of making connections with our glands and muscles and neuronal networks,” freedom must be rooted in the context of bodies and social practices as well as harkening to the desires that may alter ourselves or our condition.31 Freedom, in this formulation, does not dumbly accept natural necessity as a cow does its cud; rather, freedom transforms the necessity, in part through acceptance.32 This is a freedom short on grandeur and lacking in transcendence. Like kindness, it can only have meaning where it engages expectations and hopes within a specific social context. If this anti-absolute view of freedom were to be translated into Maruyama’s terms, “freedom” would have to incorporate both sakui (activity) and shizen (receptivity). Such a redefinition would destroy Maruyama’s utopian hopes but also mitigate his pessimism. Had Maruyama’s goal been relative rather absolute autonomy, the various uses of nature that he uncovered in Japanese political ideology would not necessarily have represented an authoritarian stranglehold on political invention. Instead of treating nature as political creativity’s deterministic opposite, attention would need to be transferred to the question of what particular understanding of nature provides the most efficacious matrix of creativity. Such an approach, aimed at limiting coercion as much as possible rather than escaping it absolutely, would require a penchant for negotiation between the givens and the possibilities of a situation rather than Maruyama’s “either-or” choice or Ienaga SaburÖ’s “logic of negation.” Freedom by this more modest definition depends on the way nature and culture are put together rather than the absolute elimination of received values, capacities, and sheer shizen. 30. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 9. 31. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Afterword,” in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 295. 32. Henri Lefebvre defines freedom through more complete mastery of nature and necessity than I think possible, though I have used his idea that freedom can transform necessity. Lefebvre claims, “first and foremost freedom consists in not accepting necessity. When a necessity is mastered, it becomes modified, transformed into ‘something else’, and often in an unforeseen way.” Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 145.

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In returning to Japanese history with this cosmopological view, the question becomes not why nature and politics were never thoroughly divorced in Japanese thought, but what mediated their multiple alliances over the century of modernization. What entity was deemed to be in the position to weigh the givens and the possibilities of each situation? What entity was believed capable of comprehending both nature and polis? In short, what entity was thought to have the capacity for choice and for freedom? In liberal modernities, this entity has been the individual, perhaps most fruitfully conceived to embody both nature and society without being the creature, solely, of either.33 In reactionary modernities of the left and right, this entity ultimately takes the form of the state, which mediates between—and often promises the complete reconciliation of— nature and society. These non-liberal modern states do not necessarily discount the individual.34 Rather, the individual is deemed to find his or her truest expression of self through the collective. For those who seek complete harmony between nature and society, state and individual, such as Tokyo Imperial University constitutional scholar Uesugi Shinkichi (1878–1929), the state becomes the “apex of morality.” As he put it in 1925, “The state provides for the most perfect fulfillment and development of the nature of man. A man is not a true man until he becomes part of a state.”35 We can see in Uesugi’s particular articulation of the 33. There are, of course, many forms of liberal individualism, each of which assumes a different type of human nature and a slightly different relation with the environment as its basic starting point for the negotiations leading to limited government. Using the tripartite typology developed by Judith Shklar, one could say that “the liberalism of natural rights” envisaging “a just society composed of politically sturdy citizens, each capable and willing to stand up for himself and others” rests on a (Lockean) concept of human nature as rational, dutiful, and energetic in the pursuit of liberty and property. Human nature, here, is conceived as the penchant for activity and acquisition ultimately compelling the creation of positive law and governmental structures. The second type, the “liberalism of personal development,” holds to the view that both individuals and societies have a natural capacity for progress and therefore that freedom is necessary to develop this potential. This second form of liberalism is especially reliant on the infinite bearing capacity of the natural environment. Third, Shklar’s own “liberalism of fear” stresses the capacity of the body and mind to feel pain with the political consequence that the weak must be protected from the strong. While in all cases the individual is conceived as having both natural and social attributes, the type of nature and the type of society shaping him or her results in different modes of negotiation. Judith N. Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 26–27. 34. As Jeffrey Herf points out, “Modernism was not a movement exclusively of the political Left or Right. Its central legend was of the free creative spirit at war with the bourgeoisie who refuses to accept limits and who advocates what Daniel Bell has called the ‘megalomania of self-infinitization,’ the impulse to reach ‘beyond: beyond morality, tragedy and culture.’ ” Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 12. 35. Kokkaron (Tokyo: YÜhikaku, 1925), quoted in Matsumoto Sannosuke, “The Roots

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relations between the state and the individual echoes of right-wing Hegelianism.36 In this reactionary form of modernity, the state finds freedom as it masters and epitomizes both nature and culture. Using this criterion, Japan stands with the non-liberal majority of the world’s modern nations, unsurprisingly since “liberalism,” as Judith Shklar argues, “has been very rare both in theory and in practice in the last two hundred odd years.”37 Most Japanese political thinking, as we have seen, idealized state structures that evinced the values of both nature (in some form) and culture (again, in a specific form) simultaneously. Sometimes, this ideal natural-cultural state was deemed to be actually present in the Tokugawa bakufu, the Meiji oligarchy, or the uniquely natural empire of TaishÖ and wartime Japan. States such as these claiming to express the values of nature and culture simultaneously are notoriously difficult to challenge because they absorb legitimacy from both realms. Nevertheless, dissent from such allabsorbing totalities is not impossible. As we have seen, alternative forms of natural-cultural community were frequently propounded by opponents of existing Japanese governments. The Tokugawa topographic imagination met with several challenges from those who felt that nature and political practice cohered in centers distant from Edo. AndÖ ShÖeki, for instance, envisioned non-hierarchical villages isolated from the bakufu where both nature and culture were expressed perfectly through agricultural labor by all. Later, social Darwinism served Meiji oligarchs fearful for Japan’s future in the struggle for survival if democratic forces were unleashed, but the same social Darwinian amalgam of natural and po-

of Political Disillusionment: ‘Public’ and ‘Private” in Japan,” in Authority and the Individual in Japan, ed. J. Victor Koschmann (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1978), 43. After years of lecturing on the constitution at the naval and military academies, where he propounded his theory that the emperor was the state rather than an organ of the state, Uesugi served as president of the right-wing Kokuhonsha (National Founding Association). 36. Hegel believed that the individual’s ultimate expression of self could only take place within the state: “The state is the actuality of concrete freedom. But concrete freedom consists in this: that personal individuality and its particular interests not only achieve their complete development and gain explicit recognition for their right . . . but, for one thing, they also pass over of their own accord into the interest of the universal and for another thing, they know and will the universal. They even recognize it as their own substantive mind; they take it as their end and aim and are active in its pursuit. . . . The principle of modern states has prodigious strength and depth because it allows the principle of subjectivity to progress to its culmination in the extreme of self-subsistent personal particularity and yet, at the same time, brings it back to the substantive unity and so maintains this unity in the principle of subjectivity itself.” Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), 160–61. 37. Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” 22.

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litical concepts suggested to Baba Tatsui that the nation should evolve at a much faster speed toward the highest political expression of nature, constitutional democracy. Even in TaishÖ Japan, with both space and time absorbed within the state and the technologies of social control well developed, the “natural nation” could be challenged on its own grounds by emphasizing rural ecology, as did Minakata, or by emphasizing anticommercial village productivity, as did Yokoi Tokiyoshi. Strikingly, these various alternatives all claimed authority from both nature and culture. Each of them, just as did the existing state, was presented as a totality, a utopia of “absolute ethics” (in Weber’s phrase), rather than a community cognizant of irreconcilable, ultimate values and thus tolerant of personal choice. In this sense, dissent often mimicked the structure of authority. Protest elevating individuals to the position of negotiating with both nature and society met with difficult obstacles given the configuration described above. In general, Japanese versions of natural-cultural states (whether existing or merely projected) provide only two alternatives to the individual: to find his or her true self within the collective, as Uesugi urges, or to exist entirely outside it. Ueki Emori, in his emphasis on the individual’s bodiliness as the primary source of freedom, and Ienaga SaburÖ, in his depiction of the hermit fleeing social confines, each suggest that the individual can defy a seemingly all-encompassing community.38 Nevertheless, Ueki and, especially, Ienaga are also aware of the utter and intractable loneliness of this person outside society—in nature in one sense but so denatured in his or her capacities as to be unable to negotiate with other human beings, let alone act to remodel the state. These individuals can dissent only through negation (mu) of the whole or in a manic dance of refusal. In so doing, they end up also negating part of human nature, the capacity for nuanced communication, without modifying state power. Ironically, only KatÖ Hiroyuki among the writers discussed here imagines, tentatively, the sort of individual who negotiates with nature and society without being absorbed completely by either or both in conjunction. In Jinken shinsetsu, KatÖ makes clear his belief that the aims of nature and of humanity are irreconcilable, despite evolutionary forces at work on each. This unharmonized configuration of nature and poli-

38. Tanaka ShÖzÖ, leader of the struggle against the Ashio Copper Mine, which polluted and destroyed communities downriver from it, actually lived this experience. After years of trying to engage the system in his role as responsible village headman, he became a vagabond, wandering from place to place until his lonely death.

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tics provides space for a proto-liberatory consciousness for those leaders in the position to “avoid the harm originating in natural law while exploiting the good.”39 However, given that KatÖ argues that only a small group of men are poised to comprehend both the evolutionary struggle for survival and the social values necessary to the Japanese state, their liberatory consciousness is, from a democratic perspective, unacceptably restricted. Not only that, but since KatÖ’s small group was, in effect, the Japanese state, the oligarchy’s ability to combine activity with receptivity was conveyed to the state. Their freedom to act was the state’s freedom, which it used to pursue the promises of modernity, the strength accorded modern nations, the productivity accorded modern economies, and, ultimately, its alluring (and false) vision of a world in which all contradictions could be overcome, all tensions resolved. In analyzing nature and modernity together (what Latour might call an “uncanny, unthinkable, unseemly” act), I have tried to provide a new perspective on Japanese political ideology. When modernity is reconceptualized so that the relationship between specific concepts of nature and specific political practices comes to the fore, Japanese ideology’s repeated commitment to finding political authority in nature no longer marks it as anti-modern when compared with other nations. Nor does the reiteration of nature in Japanese thought mark Japan as “traditional,” since nature was not one thing, an ancient remnant, but a series of radically reconfigured ideas. While Japan was not a liberal modernity, a democratic modernity (except in the most limited formal sense of universal male suffrage by 1925), or, by any means, a leftist modernity, it achieved modernity nonetheless. The Meiji and TaishÖ states’ attempts to absorb both nature and culture completely represent not a uniquely Japanese response to the trauma of change, but a tragically common attempt to overcome the contradictions at the heart of modernity through insisting that nature and culture—along with rationality and rightness, freedom and order, instrumentality and value, the forces of productivity and just social structures—can ultimately be harmonized absolutely. This promise of harmony—whether through manifesting nature perfectly as the Japanese state hoped to do or suppressing it totally as Maruyama advised—is anathema to recognizing the contradictions that necessitate political tolerance of individual choices.40

39. KatÖ, Jinken shisetsu, 461. 40. As Isaiah Berlin famously puts it in “Two Concepts of Liberty,” “The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced with choices between

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Nature is neither an essence within ourselves to which we safely return nor that object outside ourselves that we may totally conquer. It is instead the mark of necessity and freedom simultaneously. The political lessons of this nature (as ideological concept and as physical environment) are a rejection of modernity’s promises of perfection, but also an awed sense of our responsibility to choose among the multiple, competing, incommensurable values that modernity has developed. ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute, the realization of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others. Indeed, it is because this is their situation that men place such immense value upon freedom to choose; for if they had assurance that in some perfect state, realizable by men on earth, no ends pursued by them would ever be in conflict, the necessity and agony of choice would disappear, and with it the central importance of the freedom to choose.” Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 168.

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Index

Abosch, David, 85, 85n6, 90 Adorno, Theodor, 18n43, 21–22, 22n61, 209, 213, 214 agrarian radicalism, 196–97 agriculture, 18, 49–52, 182, 196–97 Aizawa Seishisai, 42, 47–48, 56 Akita, George, 81n53 Althusser, Louis, 75 Amaterasu, 43, 51, 96, 96n49, 190 American Revolution, 81–82, 167 anatomy, 56–57 ancestors, worship of, 189–90, 201 Ancient Sages: enlightenment of, 209; KatÖ Hiroyuki on, 105, 106, 107; and Maruyama Masao’s autonomous personalities, 18, 18n43, 19 AndÖ ShÖeki: on book learning, 48n47; on the Dutch, 50, 50n53; on mutuality of all things, 52n61; nature as not presocial for, 25; rural life as emphasis of, 42, 48–51, 53, 222; rural nativists compared with, 52; Shizen shin’eidÖ, 48, 48n48, 49n49,52; ten in writings of, 34 animals, differentiating human beings from, 147–49 Aristotle, 95, 96 Ashio Copper Mine, 167n24, 195, 207, 223n Asia. See East, the autonomous personality (shutaiteki jinkaku), 16, 18, 19, 212 Azuma RyÖzÖ, 183 Baba Tatsui, 111–32; arrest of, 113, 132; artificial and natural actions distinguished by, 126; education of, 112; on elites, 127, 128, 131; as embodying

promise of modernity, 131; on the emperor, 128, 130; “Enkaku ron,” 127; extremism of, 112; on freedom, 121, 122–23, 125; “Heikin ryoku no setsu,” 114–15, 119–20, 127, 162n7; “Homi KatÖ HirÖyuki kun Jinken shinsetsu,” 123; “Honron,” 122; individualism and nationalism combined in, 126; KatÖ Hiroyuki opposed by, 84, 92n34, 108, 109, 121–30, 164; legal studies in Britain, 112, 120; Manabe attack, 112, 112n6; Maruyama Masao on, 131; “Mono wa miru tokoro ni yotte kotonaru,” 127; “Nairan no gai wa kakumeika no ayamachi ni arazu,” 127; on naturalness of society, 125– 26; on natural rights, 124–25, 138; on nature and politics, 86, 123–24, 126; nature as an “outside” for, 168; nature’s authority for democracy sought by, 87; populism of, 126–27; on Roman law, 173; Romantic aspects of life of, 111–12; “Ron soshiki naikaku no shinan,” 128; “Shinka bunri no niryoku,” 114, 115–16, 120, 128, 162n7; social Darwinism of, 87, 110; on social evolution, 30, 122, 123–24, 130–32; Spencer influencing, 87, 116– 17, 120n30, 162, 162n7; on tenpu, 161; Tenpu jinkenron, 123–30; on universal suffrage, 128; on women, 128–30; writings of, 113 Baelz, Erwin von, 183 Barshay, Andrew E., 15n, 211, 212n12 Beasley, William, 81 Bell, Daniel, 221n34 Bellah, Robert N., 30–31, 201n Berlin, Isaiah, 5n14, 8, 217n22, 224n40

227

228 Berque, Augustin, 129 biology: anatomy, 56–57; historicizing nature through, 59; sociobiology, 7n17, 15, 37n15, 162n6; Yamagawa KenjirÖ on study of, 218. See also evolution; race Black, Jeremy, 39n17 Blackstone, William, 77 Blumenberg, Hans, 20, 28 Bobbio, Norberto, 28n74, 143–44, 143n31 Bodin, Jean, 56n70 Böhme, Jacob, 184 Boshin Rescript on Thrift and Diligence (1908), 195–96 Boshin War, 62 Bowen, Roger, 139n19 Bownas, Geoffrey, 202n65 “Bungaku to shizen” (Iwamoto Zenji), 171 bunmei kaika, 88 Bunmeiron no gairyaku (Fukuzawa Yukichi), 70 burakumin, 36–37 Burke, Edmund, 93, 93n41 Bury, J. B., 210 cafes, 205, 205n73 capitalism: economic liberalism, 99–101; fascism as third way between socialism and, 201n; markets, 52, 99, 100; modernization as, 99n61; nature ideology and exploitation of resources by, 193– 94 Carlyle, Thomas, 21n57 Carneri, Bartholomaus von, 103, 139 Carter, Paul, 39–40 Cartesian rationalism, 23, 24, 209, 216, 217–18 Cassirer, Ernst, 24n67 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 220 Charter Oath (GokajÖ no seimon) of 1868, 62–64, 75, 76, 83 Chen Yan, 41 cherry blossom poetry, 180, 181 ChihÖ kairyÖ undÖ (Local Improvement Movement), 196 China: as imperial center, 40–42; Japanese defeat of, 165; Japanese superiority asserted, 43–45; KatÖ Hiroyuki on ten in, 101; Marco Polo Bridge Incident, 204; ri as understood in, 54; Yokoi ShÖnan on governmental solutions of, 55 Chokugo no shishu ni moto, 200 chÜgoku, 41–42 Chu Shi Confucianism. See NeoConfucianism

Index civil society, 142–43, 206 Clark, William, 172n42 climate, 64, 172, 179, 187, 202, 211 Collingwood, R. G., 4n10, 21n56, 210n2 communism, 91, 100 competition, economic, 99 consciousness: Baba on freedom in development of, 122; communal consciousness in ultranationalist ideology, 180– 81; national and racial versus individual, 28; as problem for Ueki Emori, 147, 149, 150; separation from material forms of nature, 209; subjectivity, 14, 210, 210n4; will, 130–32, 219–20 contracts, 70 copper, 195 co-prosperity sphere, 206 “cosmopolis,” 23, 26, 28, 159, 215–16, 218–19 Craig, Albert, 53n, 54, 54n65, 76–77, 85 Crocker, Walter R., 197n53 Crosby, Alfred W., Jr., 26n71 culture: acculturation of Japanese nature, 158–78; cultural determinism, 37n15; as divorced from daily life, 200; environment as influencing, 172–76, 202; the male associated with, 129; versus nature, 27, 45, 219, 222; nature becoming synonymous with Japanese, 176; the state associated with, 27n72; Watsuji on cultural difference, 202–3; the “West” associated with, 27. See also invention; society DajÖkan, 67 Dale, Peter, 173n49 Dallmayr, Fred R., 20, 26, 27n72 Danjo no dÖken (Ueki Emori), 146, 151 Darwin, Charles, 59, 103, 104, 132, 216 Darwinian evolution. See evolution Davis, Sandra, 93n39 death: Baba Tatsui’s embrace of, 119– 21; ethics textbooks and, 199; Herbert Spencer’s embrace of, 118–19; State ShintÖ and, 191–92; Ueki’s rejection of, 135; wartime ideology and, 202–6 de Bary, Brett, 175n54 Degler, Carl N., 217n22 democracy (minshÜshugi): Baba Tatsui on Japanese parity with West and, 131, 132; the democratic Leviathan, 71–73; East/West and nature/culture dichotomies and democratization, 27; environmental struggles involving, 207; Japanese modernization not resulting in, 206; KatÖ Hiroyuki on ultimate triumph of, 165; as limited

Index in Japan, 224; Maruyama Masao on, 213; nature’s authority sought for, 87; self-criticism lacking in movement for, 136; and shutaisei (subjectivity), 210, 210n4; “TaishÖ democracy,” 185, 186; Ueki Emori and, 140, 156; Western and Japanese meanings of, 11–12. See also people’s rights movement Descartes, René, 23 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno), 18n43, 22, 22n61, 213 disasters, natural, 180 dissent, 137–38, 207, 222 divine right of kings, 101 Doak, Kevin, 28n75, 207 Dominick, Raymond, 183–84, 184n18, 205 Dore, R. P., 182n10 Douglas, Sir Robert, 191n39 Dupré, Louis, 2n3, 21, 26, 27, 29n76, 131 Durkheim, Emile, 20 “Dutch” learning (rangakusha), 53, 54 Eagleton, Terry, 193 East, the: climate in East/ West differences, 173n49; nature associated with, 27. See also China; Japan eco-nationalism, 9–10 economic competition, 99 economic liberalism, 99–101 El Dorado, 39n18 elites: Baba Tatsui, 126–27, 128, 131; KatÖ Hiroyuki on, 86, 99, 99n60, 106, 107–8, 108n96, 131, 166, 224; new idea of nature to preserve power of, 3, 215 emperor, the: Baba Tatsui on, 128, 130; Charter Oath reaffirmed by, 64; as constrained within Kyoto, 36; dual courts in fourteenth century, 199n57; emperor-system (tennosei), 74, 75, 199, 199n58; imperial leviathan, 68, 68n17; KatÖ Hiroyuki on, 98; Motoori Norinaga on, 43; restoration of, 61; Watsuji TetsurÖ on, 203 “Enjin seifu” (Ueki Emori), 138 “Enkaku ron” (Baba Tatsui), 127 Enlightenment, 50, 66, 85, 142, 157 environment: climate, 64, 172, 179, 187, 202, 211; culture as influenced by, 172–76, 202; environmental destruction in Japan, 10; environmental factors in history, 26; environmentalism in Japan, 9–10, 9n26, 183–84, 207; German national socialist environmentalism, 183–84, 205; nature seen as, 4–5, 6, 20; pollution, 195, 207, 223n

229 equilibrium: Baba Tatsui on, 114–17, 120– 21, 123; Spencer on, 118–19, 120 ethics textbooks, 198–201 evolution: Baba Tatsui on, 113; inherited adaptation, 132; Japanese reception of, 104–5; KatÖ Hiroyuki on, 89, 103, 104; natural selection, 106, 108, 116n17, 132, 177n59; survival of the fittest, 105–7, 123, 138, 163. See also social evolution exceptionalism, 14 Ezo (Hokkaido), 39, 47, 50, 61, 195 family-state (kazoku kokka), 66, 178, 198, 200 fascism, 16n38, 181–86, 181n6, 181n7, 185n23, 201n Faulds, Henry, 104n84 Fenollosa, Ernest, 163 Ferguson, Adam, 143 Ferry, Luc, 6n17, 23, 207, 219n28 filial piety, 198, 199–200 First Principles (Spencer), 118–21, 162n7 fittest, survival of the, 105–7, 123, 138, 163 Formosa (Taiwan), 61 Frankfurt School, 18n43, 21, 213 freedom (liberty): as activity and receptivity, 219–20; autonomous personality, 16, 18, 19, 212; Baba Tatsui on, 121, 122–23, 125; balancing nature and, 156; Hegel on the state and, 222n36; Itagaki on personal and public, 73; KatÖ Hiroyuki on, 124; Maruyama Masao on, 212; nature and limitation of, 25, 29; as selfchoice, 21, 29n76; Ueki Emori on, 135, 148–50 free trade, 197 Freud, Sigmund, 216 Fridell, Wilbur M., 190 FÜdo (Watsuji TetsurÖ), 202 Fujihara GinjirÖ, 197 Fujita TÖko, 44 Fukuzawa Yukichi: Baba Tatsui studying with, 112; Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 70; egalitarianism of, 69; funeral of, 70n25; Gakumon no susume, 68; on governmental body, 65, 67, 68–71; inconsistencies of, 68–69, 76; Maruyama Masao on, 69, 80, 83; Matsumoto Sannosuke on, 78, 78n50; on the nation, 71; as natural rights advocate, 69; and nature/culture and East/West oppositions, 27; on rights, 70–71; on tenchi no kÖdÖ, 63n, 83; TsÜzoku minkenron, 70; universalism rejected by, 83

230 Gakumon no susume (Fukuzawa Yukichi), 68 Gallie, W. B., 7–8, 74 Garon, Sheldon, 12n31, 28n74 Genji, 115 GenrÖ, 108, 166 geographical determinism, 66 German national socialism, 182, 183–84, 184n18, 201n, 205 Glacken, Clarence, 4–5 Gluck, Carol, 74–75 GokajÖ no seimon (Charter Oath) of 1868, 62–64, 75, 76, 83 Gortz, André, 6n17 GÖtÖ ShÖjirÖ, 91 Grotius, Hugo, 46 Gunjin Chokuyu (1882), 68 Gunjin Kunkai (1878), 68 Habermas, Jürgen, 15n, 22n61, 213–14, 213n15 Hagihara Nobutoshi, 91, 111–12, 123 Hall, John Whitney, 194 Hanley, Susan B., 35n, 36n11 happiness, 147–49 Hara Fusataka, 180 Harootunian, Harry, 51, 52, 58 Harrison, Robert Pogue, 5 Havens, Thomas, 95n44 Hayashi Razan, 42 Heavenly Deities (tenjin), 101 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Habermas on social totality of, 213–14, 213n15; on history’s mission, 21, 27; Japanese intellectuals transmuting theories of, 203; Maruyama Masao influenced by, 211, 212; master-slave parable, 115; on modernity as arising in antithesis to nature, 65; on nature and history, 210n2; second nature in modernity of, 21, 218; on the state, 143, 222n36 Heidegger, Martin, 202, 203 Heike, 115, 116 “Heikin ryoku no setsu” (Baba Tatsui), 114–15, 119–20, 127, 162n7 Herf, Jeffrey, 205n75, 221n34 Herodotus, 38n16 Hibiya Riots (1905), 186 Hidaka RokurÖ, 16n38 High Treason Incident, 186–87, 187n26, 207 Higuchi Tadahiko, 129 Hijikata Kazuo, 134 Hino Tatsuo, 32, 170 Hirakawa Sukehiro, 57n72 Hirata Atsutane, 42, 46, 48, 51, 154

Index Hiroaka Toshio, 167 Hisamatsu Senichi, 185 history: Baba Tatsui on equilibrium in, 114–17; contingency in, 74; environmental factors in, 26; and nature, 21, 21n56, 58–59, 210, 210n2; Shiga Shigetaka on, 173; universal histories, 27; world-historical role for Japan, 201–6 Hobbes, Thomas: Fukuzawa Yukichi contrasted with, 68; Japanese translation of, 93, 93n41; nature used in defining political bodies by, 66; on state of nature, 72, 143, 144 Hokkaido (Ezo), 39, 47, 50, 61, 195 Holtom, D. C., 189 “Homi KatÖ HirÖyuki kun Jinken shinsetsu” (Baba Tatsui), 123 “Honron” (Baba Tatsui), 122 Horkheimer, Max, 18n43, 21–22, 22n61, 209, 213, 214 Hozumi Yatsuka, 199, 199n58 human nature (tensei), 96 ideology, 74–75 Ienaga SaburÖ: on Fukuzawa Yukichi, 69; on hermits, 152–53, 223; illusion of modernity’s transcendence over nature serving, 219; on lack of selfdoubt during Meiji period, 87n10; logic of negation of, 136, 152, 220; on modernization and capitalism, 99n61; and nature/culture and “East”/ “West” dichotomies, 27; Nihon shisÖshi ni okeru shÜkyÖteki shizenkan no tenkai, 152; on religious concept of nature, 152–53; remorse for silence during 1930s and 1940s, 137n15; on Ueki Emori, 134, 134n6, 136–37, 147, 150; on utilitarianism in Meiji thinkers, 147n45 Igarashi Akio, 81 Ike Nobutaka, 93, 134, 147 Imperial Conservation Law (1935), 184 Imperial Decree of December 12, 1881, 93 Imperial Rescript on Education (1890), 167, 198, 200 individualism, 28, 126, 140, 203, 221, 221n33 inherited adaptation, 132 Inoue TetsujirÖ, 164, 168, 168n27, 169n30 I-novel (shishÖsetsu) literature, 171 invention (sakui): Baba Tatsui on, 131; Ishida Takeshi on natural rights as, 86; Karatani KÖjin on nature and, 175;

Index KatÖ Hiroyuki on, 86, 131; Maruyama Masao on nature and, 16–20, 17n40, 130–31, 220 Irigaray, Luce, 145 Irokawa Daikichi, 69, 75, 76n41, 84n2 Ishida EiichirÖ, 8n24, 9n26 Ishida Takeshi: on Confucianism and Western theories, 79; on ethics textbooks prepared under KatÖ Hiroyuki, 198; on KatÖ Hiroyuki, 85–86, 91, 106n89; on nature as constant feature in state ideology, 178; as source for this study, 16n36 Ishikawa Masami, 109 isson issha policy, 190–91 Itagaki Taisuke: on democratic Leviathan, 71–73; European tour of, 121; on individual’s rights and society’s rights, 78; in Liberal Party’s formation, 71, 134; on natural political body, 65; representative assembly proposed by, 91; Ueki Emori as advisor to, 134 ItÖ Enkichi, 185 ItÖ Hirobumi, 64 ItÖ Jinsai, 41 Iwakura Tomomi, 62 Iwamoto Zenji (Iwamoto Yoshiharu), 171 Izumo cult, 51 Jameson, Fredric, 31 Japan: Baba Tatsui on parity with West of, 131, 132; China defeated by, 165; environmental destruction in, 10; environmentalism in, 9–10, 9n26; expansion of, 60–61; fascism in, 16n38, 181–86, 181n6, 181n7, 185n23; as measured against modernity’s antinatural goals, 27; natural resources of, 193–98; non-liberal modernity of, 222, 224; outline of nature’s political history in, 29–31; political terminology in, 11–12; population growth in, 197; Russo-Japanese War, 165, 186; spatial centrality attributed to, 45–47; ultranationalist ideology in, 179–208. See also Meiji period; TaishÖ period; Tokugawa period Japanese Communist Party, 211n6 Jerusalem, 39n18 Jesuits, 33 Jikokushi, 171 jinen, 32, 175 Jinken shinsetsu (KatÖ Hiroyuki), 103–8; in KatÖ’s tenkÖ, 89; on mediation of nature and society, 223–24; on natural rights, 92, 103; reaction to, 92, 108–

231 10, 123, 133, 138; as refashioning nature as bulwark of state authority, 161; relationship with KatÖ’s earlier works, 90–91; thinkers acknowledged in, 103 Jinsei no shizen to gohÖ no zento (KatÖ Hiroyuki), 177 JiyÜ shinbun (newspaper), 122 jiyÜshugi. See liberalism JiyÜtÖ (Liberal Party), 71, 121–22, 126, 134 Joes, Anthony James, 181n6 Kada Tetsuji, 76, 161 Kaei period, 116 Kaibara Ekken, 194 KaishintÖ (Progressive Party), 122 Kaitai shinsho (Sugita Gempaku), 56 Kajiki JinzÖ, 109 kakumei. See revolution Kalland, Arne, 9n26 Kamo no Mabuchi, 43 Kaneko KantarÖ, 93n41, 114, 164–65 Kano Masanao, 207 Kant, Immanuel, 143, 154, 216 Karasawa TomitarÖ, 199 Karatani KÖjin, 174–75 KatÖ Hiroyuki, 84–110; announcement that he no longer supported people’s rights movement, 84n1; Baba Tatsui’s opposition to, 84, 92n34, 108, 109, 121–30, 164; and conservatism, 163– 64, 166; determinism attributed to, 97n55; on an elite, 86, 99, 99n60, 106, 107–8, 108n96, 131, 166, 224; on the emperor, 98; ethics textbooks prepared under, 198–99; on freedom, 124; as government ideologue, 92, 108; Jinsei no shizen to gohÖ no zento, 177; KÖeki mondÖ, 88, 100; Kokutai shinron, 88, 89, 92, 94, 95–103; liberalism of early works of, 90–91, 94; Maruyama Masao on, 131; Matsumoto Sannosuke on, 78n50; on mediation of nature and society, 223–24; on natural rights, 84–87, 89, 92, 102, 103, 107, 124, 138, 139–40; nature as an “outside” for, 168; on personal and intellectual characteristics, 88n13; on representative assembly proposal of 1874, 91; Rikken seitai ryaku, 88; Seiyo kakkoku seisui kyojaku ichiranhyÖ, 88; in shift of nature from spatial to temporal force, 83; Shinsei tai’i, 88, 89, 92, 94, 95–103; Shizenkai no mujun to shinka, 177; Shizen to rinri, 177; shizen used for “nature” by, 102, 107,

232 KatÖ Hiroyuki (continued) 169; social Darwinism of, 84, 86, 105–8, 161; on social evolution, 30, 97, 105, 123, 132, 163–66, 166n21, 177; tenkÖ of, 87–95; Tonarigusa, 88; Ueki Emori’s opposition to, 84, 108, 109, 133, 138–40, 142n, 151, 166; Western and Japanese ideas combined in, 85–86; on Western imperialism, 106. See also Jinken shinsetsu Kawahara JikichirÖ, 91 kazoku kokka (family-state), 66, 178, 198, 200 Keane, John, 142–43 Keene, Donald, 35n Kelly, Alfred, 103n81 Kelsen, Hans, 19 Kido KÖin, 62–64, 83, 168 “Kimi ga yo,” 167, 167n23 Kimura, Bin, 33n4 “Kindai Nihon seiji shisÖ ni okeru ‘shizen’ to ‘sakui’” (Maruyama Masao), 16 Kinmouth, Earl, 77–78 Kiso River, 174 Kita Sadakichi, 177n59, 199n57 Kito Hiroshi, 35–36, 35n KÖeki mondÖ (KatÖ Hiroyuki), 88, 100 kogakusha, 18 Kogyo Nihon Seishin (Fujihara GinjirÖ), 197 Kojiki, 43, 96 kokka: KatÖ Hiroyuki on, 96–97. See also state, the Kokkai Ganbo Kai, 134 kokugakusha (nativists), 43–48; Hirata Atsutane, 42, 46, 48, 51, 154; Kamo no Mabuchi, 43; KatÖ Hiroyuki opposing, 94, 95, 98, 99; localism of, 25; Motoori Norinaga, 42, 43–45, 43n28, 154, 181; on political landscape, 34; social Darwinism contrasted with, 105; Ueda Akinari, 45; and Ueki Emori, 87, 153–54; Western natural rights theorists compared with, 96n53 KokuikÖ (Kamo no Mabuchi), 43 Kokumin dÖtokuron, 200 kokusui, 172, 173 kokutai: in ethics textbooks, 199; foundations of, 66; KatÖ Hiroyuki on, 95, 96, 97–98, 101–2 Kokutai no hongi (Ministry of Education), 179–80, 184, 185, 187, 202, 215 Kokutai no hongi kaisetsu taisei (Sonda and Hara), 180 Kokutai shinron (KatÖ Hiroyuki), 88, 89, 92, 94, 95–103 Kokuze sanron (Yokoi ShÖnan), 55

Index Kolodny, Annette, 2n6, 37 Konoe Fumimaro, 204 Korea, ShintÖ shrines in, 190 Koschmann, Victor, 14, 48, 210n4 Kotoba to higeki (Karatani KÖjin), 175 Kuki ShÜzÖ, 176 Kumazawa Banzan, 42 Kunitomo Shigeaki, 176 Kuzubana (Motoori Norinaga), 44 kyÖdÖtai (organic community), 20, 66, 181 KyÖson DÖshÜ, 114 KyÖson zasshi (magazine), 114 Kyoto, 36, 45, 47, 51 Kyoto School, 187 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 132 land distribution, 99, 99n65 land ownership, 100–101 landscape, 171–76 landscape painting, 174 Latour, Bruno, 56n70, 217, 219, 224 law, natural. See natural law Lefebvre, Henri: on freedom and necessity, 220n32; on internal and external nature, 2n4; on modernism, 15n; and recognition of nature’s presence in modernity, 27; on subject’s relation to nature, 23, 24, 26; Ueki Emori compared with, 156n68 left, the: communism, 91, 100; and modernity, 28, 28n74, 29; on nature in political thought, 20; persuaded to abandon criticism of the government, 89–90; socialism, 91, 100, 162, 201n Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 23 liberalism ( jiyÜshugi): as anti-utopian, 157; economic liberalism, 99–101; the individual mediating nature and politics in, 221, 221n33; Japanese modernization not resulting in, 206; in KatÖ Hiroyuki’s early works, 90– 91, 94; on nature in political thought, 20; of Ueki Emori, 11–12; Western and Japanese meanings of, 11–12 Liberal Party ( JiyÜtÖ), 71, 121–22, 126, 134 liberty. See freedom literature, and nature, 171 Local Improvement Movement (ChihÖ kairyÖ undÖ), 196 Locke, John, 66, 72, 82, 101, 143, 144 Lovejoy, Arthur, 1 Lyell, Charles, 59, 216 MacFarlane, Alan, 36n11 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 93n41 Maejima Hisoka, 89n18 Maeno RyÖtaku, 54, 57

Index Maki Izumi, 46 Manabe Kaisaku, 112, 112n6 Manes, Christopher, 6n17, 168 Marco Polo Bridge Incident, 204 markets, 52, 99, 100 marriage, 129 Maruyama Masao: on Ancient Sages, 18n43; on AndÖ ShÖeki, 50, 50n53; on autonomous personality (shutaiteki jinkaku), 16, 18, 19, 212; on consciousness, 28; on continual resistance, 19n48; on continuative consciousness, 3n; on democracy, 213; on deterministic quality of nature, 80; and eclipse of nature in Meiji period, 158, 159; on European ideas in Japan, 78, 104; on Fukuzawa Yukichi, 69, 80, 83; on harmonizing freedom and nature, 156; Horkheimer and Adorno contrasted with, 22; illusion of modernity’s transcendence over nature serving, 219; on Japanese fascism, 185, 185n23; on Japan’s place in world history, 209n; Karatani KÖjin contrasted with, 175; KatÖ Hiroyuki compared with, 102; on natural rights, 86n9, 131; on nature and invention, 16–20, 17n40, 130–31, 220; nature as shizen for, 32, 34; on Okuma forced from government, 94n43; pessimism of, 212–13, 212n12; as representing particular generation’s experience, 25; Shimizu and, 9n24; on shutaisei (subjectivity), 210, 211–12; on tenchi no kÖdÖ, 63n; and universal natural laws, 65 Marx, Karl: Habermas on social totality of, 213–14, 214n15; Maruyama influenced by, 212; on overcoming nature, 26; second nature in modernity of, 21, 218; society and nature as connected in, 216 Marx, Leo, 2n6 Masters, Roger D., 37n15 Matsukata Masayoshi, 67 Matsumoto Sannosuke: on Fukuzawa Yukichi and KatÖ Hiroyuki, 78n50; illusion of modernity’s transcendence over nature serving, 219; on KatÖ Hiroyuki, 85, 90, 91–92, 92n31, 102; on natural rights as ten, 78–79; and nature/culture and “East”/“West” dichotomies, 27 McCormack, Gavan, 9n26 McNeill, William H., 35n Mead, George Herbert, 20 Meiji Constitution: nature ignored in, 158, 167; Spencer on, 132, 163, 164–65

233 Meiji period: American revolutionary rhetoric compared with that of, 81– 82; Baba Tatsui, 111–32; Charter Oath (GokajÖ no seimon) of 1868, 62–64, 75, 76, 83; conscript army of, 58n76, 68; contending visions during early, 81, 94; dissent punished during, 137– 38; environmental struggles during, 207; European and American influence engulfing Japan in, 76, 76n41; historiography of ideologies of, 73–79; ideological consolidation in, 93–94; KatÖ Hiroyuki, 84–110; modernization not destabilizing, 206; on natural resources of Japan, 194–95; nature dismissed in favor of history in, 58; nature eclipsed in, 158–59, 167–68; nature in early, 60–83; Political Crisis of 1881, 93, 108; restoration as bourgeois revolution, 13; ShintÖ during, 188–89; Ueki Emori, 133–57; words for nature during early, 169. See also Meiji Constitution Miki Kiyoshi, 182, 204 Mill, John Stuart, 1, 21, 77, 148 Minakata Kumagusu, 25, 191–92, 191n39, 193, 207, 223 Minami Hiroshi, 64, 171, 173 Minamoto RyÖen, 169n28, 170 Minichiello, Sharon A., 27n73 Minken jiyÜron (Ueki Emori), 135, 135n9, 139, 144n34, 149 Minken jiyÜron nihen kangÖ (Ueki Emori), 139, 149, 150, 151 Minobe Tatsukichi, 68n17, 199n58 minshÜshugi. See democracy Min’yÜsha group, 176 Mito school, 44, 47–48, 59 Mitsukuri RinshÖ, 64 Miura Baien, 34 Miyake YÜjirÖ, 172, 173 Mizuno RentarÖ, 188 modernism, 15n modernity: Baba Tatsui as embodying promise of, 131; cosmopological vision of, 26, 218–19; and eclipse of nature in Meiji period, 158–60; as historical experience not achieved state, 27–28; Japan as never achieving, 214; Karatani KÖjin on, 175–76; as kindaishugi, 15n; the left associated with, 29n77; modernism and modernization distinguished from, 15n; nature and, 15–29, 209–25; self-assertion as characteristic of, 20; stronger imperial state resulting from Japan’s confrontation with, 206; universal natural laws and, 65

234 modernization: and capitalism, 99n61; in early Meiji period, 74; and nature/ culture and East/West dichotomies, 27; stronger imperial state resulting from Japan’s, 206; as used in this study, 15n; variety of political outcomes consistent with, 28n74 Momoyama period, 116, 121 “Mono wa miru tokoro ni yotte kotonaru” (Baba Tatsui), 127 Montesquieu, Baron de, 64, 82 Moore, Barrington, 181n6 Mori Arinori, 163, 164 Mori Ñgai, 171 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, 9, 9n26, 33, 177n59 Morse, Edward S., 104 Mosse, George, 184–85, 201n Motoori Norinaga, 42, 43–45, 43n28, 154, 181 Mountaineering and Exploration in the Japanese Alps (Weston), 174, 174n50 mountains, 174 Muir, John, 183 Musubi no Kami, 51 Nagai Osamu, 93n41 “Nairan no gai wa kakumeika no ayamachi ni arazu” (Baba Tatsui), 127 Najita, Tetsuo, 54n65, 195 Nakae ChÖmin, 111, 112 Nakai, Kate Wildman, 42 Nakamura Naoki, 109 NanyÖ jiji (Shiga Shigetaka), 172 Nash, Roderick, 9n26 nation, the: as a family, 198–201; Fukuzawa Yukichi on, 71; versus the individual, 28; KatÖ Hiroyuki’s concept of, 96; Ueki Emori’s understanding of Japan as a nation, 153–55. See also kokka; kokutai; nationalism national anthem, 167 nationalism: Baba Tatsui combining individualism and, 126; eco-nationalism, 9–10; KatÖ Hiroyuki’s Jinken shinsetsu as philosophy for, 161; nature in ultranationalist ideology, 179–208; social Darwinism as inadequate for Japanese, 158, 164; of Ueki Emori, 154–55 national parks, 183 national socialism, German, 182, 183– 84, 184n18, 201n, 205 nativists. See kokugakusha natural calamities, 180 natural law: survival of the fittest and, 106–7; universality of, 61, 62–65, 131, 165

Index natural order: Baba Tatsui on, 112, 113; and KatÖ Hiroyuki on Meiji order, 108; Maruyama Masao on, 19, 86n9, 131 natural resources, 193–98 natural rights: in American revolutionary rhetoric, 82; Baba Tatsui on, 124–25, 138; as code for opposition in general, 87; Fukuzawa Yukichi as advocate of, 69; and Itagaki Taisuke on freedom, 73; KatÖ Hiroyuki on, 84–87, 89, 91, 92, 102, 103, 107, 124, 138, 139–40; kokugakusha compared with theorists of, 96n53; Maruyama Masao on, 86n9, 131; Meiji importation of concept of, 76–77; as sakui, 86; ten as translation of, 78–79; Ueki Emori on, 138–42, 150–52 natural science: Baba Tatsui applying to politics, 114–17; as handmaiden for politics in Japan, 104; morality and politics distinguished from, 56–59; shizen kagaku for, 170; Tokugawa scholars on superiority of Western, 53–56. See also biology natural selection, 106, 108, 116n17, 132, 177n59 nature: acculturation of Japanese, 158– 78; Baba Tatsui on, 111–32; balancing freedom and, 156; climate, 64, 172, 179, 187, 202, 211; conceptual instability of, 7–8; critiques of status quo justified in terms of, 25; versus culture, 27, 45, 219, 222; defining, 1–2; in early Meiji period, 60–83; the “East” associated with, 27; the female associated with, 129; and freedom, 25, 29; harmony with, 180, 184, 187, 202; and history, 21, 21n56, 58–59, 210, 210n2; humanity contrasted with, 20–21, 215–16; ideological power of concept of, 2–3; indeterminate determinism during early Meiji period, 80–83; in Japanese historical documents, 11; Japanese love of, 8–10, 9n26, 178, 180–81, 202, 215; Japanese vocabulary for, 7, 32–34, 169– 70; as kaibutsu, 33; KatÖ Hiroyuki on, 84–110; as manbutsu, 33, 169; Maruyama on invention and, 16–20, 130–31, 220; and modernity, 15–29, 209–25; Motoori Norinaga on culture and, 45; natural resources, 193–98; outline of political history in Japan, 29–31; political neutrality of, 14; shifting signification in Europe, 5; in ShintÖ, 188–93; as shizen, 7, 32–33,

Index 34, 44–45, 80, 99, 102, 107, 161, 169–70, 169n28; and society, 6, 20– 21, 25, 27n72, 29, 221, 223–24; as ten, 33–34, 78–79, 99, 101–2, 107; as tenchi, 33, 39, 62–63; in Tokugawa period, 32–59; and tradition, 3, 181; transformation of Japanese concept of, 3–4; as uchÜ, 62–63, 169; in ultranationalist ideology, 179–208; in Western intellectual history, 215–17. See also environment; natural law; natural order; natural rights; natural science; state of nature Nazism (national socialism), 182, 183– 84, 184n18, 201n, 205 Neo-Confucianism (Chu Shi Confucianism): Baba Tatsui’s views compared with, 113; China revered by, 41, 42; in family-state system, 178; Kido KÖin contrasted with, 63; on natural resources of Japan, 194; on nature and invention, 16–17; on nature as tenchi, 33; science seen as compatible with, 56, 58; shizen not used in, 32 Newton, Isaac, 23, 216 Nihon fÜkeiron (Shiga Shigetaka), 173– 74 Nihonjin (magazine), 172, 172n44, 176 Nihon kodai bunka (Watsuji TetsurÖ), 201–2 Nihon no shindÖ (Watsuji TetsurÖ), 203 Nihon shisÖshi ni okeru shÜkyÖteki shizenkan no tenkai (Ienaga SaburÖ), 152 Ninomiya Sontoku, 196 Nishi Amane, 169n28 Nishida KitarÖ, 182–83, 187, 203–4, 204n69, 206 Nishida Taketoshi, 122, 130 nÖhonshugisha, 95, 95n44, 99 Novick, Peter, 8 Oakschott, Michael, 13 Oda Nobunaga, 116, 128 OgyÜ Sorai, 17, 18–19, 42, 211 Ñi KentarÖ, 126 Ñji paper company, 197 Oka AsajirÖ, 177 Okakura Tenshin, 63n Okinawa, 39, 60 Ñkubo Toshimichi, 127 Ñkuma Shigenobu, 93, 94n43, 108 Ñkuni Takamasa, 46 Olsen, Edward, 9n26, 197n53 Onnagaku zasshi (magazine), 171 Ono Azusa, 114 order, natural. See natural order

235 organic community (kyÖdÖtai), 20, 66, 181 organic social theory, 15, 85, 85n6, 86, 178 Ortner, Sherry, 129 Osatake Takeo, 62–63 Ose YÖko, 163 Ñtsuka Hisao, 210–11 Ñtsuki Gentaku, 46n38 Ñuchi Tsutomu, 182n10 ownership of land, 100–101 Paine, Thomas, 103, 143, 144 parks, national, 183 patriotism, 155, 198–99 Payne, Stanley G., 181n7, 185n22 people’s rights movement: Baba Tatsui on, 121, 122, 124; Fukuzawa Yukichi dissociating himself from, 71; Imperial Decree diffusing, 93; KatÖ Hiroyuki on, 84n1, 89, 95, 103, 106 Piovesana, Gino, 162 political bodies: the democratic Leviathan, 71–73; the governmental body, 66, 67–71; nature in defining, 61, 65–73 Political Crisis of 1881, 93, 108 pollution, 195, 207, 223n popular rights movement. See people’s rights movement population growth, 197 populism: Baba Tatsui and, 87, 126–27; conservatives embracing forms of, 66; and fair dealings between government and individuals, 73; in KatÖ Hiroyuki’s early writings, 94; on nature and social change, 3; of Ueki Emori, 136, 157. See also people’s rights movement Portsmouth Treaty, 186 Principles of Psychology (Spencer), 118, 163 Progressive Party (KaishintÖ), 122 property: land distribution, 99, 99n65; landownership, 100–101; Ueki Emori on the body and, 141 Pyle, Kenneth, 165, 172n44 race: versus the individual, 28; in organic community (kyÖdÖtai), 66; in ultranationalist ideology, 182–83 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 39n18 Ramseyer, J. Mark, 71n rangakusha (“Dutch” learning), 53, 54 Rasetsukoku, 38n16 rationalism, Cartesian, 23, 24, 209, 216, 217–18 rationalization, 28, 193, 194 Reader, Ian, 9n26

236 reason: in Baba Tatsui’s concept of government, 112, 124; Cartesian rationalism, 23, 24, 209, 216, 217–18; nature subordinated to, 21–24; the state associated with, 27n72; Ueki Emori on, 141, 147 resources, natural, 193–98 revolution (kakumei): Baba Tatsui on, 127–28, 131; Japanese modernization not resulting in, 206; Western and Japanese definitions of, 12–13 ri, 53n, 54–55, 63, 76 rice riots of 1919, 202 Richards, Robert J., 117, 119, 216n21 Ricoeur, Paul, 29n76, 219–20 Ridley, Matt, 7n17 right, the: fascism, 16n38, 181–86, 181n6, 181n7, 185n23, 201n; and modernity, 28, 28n74, 29 rights, natural. See natural rights Rikken seitai ryaku (KatÖ Hiroyuki), 88 Risen Sun, The (Suematsu KenchÖ), 186 Rodgers, Daniel, 82, 168n25 Romanticism, 216 “Ron soshiki naikaku no shinan” (Baba Tatsui), 128 Rorty, Richard, 8 Rosenbluth, Frances M., 71n Ross, Andrew, 5n15 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Baba Tatsui compared with, 125; KatÖ Hiroyuki on, 88n13, 95; “kindly” natural law of, 77; nature used in defining political bodies by, 66; on state of nature, 72, 143, 144 rural centers, 48–53 Russo-Japanese War, 165, 186 Sagara TÖru, 170 Sahlins, Marshall, 37n15 sakui. See invention Sakuma ShÖzan, 57–59 Scheiner, Irwin, 52n60 Schmitt, Carl, 21n57 Schoenichen, Walter, 183–84, 205 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 21n57 science, natural. See natural science second nature, 21, 218 Seikenroku (Sakuma ShÖzan), 57 seitai, 96, 97–98 Seiyo kakkoku seisui kyojaku ichiranhyÖ (KatÖ Hiroyuki), 88 Sekai no shinchitsujo no genri (Nishida KitarÖ), 203–4 self-discipline, 212 self-improvement movements, 196 sexual desire, 148–49

Index Shanhai jing, 38n16 Shiga Shigetaka: on ancient Mediterranean world, 173; on climate in East/West differences, 173n49; on Japan’s physical environment, 172–73; NanyÖ jiji, 172; on national anthem, 167; nature associated with culture by, 168–69; Nihon fÜkeiron, 173–74; on Westernization, 172n44 Shimada SaburÖ, 114 Shimizu IkutarÖ, 9n24, 219 “Shinka bunri no niryoku” (Baba Tatsui), 114, 115–16, 120, 128, 162n7 Shin Nihon no Seinen (Tokutomi SohÖ), 163 Shinsei tai’i (KatÖ Hiroyuki), 88, 89, 92, 94, 95–103 ShintÖ, 51, 188–93 shishÖsetsu (I-novel) literature, 171 Shizenkai no mujun to shinka (KatÖ Hiroyuki), 177 Shizen shin’eidÖ (AndÖ ShÖeki), 48, 48n48 Shizen to rinri (KatÖ Hiroyuki), 177 Shklar, Judith, 157, 221n33, 222 ShÖda HeigorÖ, 187 ShÖnÖ ni kansura kenkyÜ (Yokoi Tokiyoshi), 196 ShÖrai no Nihon (Tokutomi SohÖ), 163 Showa KenkyÜkai, 204 shrines, 51, 189–92 Shujing, 40n20 shutaisei (subjectivity), 14, 210, 210n4 shutaiteki jinkaku (autonomous personality), 16, 18, 19, 212 Silberman, Bernard, 93n39 Silverberg, Miriam, 205n73 Smith, Adam, 100 Smith, Thomas C., 36n11 Snow, C. P., 217n22 social contract, 70, 96, 125 social Darwinism: of Baba Tatsui, 87, 110; biologized sense of subjectivity of, 217–18; dissenters employing, 222– 23; in ethics textbooks prepared under KatÖ Hiroyuki, 198, 199; inadequacy as state ideology, 158, 159, 164, 167; Japanese acceptance of, 77, 104–5, 161–63; in Japanese educational system, 162–63; of KatÖ Hiroyuki, 84, 86, 105–8, 161; last vestiges of, 176– 78; Local Improvement Movement contrasted with, 196; nature as ideological for, 14, 25; power structure justified by, 15, 30; ultranationalist view of nature contrasted with, 181, 184, 187

Index social evolution: Baba Tatsui on, 122, 123–24, 130–32; inadequacy as state ideology, 163–68; Japanese acceptance of, 30, 159, 160–63; KatÖ Hiroyuki on, 30, 97, 105, 123, 132, 163–66, 166n21, 177; in reaction to KatÖ Hiroyuki, 109; Spencer on, 117–18; Ueki Emori on, 138. See also social Darwinism socialism, 91, 100, 162, 201n Social Statics (Spencer), 117, 161n4 society: civil society, 142–43, 206; and nature, 6, 20–21, 25, 27n72, 29, 221, 223–24; organic community, 20, 66, 181; organic social theory, 15, 85, 85n6, 86, 178; social contract, 70, 96, 125. See also culture; social evolution sociobiology, 7n17, 15, 37n15, 162n6 sociology, 162, 218 Soejima Taneomi, 91 Sonda Hideharu, 180 sosen sÜhai, 189–90 Soviak, Eugene, 75n38, 93–94, 120n30 space: centrality attributed to Japan, 45–47; Japan transcending its spatial limitations, 203–4; nature seen in terms of, 53–54, 83 Spencer, Herbert, 117–19; Baba Tatsui influenced by, 87, 116–17, 120n30, 162, 162n7; First Principles, 118–21, 162n7; as forward-looking thinker, 117; on inherited adaptation, 132; Japan influenced by social Darwinism of, 77, 161–63; and KatÖ Hiroyuki, 103, 161, 161n4; on Meiji Constitution, 132, 163, 164–65; on natural selection, 116n17; nature historicized by, 59; Principles of Psychology, 118, 163; on social evolution, 117–18, 178n60; Social Statics, 117, 161n4; Synthetic Philosophy, 118; translation into Japanese, 104, 117; and Ueki Emori, 139, 139n19, 146; as West’s greatest intellectual export to Japan, 117; Yamagawa KenjirÖ influenced by, 218 Spirit of Laws, The (Montesquieu), 64 state, the: versus civil society, 143; environmental struggles as opposition to, 207; ethics texts on eternity of, 200; family-state (kazoku kokka), 66, 178, 198, 200; Hegel on, 143, 222n36; KatÖ Hiroyuki on kokka, 96–97; as mediating nature and politics in nonliberal modernities, 221; nature subordinated to, 21–22; reason and

237 culture associated with, 27n72; versus state of nature, 143–44, 143n31; Watsuji TetsurÖ on transcendence of, 203 state of nature: AndÖ ShÖeki’s views compared with, 50; Baba Tatsui rejecting, 125; Itagaki Taisuke rejecting, 72; KatÖ Hiroyuki rejecting, 96; political state contrasted with, 143–44, 143n31; Ueki Emori’s views compared with, 141, 142 Stephen, Leslie, 2n3 subjectivity (shutaisei), 14, 210, 210n4 Suematsu KenchÖ, 186 suffrage: demands for expanded, 202; universal, 128, 151 Sugita Gempaku, 56–57 survival of the fittest, 105–7, 123, 138, 163 Synthetic Philosophy (Spencer), 118 Tabata Shinobu, 87n11, 108 Taguchi Ukichi, 114 TaishÖ period: cafes in, 205, 205n73; environmental struggles during, 207, 223; modernization not destabilizing, 206; “TaishÖ democracy,” 185, 186 Taiwan (Formosa), 61 Takeuchi Yoshimi, 211 Tanabe Hajime, 187 Tanaka Hiroshi, 163 Tanaka ShÖzÖ, 207, 223n Tanizaki Jun’ichirÖ, 205 Taoism, 32, 44–45, 170 technology: culture and exploitation of resources, 195; Japanese anxiety about, 204–5; morality and politics distinguished from, 56–59; Nazi attitude toward, 205 Tellenbach, Hubertus, 33n4 ten, 33–34, 69, 78–79, 99, 100–101, 107 tenjin (Heavenly Deities), 101 tennosei (emperor-system), 74, 75, 199, 199n58 tenpu, 161, 169 Tenpu jinkenben (Ueki Emori), 133, 138– 46, 151 Tenpu jinkenron (Baba Tatsui), 123–30 tensei (human nature), 96 Thongchai Winichakul, 38 time: defining nature in temporal terms, 54, 83; Japan as existing in an eternal present, 203–4. See also history Timpanaro, Sebastiano, 37n15 Tobuse TarÖ, 183 TÖjÖ Hideki, 182 Tokugawa Ieyasu, 116 Tokugawa Nariaki, 194

238 Tokugawa period, 32–59; Baba Tatsui on, 116, 121; central point in topographic imagination of, 38–39; China as imperial center for, 40–42; climatic change during, 35n; Kaei period, 116; landscape in, 171–72; material abundance during, 35n; mental maps of political landscape in, 34–40; on natural resources of Japan, 194; nature and social harmony in, 30; rural centers advocated in, 48–53, 222; stability and dynamism combined in, 39–40; on Western science and technology, 53–59; words for nature during, 169 Tokutomi SohÖ, 163, 165, 176 Tokyo University, 92, 108, 162–63 Tonarigusa (KatÖ Hiroyuki), 88 Totman, Conrad, 35n Toulmin, Stephen: on cosmopolis, 23–24, 24n66, 26; on distinguishing nature and humanity, 215–16, 216n20; on incorporation of non-West into modernity, 27; on shifting signification of “nature,” 5 Toyama Mazakazu, 162–63 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 36, 116 trade, 55, 197 translation, 77–78, 93, 117 Travels in Alaska (Muir), 183 TsÜzoku minkenron (Fukuzawa Yukichi), 70 Turner, Bryan, 144–45 Uchimura KanzÖ, 63n, 172n42 Ueda Akinari, 45 Ueki Emori, 133–57; autobiographies and diaries of, 134n2, 137; balancing freedom and nature, 156; consciousness as problem for, 147, 149, 150; Danjo no dÖken, 146, 151; as disassociating politics from nature, 86; on egalitarian democracy, 156; “Enjin seifu,” 138; on freedom, 135, 148– 50; human beings differentiated from animals by, 147–49; human body emphasized by, 25, 87, 110, 140–45, 223; on individual versus social rights, 150–53; on Japan as a nation, 153–55; KatÖ Hiroyuki opposed by, 84, 108, 109, 133, 138–40, 142n, 141, 166; kokugakusha influencing, 153–54; Lefebvre compared with, 156n68; as liberal, 156–57; in loyal opposition, 136; materiality and playfulness of, 133; Minken jiyÜron, 135, 135n9, 139, 144n34, 149; Minken jiyÜron nihen kangÖ, 139, 149, 150, 151; motion

Index and dancing emphasized by, 154; on natural rights, 138–42, 150–52; nature as an “outside” for, 168; nature’s authority for democracy sought by, 87; on patriotism, 155; populism of, 136, 157; pressures on, 137–38; problems with theory of, 146–55; self-criticism lacking in, 136–37; on sexual desire, 148–49; on social evolution, 138; and Spencer, 139, 139n19, 146; on tenpu, 161; Tenpu jinkenben, 133, 138–46, 151; utilitarianism as influencing, 147–48; on women, 141, 146, 155; as written out of official histories, 134 Uesugi Shinkichi, 221–22, 221n35, 223 Umehara Takeshi, 9n26 universal histories, 27 universal suffrage, 128, 151 utilitarianism, 147–48, 147n45, 157 villages, 51–52, 222 Vlastos, Stephen, 27n73, 196 Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi: on elites in Confucian theory, 108n96; on KatÖ Hiroyuki, 90, 92n31, 97n55; on kokugakusha and natural rights theorists, 96n53; on Motoori Norinaga, 45; on Sinocentric world view, 42 Warnke, Martin, 34n8 wartime ideology, 201–6 Watanabe Masao, 9n24, 9n25, 163, 219 Watsuji TetsurÖ, 187, 188, 201–3, 201n Weber, Max, 20, 209, 211, 212, 223 West, the: climate in East/West differences, 173n49; Confucianism and theories from, 78, 79; culture associated with, 27; the Enlightenment, 50, 66, 85, 142, 157; Japan as engulfed by, 76, 76n41; Japan as outside developmental time of, 203; Japanese parity with, 131, 132; as mythologizing its clashes with nature, 180; nature in intellectual history of, 215–17; science and technology in Tokugawa period, 53–59; universal natural laws and Japan’s relationship to, 65; Western imperialism, 55, 106; Westernization, 27, 172n44 Weston, Walter, 174, 174n50 White, Hayden, 8 White, Lynn T., 9n26, 193n42 will: in Baba Tatsui’s social evolution, 130–32; Ricoeur on nature and, 219– 20 Williams, Raymond, 1, 1n2, 2n3

Index Wilson, Edward O., 37n15 Wilson, George, 81 Winner, Langdon, 58 Wolin, Sheldon S., 4n8 women: Baba Tatsui on, 128–30; Ueki Emori on, 141, 146, 155 work ethic, 211 Worster, Donald, 4 Yamaga SokÖ, 42, 179, 181 Yamagata BantÖ, 53n, 54, 54n65 Yamagawa KenjirÖ, 218 Yamamura, Kozo, 35n Yamazaki Ansai, 42

239 Yanabu Akira, 170, 171 Yanagita Kunio, 177n59, 191, 192, 193, 207 Yano Fumio, 108, 109 Yasuda Yoshinori, 9n26 Yasukuni Shrine, 190, 192 Yasunaga GÖro, 111 Yokoi ShÖnan, 55–56, 58–59 Yokoi Tokiyoshi, 196, 223 Yoshida Tadashi, 170 Yoshino SakuzÖ, 91 YÜbin Hochi (newspaper), 89, 89n18 Zizek, Slavoj, 22n60