Routledge handbook of modern Japanese history 9781138815186, 1138815187, 9781315746678, 1315746670

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of figures
List of maps
List of tables
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chronology
Part I Nation, empire, borders
1 Japan in the global twentieth century
2 Alliances and enmities: relations with Great Britain and Europe
3 Japan and Asia
4 Unequal treaties, consular jurisdiction, and treaty port society
5 The English-language press networks in the transnational history of East Asia, 1850–1950
6 Japan’s colonial empire
7 Race and racism
8 Overseas migration, 1868–1945
9 Ryukyu/Okinawa’s trajectory: from periphery to centre, 1600–2015
Part II Ideologies and the political system
10 From Edo to Meiji: the public sphere and political criticism in nineteenth-century Japan
11 State Shinto
12 Conservatism and conservative reaction
13 The military and politics
14 Liberalism, internationalism, and democracy
15 The bureaucracy and politics
16 The debate on fascism in Japanese historiography
17 Japan’s 1930s: crisis, fascism, and social imperialism
18 Japan’s war of words: World War II propaganda
Part III Economy and society
19 The path of economic development from the late nineteenth century to the economic miracle
20 The yen: Japan’s national currency
21 Urban life and the city idea in the twentieth century
22 Cooperatives and grassroots developments
23 The emergence of trade unions
24 The postwar employment system
25 Genders, sexualities and bodies in modern Japanese history
26 Religion in the postwar era
27 Washoku, heritage and national identity
28 Environmental history
Part IV Historical legacies and memory
29 Debates over historical consciousness
30 History and the state in postwar Japan
31 The politics of Yasukuni Shrine and war memory
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History

The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History is a concise overview of modern Japanese history from the middle of the nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth century. Written by a group of international historians, each an authority in his or her field, the book covers modern Japanese history in an accessible yet comprehensive manner. The subjects featured in the book range from the development of the political system and matters of international relations, to social and economic history and gender issues, to postwar discussions about modern Japan’s historical trajectory and its wartime past. Divided into thematic parts, the sections include: • • • •

Nation, empire and borders Ideologies and the political system Economy and society Historical legacies and memory

Each chapter outlines important historiographical debates and controversies, summarizes the latest developments in the field, and identifies research topics that have not yet received sufficient scholarly attention. As such, the book will be useful to students and scholars of  Japanese history, Asian history and Asian Studies. Sven Saaler is Professor of Modern Japanese History at Sophia University, Tokyo. His publications include Politics, Memory and Public Opinion (2005) and Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History (2007). Christopher W. A. Szpilman is Professor of Modern Japanese History at Teikyo University, Tokyo. His recent publications include Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History (2011, co-editor) and Radicalism and Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History (2015, in Japanese).

Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History

Edited by Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman; individual chapters, the contributors. The right of Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Saaler, Sven, 1968– editor of compilation. | Szpilman, Christopher W. A., 1951– editor of compilation. Title: Routledge handbook of modern Japanese history / edited by Sven Saaler and Christopher W.A. Szpilman. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, New York, NY : Routledge, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017025125 | ISBN 9781138815186 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315746678 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Japan—History—1868– | Japan—History—1868—Historiography. Classification: LCC DS881.9 .R68 2018 | DDC 952—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025125 ISBN: 978-1-138-81518-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-74667-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of figures viii List of maps x xi List of tables Notes on contributors xii Acknowledgementsxviii xix Introduction  Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman Chronologyxxxvi PART I

Nation, empire, borders

1

 1 Japan in the global twentieth century3 Akira Iriye  2 Alliances and enmities: relations with Great Britain and Europe13 Antony Best  3 Japan and Asia25 Christopher W. A. Szpilman and Sven Saaler  4 Unequal treaties, consular jurisdiction, and treaty port society47 Harald Fuess  5 The English-language press networks in the transnational history of East Asia, 1850–195062 Peter O’Connor  6 Japan’s colonial empire77 Sandra Wilson and Robert Cribb  7 Race and racism92 Rotem Kowner v

Contents

 8 Overseas migration, 1868–1945103 Martin Dusinberre  9 Ryukyu/Okinawa’s trajectory: from periphery to centre, 1600–2015118 Gavan McCormack PART II

Ideologies and the political system

135

10 From Edo to Meiji: the public sphere and political criticism in nineteenth-century Japan137 Matsuda Kōichirō 11 State Shinto147 Kate Wildman Nakai 12 Conservatism and conservative reaction160 Christopher W. A. Szpilman 13 The military and politics184 Sven Saaler 14 Liberalism, internationalism, and democracy199 Michael A. Schneider 15 The bureaucracy and politics212 Roger H. Brown 16 The debate on fascism in Japanese historiography225 Katō Yōko 17 Japan’s 1930s: crisis, fascism, and social imperialism237 Ethan Mark 18 Japan’s war of words: World War II propaganda251 Barak Kushner PART III

Economy and society

265

19 The path of economic development from the late nineteenth century to the economic miracle267 Penelope Francks vi

Contents

20 The yen: Japan’s national currency279 Mark Ravina 21 Urban life and the city idea in the twentieth century295 Louise Young 22 Cooperatives and grassroots developments310 Tessa Morris-Suzuki 23 The emergence of trade unions324 Christopher Gerteis 24 The postwar employment system334 Charles Weathers 25 Genders, sexualities and bodies in modern Japanese history348 Vera Mackie 26 Religion in the postwar era361 Ian Reader 27 Washoku, heritage and national identity376 Katarzyna J. Cwiertka 28 Environmental history389 Philip C. Brown PART IV

Historical legacies and memory

401

29 Debates over historical consciousness403 Yoshida Yutaka 30 History and the state in postwar Japan421 Hatano Sumio 31 The politics of Yasukuni Shrine and war memory440 Jeff Kingston Bibliography455 Index515

vii

Figures

0.1 Postcard showing a plan of the Meiji Shrine and portraits of the late Meiji Emperor and Empress Shōken (ca. 1915)xxiv 3.1 A propaganda postcard: girls with flags of Japan, China and Manchukuo as a symbol of ‘pan-Asian unity’35 3.2 A propaganda leaflet: Japan breaks the chains of Western colonialism36 3.3 Hakkō ichiu Tower in Miyazaki37 3 .4 A 1939 postcard to ‘commemorate the second anniversary of (the outbreak) of the holy war’ (seisen): a ‘boy-commander as brave as his father’ with Japanese and Manchukuo flags on his breast41 3 .5 A postcard of the ‘Greater East Asian Holy War Exhibition’ (Daitōa seisen hakurankai) held in Kobe, 1 April–31 May 1939, under the aegis of Ōsaka Asahi Shinbunsha (Osaka Asahi Newspaper Company)42 5.1 Runners and riders: U.S. and British press citations of newspapers in the networks of the English-language press of East Asia, 1913–4974 12.1 The elder statesman Itō Hirobumi (a Meiji-era postcard)163 12.2 The Privy Council in session (colour woodblock triptych by Yokoyama Ryōhachi, 1889)167 12.3 Prince Konoe Fumimaro in 1940 (Shashin shūhō, 1940, 1:1)180 13.1 Field Marshal Yamagata Aritomo (postcard, late Meiji period)186 13.2 The emperor as supreme commander reviews an army parade (kanpeishiki), 1913 lithograph188 13.3 SDF recruitment poster197 14.1 The government discusses the 1874 petition for a constitution201 20.1 1873 Japanese ¥10 note283 20.2 1864 United States National Bank $10 note283 22.1 Simulated stained-glass window installed in Grant Community Church, Michigan, to celebrate Kagawa Toyohiko’s 1936 tour of the United States311 22.2 Illustration from a pamphlet promoting a lecture by Kagawa Toyohiko at Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 1936312 22.3 Signed pamphlet promoting a lecture by Kagawa Toyohiko at Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 1936313 27.1 Prime Minister Abe Shinzō praising washoku (2015)377 27.2 Celebrations of the emperor’s birthday at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (Murai 1903)381

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Figures

27.3 The 1930 menu of a restaurant in the Mitsukoshi Department Store in Tokyo382 27.4 Per capita rice consumption in Japan, 1946–88384 29.1 Opinion poll: How proud are you of being Japanese? (Yomiuri Shinbun, 25 January 2008) 405 29.2 Confidence regarding Japan (NHK 2015)406 29.3 Sentiments toward the emperor (NHK 2015)408

ix

Maps

0.1 Map showing Japan’s national territory and its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)xxx 6.1 Japan’s expansion in Northeast Asia, 1609–193279 6.2 Japan’s expansion in Asia and the Pacific, 1933–4583

x

Tables

4.1 4.2 13.1 20.1 27.1

Japanese civil and criminal suits against foreigners in consular courts, 1878–9852 German consular court cases in Yokohama, 1874–8156 Military budgets of major countries in 2015194 Iconography of Japanese currency in the postwar period 290 Meals served in the dormitory of Tokyo Higher Normal School in May 1916 385

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Notes on contributors

Antony Best received his PhD from the London School of Economics, where he is an associ-

ate professor in international history. He is the author of Britain, Japan and Pearl Harbor: Avoiding War in East Asia, 1936–1941 (Routledge 1995) and British Intelligence and the Japanese Challenge in Asia, 1914–1941 (2002) and co-author of International History of the Twentieth Century (Routledge 2004, 2008 and 2015). Philip C. Brown received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1990 he has taught

at The Ohio State University where he is now Professor of Japanese and East Asian History. He is the author of Central Authority and Local Autonomy in the Formation of Early Modern Japan (1991) and Cultivating Commons: Joint Ownership of Arable Land in Early Modern Japan (2011) and co-editor of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Modern Japanese Empire (Routledge 2016) and Environment and Society in the Japanese Islands: From Prehistory to the Present (2015). Roger H. Brown is Professor of Modern Japanese History in the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Saitama University in Japan. He earned a PhD in history from the University of Southern California. His research focuses on prewar and wartime Japan, and his publications include ‘Shepherds of the People: Yasuoka Masahiro and the New Bureaucrats in Early Showa Japan’, Journal of Japanese Studies 35:2 (2009); ‘(The Other) Yoshida Shigeru and the Expansion of Bureaucratic Power in Prewar Japan’, Monumenta Nipponica 67:2 (2012); ‘Yasuoka Masahiro’s “New Discourse on Bushidō Philosophy”: Cultivating Samurai Spirit and Men of Character for Imperial Japan’, Social Science Japan Journal 16:1 (2013); and ‘Desiring to Inaugurate Great Peace: Yasuoka Masahiro, kokutai Preservation, and Japan’s Imperial Rescript of Surrender’, Saitama University Review 50:2 (2015). Robert Cribb, who received his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, Univer-

sity of London, is Professor of Asian History at the Australian National University. He is joint author with Li Narangoa of the Historical Atlas of Northeast Asia 1590–2010: Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia, Eastern Siberia (2014) and joint author with Sandra Wilson, Beatrice Trefalt and Dean Aszkielowicz of Japanese War Criminals:The Politics of Justice after the Second World War (2017). Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, a recognized authority on the food history of modern Japan and Korea, received her PhD in 1999 from the University of Leiden, where she is Professor of Modern Japan Studies. She is the author of Modern Japanese Cuisine (2006), Cuisine, Colonialism and Cold War (2012) and Himerareta washokushi (2016). The English version of the last publication is forthcoming.

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Notes on contributors

Martin Dusinberre is Professor and Chair for Global History at the University of Zurich. His

research focuses on Japan and the Pacific world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in particular on the history of Japanese imperialism, overseas migration and maritime trade. His first book, Hard Times in the Hometown: A History of Community Survival in Modern Japan (2012), was a microhistory of a Japanese nuclear village. He is currently writing a global history of Japan through the story of a nineteenth-century steamship. His essays have appeared in The Journal of Global History, The Journal of Asian Studies, History Workshop Journal, Japan Forum and The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. Penelope Francks, who received her PhD in Japanese economic history from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, in 1978, is Honorary Fellow in Japanese Studies at the University of Leeds and Research Associate at the Japan Research Centre, School of Oriental and African Studies. She was for many years Reader in Japanese Studies in the Department of East Asian Studies at Leeds. Her publications include Rural Economic Development in Japan (Routledge 2006), The Japanese Consumer (2009) and Japan and the Great Divergence (2016). The third edition of her textbook Japanese Economic Development was published by Routledge in 2015. Harald Fuess, who received his PhD from Harvard University, is a Professor of History at the Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’ at Heidelberg University and Top Global University Project Professor at Kyoto University. Fuess served as President of the European Association of Japanese Studies (EAJS) and currently is a member of the International Advisory Board of Tohoku University in Sendai. He is the editor of Japanese Imperialism and Its Postwar Legacy (1998) and author of Divorce in Japan: Gender, Family, and the State (2004). His recent publications and research projects explore the role of Western imperialism in East Asia during the long nineteenth century. Christopher Gerteis, who received his PhD from the University of Iowa, is Senior Lecturer

in the History of Contemporary Japan at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. He is author of Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (2009); co-editor of Japan since 1945: From Postwar to Post-Bubble (2012); and editor of Critical Readings on the History of Industrialization in Modern Japan, 3 vols (2012). He is also founding editor of the SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan, a peer-reviewed scholarly monograph series, and co-editor of Japan Forum, the journal of the British Association for Japanese Studies. Hatano Sumio, who received his PhD from Keio Gijuku University, is Professor of Japanese History Emeritus at the University of Tsukuba and Director-General of the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (JACAR). He has been chair of the Editorial Committee of the official Nihon gaikō bunsho (Diplomatic Documents of Japan) series published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. Between 2008 and 2011, he was also a member of the Japan-China Joint History Research Committee. His numerous books include Taiheiyō sensō to Ajia gaikō (1996; winner of the Yoshida Shigeru Prize) and Kokka to rekishi (2011). Akira Iriye, Charles Warren Professor of American History Emeritus, Harvard University, and

a former President of the American Historical Association, received his PhD in U.S. and East Asian history from Harvard University. His numerous books include Pacific Estrangement: Japanese

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Notes on contributors

and American Expansion, 1897–1911 (1972); Power and Culture:The Japanese-American War, 1941– 1945 (1981); Fifty Years of Japanese-American Relations (in Japanese, 1991); China and Japan in the Global Setting (1992); The Globalizing of America (1993); and Cultural Internationalism and World Order (1997). Katō Yōko received her PhD from the University of Tokyo, where she is professor in the

Department of Japanese History. She has written widely on U.S.–Japan relations in the 1930s, the Japanese military in the 1930s, the Japanese conscription system and other aspects of modern Japanese history. Her many books include Mosaku suru 1930-nendai: Nichi-Bei kankei to rikugun chūken-sō (1993), Chōheisei to kindai Nihon, 1868–1945 (1996), Sensō no Nihon kingendaishi (2002), Sensō no ronri (2005), Sore demo Nihonjin wa ‘sensō’ o eranda (2009), and Sensō made (2016). Jeff Kingston, who received his PhD in history from Columbia University, is Director of Asian

Studies and Professor of History at Temple University Japan. He is the author of Nationalism in Asia: A History since 1945 (2016) and editor of Press Freedom in Contemporary Japan (Routledge 2017), Asian Nationalisms Reconsidered (Routledge 2016), Critical Issues in Contemporary Japan (Routledge 2014) and Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis (Routledge 2012). He also writes ‘Counterpoint’, a weekly column for the Japan Times. Rotem Kowner, who received his PhD from Tsukuba University, is Professor of Japanese His-

tory and Culture at the University of Haifa, Israel. His research focuses on the cultural and racial nexus between Japan and the West since the early modern period as well as on Japanese wartime behaviour and attitudes. His recent books include From White to Yellow (vol. I): The Japanese in European Racial Thought, 1300–1735 (2014) and the co-edited volumes Race and Racism in Modern East Asia I: Western and Eastern Constructions (2013) and Race and Racism in Modern East Asia II: Interactions, Nationalism, Gender and Lineage (2015). Barak Kushner is University Reader in Modern Japanese History at the University of Cam-

bridge. His publications include Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (2015, Winner of the American Historical Association’s 2016 John K. Fairbank Prize); Slurp! A Culinary and Social History of Ramen – Japan’s Favorite Noodle Soup (2012); and The Thought War – Japanese Imperial Propaganda (2006). He researches and writes on wartime Japanese and Chinese propaganda, Japanese media, Sino-Japanese relations, humour, food history, B- and C-class war crimes, and the Cold War and East Asia. Vera Mackie is Associate Dean, Research in the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts at

the University of Wollongong. Her publications include The Social Sciences in the Asian Century (2015, co-edited); Ways of Knowing about Human Rights in Asia (Routledge 2015); The Routledge Handbook of Sexuality Studies in East Asia (Routledge 2015; co-edited); Gender, Nation and State in Modern Japan (Routledge 2014; co-edited); Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality (2003); Gurōbaruka to jendā hyōshō (2003); Human Rights and Gender Politics: AsiaPacific Perspectives (Routledge 2000; co-edited); Creating Socialist Women in Japan: Gender, Labour and Activism, 1900–1937 (1997). Ethan Mark, who is a University Lecturer in Japanese history at the University of Leiden, received his PhD in modern Japanese history from Columbia University. He is author of ‘The perils of co-prosperity: Takeda Rintarō, occupied Southeast Asia, and the seductions of xiv

Notes on contributors

postcolonial empire’, American Historical Review, 119:4 (October 2014), ‘ “Asia’s” transwar lineage: Nationalism, Marxism, and Greater Asia in an Indonesian inflection’, Journal of Asian Studies, 65:3 (August 2006) and Japan’s Occupation of Java in the Second World War: A Transnational History (London: forthcoming 2018). His translation of Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s Grassroots Fascism:The War Experience of the Japanese People was published in 2015. Gavan McCormack, who received his PhD in East Asian history from the School of Oriental

and African Studies, London University, is a Professor Emeritus, Australian National University, and coordinator of The Asia-Pacific Journal. He is the author of Chang Tso-lin in Northeast China, 1911–1928: China, Japan, and the Manchurian Idea (1977), The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence (1996) and many other books. Most recently, he has co-authored Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States (2012, Japanese translation, 2013) and Tenkanki no Nihon e: ‘Pakkusu Amerikana’ ka ‘pakkusu Ajia’ ka (2014). Matsuda Kōichirō, who received his Ph.D. from Tokyo Metropolitan University, is Professor of Japanese Political Thought at Rikkyo University, Tokyo. His research mainly focuses on political ideas and thinkers in the Tokugawa and Meiji periods. He has published books and articles in Japanese, Korean and English which include Patriotism in East Asia (co-edited with Jun-Hyeok Kwak, Routledge, 2014); ‘The Concept of “Asia” before Pan-Asianism’ in Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman (eds) Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History (2011), Edo no chishiki kara Meiji no seiji e (2008, winner of the Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities) and, Gisei no ronri, jiyū no fuan (2017). Tessa Morris-Suzuki, who received her PhD from the University of Bath, England, is Australia

Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor of Japanese History at the Australian National University. Her research focuses mainly on issues of history and memory in modern Northeast Asia, frontiers and ethnic minorities in Japan, and grassroots social movements in modern Japanese history. Her books include Re-inventing Japan:Time, Space, Nation (1998), Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan’s Cold War (2007), Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era (2010) and East Asia beyond the History War: Confronting the Ghosts of Violence (co-authored, Routledge 2013). Kate Wildman Nakai, who received her PhD from Harvard University, is Professor Emerita at Sophia University, Tokyo, and former editor of Monumenta Nipponica. Her research focuses on Edo-period intellectual, social, and religious developments and on issues concerning shrines, education, and church–state relations in the prewar period. Major publications include Shogunal Politics: Arai Hakuseki and the Premises of Tokugawa Rule (Harvard University, Council on East Asian Studies, l988); Women of the Mito Domain: Recollections of Samurai Family Life (1992); ‘Coming to Terms with “Reverence at Shrines”: The 1932 Sophia University  – Yasukuni Shrine Incident’, in Bernhard Scheid, ed., Kami Ways in Nationalist Territory: Shinto Studies in Prewar Japan and the West (2013); and Lust, Commerce, and Corruption: ‘An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard’ by an Edo Samurai (co-authored, 2014). Peter O’Connor, who received his PhD in history from the School of Oriental and African

Studies, University of London, is a historian of the transnational media of East Asia. He teaches courses on the British world in East Asia, propaganda, journalism and biographical writing at Musashino University, Tsuda College and Waseda University in Tokyo. He is the author of The English-language Press Networks of East Asia, 1918–1945 (2011) and editor of a multi-volume series titled Japanese Propaganda. xv

Notes on contributors

Mark Ravina, who received his PhD in Japanese history from Stanford University, is Professor

of Japanese History in the Department of History, Emory University. His first book, Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan (1999), was also published in Japanese as Meikun no satetsu (2004). He is also the author of a biography of Saigō Takamori, titled The Last Samurai (2004) and, most recently, To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan’s Meiji Restoration in World History (2017). Ian Reader is Professor Emeritus, University of Manchester, where he was previously Professor of Japanese Studies. Earlier he was Professor of Religious Studies at Lancaster University and has held positions at the University of Stirling, the University of Hawaii, the Nordic Institute for Asian Studies, Denmark, and at various universities in Japan. He is author or co-author of ten books, including Health-Related Votive Tablets from Japan: Ema for Healing and Well-Being (coauthored, 2017), Pilgrimage in the Marketplace (Routledge 2013), Making Pilgrimages: Meaning and Practice in Shikoku (2005), Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan:The Case of Aum Shinrikyō (2000), and Practically Religious: Worldly Benefits and the Common Religion of Japan (co-authored, 1998). His main areas of research are religion in Japan, religion and violence, pilgrimages, new religious movements, especially in Japan, and, most recently, secularizing dynamics and religious decline in Japan. Sven Saaler is Professor of Modern Japanese History at Sophia University, Tokyo. After earning a PhD in Japanese Studies and history from Bonn University, he was Lecturer at Marburg University, Head of the Humanities Section of the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) and Associate Professor at The University of Tokyo (2004–2008). He has written a monograph on history debates in Japan (Politics, Memory and Public Opinion, 2005) and articles on the history textbook controversy, the Yasukuni Shrine issue and the historical development and significance of Pan-Asianism. He is co-author/co-editor of Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History (Routledge 2007), The Power of Memory in Modern Japan (2008), Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, 2 vols, (2011), Under Eagle Eyes: Lithographs, Drawings and Photographs from the Prussian Expedition to Japan, 1860–61 (in German, Japanese and English, 2011), and Mutual Perceptions and Images in Japanese-German Relations, 1860–2010 (2017). Michael A. Schneider is Professor of History and Asian Studies at Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois. His research interests include Japanese colonialism, internationalism, pan-Asianist thought, and other topics in the early twentieth-century history of Japanese foreign policy as well as contemporary foreign policy and security discourse in Japan. His recent publications include ‘Mr. Moto: Improbable International Man of Mystery’, Journal of American-East Asian Relations (2015) and ‘Women Leaders in Diplomacy Across the Pacific’, in Robert David Johnson (ed.) Asia Pacific in the Age of Globalization (2015). His current research focuses on cultural internationalism in the lives of ordinary Japanese in the twentieth century. Christopher W. A. Szpilman, Professor of Modern Japanese History in the Department of

Japanese Culture, Teikyo University, Tokyo, received his PhD in Japanese history from Yale University. He is the author of Kindai Nihon no kakushinron to Ajiashugi (2015), editor of Honma Kyūsuke’s Chōsen zakki (2016), and co-editor of Kita Ikki’s Jihitsu shūseiban Kokutairon oyobi junsei shakaishugi (2007), Mitsukawa Kametarō nikki, 1919–1936 (2011), Mitsukawa Kametarō shokanshū: Kita Ikki, Ōkawa Shūmei, Nishida Mitsugi-ra kara no shokan (2012) and Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History (2011). He has also published numerous articles on Japan’s prewar right wing and conservatism.

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Notes on contributors

Charles Weathers, who received his PhD in Japanese political science from the University of California-Berkeley in 1995, is Professor of Labour Relations and Political Economy at Osaka City University. His recent publication include Amerika no rōdō kumiai undō: hoshuka keikō ni kōsuru kumiai no kasseika (2010), ‘Reformer or destroyer? Hashimoto Tōru and populist neoliberal politics in Japan’, Social Science Japan Journal, 2014, and ‘Enter the Workers: Japan’s Changing Childcare Controversy’, Social Science Japan Journal, 2017. Sandra Wilson, who received her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford, is Professor of History and a Fellow of the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University, Western Australia. She is the author of The Manchurian Crisis and Japanese Society, 1931–33 (Routledge, 2002) and joint author with Robert Cribb, Beatrice Trefalt and Dean Aszkielowicz of Japanese War Criminals: the Politics of Justice after the Second World War (2017). Yoshida Yutaka is Professor of Japanese History at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. His research focuses on the social and political history of the military in modern Japan as well as postwar Japan’s dealings with its wartime past. His numerous publications include Nihonjin no sensōkan (2005), Sensō no seijigaku (2005) and Heishitachi no sengoshi (2011). He is also co-editor of the eight-volume Iwanami series Ajia Taiheiyō sensō (2005). Louise Young, who received her PhD from Columbia University, is Vilas Distinguished Professor of History at University of Wisconsin-Madison and a senior fellow at the Institute for Research in Humanities. As an historian of modern Japan, her successive major research projects have focused on the relationship between culture and empire, urban modernism between the wars, and most recently, the history of sociology and the idea of class. In several new essays, Young has returned to the subject of empire, especially the post-empire and contemporary geopolitics in East Asia. She is the author of Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (1998) and Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan (2013).

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Acknowledgements

This handbook has taken several years to complete. In the process of putting it together, editors have incurred an enormous debt of gratitude to many persons. Paul Sorrell deserves special mention for his magnificent skills as a copyeditor. Thanks are due to Roger Brown, John Dougill, Izabela Grocholski and Michael Schneider for their advice that has saved us from many errors of fact and infelicities of style. The editorial assistance of Silviu Catalin (Collin) Rusneac Oblea, Louisa Süß, Robert Ebenburger and Sandra Meerwein has been invaluable. We are also very grateful to Georgina Bishop at Routledge for bringing this project fruition.

xviii

Introduction Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman

The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History is a comprehensive guide to Japanese history from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. The handbook covers not only issues of politics, political thought and international relations, but also social questions, economic development, religion, the environment and gender issues. Further, it pays attention to recent and current trends in historical research and historiography. Several chapters are devoted to the ongoing debates over war responsibility and the legacies of World War II that continue to affect Japanese politics and society as well as relations between Japan, its East Asian neighbours and the world. The handbook is arranged thematically in four parts and 31 chapters. Each chapter provides a state-of-the art survey of the field of modern Japanese history covered, intended to be of value to specialist and non-specialist readers alike. Several contributions were written by leading Japanese historians, whose perspectives we considered essential in a volume of this kind. However, because direct translations of works written for a Japanese audience assume a degree of knowledge that most Western readers would not have, we have revised these texts in cooperation with the authors both to make them more accessible and to update their contents to take account of recent developments. Part I focuses on Japan’s position in the world. It includes chapters on Japan’s alliances, the so-called treaty-port system in the nineteenth century, transnational press networks in East Asia, the Japanese colonial empire, Japan’s relations with and its place in East Asia, emigration and racial ideology. It also includes a chapter dedicated to Okinawa, the archipelago lying south of the Japanese main islands which occupies a special position in the history of East Asia. Part II introduces ideas and ideologies that have shaped modern Japan and the political systems that emerged from the competition between them. The chapters in this section trace the development of conservatism, fascism, militarism, liberalism and democratic movements, as well as the role of State Shinto, arguably the most relevant of Japan’s many religions to the political scene. The authors in this section also discuss the role of the bureaucracy, the genesis of political criticism and the role of propaganda in the modern state. Part III shifts the focus to social and economic issues and includes discussions of Japan’s economic development; its national currency, the yen; the roles of trade unions, cooperatives and religions; urban development; changing patterns of food consumption in modern Japan; and environmental problems. Part IV takes up debates over the role of history in modern Japan. The first chapter in this section introduces the ongoing debates over the legacies of war and war responsibility as reflected in the ‘historical consciousness’ (rekishi ninshiki) of the Japanese people. The second chapter xix

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discusses the various attempts by the Japanese state to achieve reconciliation with its wartime enemies and the extent to which these attempts have been successful. The final chapter discusses the controversy over Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo as an example of the obstacles that continue to hinder Japan’s attempts to ‘come to terms with its past’.

The scope of the handbook and problems of periodization Eras and calendars As mentioned above, this handbook covers ‘modern’ Japanese history. Although any definition of ‘modern’ must be arbitrary, our choice of the mid-nineteenth century as a starting point reflects a consensus among historians of modern Japan. Behind this broad consensus, however, lie multiple and often heated debates over the best way of subdividing the period under consideration into meaningful entities. Because periodization, as historians have frequently pointed out, is essential for understanding history (Carr 1961; Evans 1997), it will be useful to explain at the outset how problems with periodization in modern Japanese history are bound up with major historical controversies relating to this era. Many of these controversies are closely linked to questions of continuity and discontinuity in modern Japan’s historical trajectory. Given the multiplicity of controversies still being aired today, no single periodization should be taken for granted by the reader. However, some knowledge of previous attempts to periodize and contextualize the events and ideologies that have led to the formation of modern Japan is indispensable for a fuller understanding of the subject. Historical periodization must not be confused with the calendars that most societies use to reckon time and count off years, but it often draws on the calendars used by modern nationstates. Decisions about the calendar to be adopted by a particular society or state are often influenced by political considerations and by debates about ‘traditional culture’. For this reason, we will introduce the various calendars used in modern Japan before discussing issues of periodization. The first is the Western (or Gregorian) calendar, which is most familiar to the Western reader. It has been in use in Japan since 1873, when it replaced the traditional lunar calendar. The decision to introduce the Western calendar was made during a period of rapid modernization when the country was eager to ‘catch up’ with the Western powers and also introduced compulsory education, conscription and other reforms. In later years, however, critics leveled charges of ‘exaggerated modernization’ at Japan’s leaders, which, among other things, led to some Japanese questioning the Western calendar and the neglect of ‘tradition’ that its use allegedly implied. Although this kind of criticism is rarely heard today and the Western calendar is still in wide use, different calendars and methods of numbering years are used alongside it. The second calendar used in modern Japan, formally introduced in the same year as the Western calendar, is known as the imperial calendar (kōki). In imitation of the traditional Buddhist and Confucian calendars, it starts the year count from the mythical foundation of Japan by the nation’s legendary first emperor, Jimmu, in 660 BC.1 Although only ultraconservative and right-wing circles insist on using the imperial calendar today, it was in common use before World War II. For example, in 1940 – which was also the year 2600 in the imperial calendar – the government celebrated the 2600th anniversary of the foundation of the Japanese Empire with much fanfare. The third Japanese calendar, borrowed from China, is based on a cycle of sixty years, with each year being defined in terms of a combination of one of the five elements and twelve animal signs of the Chinese zodiac. It was widely used in early modern Japan (the Edo period, xx

Introduction

1603–1868) and continued to be used in the Meiji era (1868–1912). Prominent events were often identified by the appropriate year name in this cycle. Thus, for example, the civil war following the 1868 Meiji Restoration is known in Japan as the Boshin War (Ch. wùchén, earth/ dragon year = 1868), and the Chinese revolution of 1911–12 is referred to in Japanese as the Shingai Revolution (Ch. xīnhài, metal/pig year = 1911). The fourth method, introduced from China in the seventh century, was to mark time by dividing it into eras with – what was hoped to be – propitious names. Although these denominations are often considered signifiers of eras of imperial rule, in pre-modern Japan they did not necessarily coincide with the reigns of individual emperors.The main criterion for the selection of an era name was its propitiousness. If, as a result of some natural disaster, famine, epidemic or such, the name turned out to be less than auspicious, it was quickly changed (although the emperor might well remain on his throne). After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the government decreed that these titles would no longer be changed arbitrarily, but that each imperial reign would carry its own – and only one – era name (issei ichigō; one reign, one era name). Under this new system, which was codified in the 1889 Imperial Household Law (Kōshitsu tenpan), the era name could only be changed following the death of an emperor, who would be posthumously known by the name of his reign. Thus, whereas prior to Meiji the relatively short reign of Emperor Kōmei (Okihito, 1831–67) extended over seven distinct eras,2 his successor Mutsuhito reigned during the course of a single era (Meiji), which ended with his death on 30 July 1912. He was succeeded by Emperors Yoshihito (Taishō, 1912–26), Hirohito (Shōwa, 1926–89), and Akihito (Heisei, since 1989). The combination of these era names (gengō) with a regnal number results in a system of counting off years that is still widely used in Japan today, including in all official documents, as mandated by the 1979 Era Name Act (Gengō-hō). According to this system, World War I broke out in the year Taishō 3, World War II ended in Shōwa 20, and this handbook was published in Heisei 29 (2017). This ‘one reign, one era name’ rule encouraged the writing of history according to imperial reigns. Even today, this is the periodization most commonly used by historians of modern Japan writing in Japanese. Thus, whereas works dealing with the social history of the ‘Meiji era’ or ‘Japan in the Taishō era’ are commonplace, it would be difficult to find a history book in Japanese titled ‘Nineteenth-century Japan’ or ‘Twentieth-century Japan’. It should be noted, however, that periodization by reign is not unknown in Western historiography. In Britain, for example, history titles often refer to the Victorian era (1837–1901) or the Edwardian period (1901–10), and in Germany, books on the Wilhelmine era (1860s–1918) are also common. Nonetheless, in Japan, as in Britain and Germany, a variety of rival periodizations – often related to historical controversies about events, periods and historical developments – have emerged, as we discuss next.

Meiji Restoration or Meiji Revolution? Major developments in society and politics do not neatly follow the turns of centuries or changes of reigns. Historians thus invariably confront the problem of deciding at what moment a given trend emerged or a particular historical development or issue assumes relevance. The difficulties involved in the periodization of the Meiji Restoration (Meiji ishin), often considered the foundational event of modern Japan, are a case in point. Narrowly conceived, the Meiji Restoration can be seen as a series of events that took place between 9 November 1867 (fourteenth day of the tenth month of Keiō 3 according to the traditional calendar),3 when the shogun returned political authority to the emperor (taisei hōkan), and 3 January 1868 (ninth day of the xxi

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twelfth month of Keiō 3), when the feudal government of the shogunate was abolished and a new government under the emperor, fifteen-year-old Mutsuhito, was established (ōsei fukko). However, most historians would argue that discussing the Meiji Restoration as an ‘event’ that took place on a certain date explains very little about that particular moment in the history of Japan. They would point out that the causes of the ‘return of political authority to the emperor’ in late 1867 and the establishment of ‘imperial government’ in early 1868 have their origins at a much earlier time. These causes, like the periodization question, are a matter of debate among contemporary historians. Some trace the origins of the Meiji Restoration to the famines and other economic problems that plagued the last decades of the shogunate; others locate it in the Opium War of 1839–42 between Great Britain and China and the arrival of U.S. Commodore Matthew C. Perry and his flotilla of ‘black ships’ (kurofune) in the bay of Edo (Tokyo) in 1853. Other commentators find significant points of departure elsewhere, further complicating the picture and suggesting alternative approaches to periodization. Just as the origins (or causes) of the Meiji Restoration are subject to historical interpretation, so, too, are its consequences. For if most historians trace the origins of the Meiji Restoration to the two or three decades before 1867–68, few would claim that the Restoration ended with the return of political authority to the emperor and the establishment of an ‘imperial government’. Rather, they argue that this was just the beginning of a long string of changes collectively described as the era of the Meiji Restoration. The Restoration of the emperor in January 1868 took place in the midst of a civil war (the earlier mentioned Boshin War) that would continue to rage for more than a year. The new government embarked on a series of reforms that were only completed in 1889 when the Constitution of the Japanese Empire was promulgated (see Chapters 12 and 14 in this volume), a development which shaped the Japanese polity until 1947. Periodization thus imposes labels on stretches of time. But just as periodization is always arbitrary and as such subject to endless debate by historians, so, too, is the character of an historical event such as the Meiji Restoration. In what sense was the Meiji Restoration a ‘restoration’? There is no question that the shogunate was abolished and the emperor’s ‘direct rule’ (shinsei) was, at least formally, ‘restored’. But the reforms implemented in the years following the 1868 ‘Restoration’ were nothing short of revolutionary. They included the abolition of feudal domains (1871), the abolition of the privileges enjoyed by the warrior class (bushi) and the introduction of the conscription system (1873), educational reform, the imposition of a land tax (also in 1873) and the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution in 1889.4 These reforms changed the Japanese state and society in fundamental and irreversible ways. Although the government of the day chose to describe these changes as a ‘restoration’, can this claim be taken at face value? First of all, we should note that although the term ‘restoration’ (ishin) was used in official terminology, the leading figures of the time more often talked of a ‘complete renovation’ (go-isshin), a term which hints at their awareness of the revolutionary changes taking place in Japan. Yet again, they had good reason for eschewing the word ‘revolution’ (kakumei). The term kakumei, derived from classical Chinese, originally simply meant a dynastic change. The word was thus considered inappropriate to describe the situation in Japan, where, it was believed, a single imperial dynasty had ruled since the foundation of the Empire of Japan by Emperor Jimmu in 660 BC and where change – if it occurred at all – consisted not of replacing a dynasty, but of removing the usurper (the shogunate) and restoring the emperor to his rightful position as the country’s legitimate ruler.5 If contemporaries were reluctant to explicitly address the revolutionary character of the reforms unleashed by the Meiji Restoration, later generations had no such qualms. At the turn of the nineteenth century, some commentators were referring to the Meiji Restoration using the expression ‘restoration–revolution’ (ishin-kakumei); others simply called it a ‘revolution’ xxii

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(kakumei). Among the former was Kita Ikki (1883–1937), who used the term ishin-kakumei in 1906. Among the latter was the socialist leader Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911), who argued in 1910 that although the emperor’s political authority had been restored, the Meiji Restoration was a revolution ‘because all of the forms and customs of our everyday life were transformed from top to bottom’ (cited in Tierney 2015). Certainly, few historians in Japan today would deny the revolutionary character of the Meiji Restoration in the wider definition of the term. Most Western historians of Japan would agree. The term ‘revolution’ is used to describe the Meiji Restoration by most contemporary textbooks on modern Japan published in English (e.g., McClain 2002; Gordon 2003; see also Beasley 1972). Japanese and Western historians agree that the second half of the nineteenth century was a revolutionary period, during which Japan’s political, economic and social systems underwent a series of fundamental changes: •

•

•

Decentralized feudal governance was replaced by a highly centralized, authoritarian nationstate: the emperor, whose direct rule had been ‘restored’, was defined in the 1889 Constitution as an inviolable sacred being, in whom all power was vested (see Chapters 10 to 14 in this volume). The agriculture-based feudal economy was replaced by a capitalist economy that was gradually integrated into the international economic system, despite Japan not having fully industrialized in the nineteenth century (see Chapters 19 to 21 in this volume). The feudal privileges of the warrior class and most traditional status distinctions were abolished. Thus, in theory, all Japanese became equal subjects (shinmin) of the emperor, even if in practice social inequalities persisted (see Chapters 22, 23 and 25 in this volume).

These developments continue to spark discussion today. The question of whether the Meiji Restoration constituted a revolution is closely related to the still-far-from-settled debate over whether 1930s Japan was a fascist state. Some Marxist scholars believe that fascism could only have arisen in Japan after the nation had undergone a comprehensive bourgeois revolution. (For an account of this debate, see Chapters 16 and 17 in this volume.)

Taishō Democracy and militarism Another controversial issue relating to the periodization of modern Japanese history is the characterization of the 1910s and 1920s, otherwise known as the Taishō era (1912–26). The reign of Yoshihito, known to posterity as the Taishō Emperor, coincided with the flourishing of liberalism and parliamentary politics which historians have retrospectively named ‘Taishō Democracy’ (Taishō demokurashii). It is convenient to date the end of the Meiji era and the beginning of the Taishō era with the death of the Meiji Emperor on 30 July 1912 and the declaration of the new era of ‘Taishō’ on the same day. These events constituted a true fin-de-siècle for many Japanese, as contemporary media coverage of the Meiji Emperor’s funeral and the subsequent building of memorials for the monarch, such as the Meiji Shrine (see Figure 0.1), attest. Nevertheless, historians have become embroiled in heated debate over the question of how to date the beginnings of ‘Taishō Democracy’. Some historians have pointed out that the beginnings of liberalization and democratization in Japan predated the Taishō Emperor’s accession to the throne by many years. As early as the 1920s, for example, the well-known political scientist and columnist Yoshino Sakuzō (1878– 1933) traced what he saw as the dawn of a new era to the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, when people took to the streets to demonstrate against the government in what became xxiii

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Figure 0.1 Postcard showing a plan of the Meiji Shrine and portraits of the late Meiji Emperor and Empress Sho¯ken (ca. 1915).

known as the Hibiya Riots (on the Hibiya Riots, see Okamoto 1970). It is even possible to detect the roots of Japanese liberalism and democracy in the so-called Movement for Freedom and People’s Rights of the 1870s (see Bowen 1984; Banno 2005 and Chapter 14 in this volume). However, as Yoshino and others have argued, the 1905 riots marked the beginning of the participation of the masses in Japanese politics. After 1905, administrations that ran roughshod over public opinion did so at their own risk. Large-scale protests led directly to the fall of two cabinets in the 1910s: the third Katsura Tarō cabinet, following the protests known as the Taishō Political Crisis of 1912–13, and the Terauchi Masatake cabinet (1916–18), after the Rice Riots in the autumn of 1918. In 1905 and again in 1918, the government was forced to declare martial law and called in the army to restore public order. The Rice Riots gave rise to the first party cabinet in Japanese history – and one that was headed, for the first time, by an elected member of the Lower House of the Diet without an aristocratic title. This innovation ushered in an era in which Japan was ruled by party cabinets (1918–22, 1924–32), a time when demands for universal suffrage, as well as calls for equality for women, intensified (see Chapters 14 and 25 in this volume), and the labour force was rapidly unionizing (see Chapter 23 in this volume). As a result of these demands, the Universal Suffrage Law (for males older than twenty-five) was passed as part of the Imperial Law of 1925; the first general election held under the new law took place in 1928. This ballot is usually considered the high point of Taishō Democracy. During this time, Japan emerged as a vibrant, pluralistic society undergoing a diverse range of economic, social and political changes – which would only accelerate in pace (Dickinson 2015). xxiv

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If the beginnings of the Taishō era are a matter of historical debate, so, too, is its end. For at some point, this period of liberalism, party politics and democratization gave way to an era of militarism or, as some historians would argue, of fascism. But exactly when? Again, it is beyond dispute that following the death of Yoshihito in December 1926, a new era, which was named Shōwa (literally, ‘radiant peace’), was declared and Hirohito acceded to the throne. But it is a matter of historical debate precisely when the era of Taishō Democracy gave way to a very different era in which the military came to dominate politics and transform Japan, with the help of reformist bureaucrats, into a totalitarian state – if not a fascist state (see Chapters 13, 15, 16 and 17 in this volume). Some historians regard the enactment of the Peace Preservation Law (Chian ijihō) in 1925 as marking the beginning of these anti-democratic trends. Others place the beginning of the new era in 1931 – it was in September 1931 that officers of the Kwantung Army (Japanese units stationed in Northeastern China) staged a sabotage attack (known as the Manchurian Incident) which over the next few months led to the occupation of the area by Japan and the setting up of the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932 – a territory which was essentially under the control of the Japanese army. It was from this time that the military gradually began to expand its influence in politics and, by degrees, take control of Japanese foreign policy. The point of rupture for yet other historians is the assassination in May 1932 of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi (1855–1932), which put an end to the era of party cabinets. In contrast to the 1920s, the 1930s were characterized by terrorist attacks, military conspiracies and attempted military coups (see Chapter 13 in this volume). These incidents culminated in a 1936 military rebellion known as the February 26 Incident. Although the rebellion was suppressed following a three-day stand-off, the army took advantage of this coup attempt to expand its power within the political system to the point that, by 1937, Japanese politics were almost completely dominated by the military. When, in August 1937, a skirmish near Beijing between Japanese and Chinese troops escalated into a full-scale war – known to the West as the Second Sino-Japanese War (Nitchū sensō) – no politician was strong enough to control the army, which was now running on its own momentum.

War and peace – prewar and postwar Japan Even before the military’s domination of politics, Japan was involved in a series of frequent wars. Thus, modern Japanese history can also be divided into two broad eras: a period of war that ended with Japan’s unconditional surrender on 2 September 1945, and a period of peace that followed it and has continued to the present day. The period prior to 1945 is associated with the ‘Greater Japanese Empire’, a time when Japan was a major imperialist power; the postwar period has seen Japan emerging as a post-imperialist nation-state.This evolution is also reflected in the changes made to Japan’s Constitution – named the ‘Constitution of the Greater Japanese Empire’ until 1947; the present version is simply called the ‘Constitution of Japan’. Amid a series of civil wars and domestic rebellions against the new Meiji government in the late 1860s and 1870s, Japan’s first military engagement abroad took place. In 1874 the new government sent troops to Taiwan, an episode known as the Taiwan Expedition (for details, see Orbach 2017; Eskildsen 2002). Japan also made several military interventions on the Korean peninsula in the 1880s and 1890s. From the 1890s on, Japan was involved in a number of fullscale military conflicts such as the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), the First World War (1914–18), and the Siberian Intervention (1918–22). Following an interlude of peace – which coincided with the era of Taishō Democracy and was disturbed only by relatively small-scale military interventions in xxv

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China in the late 1920s (leading to the selection of Shōwa – ‘radiant peace’ – as the regnal name for the new imperial era beginning in 1926) – the 1931 Manchurian Incident marked, in the opinion of most historians, the beginning of what is called the Asia-Pacific War (Ajia Taiheiyō sensō). This war would fuse with World War II following Japan’s attack on the United States and Great Britain in December 1941. Considerable controversy remains over the periodization of World War II in Asia and the names given to various events, and even the war(s) themselves. These controversies go back to the terminology used during the conflict. In the 1930s, the Japanese government avoided the use of the term ‘war’ (sensō): thus the hostilities in Manchuria were officially referred to as the ‘Manchurian Incident’ (Manshū jihen), and Japan’s full-scale war with China after August 1937 was officially known as the ‘China Incident’ (Shina jihen). The Chinese Nationalist government, too, avoided using the term ‘war’. Both Japan and China took this position to avoid the application of the United States Neutrality Act to their countries, which would have resulted in the imposition of a U.S. export embargo on war-related materials. In contemporary Japanese historiography, the conflict with China beginning in 1937 is usually called the ‘Japan–China War’ (Nitchū sensō), while Chinese historians speak of the ‘War of Resistance Against Japan’, or even place it in the framework of a ‘Global Anti-Fascist War’ (Mitter 2013a; 2013b). Following the outbreak of war with the United States and Great Britain in December 1941, the Japanese government referred to the conflict as the ‘Greater East Asia War’ (Daitōa sensō). Following 1945, this term was banned by the Allied occupation authorities as ‘wartime propaganda’, and is still generally avoided in Japan – with the exception of right-wing groups seeking to emphasize the legitimacy of the war and its ‘positive legacy’ for Japan. The occupation authorities usually referred to the ‘Greater East Asia War’ as the Pacific War (Taiheiyō sensō), a term picked up by U.S. historians and also widely used in Japanese postwar historiography. Today, however, because many Japanese scholars see Japan’s military conflicts between 1931 and 1945 as linked in a causal chain, they prefer to use expressions such as ‘The Fifteen-Year-War’ (Jūgonen sensō) or ‘The Asia-Pacific War’ (Ajia Taiheiyō sensō). The latter name has gained wide currency since the publication of the influential multi-volume series Kōza Ajia Taiheiyō sensō by the publisher Iwanami Shoten in 2005. Since 1945, Japan has been a country largely at peace – although the southernmost prefecture of Okinawa, which was administered by the United States between 1945 and 1972, served as an important base for U.S. military operations during the Korean (1950–53) and Vietnam (1961–75) wars. As a result of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan (Nippon-koku to Amerika-gasshūkoku to no aida no sōgo kyōryoku oyobi anzen hoshō jōyaku, known in Japan in abbreviated form as Anpo jōyaku), signed in 1952 and amended in 1960, Japan became – and remains – the most important U.S. ally in East Asia. To be sure, Article 9 of the 1947 Constitution6 prohibits Japan’s large-scale military involvement overseas within the framework of the American–Japanese Security Treaty (see Chapter 13 in this volume). In this sense, postwar Japan is fundamentally different from the prewar nation, as is the position of Japan in international relations. However, it is difficult to overestimate the importance of American bases in Japan as a part of the United States’ global ‘empire of military bases’ (Johnson 2004; see also Chapter 9 in this volume). Given the privileges that U.S. military forces in Japan enjoy, some scholars have described Japan as a semi-colonial dependency of the United States (e.g., Johnson 2004). In addition to abstaining from war with other countries, Japan has become a peaceful nation internally. The reforms introduced during the Allied occupation (1945–52) turned Japan into a democracy. According to the constitution promulgated in 1947, Japan is a parliamentary democracy with the people as the sovereign power. Although the national parliament xxvi

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or Diet – which was never dissolved even during the period of military dominance, during the war or under the occupation – constitutes an important element of continuity from the 1889 Meiji Constitution to the new constitution of 1947,7 in postwar Japan power relations were redefined in fundamentally different ways. Most significantly, the Japanese people are defined in the Constitution as citizens (kokumin), not subjects (shinmin), and the emperor is no longer ultimate sovereign, a living god and supreme military commander, but is reduced to the status of a ‘symbol (shōchō) of the nation’ and rendered largely powerless. The reforms made during the Allied occupation – which included demilitarization as well as radical educational and land reforms – were so comprehensive that some historians have interpreted them as a ‘second revolution’, following the changes Japanese society experienced in the late nineteenth century (Takemae 2003). In fact, the consequences of the reforms of the late 1940s have been so far reaching that many traditionalists today find them objectionable and regularly demand that they be rescinded.These conservatives advocate a policy of ‘breaking away from the postwar regime’ (sengo rejiimu kara no dakkyaku), a demand which is not limited to abolishing Article 9 of the Constitution, but also extends to questions of education and historical awareness (see Chapter 29 in this volume).8 These controversial political manoeuvres are closely related to developments in historiography and commemoration. As Chapters 29 to 31 in this handbook demonstrate, although early twenty-first-century Japan might be a state at peace, Japanese historiography is standing on the brink of a ‘war about history’ (rekishi sensō), internally and externally, if not already in the middle of such a conflict (see also Saaler 2016a; 2016b).

The place of modern Japan in global history In Chapter 1 of this volume, Akira Iriye argues that although Japan has never undergone the process of globalization in the fullest sense of the term, it is impossible to ignore the fact that globalization and regionalization represent important elements of continuity in Japan’s modern history. This would include interaction with foreign states (see Chapter 2 in this volume) and outbound and inbound migration (see Chapter 8), as well as international trade and the exchange of ideas and technology. Japan began to introduce Western technology in the 1850s, albeit selectively, following the templates of ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ in the West. Government missions (as well as students) were sent to observe these ‘civilizational achievements’ first hand, and foreign advisors were invited to teach at Japanese educational institutions. One of the early Japanese visitors to the West was educator and writer Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), who, writing in 1872, concluded that Japan was lagging far behind in many areas: [I]f we compare the knowledge of the Japanese and the Westerners, in letters, in technology, in commerce, or in industry, from the largest to the smallest matter, there is not one thing in which we excel. In Japan’s present condition there is nothing in which we may take pride vis-à-vis the West. All that Japan has to be proud of is its scenery. (Fukuzawa 2013) Spurred on partly by such critical assessments, nineteenth-century Japanese looked toward the West to modernize itself, introducing the Western calendar, as we have seen, but also embarking on a policy of economic modernization, leading to a program of industrialization based on highly efficient technological innovation. However, as Chapter 12 in this volume shows, modernization was not an end in itself, and those features considered to be ‘traditional’ characteristics xxvii

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of Japanese politics, society and the economy were proactively preserved or, in many cases, constructed – as was the case in Western countries.9 Highly sensitive to the importance of preserving (and, where necessary, constructing) ‘tradition’ in modern nation-states, Japan has also been actively promoting its culture internationally (Saaler et al. 2017). These efforts to promote its national culture as a form of ‘soft power’ date back to the late nineteenth century (Valliant 1974). In recent decades, Japanese efforts to register historical and cultural sites as UNESCO World Heritage Sites, including those relating to Japan’s modern experience of industrialization (e.g., the ‘Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution’) and war (e.g., the Hiroshima Peace Memorial), have been the most obvious manifestation of this trend (see http://whc.unesco.org/en/statesparties/jp). The transnational dimensions of modern Japanese history are increasingly attracting the attention of scholars of Japan (see, for example, Katzenstein and Shiraishi 1997; Arrighi, Hamashita and Selden 2003; Saaler and Koschmann 2007; Saaler and Szpilman 2011).These commentators emphasize the regional roots of Japan’s modern evolution by examining notions of transnational regional solidarity, including attempts to build a ‘New Order’ in East Asia (Fletcher 1982; Mimura 2011). Prior to 1945 Japan played the central role in such efforts, although the forms they took varied over time and the outcome was often disastrous for the peoples of East Asia, including Japan (for details, see Chapter 3 in this volume). On the positive side, Japan became an important forum for the exchange of ideas among leaders of Asian independence movements and their Japanese and European supporters during the first half of the twentieth century (Saaler and Szpilman 2011: introduction). Though fundamentally different in character, since the last decade of the twentieth century, Japan (and in particular Tokyo) has become a tourist mecca and a popular venue for international conferences, attracting fast-growing numbers of foreign visitors. Japan has also played important roles in global organizations, starting with the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization, founded in 1919 (Burkman 2008); the United Nations (UN) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), both of which Japan joined in 1956 (see MOFA 2014a; 2014b); the World Bank; the International Monetary Fund; and many others. These transnational dimensions of modern Japanese history are discussed in greater detail in Part I of this volume.

National boundaries and national space Notwithstanding a broad variety of transnational interactions and global developments in which Japan was beginning to get involved, the modern era was also characterized by the strengthening of national borders and geopolitical adjustments, not only for Japan, but for many other countries (most of the 195 countries recognized today are a product of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries). In the case of Japan, the Edo period was marked by a ‘tolerance for blurred boundaries’ (Jansen 1997: 287) with the outside world (even if travel from one feudal domain to another was hindered by immense obstacles). It was the formation of a modern nation-state after the Meiji Restoration that led to the clarification of Japan’s geographical boundaries: in 1869, the Tokyo government renamed the northern island of Ezo as Hokkaido (Northern Circuit) and began to impose strict control over this territory. In the 1870s, steps were taken to annex the Ryukyu10 and the Ogasawara Islands. Some historians regard these developments as the emergence of a ‘territorial state’ (Mitani 1997: 294; see also see Morris-Suzuki 1998). With the seizure of Taiwan in 1895, Japan began to expand beyond the Japanese–Okinawan archipelago and became an imperialist state. In 1910 Japan also annexed Korea and then, over the course of the next three decades, Manchuria and other territories in East Asia and the Pacific xxviii

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were occupied and colonized (see Chapter 6 in this volume; see also Narangoa and Cribb 2014 for helpful historical maps of East Asia). Japan’s defeat in World War II resulted in the loss of all its post-1895 territorial gains, and Japan’s national space was again limited to the four main islands. Okinawa, placed under U.S. administration in 1945, was not returned to Japan until 1972, and in many respects retains a quasi-colonial status (see Chapter 9 in this volume). Notwithstanding the growing emphasis on the importance of ‘transnationalism’ in modern Japanese history in recent research, the continuing disputes over national boundaries and national space in which Japan has been involved up to the present day are also notable for their intensity. Although, as an island nation, Japan is often considered a country with readily definable ‘natural boundaries’, many of its boundaries are actually contested. Japan insists that the Takeshima islets (Liancourt Rocks, Kor. Dokdo) in the Sea of Japan (in Korea called the Eastern Sea), currently controlled by Korea, must be returned. On its side, Korea maintains that these islands were annexed by Japan as part of the process of colonization and thus reverted to Korea when the country became independent after World War II. Japan is similarly involved in a dispute with Russia over the four southernmost islands of the Kuril archipelago. In Japan, these four islands are known as the ‘Northern Territories’ (hoppō ryōdo).They were occupied by the Soviet Union in September 1945, following Japan’s surrender. Japan insists that this occupation is illegal and that Russia must return the islands to Japan. This territorial issue is one of the reasons why Japan and Russia have not yet signed a peace treaty following the end of World War II. Japan also has a territorial conflict with China, rejecting Chinese claims to the Senkaku islets in the South China Sea; their ownership has never been clarified in any international treaty, either before or after World War II (see McCormack 2013b; Manyin 2016; see also Chapter 30 in this volume). In addition to these disputes, Japan has shown a high degree of attachment to the idea of ‘national territory’ by actively protecting several small atolls in the Pacific, reinforcing them with concrete to protect them from erosion. The preservation of the tiny atolls known as Okinoto­ rishima (consisting merely of three small rocks encased in concrete) and Minamitorishima, for example, is considered of utmost importance for the security of Japan’s national ‘boundaries’, as they constitute the basis for Japan’s claim to a large pelagic zone in the Pacific Ocean (see Map 0.1).11 The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which Japan ratified in 1994, allows states to declare Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) extending for 200 nautical miles around their territories. However, as the convention defines an island as ‘a naturally formed area of land, surrounded by water, which is above water at high tide’ and further states that ‘rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf ’ (part XIII, article 121),12 Japan’s claims to an EEZ in the Pacific remain shaky. In addition to these territorial borders, the ‘boundaries of the Japanese’ (Oguma 1998) – the definition of national identity – have been subject to frequent change between the mid-nineteenth century and today. As historian Oguma Eiji (1995; 1998; 2002; see also Chapter 7 in this volume and Morris-Suzuki 1998) has shown, the term ‘Japanese’ (Nihonjin) was defined flexibly in Japan before 1945 as the multi-ethnic character of the ‘Greater Japanese Empire’ that required the integration of multiple ethnicities into the state. Although ethnic Japanese were the dominant group, a considerable number of ‘Koreans’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Taiwanese’ (aborigines) and others were all regarded as ‘subjects’ (shinmin) or ‘children’ (sekishi) of the emperor. As Takashi Fujitani has shown in his book Race for Empire (Fujitani 2011), the need to mobilize Korean manpower for the Japanese war effort produced a large variety of measures aimed at propagating the idea of a multi-ethnic empire. The creation in 1932 of the multi-ethnic state of Manchukuo in northeast xxix

Introduction

Map 0.1  Map showing Japan’s national territory and its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

China was another example of transnational approaches to twentieth-century nation building, as Prasenjit Duara has amply demonstrated in his Sovereignty and Authenticity (Duara 2003; see also Tamanoi 2005). The notion of ethnic ‘homogeneity’, which defines the term ‘Japanese’ in much narrower terms, emerged as the dominant discourse defining Japanese identity only after Japan’s defeat – and the loss of its colonial empire. This discourse developed further by promoting the idea of a coherent identity for a people who had for many centuries been ‘traditionally isolated’ from the outside world and, as an ‘island nation’ (shimaguni), had developed a unique national identity that held them apart from any other nation. These discourses of uniqueness and superiority, whose roots go back to prewar Japan, persist today in various guises (see Dale 1986; on definitions of the ‘nation’, see also Doak 2007b; 2007c; Saaler 2016b; see also Chapter 7 in this volume). Domestic spaces and internal boundaries were also radically restructured during this period, as the contributions by Louise Young and Penelope Francks in this handbook show. The feudal domains were replaced by centrally administered prefectures in 1871; Japanese cities developed into metropolises (see Chapter 21), and the population migrated in large numbers from the countryside to the cities at an accelerating rate. Urbanization was closely related to economic changes, in particular the wholesale industrialization of the country (see Chapter 19). Whereas at the beginning of the Meiji era, Japan was still a largely agricultural society, by the time of the xxx

Introduction

outbreak of World War II the majority of Japanese lived in the cities, working in industry-related occupations. Today, at 94%, Japan’s urbanization rate is among the highest in the world13; 85% of the population live in the so-called Tokyo–Yokohama–Nagoya–Osaka corridor alone. In the modern era, the population of the Japanese islands has been characterized by constant growth, starting from around 30 million in the early Meiji period, passing 50 million at the beginning of Taishō in 1912 and reaching 70 million during the war (1936). After a temporary decline as a result of wartime losses, the population began to grow again in 1946, reaching 100 million in 1967 (see Yano Tsuneta Kinenkai 2000: 33–8) and peaking at over 128 million in 2010. Since then, we have witnessed a reversal of this trend: for the first time since Meiji, the Japanese population has been shrinking in recent years (see http://data.worldbank.org/ country/japan). The National Institute of Population and Social Security Research expects this demographic shift to accelerate in the near future, given the low birthrate in contemporary Japan. According to its estimates, the population of Japan will have declined to below 100 million by 2050 (Institute of Population and Social Security Research 2012). Sustained by the combined population and economic growth, Japan became the secondlargest global economy in the early 1970s (see Chapter 19 in this volume). The growth of both the human population and the economy through industrialization has had a negative impact on the natural environment, as Philip Brown explains in Chapter 28 of this volume. At the same time, demand for energy continued to rise, contributing to the earlier mentioned radical restructuring of national space – for example, through the construction of dams and nuclear power plants, with all the consequences, direct and indirect, that they entailed (Hein 1992). Only in recent years have the paradigms of economic growth and a ‘secure’ energy supply through nuclear power begun to be challenged (see Kingston 2012; Schreurs and Yoshida 2013). The current population decline may well result in even more fundamental changes in the ways in which we assess these issues.

The importance of historical context Healthy debate over a country’s recent history has always been an important feature of national life, in Japan as elsewhere, and its impact has never been limited to the academic world. Such discussions have implications for society and the political sphere in general, and they also constitute a major issue in international relations. The question of Japan’s war responsibility continues to be debated in the nation’s mass media and between governments in East Asia (see Chapter 30 in this volume); scholars, educators, bureaucrats and politicians, and journalists have become embroiled in controversies over the content of school history textbooks, and a wide variety of organizations are challenging the ways in which the war dead are being commemorated. If anything, these debates are increasing in intensity, a development reflected in a growing body of literature on these topics.14 On the downside, the intensification of these controversies in the political sphere has slowed the historical reconciliation process in East Asia at a government level, as Hatano Sumio explains in Chapter 30 in this volume. One reason for this setback is the rise of the right-wing ideology known as historical revisionism (rekishi shūseishugi). Generally speaking, historical revisionism is a political movement that aims to challenge mainstream narratives provided by academic historians and propagate uncritical and selectively positive views of a nation’s past. In Japan, the emergence of historical revisionism was triggered by a statement made by Hosokawa Morihiro in 1993, the first prime minister to publicly acknowledge that the Asia-Pacific War was a war of aggression (shinryaku sensō) on the part of Japan (see Chapter 29 in this volume). In reaction, over 200 members of the Diet signed a counter-declaration stating that, far from being aggressive, Japan’s wars were acts of xxxi

Introduction

self-defence and were fought to secure the liberation of the oppressed peoples of Asia (see Saaler 2005: ch. 2). Two years later, the so-called History Re-Examination Committee (Rekishi kentō iinkai) established within the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) published a report, which summarized its views in the following paragraph: The Manchurian Incident [1931], the China Incident [1937] and the Greater East Asian War . . . were a fight for survival between the colored races and the white race. Since the Russo-Japanese War [1904/05], the colored races had all depended on Japan to be liberated from colonial rule. Since this would be a terrible blow, the whites united in order to suppress Japan. . . . The Greater East Asian War was a glorious international contribution, a sacrifice without precedent in the history of mankind. . . .The Japanese are a righteous people. (RKI 1995: 62–7) This interpretation of Japan’s wartime history is hardly calculated to appeal to the former victims of Japanese expansionism in Korea, China and Southeast Asian countries – even if it is true that Japan temporarily ousted Western colonial rulers from Southeast Asia in 1942. But more important than a question of political priorities, debates over historical questions in the public sphere in East Asia – and elsewhere – are often insufficiently informed by established knowledge produced over many decades by professional historians – whether in Japan, elsewhere in East Asia, in the West or by historians who are part of multinational research groups. Thus, among other things, historical revisionism also poses a serious challenge to the scholarly profession of the historian. Hardly any historians in Japan advocate historical revisionism. On the other side, many so-called revisionists have no academic training of any sort (see Saaler 2016a). Although they claim to provide ‘new perspectives’ on Japanese history, they violate basic principles of historical inquiry, and their ‘research’ fails to meet the standards demanded by the academic profession. Their polemical strategies strongly resemble the anti-intellectual ‘post-truth’ style of argumentation that has recently emerged in Britain, the United States and elsewhere. Despite the claims of revisionists to the contrary, few academic historians would dispute the validity of certain established historical facts. World War II really occurred; Japan was one of the countries that started it; and Japanese cities were bombed with nuclear weapons in August 1945. Surely, no sane person would claim that these are ‘alternative facts’. However, in the age of the ‘Internet revolution’, it is easy for the public to be misled by websites that present ‘alternative facts’ and conspiracy theories as the truth. Information gathered online is often unreliable, cannot be easily verified and is often not easy to digest. Easy access to information does not necessarily mean that the information presented can be put in a meaningful context by non-specialists. Political scientist Tom Nichols recently has put the issue in a nutshell: The convenience of the Internet is a tremendous boon, but mostly for people already trained in research and who have some idea what they’re looking for. It does little good, unfortunately, for a student or an untrained layperson who has never been taught how to judge the provenance of information or the reputability of a writer. (Nichols 2017a: 69; see also Nichols 2017b) Given this fundamental problem, the benefits of the often-praised ‘Internet revolution’ are highly questionable. That said, numerous reliable Internet sites can be recommended to the reader of this handbook for further study. Despite the pitfalls noted earlier, easy access to online resources makes xxxii

Introduction

it possible for enquirers to undertake research much more efficiently than was the case two or three decades ago. Japan is a pioneer in this field, and a good deal of research on modern Japan can be confidently done online.15 One important project aimed at giving researchers access to primary sources was initiated by the government of Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi, who in 1994 announced the digitalization of primary sources relating to Japan’s relations with Asia. Today, through the database maintained by the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (www.jacar.go.jp), more than 30 million complete documents from the National Archives of Japan, the Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, the National Institute for Defence Studies and the Ministry of Defence of Japan, as well as some local archives, are accessible online. All these materials can be downloaded free of charge (see Chapter 30 in this volume for the historical background of this archive). The Digital Collection of the National Diet Library of Japan (http://dl.ndl.go.jp/?__lang=en) is also very useful for historical research. At the time of writing, the collection, which is being continuously expanded, contains 350,000 unabridged titles. Special feature pages on topics such as the ‘Political History of Japan’ (www.ndl.go.jp/modern/e/index.html), Japanese emigration to Brazil (www.ndl.go.jp/brasil/e/s1/s1_1.html) and the birth of the Japanese Constitution (www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/) provide the necessary contextualization of, and introduction to, the primary sources. A sub-site, ‘Portraits of Modern Japanese Historical Figures’, allows readers access to biographical sources for important personalities in modern Japanese history. The National Diet Library’s website also includes a very useful timeline, which the readers of this volume will benefit from consulting (www.ndl.go.jp/modern/e/utility/chronology.html). Another initiative by Prime Minister Murayama was the Asian Women’s Fund (AWF), established to deal with the so-called ‘comfort women’ issue (see Chapter 30 for details). Although the AWF was dissolved in 2007, its website is still active (www.awf.or.jp) and contains a trove of information on this highly sensitive historical issue. In addition to these sites, the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan contains significant collections of documents relating to Japan’s recent history and the debates over historical memory, as well as the territorial issues discussed earlier (see, for example, www.mofa.go.jp/policy/postwar/index.html). Although reflecting the government’s perspective and not to be read uncritically, it is a good place to begin an investigation of these topics. The database of the Ohara Institute for Social Research at Hosei University is helpful to anyone interested in social issues. Its database provides direct access to hundreds of posters and other materials relating to the labour movement and other social movements, mostly, but not exclusively, from the post-1945 period (http://oohara.mt.tama.hosei.ac.jp/posengl/index.html). Another useful site is www.archive.org, an easily accessible global site that allows online access to a vast array of historical sources. Searching the site for ‘treaties and agreements’ (https://archive. org/search.php?query=%22treaties%20and%20agreements%22), for example, takes the user to the Treaties and Agreement series, which contains thousands of basic primary sources relating to international relations in East Asia before World War II. Newspapers and journals are also of great importance in historical research. Today, many Japanese newspapers are available online in full, although most cannot be accessed free of charge. The daily Japan Times, as well as a number of weekly and monthly journals, such as Taiyō (The Sun) and Fūzoku gahō, are available as DVD databases. Prewar Japanese English-language newspapers and journals such as the Japan Chronicle, Contemporary Japan, Contemporary Manchuria and The Japan Times Weekly/Nippon Times Weekly are available through online databases.16 Outside Japan, The Times (London) has a formidable online archive. U.S. newspapers can be accessed through the website Historical Newspapers (although usage is not free of charge, the site can be xxxiii

Introduction

accessed through many libraries). Websites that allow access to local newspapers, often free of charge, are also proliferating.17 Websites outside Japan that allow access to resources related to Japanese history include ‘Visualizing Cultures’, founded and maintained by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (visualizingcultures.mit.edu). This website offers visual sources that are difficult to access elsewhere. The historical context to these materials is provided in essays by the MIT historian John Dower, one of the founders of the project, and other leading scholars in the field. Another useful site is the ‘East Asia Image Collection’ hosted by Lafayette College, ‘an open-access archive of digitized photographs, negatives, postcards’ and other visual sources documenting ‘the history of imperial Japan (1868–1945), its Asian empire (1895–1945) and occupied Japan (1947–52)’ (http://digital.lafayette.edu/collections/eastasia). Similar projects have sprung up elsewhere in recent years, and although it is impossible to cover them all in this introduction, a word of caution is in order. Although the websites maintained by public institutions, such as public libraries, archives and museums, are generally reliable, those operated by individuals, even by individual researchers, should be treated with caution if one’s ‘research’ is intended to produce widely accepted results. Before consulting websites, the student of modern Japan would do well to begin by reading if not this handbook, then at least a reliable general survey of modern Japanese history such as Pyle 1978, Beasley 1989, Duus 1998, Sims 1998, McClain 2002, Gordon 2003, or Walker 2015; or reference works dealing with Japan and modern East Asia, such as Tsutsui 2007, Bestor et al. 2011, Gaunder 2011, McLelland and Mackie 2015 and Kim 2015. These volumes all cover issues that could not be addressed in this book, or are discussed marginally at best.

Conventions Throughout this handbook, Japanese and other East Asian names are given in accordance with East Asian custom, with the family name preceding the given name. However, the names of Japanese and other Asian authors of English-language works are cited with the given name first. Following standard practice, macrons have been omitted from well-known Japanese place names (Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Ryukyu). This does not include organizations containing the names of cities, for example, such as Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai. East Asian languages are romanized as follows: we use the Hepburn system for Japanese, the Revised Romanization of Korean (2000) for Korean and Pinyin for Chinese. Personal and place names in Chinese and Korean with established spellings in Western languages (such as Chiang Kai-shek), have been retained in this form or are given in brackets on their first occurrence.

Notes 1 The website of the Imperial Household Agency contains a genealogical tree of the Japanese Imperial Family, beginning with the first (mythical) emperor of Japan, Jimmu.The tree gives ‘660 BC’ as the year of Jimmu’s accession to the throne, showing that even the Imperial Household Agency relies on the Gregorian calendar to define the origins of the dynasty. See www.kunaicho.go.jp/e-about/genealogy/ img/keizu-e.pdf. 2 They are Kōka (1844–48), Ka’ei (1848–55), Ansei (1855–60), Man’en (1860–61), Bunkyū (1861–64), Genji (1864–65) and Keiō (1865–68). 3 After the death of the Kōmei Emperor in January 1867, Mutsuhito followed his father on the throne in February; however, the era name Keiō was not changed to Meiji until the eighth day of the ninth month (23 October 1868), meaning that Keiō 4 became the year Meiji 1. 4 On the genesis of the Constitution, see Takii 2003; 2007. See also the website of the National Diet Library of Japan, www.ndl.go.jp/modern/e/cha2/index.html. xxxiv

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5 The Restoration Edict explicitly defines ‘Restoration’ as the return to the direct imperial rule of antiquity as practised during the age of Emperor Jinmu. 6 See Government Printing Bureau, ‘The Constitution of Japan’, www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/etc/ c01.html. 7 This is why the editors have chosen an image of the Japanese Diet for the cover of this volume. 8 The slogan sengo rejiimu kara no dakkyaku is also related to the problems of defining ‘postwar’ in the Japanese context. On this issue, see Gordon 1993. 9 On ‘invented traditions’ in modern Japan, see contributions in Vlastos 1998. 10 The Ryukyu kingdom was turned into a domain (han) in 1872 and then annexed and renamed Okinawa Prefecture in 1879. On the history of the Ryukyu Kingdom, see Akamine 2016. 11 For photographs of these atolls, see the Japan Coast Guard website, www.kaiho.mlit.go.jp/info/books/ report2005/tokushu/p027.html; see also www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/04/29/national/u-n-oksjapan-claim-to-expand-shelf/ and www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-07-28/u-s-japan-andother-nations-could-lose-exclusive-economic-zones. 12 See ‘United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea’, www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agree ments/texts/unclos/unclos_e.pdf. 13 See The World Bank, ‘Urban population (% of total)’, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB. TOTL.IN.ZS?locations=JP. 14 See Yoshida 1995; Yoneyama 1999; Hein and Selden 2000; Fujitani et al. 2001; Saaler 2005; Seraphim 2006; Seaton 2006; Frühstück 2007: chapter IV; Saaler and Schwentker 2008; Hasegawa and Togo 2008; Yoshida 2013; Kingston 2014; Saaler 2014b; Takenaka 2015; Hashimoto 2015; Kim 2015; White 2016; Saaler 2016a; 2016b. See also the last three chapters in this volume and numerous articles and essays on the website The Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus (http://apjjf.org/). 15 General databases allowing access to secondary sources (e.g., scholarly journals) such as JStor and Project MUSE are not discussed here. 16 See “Japan Chronicle Online” (http://primarysources.brillonline.com/browse/japan-chronicle) and “Mobilizing East Asia Online” (http://primarysources.brillonline.com/browse/mobilizing-east-asiaonline). 17 A collection of links to freely accessible newspapers is provided by Google at https://news.google. com/newspapers.

xxxv

Chronology

1853–68 Late Edo period (bakumatsu) 1853 1854 1855 1858

1860 1867

1868

Arrival of a four-ship U.S. flotilla under Commodore Matthew C. Perry, who demands Japan conclude diplomatic relations with the United States. Japan–U.S. Treaty of Peace and Amity (Convention of Kanagawa) opens Shimoda and Hakodate to U.S. ships. Treaty of Shimoda with Russia opens Shimoda, Hakodate and Nagasaki to Russian ships. Treaties of amity and commerce with the United States, Russia, Britain, France and the Netherlands (known as the Ansei or unequal treaties) open more ports to foreign trade and grant extraterritorial rights to foreigners in Japan. First Japanese diplomatic mission goes to the United States. Mutsuhito (the Meiji Emperor) accedes to the throne (30 January/25 December Keiō 2). The shogun returns political authority to the emperor (taisei hōkan), ushering in the Meiji Restoration (9 November/14 October Keiō 3). Shogunate abolished, marking the beginning of a government under the emperor (ōsei fukko) (3 January/9 December Keiō 3).

1868–1912 Meiji era 1868–69 Boshin Civil War, in which the ‘imperial forces’ defeat the pro-shogunate domains. 1871 Feudal domains abolished and replaced by prefectures; centralized government established. 1872–73 Iwakura Mission tours the United States and Europe. 1874 Taiwan Expedition: a Japanese military expedition to retaliate for the murder of Ryukyuan sailors by Taiwan aborigines. 1875 Russia obtains Sakhalin and Japan the Kuril Islands under the terms of the Treaty of St. Petersburg. 1876 Treaty of Gangwha opens Korea to Japanese trade and gives Japan extraterritorial rights in Korea. 1877 Satsuma Rebellion (War of the Southwest), the last uprising against the Meiji government, put down. 1879 The former Ryukyu Kingdom annexed to Japan as Okinawa Prefecture. Peerage system established. 1884 1885 Cabinet system established. 1889 Constitution of the Japanese Empire (Meiji Constitution) promulgated. xxxvi

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1890

The first election to the Lower House of the Imperial Diet takes place (1 July); the opening of the Imperial Diet (29 November). 1894 The outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War. Japanese victory in the Sino-Japanese War. The Peace Treaty of Shimonoseki (17 1895 April). Japan obtains Taiwan and a large indemnity. Triple Intervention by Russia, Germany and France forces Japan to forgo its territorial claims in continental China (23 April). 1899–1901 Boxer Rebellion; Japan sends a large contingent of troops to China. 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance. 1904 Outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. 1905 Russo-Japanese War concluded with the Treaty of Portsmouth. Riots erupt in Japan against the terms of the treaty (September). Korea becomes a Japanese protectorate (November). Japanese annexation of Korea. 1910 1911 Execution of Kōtoku Shūsui and eleven socialists/anarchists in the ‘High Treason Incident’.

1912–26 Taisho ¯ era Population of the Japanese archipelago reaches 50 million.Yūaikai (Friendly Society), the first Japanese labour union, is founded. 1912/13 Taishō Political Crisis: mass demonstrations cause the resignation of the Katsura cabinet. 1914 World War I erupts (28 July). Japan declares war on Germany (23 August) and on Austria-Hungary (25 August) on the side of Britain, France and Russia. First party cabinet headed by Hara Takashi, the ‘commoner’ prime minister. 1918 1918–22 Japanese military intervention in Siberia. 1919 Japan participates in the Paris Peace Conference (January–June). The eruption of anti-colonial unrest in Korea (March) and nationalist protests in China (May). Japan becomes a founding member of the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization (ILO). 1921/22 Japan participates in the Washington Conference (November–February). Several multilateral treaties signed to limit naval armaments and guarantee the status quo in the Asia-Pacific region. 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake devastates Tokyo, Yokohama and surrounding areas, killing more than 100,000 (1 September). Peace Preservation Law (April) and Universal Suffrage Law, which grants votes to 1925 males over twenty-five years of age (May), are enacted. 1912

1926–89 Sho ¯wa era 1926 Shōwa Financial Crisis. 1930 London Naval Conference. 1931 Manchurian Incident. 1932 Assassination of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi (15 May) ends the era of party cabinets. 1933 Japan withdraws from the League of Nations. xxxvii

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1936

February 26 Incident (failed coup). Anti-Comintern Pact signed with Germany (25 November) (Italy joins in 1937). 1937 Marco Polo Bridge Incident starts the Second Sino-Japanese War (7 July). Total Mobilization Law (24 March). Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro calls for ‘a 1938 New Order in East Asia’ (22 December). Political parties dissolved as the Imperial Rule Assistance Association is launched. 1940 1941 Tripartite Pact signed with Germany and Italy (27 September). Japan attacks the United States and invades British territories in Southeast Asia (7 December). 1942 Battle of Midway (turning point of the war in the Pacific) (4–7 June). 1944 General Tōjō Hideki forced to resign as prime minister (in office since 1941). Great Air Raid on Tokyo leaves some 100,000 dead (9–10 March). Battle of Okinawa 1945 (1 April–22 June). Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August). The Soviet Union attacks Japan (9 August). Emperor Hirohito makes a radio broadcast announcing Japan’s decision to surrender (15 August). Unconditional surrender of Japan (2 September). 1945–52 Allied occupation. 1946 International Military Tribunal for the Far East starts (IMTFE, aka ‘Tokyo Trials’, April). The Constitution of Japan promulgated (November, effective May 1947), replacing the Meiji Constitution. 1948 Seven IMTFE defendants, including former Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki, executed. 1949 Ministry of International Trade and Industry established. 1950 Formation of Sōhyō (General Council of Trade Unions of Japan). 1951 Signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty (in effect 1952) and the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security with the United States. The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China do not attend the peace conference. Self-Defense Forces (SDF) established. 1954 1955 Japan joins the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (10 September). The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) founded (15 November). 1956 Joint Declaration normalizes relations between Japan and the Soviet Union (October). Japan joins the United Nations (December). 1959 Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery established. 1959–60 Mass unrest over the renewal of the security treaty with the United States (Anpo disturbances). Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato announces his cabinet’s Income Doubling Plan. 1964 Japan joins the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (April). Tokyo Olympiad (October). 1965 Japan and South Korea establish diplomatic relations. 1967 Population of the Japanese archipelago surpasses 100 million. Japan becomes second-largest economy in the world. 1968 1970 World Exposition held in Osaka. United States returns Okinawa to Japan (May). Japan and the People’s Republic of 1972 China establish diplomatic relations (September). 1975 Japan becomes a founding member of the ‘Group of Six’ (G6, today G7). 1978 Japan signs the Peace and Friendship Treaty with China. 1982 Chinese and Korean protests against the content of Japanese school textbooks mark the beginning of a ‘history textbook controversy’. 1986 Equal Employment Opportunity Law enacted. 1989 The United States labels Japan an ‘unfair trader’, marking the climax in Japan–U.S. trade frictions. xxxviii

Chronology

1989-present Heisei era 1991 Japan’s ‘economic bubble’ bursts. 1992 Peace Keeping Operations (PKO) Law allows Japan to dispatch military personnel abroad in the framework of UN peace missions. 1994 Government sets up the Asian Women’s Fund (AWF) to compensate wartime victims. 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake devastates Kobe and surrounding areas (17 January). Terrorist attack by the religious group Aum Shinrikyō on the Tokyo Underground kills 12 (20 March). Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi apologizes for Japanese aggression and colonial rule (Murayama Statement, 15 August). 1995 Japan joins the World Trade Organization (WTO). 1997 Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions signed. 2010 Population of Japan peaks at 128 million. 2011 Great Northeast Japan Earthquake. 2016 Emperor Akihito announces his wish to abdicate.

xxxix

Part I

Nation, empire, borders

1 Japan in the global twentieth century Akira Iriye

National, international, and transnational history To talk about ‘Japan (or any country) in the twentieth century’ is to consider that the history of the century is comprehensible in the national framework. The world, it is assumed, consists of nations so that domestic national affairs and interrelations among nations comprise the century’s history.That is why national and international history still provide the key frameworks in which the past is examined. But such privileging of the nation would obscure the large number of people who do not belong to any country, including refugees and migrants who are not admitted into specific countries as their legitimate residents or citizens. But they are all human beings. Why should they not count in any study of the world? In some respects, what matters is not so much population censuses of specific countries as the total number of people who inhabit the earth. This is particularly important when we consider the relationship between man and nature, that is, what people do to their physical environment (see also Chapter 28 in this volume). Different countries, of course, have different policies toward the use or protection of their natural habitat, but nationality is only one of many determinants of such a phenomenon. Religion plays a role, as do age, health conditions, education, and many other factors as they bear on the use of energy. As such cases indicate, the nation is only one among many identities that define individuals. They are not just members of a specific country, but they also belong to other categories of humans, such as gender, age, race, ethnicity, and religion. When we look at the globe and consider how it has developed and changed in the span of a century, it would be just as important to examine these other categories. For instance, take age as a framework. In 1900, the average life expectancy of the world’s people was around forty, whereas a hundred years later it had gone beyond fifty. That meant not simply that there were more people to breathe the air and to eat, but also that there were more opportunities for them to encounter one another. Moreover, longevity may lead to senility. The World Health Organization estimates that in 2017 there were some 47 million people in the world, or about a half per cent of the total population, who were diagnosed as suffering from dementia. People become ‘senile’ everywhere, although what happens to them may differ from country to country. 3

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Likewise, all countries have people who are considered ‘disabled’. They used to be referred to as ‘handicapped’, even ‘abnormal’, but this adjective came to be considered inadequate and prejudicial in the second half of the twentieth century, and some countries came to call them ‘disabled’ instead, as can be seen in the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed by the United States Congress in 1990. The change reflected the sentiment that ‘handicap’ was a prejudicial term, whereas ‘disability’ seemed more benign or neutral. But regardless of how such people, as well as others afflicted with physical or mental problems, are referred to, their nationality is of far less significance than their state of health, physical or mental. It is clear, then, that national history is only one part of the human story.To fully understand a country’s history, it must be ‘de-nationalized’ and ‘internationalized’ as well as ‘transnationalized’. It is part of international history in that the nation always exists among, and in relation to, other countries. Its people are never autonomous but are linked to what goes on elsewhere. The same holds true of all people. They are global as well as national beings. They are connected with one another not simply as citizens of their countries but also as fellow humans sharing certain ideas, beliefs, interests, and existential circumstances such as age, physical conditions, and, of course, expectations of ultimate death. They have always been transnational beings in this sense, but the process accelerated in the twentieth century.

Globalization Whether internationalizing or transnationalizing the modern history of Japan, one of the key conceptual frameworks would be globalization. The term ‘global’ is synonymous with ‘worldwide’, but historians have preferred the former adjective in recent years. Scholars began using terms like ‘global’ and ‘globalization’ only toward the end of the twentieth century, long after the world and humankind had become ‘globalized’, that is, linked with one another across national and regional boundaries. This is an excellent example of the gap between reality and comprehension; it takes time for us to become aware of, and to understand, what has happened or is happening. The history of the twentieth century still tends to be viewed in terms of its wars, slaughters, and countless human tragedies throughout the world. Such a negative view of the century is often compared to the more ‘progressive’ or ‘civilized’ nineteenth century. Whereas ‘the long peace’ reigned between 1815 (the end of the Napoleonic wars) and 1914 (the outbreak of the Great War), the twentieth century witnessed two world wars, the sustained Cold War, colonial and postcolonial conflicts, and numerous instances of sectarian and tribal violence. And yet another major theme of twentieth-century history must surely be globalization that, if anything, has proven to be an even more enduring and pervasive phenomenon than national divisions or international conflicts. That, after all, is what the term ‘global’ implies. The adjective has the connotation of different parts of the world being interconnected, even becoming borderless. It is possible, of course, to apply the adjective ‘global’ to earlier periods, such as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when Western technology and military power combined to bring separate parts of the world closer together. But that was imperialism, not globalization. Only a handful of nations had the economic resources and armed force to be called ‘powers’, and they dominated the rest of the world by establishing colonies and spheres of influence. But Western domination is not the same thing as globalization. A globalized world would have to be one in which various countries and regions were interconnected through cross-border movements of goods, people, and cultures. Of course, a totally borderless world has never existed, and national boundaries have remained one of the key realities for the bulk of humanity. Indeed, the ‘modern’ centuries have been 4

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characterized by the growing number of nations among whom ‘international’ affairs have consisted of safeguarding those boundaries. Peace has implied the observance of such boundaries, and war the breaching of them.Yet at the same time, cross-border (‘transnational’) movements of people, whether as migrants or temporary visitors, have also been a major feature of the modern centuries.Their encounters have resulted in interactions among people, often producing ‘hybrid’ communities consisting of diverse races and cultures. Hybridity, indeed, may be taken as a main feature of the modern world.There may have been no such thing as a ‘pure’ race or culture anywhere in history, but even if it once existed, the human community has grown more and more multi-ethnic and hybridized since the nineteenth century. The history of modern Japan, like that of any other country, must be understood in such a context. The emergence and increase in the number of separate nations are major characteristics of modern history, but so are transnational encounters and interactions. Nationalism has remained a powerful force to give people their identity, but at the same time a strong sense of transnationalism has emerged as they move across countries, whether physically (as refugees, migrant workers, tourists, students, or in other capacities) or mentally (through the books they read, the food they eat, the musical and theatrical performances they attend, and in many other ways).

Modern Japan, globalization and imperialism An important key to understanding modern Japanese history, then, is to realize that Japan emerged as a modern nation in the age of globalization. The Meiji era (1868–1912) virtually coincided with the initial phase of globalization. This period of modern Japanese history is usually understood in the framework of the West’s modernization as well as of imperialism. The European powers as well as the United States, it is said, became ‘modern’ through their technological innovations, economic advances, and political reforms, all of which were aspects of ‘modernization’. But the rest of the world was not ‘modernized’ and in fact became subservient to the advanced and advancing West. Except for Japan. The nation modernized itself in certain ways – industrialization, military strengthening, etc. – and it also became imperialistic. Thus, modernization and imperialism went hand in hand in the case of modern Japan. Modernization and globalization are not the same thing, but what is interesting is that in Japan’s case the two tended to coincide. The nation became a modern state just as the world was becoming global. The two coincided so that Japan benefited from, and took advantage of, a globalizing world. It would be more difficult to say, however, whether modern Japan made a significant contribution to globalization. That Japan benefited from globalization would be hard to dispute. It borrowed technological innovations being developed in Europe and North America; it imported modern educational and professional practices from the West; and it sent its people out as emigrants, business people, and students (see Chapter 8 in this volume). As a consequence, the Japanese became ‘hybridized’ to a far greater extent than ever before. Ironically, however, the nation’s political and cultural leaders simultaneously came to emphasize its uniqueness and even its ‘purity’, concepts that would continue to characterize the way they defined their country. Japan was by no means alone in simultaneously becoming global and ‘exceptionalist’. Globalization and nationalistic exceptionalism characterized virtually all countries, but in Japan’s case, the potential conflict between the two may have been mitigated by the tendency to view globalization primarily in terms of military power and economic achievements, not of transnational connections or cultural sharedness. Japan emerged as an imperialist at the turn of the twentieth century (see Chapter 6 in this volume), but it did not become global right away. In other words, for Japan imperialism came 5

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first and globalization much later than was the case with the European powers or the United States. Japanese trade and financial activities were constrained by the ‘unequal’ treaties the nation had signed in the mid-nineteenth century, and it did not gain tariff autonomy until 1910 (see Chapter 4 in this volume). Until then, Japan could not be said to be a full-fledged member of the global community. But this did not prevent it from expanding territorially and establishing overseas colonies. (Taiwan was annexed to Japan in 1895 and Korea in 1910.) Imperialism came before globalization. Indeed, imperialism may be said to have enabled the country to become more global, sending its people overseas as colonists and its goods all over the world. Modern Japanese imperialism may be dated from the 1870s, when the island kingdom of Ryukyu was annexed (see Chapter 9 in this volume), to be followed by the establishment of ‘spheres of influence’ in nearby areas such as Korea and southern Manchuria. Korea was an independent kingdom, but Japan steadily encroached on its territory, turning it into a protectorate and eventually, in 1910, an outright colony. Japan was not unique in such behaviour, of course. Great Britain had established control over India in the 1850s, France over Indochina in the 1870s, and the United States over Hawaii and the Philippines in the 1890s. The globe was fast becoming divided between these and other imperialist powers and their colonies and protectorates. China was an important exception in that it did not undertake overseas expansionism, but neither was it turned into a formal colony. It maintained its nominally independent existence, but parts of its territory were carved into the imperialist powers’ spheres of influence. The main exception was the island of Taiwan (Formosa) that had been part of the Qing (Ch’ing) empire since the seventeenth century but was seized by Japan at the end of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. That war came about when Chinese and Japanese troops, occupying Korea ostensibly to maintain the security of their respective nationals in the peninsular kingdom, collided. None of the Western powers intervened and ignored China’s pleas for help. This was primarily because they could live with a weakened China so long as its ‘territorial integrity’ was maintained. In the end this principle was jeopardized when Japan annexed Taiwan, turning it into a major outpost of its new empire, but on the mainland no external power sought outright domination. Russia feared such a move on the part of Japan when the latter established its control over Korea, threatening the tsarist empire’s ambitions in southern Manchuria, where a railway, an extension of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, was being built. When Japan sought to establish its sphere of influence over the Liaodong peninsula, on the southern tip of Manchuria, Russia sought to oppose such expansion by reinforcing its army in eastern Siberia and sending its navy (the Baltic Fleet) to East Asian waters. The result was yet another war, this time between Japan and Russia over control of Korea and southern Manchuria. Japan won initial victories and, as a result, established itself in Korea and southern Manchuria.The other Western powers did not intervene; so long as Japanese territorial ambitions were confined to southern Manchuria, as it appeared likely to be the case at first, they could live with the aggrandizement. They accepted the postwar arrangements in which Russia ceded southern Manchuria as well as southern Sakhalin (Karafuto) to Japanese control. These were all imperialistic acts, analogous to British expansion into India or the French annexation of Indochina. By the end of the nineteenth century, most regions of Asia and Africa had been turned into colonies or protectorates of the European powers. Even the United States, which had virtually stood by while the European powers and Japan were busily engaged in establishing overseas colonies and protectorates, eventually decided to act. It drove the Spanish out of the Philippines and established its control over the Caribbean, in the process turning Cuba and Santo Domingo into its protectorates.

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Non-global imperialism Japan’s international affairs were thus virtually interchangeable with the Western imperialist activities.Yet it would be difficult to say that Japan was also becoming global. One of the remarkable phenomena of world history at the turn of the twentieth century is that imperialism coincided with globalization. The European powers and the United States were becoming global empires. In other words, their imperial domination coincided with the globalization of their commercial and, it may be added, cultural affairs. Late nineteenth-century Western imperialism came in the age of globalization so that the two were virtually synonymous.The globalization of means of production and communication facilitated the extension of the Western powers, while at the same time their overseas empires helped promote economic and cultural globalization. It would be difficult to say which came first, imperialism or globalization.They were simultaneous phenomena. The same cannot be said of Japan, however. Unlike the Western powers that pursued both imperialism and globalization, Japan’s was a non-global imperialism. To begin with, its imperialism had a sharply focused geographical focus, mostly limited to East and Southeast Asia. To be sure, there were exponents of trans-Pacific expansionism, among whom the socialist Katayama Sen (1859–1933) was perhaps the most influential. He and other expansionists believed Japan should establish its foothold in Hawaii and further extend it to the West Coast of the United States as well as of Canada. The New Japan in North America was the title of a little book Katayama published in 1901 in which he exhorted his countrymen to migrate across the Pacific and establish Japanese communities in the Americas. But they found it extremely difficult to do so because of immigration restrictions in California and elsewhere. It was cheaper and less complicated to move to and settle in Korea, Manchuria, or Indochina. It may also be noted that Japanese expansion was couched less in the framework of globalization than that of the Western nations. The latter took with them modern technology as well as European religion and ideology, exemplified by Christianity and Enlightenment thought. These were being ‘globalized’ in the sense that Europeans and Americans were eager to spread their religious as well as secular ideas and ways of life to other parts of the world. They believed that modern Western culture was exportable so that as a result of their expansion, the world’s people would become interconnected and inter-mixed. Japanese imperialism, on the other hand, was not seen as an aspect of a globalizing endeavour. It was more parochial, and a good way to understand modern Japanese history in the global context is to ask why this should have been the case. For one thing, it may well be that the Japanese really wanted to globalize themselves by going abroad, but that they encountered serious obstacles on the part of the societies to which they sought to move. They encountered racial prejudice wherever they wanted to settle. They did manage to migrate to and reside in Hawaii starting in the 1890s, and soon they became the most numerous group in the islands. But that was when Hawaii was an independent kingdom. When it was annexed by the United States in 1898, many Japanese inhabitants proceeded to cross the ocean and sought to settle on the West Coast. But they met with local prejudice, and their entry into the United States came to be severely restricted around 1905 and was totally prohibited after 1924. This is the well-known story of the immigration dispute between Japan and the United States, which may be summarized in the context of the history of globalization.That is to say, the Japanese sought to globalize themselves by going to and living in North America but encountered strong opposition on the part of Americans and Canadians. They were engaged in many

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projects to globalize themselves, but their globalization did not include the acceptance of Asians among themselves.They were considered different, alien, inferior, and not fit to become citizens. But if Americans viewed themselves as global citizens, why did they fail to embrace Asians who were eager to come and live among them? Obviously, American globalization was not the same thing as unrestricted immigration. Americans were interested in going abroad and engaging in commercial and other activities, but they did not want Chinese or Japanese to do likewise in their midst. Their globalization had limits, or, to put it differently, at the turn of the century globalization and racism existed side by side. Europeans and Americans aspired to become global, going everywhere they wanted, working, living, and even dying there. But their definition of globalization did not include the immigration of, and living together with, people of all countries and races.

Racist globalization? Can there be such a thing as racist globalization, envisaging the globalization of white people but not of non-whites? Did globalization mean a global division of labour, in which the allegedly superior white countries undertook commercial, industrial, and even cultural globalization while other races primarily supplied labour and markets? These were serious questions that concerned Asians and Africans as well as Europeans and Americans. The majority of white people assumed that globalization and racial superiority were compatible, if not interdependent. Some did wonder if the West’s globalization might not eventually lead to globalizing the rest of the world, making globalization truly global, as it were. That is, by exporting goods and capital to other countries, Europe and North America would in effect be contributing to the nonWest’s Westernization, turning Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America into ‘modern’ countries.They would provide not only labour and markets for the West’s goods and capital, but eventually they would come to produce the same items as the latter, and do so more cheaply so that they could successfully compete with the more expensive items being produced in the West. What could and should the latter then do? How could it prevent the non-West from developing itself in such a way as to challenge the superior West – and indeed even to surpass it by means of cheaper products? Or could it be said that Asians and Africans would never be able to match Europeans and Americans in the quality of what they produced? That would be a reassuring thought, but it would have to derive from some optimism (or pessimism) that nonWestern products would never be able to match the quality of what was produced in the West. That optimism would be the case because of the latter’s superior skills and work habits, products of their history and culture. Thus put, it would be no exaggeration to say that the debate on the relationship between globalization and racism was one of the key questions determining humankind’s fate in the twentieth century – and indeed it continues to be the case in the twenty-first (on racism, see Chapter 7 in this volume). If globalization was truly global, then all people, regardless of their national, racial, and other differences, would be able to partake of it. But if globalization came with an adjective – be it ‘white’, ‘Western’, or ‘Christian’, it would not be unqualified globalization. It would not be truly global. Such observations help put Japan’s international (and transnational) affairs in the context of global history. To put it simply, by the early twentieth century, the Japanese began to realize that, much as they sought to globalize their country, the superior West would not let them. Western racism stood in the way of Japanese globalization. The Japanese could, to be sure, ‘modernize’ their economy, society, and culture, but modernization did not seem to them to be synonymous

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with globalization. But if the West was fast globalizing itself, and if Japan could only modernize without globalization, how could this be carried out? The answer, the Japanese came to believe, lay in regionalization, that is, to seek to modernize their country by focusing on expanding into nearby countries. To be sure, Japan’s trade in the first decades of the twentieth century was as oriented toward the United States and Europe as toward East and Southeast Asia (see Saaler and Szpilman 2011 and Chapter 3 in this volume). But the nation was a net importer of goods and of capital, and it was only after the Great War that had devastated the European countries that Japan was able to capture some of their markets in Asia. However, during the Depression in the 1930s, as one Western country after another erected high tariff walls, Japan followed their example and sought to define an Asian economic sphere under its control. This was called the Great East Asia CoProsperity Sphere, reflecting the idea that Japan would seek to foster the prosperity of its Asian neighbours through close economic relations. Regional schemes were in fact a global phenomenon during the 1930s. In Europe, Germany and Austria, which was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, established a trade bloc, and Great Britain organized a Commonwealth to integrate the economic affairs of the British Isles, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The fact remains, however, that Japan never developed as a global economic power at that time. That is hardly surprising because no other country was truly global. That would come only after the disasters of the Second World War. If Japanese economic affairs were hardly global during the first decades of the century, neither were its cultural activities, except insofar as they were increasingly Westernized, which appeared to be the shortcut to becoming ‘civilized’. Civilization was frequently contrasted to tradition, both being put in the framework of modernization. To be civilized was to be modernized, which was defined as being Westernized. Traditional Japanese culture was frequently juxtaposed to modernization, and it was often argued that Japan combined modern Western civilization and traditional culture. That, it was said, made the country unique. It chose to transform itself but also retained its traditional customs, ideas, and human relationships. Such a focus on national identity meant the Japanese were little interested in globalizing its culture. They would proudly show their traditional art, architecture, clothes, food, and other items that were not abandoned in the process of national transformation, but they did not put these items in the context of globalization. Within its colonial empire, to be sure, Japan introduced its language, religion, and ways of life to the indigenous population, but these endeavours were not understood as a prelude to a more ambitious project of globalization. Thus neither did Japanese imperialism nor its nationalism produce a global Japan. Globalization was something beyond the vision of the Japanese people. This may be one important difference between Japanese on one hand and Europeans and Americans on the other. These latter instinctively linked their existence and their fate to the wider world. Even their imperialism was put in the same framework of thought. Not so, however, in the Japanese case.

Regional and universal visions The conflict between Japan and the United States during the 1930s may be understood in such a context. Japan’s territorial imperialism with a geographic focus collided with U.S. visions of world order.To be sure, the United States, too, aspired to being a regional hegemon. Going back to the Monroe Doctrine of the 1820s but more urgently in the circumstances of the global economic crisis, Washington viewed its national and regional interests in the framework of global affairs. Even during the Depression years, U.S. officials continued to tie their country’s ideas

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and interests to worldwide development. Thus, although the nation’s powerful presence in the Western Hemisphere would not be compromised, this was almost always put in the context of its global interests and visions. The Japanese-American crisis that led to the war that started with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 may be understood as a conflict not just of separate national interests but also of visions pitting regionalism against globalism. Japan’s territorial and commercial imperialism was buttressed by a particularistic vision, Pan-Asianism, in the name of which the nation sought to establish control over the neighbouring countries. The colonies of Korea and Taiwan, the occupied parts of Manchuria and China proper, and the European colonies and dependencies in South and Southeast Asia were all put together in Japanese strategy and conceptualization, ultimately leading to the slogan, ‘the new order in East Asia’, and the scheme for establishing a ‘Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’. The United States, on its part, countered Japanese propaganda with the espousal of universalistic principles as enunciated in the Atlantic Charter, the document the American and the British governments published in the wake of the conference between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill off the coast of Nova Scotia.1 The principles to which they pledged their countries’ commitment included national sovereignty, an open world market, and all countries’ equal access to natural resources. In such a framework, Japanese aggression against, and control over, China was clearly in violation of what the United States and its would-be allies stood for. With the United States steadily augmenting its military and economic support of China in the last years of the 1930s, war became increasingly likely, and in the end inevitable, between Japan and the United States. Even today, more than three-fourths of a century after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese government has not formally apologized for its ‘sneak attack’. Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, who visited Pearl Harbor in December 2016, did not apologize, but merely offered ‘condolences’ (The Japan Times, 29 December 2016). Neither do the majority of the people of Japan seem to understand the historical background of the war between the two Pacific countries. Unlike Germany and France, or Germany and Poland, no formal steps have been taken by the governments in Tokyo and Washington to confront and, what would be even more important, to share the past. With the wartime generation in the two countries – roughly, those born in the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s – rapidly disappearing from the world, it would seem particularly important for those in their eighties and nineties to examine the past and to pass on what they have learned to the younger generation. There is such a thing as generational history, that is, the history of a particular generation worldwide that is shared across boundaries. It would seem that the 1930s are a particularly live epoch for such sharing. Europeans do so to a far greater extent than Asians. Even today, it cannot be said that Japanese and Koreans, or Japanese and Chinese, ‘share’ the history of that decade, or for that matter of any other period. Japanese and Americans have not done much better, although in so many other respects they have developed some sense of identity derived from their personal encounters that began to take place almost as soon as the war was over. When U.S. troops occupied defeated Japan, American soldiers and the occupied Japanese got along remarkably well. They did so long before the Cold War in Asia brought the two nations into a geopolitical union.

Postwar globalization Indeed, the key to postwar Japanese-American relations lies not in their geopolitical partnership but in their cross-border connections, economically, socially, and culturally. Because the

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United States had historically, and even during the 1930s, defined itself in a global framework, what brought about the two countries’ close ties must be attributed to a great extent to Japan’s postwar transformation. To put it simply, Japan redefined itself after the war as a global, and globalizing, nation, and in so doing it came to approximate the tasks that the United States had traditionally assigned itself. To begin with, Japan’s territorial imperialism ended with its defeat in the war, and since 1945 it has not undertaken any territorial acquisition by military force. On the other hand, its economic expansion developed far more globally than ever. By the mid-1950s its trade had recovered the level achieved before the war, and during the ‘economic miracle’ of the subsequent decades its trade penetrated all corners of the earth. Japan’s total exports, which rarely exceeded US$4 billion before 1960, reached US$20 billion by the end of the early 1970s and almost US$300 billion by 1990. And Japanese trade became even more globally oriented after the war. It is estimated that in 1900 some 45 per cent of Japanese exports went to other Asian countries, 30 per cent to North America, and 22 per cent to Europe. In 1990, the comparative figures were approximately 34, 33, and 22 per cent. Asia’s share in Japanese export trade declined significantly, and some of the loss was attributable to the growth of the market in Central and South America, Africa, and Oceania. Here again, one sees the steady globalization of Japanese commercial affairs. How about cultural globalization? It would be difficult to give a precise measurement, but certain statistical and other data give us an indication that in cultural affairs, too, the nation was becoming more globally oriented. For one thing, more people were being educated than ever. In 1940 Japan had approximately 26,000 grade schools, close to 1,700 middle schools (including 1,066 for girls), 32 high schools, and 47 universities. By 1990 the respective numbers stood at 25,000, 11,000, 5,000, and 1,100. The phenomenal growth in the number of universities is attributable to the postwar educational reforms that established many new colleges and junior colleges and would not necessarily imply that the Japanese were now better educated. Nevertheless, there seems to be little doubt that there was virtually universal literacy in the country and that they were being taught about world history and geography to a far greater extent than before. Postwar school textbooks were far more globally oriented than before, and the students were encouraged to visit other countries and to interact with international visitors. In short, Japan has benefited from globalization. Although initially, from the late nineteenth century on, it undertook economic and cultural developments in its own interest, pursuing its wealth and power, in the second half of the twentieth century it was ready to act as a promoter as well as a beneficiary of globalization. And it seems doubtful whether the nation could continue to remain a viable entity without linking itself even more closely to the globalizing world. That is the direction China also seems to be moving. And there is no question that the two countries can develop globally together. Unlike earlier periods where the ‘zero-sum game’ of competing for limited resources and markets was played among richer and more powerful countries, in a globalizing world, all can be beneficiaries. They will, of course, have to cooperate together to safeguard the natural environment, save resources, and promote freedom and human rights, but how can they do so when they are engaging themselves in nation-centric pursuits? Ultimately, humanity on the whole, not just separate states, will need to work together in pursuit of their common interest and shared visions. That, after all, is what Japan may contribute to the world. For far too long, it has defined and followed its narrowly defined national interests. But the time has come for the Japanese – as well as the Americans, Chinese, and all willing neighbours – to learn to think and behave as global citizens.When that happens, it will truly be possible to say that Japan has become a global nation.

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Note 1 See “Atlantic Charter,” http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp.

Further reading Iriye, Akira (1965) After Imperialism:The Search for a New Order in the Far East, 1921–1931, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. _____ (1972) Pacific Estrangement: Japanese and American Expansion, 1897–1911, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. _____ (1981) Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941–1945, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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2 Alliances and enmities Relations with Great Britain and Europe Antony Best

Japan and Europe are located at opposite ends of the Eurasian landmass separated by thousands of miles. For much of their history this has meant that they have had little, if any, interaction, be it strategic, political, economic or cultural. In the modern age, however, with distance rendered less of an obstacle due to advances in shipping, railways and communications, Japan increasingly found itself forced to interact with Europe. Indeed, it could be argued that in the first half of Japan’s 150-year-old relationship with Western modernity, its interaction with Europe was as, if not more, important than its ties with the United States. It is only the American predominance after 1945 that has obscured this fact. Europe’s significance for Japan related to many facets. For those concerned with Japanese domestic history, the Europeans were, of course, a great influence on the development of science, technology and economic innovation. In politics, it was Europe that was the fount of modern political thought and the inspiration behind the development of constitutional government. From the perspective of modernization, Europe might then be interpreted as a positive influence, but it is also important to acknowledge that in the era of the treaty-port system, the European Great Powers were the major obstacle to Japan’s bid for equality. Moreover, the creation in the late nineteenth century of a global balance of power centred on the European empires meant that from then on Japan’s fate came to be dangerously intermingled with the fortunes of the troubled continent at the other end of the world. So intense was this interaction that, on a number of occasions, alliances were concluded between the Japanese empire and one or more European states. It was only when this link led to the destruction of both Japan and its ally, Germany, at the end of the Second World War that this cycle came to an end, for this conflictravaged Europe, leading to a relative decline in both its global power and intellectual influence.

Early contacts Initially Japan’s contact with Europe came in the form of a brief period beginning in the sixteenth century when Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and British ships entered Japanese waters, bringing with them firearms, Christianity and their own political and religious rivalries. In 1639 this era came to an end with the Tokugawa shogunate’s adoption of the policy of kaikin (isolation)1 – its sole window on the Western world being the Dutch trading post at Dejima 13

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in Nagasaki. Japan was, though, unable to make its isolation permanent. In the mid-nineteenth century under pressure from the United States, Japan was forced to agree to the establishment of a system of unequal treaties based on the model that the European powers had developed to regulate their relations with what they perceived as the less ‘civilized’ non-European states. Moreover, under the rubric of most-favoured nation status, Japan soon found itself having to open relations with an array of European countries, including the Great Powers of Britain, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Prussia (Germany from 1871). In the first period of Japan’s modern interaction with Europe between 1858 and 1894, its relations with the European states centred upon its single most important foreign policy issue, namely the desire to free itself from the unequal treaties. Both in terms of domestic legitimacy and in fuelling reform (through the introduction of higher tariffs), it was vital for the Japanese government to revise the treaties, but this did not prove an easy task. Although the United States had imposed this system on the Tokugawa regime, the most important arbiter of the workings of this relationship was Great Britain, which had the largest Western presence in the treaty ports in East Asia and the greatest ability to project its power into Japanese waters. As Japan pushed for revision, it met with significant obstruction from Britain, which was only willing to accept the abolition of its extraterritorial rights if the Japanese government introduced satisfactory judicial reforms. Moreover, the other European powers generally followed Britain’s lead (Perez 1998: 71–86 and Auslin 2004: 176–200; see also Chapter 4 in this volume). Naturally this led to tension at the diplomatic level, but the Japanese-European relationship was far from being entirely negative, for these years saw a great deal of educational, scientific and cultural interaction with both public employees and private individuals travelling in both directions. Most noticeably, Europeans were a large majority of the oyatoi (hired experts) who were employed to advise Japanese institutions on how to modernize. As such, it was their expertise on technology and organization that, ironically, helped to provide Japan with the means to successfully challenge the unequal treaties. It is also important to note that Japan’s need to regain its sovereignty did not just lead to domestic reform, but also to profound changes in the way it interacted diplomatically with the West. In contrast to China and Korea, Japan was much quicker to adopt what was essentially European diplomatic practice by opening legations overseas, adapting itself to the ceremonial aspects of diplomacy (including accepting a new, more integrated role for women in high society), and, most notably, attempting to enter into communication with the monarchical courts of Europe. All of this was part of its broader effort to cultivate an image of itself as a civilized polity (Best 2008: 239–44). By the mid-1880s the modernization that had taken place under the auspices of the new government had developed to the extent that talks about treaty revision could begin to make progress. However, a solution was only reached in July 1894 when secret negotiations in London led to the conclusion of a new Anglo-Japanese commercial treaty. This settlement provided the model for bilateral agreements with the other treaty powers with the result that in 1899 Japan regained control of its judicial sovereignty and tariff autonomy (Perez 1998: 154–75).

Japan’s rise On the face of it, the termination of the unequal treaties should have freed Japan from Europe’s grasp and allowed it to till its own path as an independent and equal member of international society. This, though, was not to be the case. The major reason for this was that, whereas in the mid-nineteenth century Great Britain had clearly been the dominant strategic and commercial presence in East Asia and had been able to shape Western interaction with Asia in its own image, 14

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by the 1880s its hegemony was being eroded. The challenge to British authority came in the form of the creation of a new global balance of power in which countries such as France, Russia and Germany were increasingly able to exert influence in areas of the world that had previously been British backwaters. In the case of East Asia this became apparent with the French seizure of Tonkin, the increasing Russian presence in the Maritime Province (Primorsky Krai) centred upon Vladivostok, and the new German interest in acquiring colonies in the Pacific. For Japan, this fresh desire for European imperial expansion in the region was a troubling development. At one level, Japan was concerned that in their attempt to outflank one another, the European powers might advance into areas of strategic sensitivity for Japan, such as Korea. Even more disturbing, though, was the prospect that a European war might break out in East Asia, forcing Japan to take sides when it was still a strategic makeweight that could not influence the outcome of any such conflict. The logical result of these concerns was that Japan became increasingly concerned about Korea where it feared that the tardiness of the regime of King Gojong (Kojong, 1852–1919), in introducing substantial reforms, might tempt Russian intervention. Here lay at least one of the motives behind the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, in which Japan defeated China thus ending the latter’s suzerainty over Korea (Duus 1995: 66–73). However, if Japan’s aim in going to war in 1894 was to improve its security, it was to be gravely disappointed, for the conflict ended as a pyrrhic victory. This came about because at its moment of triumph in April 1895 Japan discovered that its intention to take possession of the Liaodong peninsula in south Manchuria was unacceptable to a powerful coalition of European states comprising Russia, Germany and France (Otte 2007). This ‘Triple Intervention’, as it is commonly known, was a significant moment in Japan’s history, for it revealed that although the country had been able to free itself from the shackles of the treaty-port system, it was still not able to compete militarily with the Europeans. The obvious corollary of this episode was that Japan needed to strengthen itself even further by expanding its armed forces, stimulating heavy industry in order to provide itself with munitions and warships, and seeking an ally so that it would be able to overcome any future European opposition. The necessity for Japan to break free from its relative diplomatic isolation was underlined in the years down to 1901 as the Russian stake in northeast Asia grew alarmingly. During this period Russia, through a series of diplomatic and military moves, was able to gain paramount influence over Manchuria, including control over the Liaodong peninsula, the very area that it had denied to Japan in 1895. Moreover, Japan discovered that it had squeezed Chinese power out of Korea only for Gojong to turn to the Russians as a means of balancing the Japanese (Duus 1995: 118–23). For some in Japan, the debacle of the ‘Triple Intervention’ and the rise of European racial hostility toward the Japanese, as personified by the rise of ‘yellow peril’ rhetoric, led to an intellectual rejection of the West as the model to which their country should aspire. Thus figures such as the Pan-Asianists Konoe Atsumaro (1863–1904) and Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913) were drawn toward the idea of creating closer ties with Asia, whereas conservatives including Tokutomi Sohō (1863–1957) espoused an avowedly nationalist and expansionist line. The government recognized, however, that it could not go to these extremes. Asia was too fragile and divided to be relied upon; only Europeans could defend Japan from Europe (Saaler 2007a: 4–5; see also Chapter 3 in this volume). Fortunately for Japan, its deteriorating strategic position in the region was paralleled by the threat that Russian expansion posed to the British presence in East Asia. As it became clear in 1901 that no compromise could be reached with the Russians, the British government’s initial instinct was to align itself with Germany in order to force Russia to back down. However, the complexity of European rivalries meant that this was not a practical option, for the Germans 15

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would only agree to such an arrangement if it applied to Europe as well as East Asia, thus forcing Britain to commit itself to the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. Jealous of its freedom of action, Britain was not willing to pay such a heavy price. Accordingly, the British gaze started to turn instead to Japan as a potential partner in containing the Russian menace. This led to the beginning of secret bilateral talks in the autumn of 1901 and then the stunning announcement in February 1902 that the world’s greatest power, Britain, had signed an alliance with an Asian country, Japan, that had only ended a policy of isolation fifty years earlier (Nish 1966: 124–228). The Anglo-Japanese Alliance2 stated that each signatory would remain neutral if either became involved in a war in East Asia with one other state. If, however, either signatory should find itself in a conflict with two or more states, then the other ally would come to its aid. These terms were clearly directed against Russia and were aimed at ensuring that should a Russo-Japanese war erupt, Russia’s ally, France, would remain neutral. On the face of it that might suggest that Britain wished to see a Russo-Japanese conflict, but in reality the treaty’s primary aim was to persuade Russia to retreat before it was too late (Nish 1966: 229–44 and Best 2006: 172–5). It is easy to present Britain’s newfound interest in Japan as evidence that it saw the latter as a strong and valuable bulwark against Russia and that this clearly demonstrates the progress that had been made during the Meiji period (1868–1912). To a considerable degree this is true; the Royal Navy did have a good opinion of its Japanese counterpart, and Japan had been praised in 1900–01 for the help it had provided during the Boxer Rebellion, when the Chinese had placed the foreign legations in Beijing under siege. At the same time, though, Britain did not just commit itself to Japan out of enthusiasm for the latter’s achievements. There was a fear within Whitehall that the ‘Asian-tempered’ Japanese, might, if they remained entirely independent, enter precipitously into a conflict with Russia and that Britain would then be forced to come to its aid in order to repair the regional balance of power. Alternatively, and just as dangerous, was the possibility that Japan might cut an unsatisfactory deal with the tsar’s government. An alliance was therefore valuable because Japan could be dissuaded from engaging in either extreme. In other words, Britain did not see Japan as its equal in this alliance relationship; it was partly predicated on the Japanese being Asians and therefore unpredictable. Moreover, it should not be assumed that there was a consensus in Britain in favour of the alliance, for it had its critics among politicians and the media (Best 2006: 172–4). Within Japan itself the alliance also occasioned debate. There were some within the Meiji leadership, most notably the elder statesman (genrō) Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909), who believed that signing a military pact was a dangerous risk and preferred instead the less contentious option of coming to terms with Russia. The problem, though, for Itō was that the tsarist regime was unwilling to compromise and thus inadvertently pushed Japan into Britain’s arms (Nish 1966: 185–92). In addition, though, it needs to be remembered that a close connection with Britain had advantages other than the purely strategic one that Russia might retreat in the face of Anglo-Japanese combination. One of the most significant was that it raised the prospect of the Japanese state gaining better access to the money markets of the City of London. With Japan’s need for modernization now outstripping both its revenue stream and the domestic market for government bonds, the ability to raise foreign loans at reasonable rates of interest was becoming a pressing concern (Nish 1966: 254–5). Initially the Anglo-Japanese alliance achieved its primary aim in that it forced Russia to begin to retreat from southern Manchuria. Unfortunately, though, divisions within the tsarist court meant that this new policy was abandoned in early 1903 and Russia appeared poised to renew its advance. Japan tried again to offer a compromise to the Russian court, but these overtures were rejected. Accordingly, with the terms of the alliance with Britain providing the framework 16

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for a purely bilateral conflict with Russia rather than a repeat of the 1895 European coalition, the government of General Katsura Tarō (1847–1913) in February 1904 opted for war (Nish 1985: 179–221; on Katsura, see also Lone 2000). There is no doubt that Japan was taking a huge risk in declaring war, and it is not surprising that many contemporaries believed that it was heading for defeat. Making matters even worse was that initially there was an outpouring of sympathy for Russia within continental Europe and talk of the need to meet the challenge posed by the ‘yellow peril’. Japan, however, was sensitive to the prospect of a war of words and carefully presented itself to the Western media as a civilized country that believed in equality of commercial opportunity, as epitomized by the concept of an ‘open door’ for trade in China, compared to the selfish, mercantilist Russians (Valliant 1974: 415–38). The alliance helped Japan to make its case, for many in the British press, including its most influential voice, The Times, repeated and affirmed the Japanese case. Despite the fact that the British state remained strictly neutral, it did provide assistance to Japan in a number of ways. Most noticeably, the rigidity with which it exercised its neutrality provided a brake on those other powers that sought a rapid peace by making it clear that the British government was not prepared to exert the slightest pressure on Japan. In addition, the alliance proved invaluable because it smoothed Japan’s path in the raising of loans in London and New York, and without those funds the war could not have been fought to a successful conclusion (Metzler 2006: 45–50). The weaknesses that had forced Japan to retreat in 1895 – isolation and a relative lack of financial and military strength – had thus been successfully overcome, both through its own efforts at home and its ability to integrate itself into the European international system.

Japan as a first-rate power Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905 led to both a material and symbolic transformation of its fortunes. Having defeated the Russian army on land and defeated its navy at sea in the battle of Tsushima, Japan was now clearly the strongest single power in East Asia. For some Japanese and for a number of nationalists in Asia, this indicated that it was time for Japan to aspire to a leadership role for itself. Japan’s statesmen, however, put greater emphasis on sealing the country’s security through closer ties with Europe. This policy led between 1905 and 1907 to the negotiation of a series of treaties with European states that appeared to seal Japan’s entry into the Great Power pantheon. In August 1905, Great Britain and Japan signed a new alliance whose terms now committed the latter to the defence of India and which was designed to prevent any Russian war of revenge. This was then followed in 1907 by a Franco-Japanese pact to uphold the sovereignty of China and by a Russo-Japanese treaty that agreed on a modus vivendi in Manchuria (Nish 1966: 359–60). Meanwhile, in the ceremonial realm Japan was now formally recognized as a Great Power; its diplomatic representatives to the Great Powers were elevated to ambassadorial rank, and King Edward VII bestowed on its emperor Britain’s preeminent chivalric decoration, the Order of the Garter (Best 2006: 181). It appeared therefore that Japan had finally overcome the security dilemma that had shaped its foreign policy for the previous fifty years and had at last become an equal with the Europeans. Indeed, to an extent it could be argued that whereas Japan had previously been a pawn caught up in the storms of European rivalries, its newfound power meant that for the first time it was now able in a limited way to take advantage of Europe’s division for its own ends. This can be seen in terms of its policy toward China, and especially Manchuria, in the years between 1905 and 1914. Having evicted Russia from south Manchuria as a result of the war, Japan did not live up to its wartime rhetoric of honouring the ‘open door’, but instead sought to construct 17

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its own sphere of influence. This brought about a hail of criticism from British and American capitalists who wanted to invest in the expansion of Chinese railways in that region. However, Japan remained immune from this disquiet because by the late 1900s the Anglo-Japanese alliance had taken on a new importance for Britain. This arose because the strength of the Japanese fleet allowed the British Admiralty to redeploy its battleships from East Asian waters to the North Sea in order to ward off the growing German naval threat. The British government was therefore largely deaf to the outraged cries of its merchant community in China (Lowe 1969:18–23). A more significant sign of the shift that had taken place in favour of Japan emerged during the First World War.When that conflict became global with Britain’s entry in early August 1914, Japan’s statesmen quickly recognized that this maelstrom provided a golden opportunity for their country to expand its influence in China at Europe’s expense. Accordingly, as Britain’s ally, Japan entered the conflict and took the lead in seizing the German concession at Qingdao (Tsingtao) in China and its island possessions north of the equator in the western Pacific. Then, with European attention focused on the war, in January 1915 it presented the Chinese government of Yuan Shi-kai (1859–1916) with the infamous ‘Twenty-One Demands’ that threatened to turn China into a Japanese protectorate. In other words, Japan showed that it had fully imbibed the imperialist ideology that had once brought the Europeans to its shores and was now prepared to use it to undermine European influence (Naraoka 2015: 36–51). Believing that realpolitik underpinned the European international order, it saw nothing wrong or controversial in this approach. Japan’s propensity for acting in this matter had, though, one significant flaw: it underestimated the degree to which the Anglo-Saxon world was willing to accept this development.The timorous British response to Japan’s activities both before and during the First World War was conditional on the Japanese being useful contributors to the containment of first Russian and then German ambitions. However, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and Imperial Germany’s collapse in 1918 meant that these threats now evaporated. Indeed, by 1919 Britain no longer faced a challenge to its position in East Asia from any of its European rivals, thus reversing the strategic tendency of the past forty years. Moreover, whereas Japan felt endangered by the rise of American power, Britain did not share this sentiment. It is true that the United States was emerging as a serious commercial and naval rival to British power and that there were elements in both countries who looked upon the other as a dangerous, unprincipled rival. This, though, was not a majority view, for ties of kinship, culture and ideological outlook meant that many within the two countries saw each other as potential partners. Indeed, from the dawn of the twentieth century a section of the British elite had been increasingly drawn toward thinking about a new global alignment that might provide both material and ideological stability, namely the creation of an Anglo-Saxon world order in league with the United States. Moreover, in regard to East Asia itself, Britain and the United States were drawn together by their ideological commitment to upholding the ‘open door’ in China; in other words, they shared values that ran directly counter to the spirit of the ‘Twenty-One Demands’. Indeed, the recognition that these principles could lead to conflict had already led Britain in 1911 to introduce a new clause in the second renegotiation of the alliance that inhibited the treaty from being invoked in the case of an American-Japanese war (Lowe 1969: 33–57). The situation therefore by the end of the First World War was that the alliance had lost its original meaning. If it now had any purpose at all for the British, it was ironically to contain Japan, whereas for the Japanese themselves it was clearly of little utility against the United States. Moreover, it had come to be an anachronistic institution in a world that was now being shaped by new approaches to international relations, such as the foundation of the League of Nations 18

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and the hope that the future would see a move toward arms limitation. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that at a conference held in Washington in 1921–22 to discuss East Asian politics and naval arms limitation, the Anglo-Japanese alliance was replaced by a new fourpower pact of Britain, Japan, the United States and France which contained no military clauses. In addition, this gathering saw the signing of a nine-power treaty to honour the ‘open door’ in China and a five-power treaty that introduced the principle of naval arms limitation. It should be stressed that Japan did not enter into these agreements entirely reluctantly. A significant element within the Japanese elite was aware of the growing importance of relations with the United States and recognized that the new internationalist mood within the world constituted a fresh paradigm from which Japan could benefit (Nish 1972: 381–2 and Burkman 2008: 43–59). Again, as at the time when the alliance had been originally signed, financial necessity played a role in this foreign-policy orientation. The simple fact of the matter was that Japan required continued access to foreign capital to finance its modernization. The significance of this factor was made abundantly clear in 1923–24 when Japan was required to turn once again to London and New York to fund reconstruction following the Yokohama earthquake (Metzler 2006: 145–153).

Realignment of Japan’s foreign policy: from the 1920s to the 1930s Based on the hope that a new stable international order had emerged from the debris of the Great War, Anglo-Japanese relations remained reasonably close in the 1920s. Despite the formal end of the alliance, there was much rhetoric in both countries about its ‘spirit’ living on, and this was epitomized in symbolic terms by the high number of reciprocal visits made by royal princes during the years down to 1930. Beneath the surface there were, though, indications that profound differences of opinion in regard to China still existed. When the Guomindang (Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party) seized power in China between 1926 and 1928, the government in London concluded that it needed to come to terms with the new Chinese regime in the long-term interests of British trade, even if this meant a gradual dismantling of the treaty-port system. Although some in Japan came to the same conclusion, the majority was more reluctant to move in this direction because the inevitable consequence would be a Chinese challenge to its predominance in south Manchuria, a region that had become an essential economic and strategic adjunct to the Japanese Empire (Iriye 1965: 160–91). On top of this newly troubling situation, Japan at the start of the 1930s also faced other challenges to its stability and security that would lead to a parting of the ways with Britain. The most obvious of these was the arrival of the global Great Depression. At home this led to mass unemployment and a drop of living standards which, in turn, sparked a political backlash that led within two years to the end of party government. Abroad, its effects were to undermine the foundations of the new international order that had been established at Washington, as the United States and the European empires, including Britain, now sought to defend their own industries through higher tariffs and the introduction of trade quotas. This tilt toward protectionism threatened Japanese interests, for having relatively few essential raw materials within its home islands and colonial possessions, Japan needed to trade to survive. In response, Japan was forced to act unilaterally in two significant ways. First of all, in order to make its goods competitive and thus preserve its overseas earnings, in late 1931 Japan devalued the yen. In the short term this had the desired effect of stimulating foreign sales of its goods, in particular cotton textiles, but it also helped to stimulate a dangerous spiral of trade competition that embittered its relations with many of the other advanced economies, including Britain. Within the West the perception that the Japanese were involved 19

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in unfair trade practices even had the effect of reviving discourse about the ‘yellow peril’ (Best 2002: 77–101). The second effect of the Depression on Japanese foreign policy was that it reinforced the interest within significant elements of the army and the bureaucracy in the acquisition of an autarkic empire. The first manifestation of this desire came in Manchuria in September 1931 when the locally based Japanese force, the Kwantung Army, began a campaign to bring the whole area under Japan’s control. The Chinese response to this Manchurian crisis was to appeal to the League of Nations for help. In doing so, China pitted Japan against the most important of the new postwar institutions and one that was seen as being a lynchpin to continuing peace in Europe. The effect was, not surprisingly, to lead to an increasing divide between Japan and the status quo powers in Europe, for the Japanese refusal to abide by the League’s resolutions undermined that institution’s authority. In the case of Britain, many within the National Government that was formed in 1931 had sympathy with Japan and thought it would bring much-needed stability to Manchuria and act as a useful buffer against any revival of Russian power. However, the transcendent need to demonstrate Britain’s allegiance to the League meant that when in February 1933 a vote was taken in Geneva to accept a report critical of Japan’s activities, the British delegation voted for its adoption and pledged not to recognize the puppet state of Manchukuo (Thorne 1972: 353–67). The League’s disapproval of Japanese actions in Manchuria led in March 1933 to Japan’s leaving the organization. With this move, it signalled that it would no longer adhere to the tenets of internationalism that underpinned the postwar order. It did not, though, mark a complete break with the status quo powers, for Japan’s diplomats were convinced that, in reality, the world still moved to the logic of realpolitik (Nish 2000: 275–6). Accordingly, it was believed that, in time, Britain would come to terms with Japan’s expansion. This was particularly the case, because a new strategic rivalry was developing in East Asia in the early 1930s between Japan and the Soviet Union. Convinced of the need to launch a pre-emptive strike against the Russians in order to ward off any expansion of Soviet influence in northeast Asia, the Japanese elite believed that the British government held similar anti-Bolshevik sentiments and would be prepared to accept Japan’s political predominance in East Asia as long as there was still room for British trade and investment (Shigemitsu 1978: 203–5).The conditions thus existed for some kind of loose revival of the alliance. Those on the right in Britain were undoubtedly sympathetic to this way of thinking, and the case for a rapprochement was made even stronger by the fact that Britain could not afford to rearm against Germany and Japan simultaneously. However, despite the fact that some in Whitehall talked of the need to appease the Japanese, it was clear to the Foreign Office that any such move potentially involved serious disadvantages, such as alienating American opinion, potentially provoking a Chinese boycott of British goods and sparking domestic political discord. In regard to the latter, it is important not to overlook the damage that trade competition and the use of bombing against Chinese residential areas had done to Japan’s international image. Thus, despite a few awkward and rather vague overtures between 1933 and 1937, there was no revival in Anglo-Japanese relations, despite Britain’s deteriorating strategic position. Moreover, when a new Sino-Japanese war broke out in July 1937, British public opinion was quick to blame this conflict on Japanese aggression, and in some quarters there were calls for the introduction of economic sanctions. Faced with concern about the revival of Soviet power and with both Britain and the United States disapproving of its actions in China, Japan decided to try to improve its strategic position by renewing a direct strategic tie with Europe, but this time in a previously untried direction, namely by aligning itself with the continent’s revisionist states – Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. 20

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The logic behind this move was that Japan could, through this arrangement, make it clear to its potential enemies that it was prepared to take advantage of European entanglements for its own benefit; they would therefore be best advised not to interfere with Japan’s ambitions.This process began in November 1936 with the signature of the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact, which was a loose consultative treaty. One year later, Italy also acceded (Ōhata 1976: 23–47). Japanese ties with the Axis were not, though, limited to the realm of grand strategy. Within Japan there had long been among both bureaucrats and intellectuals a strong sympathy for Germany. Indeed for the Japanese army, its German counterpart had since the early Meiji period been its model, in contrast to the navy’s ties with Britain (Spang and Wippich 2006). In addition, European fascism also provided an ideological inspiration for Japan’s attempts to develop into a modern autarkic defence state.This was particularly evident in regard to its attempts to construct a corporatist economy. Japan may never have been fully fascist, but its influence was pervasive (Reynolds 2004). Thus, in more ways than one, the fortunes of Europe and East Asia were tied together once again. Japan’s attempt to gain strategic advantage by linking itself to Europe did not prove particularly fruitful for the first two years of the Sino-Japanese War. Indeed, in August 1939 Germany showed itself to be an unreliable partner by signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviet Union (Ōhata 1976: 110–1). However, this relationship began to make more sense from the summer of 1940. With Germany launching its successful campaign against France in May and Italy entering the war one month later, it appeared that the time had finally come to bring the ties with the Axis to maturity and to reap the harvest from European misfortunes, just as Japan had attempted to do during the First World War. In September 1940 the Tripartite Pact was signed in Berlin.3 This treaty existed not merely to put pressure on Britain, but also, and more importantly from Japan’s perspective, was a means of using the European card against its most dangerous potential foe, the United States. Briefly stated, the aim was to ward off American intervention in the Pacific by threatening it with the prospect of a second front breaking out simultaneously in the Atlantic. The unfortunate reality was that Japan’s linking of its own fortunes to political developments in Europe was a fatal miscalculation. By allying with Germany and Italy, Japan became, in the eyes of Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, an essential player in what was developing into a global confrontation between democracy and fascism. It therefore logically followed that it had to be neutralized as a potential threat, and this meant, in turn, that from the autumn of 1940 Japan was subjected to an increasingly severe sanctions regime. By July 1941 this involved the freezing of its financial assets in the United States and Britain and the introduction of a boycott on sales of oil (Heinrichs 1988: 118–45). Thus, far from reaping the rewards of its ties to the Axis, Japan was being pushed into a corner and threatened with the loss of all of its territorial gains from 1931. In an attempt to extricate itself from this situation, Japan offered some limited concessions. Moreover, in its talks in Washington with the United States it presented itself as still a free agent in international affairs, but the insights that signals intelligence gave the State Department into Japanese diplomacy belied these protestations. With the United States unwilling to compromise and Britain convinced that its security was best guaranteed by a strong Anglo-American coalition, Japan could only break free from the sanctions stranglehold by going to war. It took this fateful step in December 1941. The common perception of this war is that it was primarily an American-Japanese conflict, and this image is, of course, strongly linked to the way in which the conflagration began with Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. It is important, though, to note that the latter operation was a late addition to Japan’s war plan. The real object of its initial campaign was to attack the European colonies in Southeast Asia in order to seize control of their resources. Moreover, 21

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this military aspect of the war was paralleled by developments in propaganda where Pan-Asian rhetoric finally took centre stage both at home and abroad. The conflict thus marked the highpoint of Japan’s rejection of European liberal-democratic values (Saaler 2007a: 12–4).

Japan in the Cold War order The war that Japan entered in 1941 led to disaster. In August 1945, it was forced to surrender after the dropping of two American atomic bombs on its soil and a Soviet invasion of Manchuria. It was not, though, just Japan that was left devastated by the conflict. At the other end of Eurasia, Europe, too, was in ruins. The Second World War marked the start of a permanent relative decline in Europe’s ability to shape world affairs, and from the start of the postwar era this was particularly apparent in East Asia where the European colonial presence had always been limited. Accordingly, it was left to the United States to dominate the Allied occupation of Japan and to shape the future of that country through its sponsorship of reform. This relationship was, of course, sealed by the conclusion in 1951 of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which committed Japan to the American side in the Cold War. Japan’s politicians were, though, uncomfortable with the idea of Japanese foreign policy being permanently constrained by an American straitjacket which was in some areas clearly disadvantageous. For example, the link with the United States placed strict limits on Japan’s trade with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The result was that a number of Japanese prime ministers were interested during the Cold War era in providing Japan with greater diplomatic flexibility by reaching out to the countries of Western Europe. This was done in the hope that collaborating with the Western European states would help to ease controls on trade with the PRC and assist with gaining Japanese entry into the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Developing this second arm to Japanese diplomacy was, however, easier said than done because the Western European states were hesitant about reciprocating Japan’s interest. One reason for this was that the Pacific War had cast a dark shadow over European perceptions of Japan due to the cruelty with which British and Dutch prisoners of war had been treated by the Japanese army. This meant that politicians in Western Europe were reluctant to be seen as friendly toward Japan. In this context, it is noticeable that the visit that Emperor Hirohito made to the region in 1971 was punctuated by public protests and that it was not until 1972 that a British prime minister, Edward Heath, visited Japan. Another problem that bedevilled relations was European resentment of the challenges posed by Japanese exports. In part, this was a legacy of the economic competition of the 1930s, but it also reflected more contemporary concerns. The scale of the issue became evident for the first time in 1955 when most Western European countries reacted to the American-sponsored Japanese entry into the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) by invoking Article 35 of that treaty, thus denying Japan most-favoured nation status. This stance was only reversed in 1963. Japan’s significance in Western European eyes was also undermined, at least until the 1970s, by its disinclination to rearm.This led to the belief that Japan was not an important player in the Cold War alliance against the Soviet Union and that its foreign policy was primarily defined by a selfish obsession with trade. It was this that added credibility to the story that the French President Charles de Gaulle had referred dismissively to Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato (1899–1965) as no more than a ‘transistor radio salesman’ (Tadokoro 2011: 86–8). The need to engage with Japan became steadily more evident as its economy boomed, but it was the problems that struck the world economy in the early 1970s that finally forced the Europe–Japan axis to be strengthened. This process began with the American decision in 1971 22

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to end dollar convertibility and was then reinforced by the oil shock of 1973 and the accompanying Third World challenge to the terms of North-South trade. These events forced the individual Western countries and the European Economic Community (EEC), which by 1973 was strengthened by British entry, to consider cooperation with Japan more seriously. More­ over, this process was encouraged by the United States, which was now coming to terms with the existence of a multipolar world. Thus when the Rambouillet or G5 summit took place in France in 1975 there was no question that Japan would not be present. It was, though, apparent into the 1980s that the Europe–Japan axis remained the weakest link in the triangular relationship between the United States, Japan and Western Europe. In part, this was because the EEC’s strength was always compromised by its need to create a consensus among its members, but it is also important to understand that resentment toward Japan’s trade surplus continued to run deep, particularly in France. Moreover, unlike in the American case, there was no strategic relationship with Japan that diverted political attention away from commercial friction. The only exception in Western Europe was Britain, which under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher actively sought to attract Japanese direct investment. Even in this relationship, however, the Japanese trade surplus and the obstacles placed in front of foreign investment in Japan caused a degree of resentment. It was only with the bursting of Japan’s ‘bubble economy’ around 1990 that the ill-will that continued to mar European-Japanese relations began to subside (Murata 2011: 163–4; Braddick 2000: 275–89).

Conclusion The relationship between Europe and Japan has therefore played an important role in the modern history of the latter country despite the great distances involved. For Japan, Europe began both as a threat and as a model for modernization. Initially, the threat was colonial in nature, but as Japan strengthened itself and became more concerned about regional rather than simply national security, the danger mutated to one of the Japanese having to navigate an international order shaped by intra-European rivalries. The degree to which this competition directly impinged on Japan was lessened after its victory over Russia in 1905. From this point on, Japan, as the strongest power in East Asia, attempted instead to take advantage of Europe’s disunity for its own purposes. It engaged in such a policy during the Great War and returned to the same calculation in the mid-1930s. The eclipse of European power in the wake of the Second World War dramatically changed the nature of Japanese-European interaction.The strategic element of the relationship dwindled away as the European empires retreated from Asia and they became once again territorially distant. Moreover, the fact that Japan took a low security posture in the Cold War meant that there were not even significant defence ties, despite their having a common foe in the form of the Soviet Union. Instead, Japanese-European relations were reduced to being centred on issues such as trade and governance of the world economy. Accordingly, distance began to exercise its influence both in a geographical and perceptual sense. It was now the United States rather than Europe that was the primary Western influence on Japan.

Notes 1 The term sakoku, prevalent at present to describe Japan’s policy of isolation between the seventeenth century and the opening of Japan in the middle of the nineteenth, was not in use when the Tokugawa shogunate imposed its control over foreign relations in the 1630s. It occured for the first time only in the early nineteenth century when Engelbert Kaempfer’s The History of Japan was translated into Japanese under the title Sakokuron (On Isolation). See Toby 1984: 12–3. 2 See ‘The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, January 30, 1902’, www.jacar.go.jp/nichiro/uk-japan.htm. 23

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3 See ‘Three-Power Pact Between Germany, Italy, and Japan, Signed at Berlin, September 27, 1940’, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/triparti.asp.

Further reading Frattolillo, Oliviero, and Best, Antony (eds) (2015) Japan and the Great War, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Nish, Ian (1966) The Anglo-Japanese Alliance:The Diplomacy of Two Island Empires, 1894–1907, London: Athlone Press. _____ (1972) Alliance in Decline: A Study in Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1908–23, London: Athlone Press. Saaler, Sven, and Szpilman, Christopher W. A. (eds) (2011) Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, 2 vols, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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3 Japan and Asia Christopher W. A. Szpilman and Sven Saaler

This chapter is a survey of Japan’s relations with other Asian nations. It focuses on the ideology and movement known as Pan-Asianism,1 which emphasized Asian solidarity and unity, from the early Meiji era (1868–1912) to the present day. Throughout its history, Pan-Asianism has assumed many forms. Embodying the ideal of cooperation among the nations of East Asia against the threat of Western imperialism and domination, the movement was egalitarian in theory.Whereas the Japanese government’s diplomatic efforts (see Chapter 2 in this volume) focused on establishing and maintaining friendly relations with the Western powers, Pan-Asianist writers and activists emphasized the need for closer relations with Japan’s Asian neighbours and, in some circumstances, a Pan-Asian alliance against the West. However, in many cases, this aim also implied Japanese claims to leadership in Asia. In the immediate postwar period, scholars avoided Pan-Asianism as a research subject because of its complex and ambiguous legacy; however, recent decades have seen much scholarly interest in the history of regionalism in East Asia, stimulated by the ongoing regional integration and its problems. The growing body of works on Pan-Asianism include studies by Koschmann (1997), Yamamuro (2001), Arrighi, Hamashita and Selden (2003), Matsuura (2010), Aydin (2007), Hotta (2007), Saaler and Koschmann (2007), and Saaler and Szpilman (2011). Detailed studies on the role of Pan-Asianism in Sino-Japanese relations are now also available (Saga 2016; Sun 2000). All these works, and many others, too numerous to list here, cumulatively contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of the region and of the issues related to national and transnational identities in modern East Asia.

Early Pan-Asianism: Japan and China One of the central questions to ask when thinking about regional integration, past and present, is whether it is intended to serve the interests of the leading state or nation involved, or whether it is envisaged that all nations in the region should share in its benefits. Few Pan-Asianists have given a clear answer to this question. In this sense, Pan-Asianism has always been a morally ambiguous ideology that was mobilized over time by different actors for different aims. The earliest works on Pan-Asianism, written in Japan during the Edo period (1603–1868), gave priority to Japan’s national interest. Many of these writings could be characterized as expressions 25

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of proto-imperialism. Satō Nobuhiro (1769–1850), Aizawa Seishisai (1782–1863), Hirano Kuniomi (1828–64) and other political commentators believed that Japan was a sacred country under the rule of the divine emperor (tennō), and thus took it for granted that it should be the leader of Asia. Nevertheless, arguments for regional cooperation were not limited to such visions of a bloc under Japanese control. Many Japanese writers acknowledged the central position of China, the ‘Middle Kingdom’, in the international order in East Asia. They knew very well that China was the dominant regional power and, for cultural and historical reasons, they had great respect for Chinese civilization and its power as a nation. Japan had been under Chinese influence for many centuries. It was not until the defeat of China in the Opium War (1839–42) and the mid-century Taiping Rebellion, which nearly toppled the Qing dynasty, that China’s reputation began to be undermined in Japanese eyes. However, until the last decade of the nineteenth century, an emphasis on cooperation with China remained an important facet of Pan-Asian discourse. Article 2 of the 1871 Sino-Japanese Friendship and Trade Treaty, concluded in Tianjin (Tientsin) between Qing China and Japan, specifically referred to ‘reciprocal assistance’ between the two nations in the event of a foreign threat. Prince Iwakura Tomomi (1825–83), one of the leaders of the new Meiji government, and Shiga Shigetaka (1863–1927), a scholar and journalist associated with the opposition, both continued to express the need for cooperation with China. Support for cooperation can also be found in the popular press of the time. As late as 1890, for example, the influential daily Asahi Shinbun published an editorial which argued for an alliance between the two countries against ‘European aggression’ (Oka 1961: 18). In addition, China was an important trading partner of Japan, and advocates of close relations with China never tired of pointing out that ‘geography is destiny’. Japan, they insisted, could not ignore its proximity to the Middle Kingdom. Not surprisingly, Japanese traders and entrepreneurs active in China were outspoken advocates of Pan-Asianism. Among the first Japanese to set up a business in China was Sone Toshitora (1847–1910), who arrived in Shanghai in 1867. A naval officer, in 1877 Sone founded the Shin-A-sha, the first Pan-Asian association established in Japan. Another important figure was Arao Sei (1859–96), a Pan-Asianist torn between Asian solidarity, on the one hand, and Japanese nationalism and the blind loyalty and obedience it demanded, on the other. To a degree, this same conflict was true of most Japanese active in Asia during this period. A serving army officer, in 1885 Arao was posted to the China Department within the Army General Staff. One year later, he was sent on an assignment to gather information in China. In effect, he was a spy. But he was also a Pan-Asian idealist, and his views did not necessarily reflect the views of the military on this question. Although he was a proponent of ‘reforming’ China under Japan’s guidance, Arao did not unconditionally approve of Japanese aggression in China. Japan’s victory over China in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 bolstered Japanese confidence in their ability to build an empire in Asia. Arao died of bubonic plague in 1896, too early to know how Japan’s victory would affect his views. It is clear, however, that in the memoranda he penned during and immediately after the war he opposed the imposition of large indemnities on the Qing government by the Japanese, believing that it would only cause resentment in China. For the same reason, he argued that Japan should not seek any territorial gains at the expense of China (Oka 1961: 36). In hindsight, the threat of Western imperialism emphasized by these early Pan-Asian activists may have been exaggerated – but it is worth remembering that for the Japanese in the Meiji period, the situation seemed critical. For them, the danger was clear and present. As a result, the government’s main concern in the first decades of the Meiji period was to complete a 26

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programme of domestic reform that would transform Japan into a modern state as rapidly as possible. The goal was to fend off any possible military threats to Japan’s independence and to obtain revision of the ‘unequal treaties’ that Japan had been forced to sign and which were perceived as a humiliating encroachment on Japan’s independence. Consequently, relations with neighbouring countries received less attention. However, developments in Korea soon became a matter of serious concern, precisely because of their perceived relevance to preserving Japan’s independence.

Japan and Korea Japan’s relations with Korea were a matter of controversy right from the beginning of the Meiji period in 1868. Whereas some in the government demanded that domestic reform should take precedence over foreign policy issues, others argued that Japan should pursue a more offensive strategy on the Korean peninsula, which was seen as a threat to Japan’s security. The debate over the ‘chastisement of Korea’ – or, more accurately, conquering Korea (seikanron) – that erupted in the early 1870s reflected these discussions. Influential members of the Meiji government such as Saigō Takamori (1828–77) and Itagaki Taisuke (1837–1919) argued that troops should be despatched to Korea, whereas others, although not opposing such sentiments, argued that Japan was not yet ready for foreign adventures – the country must be modernized first. Historians have disagreed over the motives of the advocates of an invasion of Korea. Some see the root cause as security concerns. The trope of the peninsula thrusting ‘like a dagger into the soft belly of Japan’, as German military advisor General Jakob Klemens Meckel (1842–1905) put it in the 1880s, reflected the fear that the Korean peninsula, if occupied by a third country, might serve as a springboard for an attack on Japan. Others see a projected invasion in terms of ‘social imperialism’: the despatch of an army of samurai, who were about to lose their privileged status and stipends, to fight in Korea would reduce discontent in their ranks and make it more difficult for samurai to foment rebellion against the new government. It is very likely that strategic, security and social considerations all played a part in the eventual annexation of Korea. Although Japan’s military inferiority to the West forced the early Meiji era policymakers to adopt a conciliatory approach over Korea, this moderate approach also reflected the fact that the Joseon Kingdom (Korea) was under Chinese suzerainty. A more aggressive policy toward the peninsula threatened to involve Japan in a war with China. Nevertheless, to increase its influence in the Korean peninsula, Japan forced the Joseon Kingdom to sign the Japan–Korea Treaty of 1876 (Nitchō shūkō jōki, known in Korea as the Treaty of Ganghwa). The treaty demonstrated that Japan regarded its national interest as more important than Asian solidarity, as it was essentially an unequal treaty that closely resembled the one-sided treaties that Japan had been forced to sign with the Western powers. Whereas there were many vocal advocates of cooperation with China, few in Japan proposed cooperation with Korea. There were a number of reasons for this. First, Korea did not inspire as much admiration as China, which was the acknowledged centre of East Asian civilization and the greatest power in the region. Second, Japanese armies, despatched by warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–98), had invaded and devastated the peninsula at the end of the sixteenth century and were forced to withdraw from Korea only as a result of Chinese military intervention. This did not inspire confidence in Korea as an effective ally against the Western threat. Nevertheless, there were some supporters of such an alliance in Japan. One of the earliest advocates of Japanese-Korean cooperation was Tarui Tōkichi (1850–1922), who, after travelling extensively throughout the peninsula in the 1880s, became convinced of the necessity of reforming Korea. The chief obstacles to implementing such reform, he thought, were the antiquated royal family and the feudal system that supported it. Korean conservatives, who were adamantly 27

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opposed to change, looked to China for help, whereas Korean proponents of reform looked to Japan as a model. Tarui and other like-minded Japanese formed ties with the progressive camp, which included Kim Ok-gyun (1851–94), who had visited Japan and been impressed by its modernizing efforts. Kim was convinced Korea should throw in its lot with Japan – otherwise Korea would inevitably be swallowed up by Russia or another Western power. To realize their reformist programme, Kim and his comrades staged a coup d’état (the Gapsin Coup) in 1884, but they lacked broad support: their revolt was quickly suppressed with the help of Chinese troops, called in by conservative elements in the government that the coup was seeking to unseat. Following this fiasco, Kim fled to Japan. The Korean government continued to regard him as a threat and sent agents to Japan to assassinate him, but without success. However, in 1894 Kim was murdered during a visit to Shanghai by a Korean government agent. The assassin returned to Korea to a hero’s welcome. The body of the failed reformist was sent back to Korea, where it was hacked to pieces and put on display throughout the country as a warning to other would-be pro-Japanese reformers (Kim 2011; Saga 2016). Meanwhile,Tarui was putting his views on Korea on paper. His book Daitō gappōron (Treatise on the Great East), a product of many years’ writing and revision, was a Pan-Asianist treatise calling for Japan and Korea to unite to counter the menace of Western imperialism. Whether Tarui envisioned an alliance on equal terms is debatable (Kim 2011), but he certainly believed that Korea could only be reformed with Japanese assistance. The unfortunate Kim is also on record as having discussed the idea of sending Japanese to help reform Korea with Tōyama Mitsuru (1855–1944), the leader of the Genyōsha (see Joos 2011), in the 1880s. Some responded to Tarui’s cue. By 1890, a number of Japanese had infiltrated the Korean peninsula where they supported anti-government activities. Many of these men had been involved in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement in Japan, which had lost its impetus by the late 1880s. Finding no outlets for their activism in Japan, they pursued their reformist ideals in Korea. Many espoused Pan-Asian sentiments, albeit of a vague and ill-defined nature. As the Japanese presence in Korea increased, tensions with China – which, like Japan, maintained a significant presence in Korea – led to a deterioration of relations between the two countries. When Korean peasants, suffering from increasingly heavy taxation and resentful of foreign intrusion, staged an uprising in the 1890s, some of the Japanese activists on the peninsula – against the stated policy of the Japanese government – chose to assist the rebels. One celebrated band of these ‘continental adventurers’ (tairiku rōnin) was the Ten’yūkyō (Chivalrous Knights of Heavenly Assistance). Many of these men came from Fukuoka and Saga on Kyushu; others from Fukushima and other prefectures. Although the extent of their support for the Korean rebels is unclear, it had little practical effect. When the beleaguered Korean government appealed to China for help, the Chinese sent a detachment of troops to help quell the uprising. China’s intervention led to the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894. The members of the Ten’yūkyō turned their energy to assisting Japan’s war effort as spies and interpreters, and the organization was dissolved (Szpilman 2016, 337–48). However, its goals and ideals would be kept alive by the Kokuryūkai (Amur Society or Black Dragon Society, see Saaler 2014a), founded by Uchida Ryōhei (1873–1937) in 1901, which many Ten’yūkyō veterans joined. With hindsight, it is easy to dismiss Japanese activities in Korea as serving the interests of Japanese imperialism, and there is much evidence to support this view.The young Japanese who were active in Korea were, first and foremost, nationalists whose primary concern was to protect Japan’s interests (Jansen 1954). But it is also true that they were in part motivated by ideas of Asian solidarity and a desire to protect their fellow Asians from Western imperialism. Nor should we forget that some well-educated Koreans shared this view. Although Koreans acknowledged the threat of Japanese imperialism, they were also aware of other threats, more 28

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immediate and more acute – such as that posed by Russia – and Japan was seen as a model for successful modernization and the preservation of national independence. For example, in a series of eight articles published in 1901, An Kyong-su (1853–1900), first president of the reformist Independence Club (see Oh 1995) and a former minister of war in the Joseon government, argued for a tripartite alliance between Japan, China and Korea (An 1900). Even some anti-Japanese activists, such as An Jung-geun (1879–1910, no relation of An Kyong-su), supported such an alliance. An devoted his last days before his execution for assassinating Prince Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909), Japan’s Resident-General in Korea, in 1909, to writing a ‘A Treatise on Peace in the East’, in which he also argued for cooperation between Japan, China and Korea (see Rausch 2012). However, the assassination of Itō strengthened the position of those in Japan who argued for an annexation of Korea – though not on equal terms as demanded by Tarui, but as a colony and a bridgehead for further expansion onto the Asian continent. Although Tarui himself failed to object to the annexation of Korea in 1910, the Kokuryūkai approved of it without reservation as the realization of its long-desired goal – the union of Japan and Korea. Nevertheless, some members of the Kokuryūkai criticized Japan’s Korean policy following a large-scale anti-Japanese uprising in Korea in 1919 known as the March First Independence Movement.They took this as proof that the Pan-Asian unity they advocated was failing to materialize. In 1921, these dissidents founded the Dōkōkai, an association which promoted equality for the Korean subjects of the Japanese emperor. Showing a strong awareness of international support for ‘self-determination’, the association stated that the basic principle of the annexation of Korea, on the part of Japan, was to establish equality between the two nations, it being quite foreign to Japan’s intention to discriminate against Korea. . . . The urgent task, therefore, for Japan and Korea is to bring themselves into a harmonious whole and act in perfect brotherhood, so as to give effect to the spirit of the annexation. (cited in Saaler 2011b: 66) Clearly, the Dōkōkai had no doubts that annexation was the right way to bring about unity between Japan and Korea. However, their calls for equality fell on deaf ears. Koreans continued to suffer discrimination in the Greater Japanese Empire until colonial rule ended in September 1945.

The institutional development of Japanese Pan-Asianism Japanese Pan-Asianists began organizing themselves into pressure groups in the 1880s with the objective of influencing both the government and public opinion. They resented their government’s policy of friendly relations and cooperation with the Western powers and objected to what they saw as the government’s failure to maintain relations with Japan’s Asian neighbours. Their goal was to change this situation. The first significant Pan-Asian organization was the Kōakai (Raise Asia Society), founded in February 1880 (Kuroki 2007). Sone Taketora, who had founded the Shin’A-kai in 1877 and whom we have already encountered in this chapter, together with diplomat-cum-politician Watanabe Hiromoto (1848–1901), were the moving spirits of the Kōakai. The association also included an impressive number of senior Foreign Ministry officials (including Viscount Nagaoka Moriyoshi, 1842–1906, and Viscount Enomoto Takeaki, 1836–1908), some military figures (notably Katsura Tarō, 1848–1913, future prime minister, field marshal and prince) and a handful of journalists. 29

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Although it is questionable whether the Kōakai’s more illustrious members were actively involved in its day-to-day operations, the fact that they lent their names to it invested it with enormous prestige. The society gained even more fame when the Imperial Household Ministry donated 1,000 yen to the organization, and two imperial princes, Kitashirakawa and Komatsu, became members. Some Chinese living in Japan were also co-opted as members (Kuroki 2005: 623). The Chinese, however, resented the name Kōakai, which to them implied inequality, as it was Japan that was assumed to be ‘raising’ an underdeveloped or less developed Asia. To placate them, the name was changed to Ajia kyōkai (Asia Society) in 1883 (Kuroki 2005: 263). The association founded branches in various cities throughout Japan. Advocates of greater involvement with China included the members of the Tōhō kyōkai (Eastern Association), which was founded in July 1890 in Tokyo. Some of the founding members, such as Fukumoto Makoto (Nichinan, 1857–1921), were also members of the Kōakai and were close to Kuga Katsunan (1857–1907) and the Movement to Preserve National Essence, which was conservative and generally anti-Western in outlook. The Pan-Asian views of the Tōhō kyōkai were publicized in Shinbun Nihon (Newspaper Japan) and the short-lived periodical Katsu Nihon (Vigorous Japan), among other outlets. In the 1890s, Japanese confidence was buoyed by its victory in the Sino-Japanese War (1894– 95) and then deflated by the so-called Triple Intervention which deprived Japan of most of the spoils of war (see Chapter 2 in this volume). Pan-Asianists took the Triple Intervention as renewed proof of the hostile intentions of the Western powers and of Japan’s need to ally itself with its Asian neighbours. Prince Konoe Atsumaro (1863–1904), a scion of the most senior branch of the ancient Fujiwara family, who had received his doctorate at Leipzig, wrote in the popular journal Taiyō (The Sun) in January 1898:‘We must ally ourselves with those of the same race, and we must study the China problem’ (Jansen 1980: 113). Konoe also advocated an ‘Asian Monroe doctrine’, although he believed that the conditions for enforcing such a doctrine were not yet in place (Zachmann 2011). Konoe regarded East Asia as a battlefield where the ‘White and Yellow races would fight each other for world domination’. Alarmed that ‘too many Japanese had oriented themselves toward the West’, he determined to stop this ‘dangerous trend’ (Jansen 1980: 114) by founding, in June 1898, the Dōbunkai. The organization’s name expressed the Pan-Asian notion that China and Japan shared the same culture (dōbun) and the same script. But the Dōbunkai proved short-lived. Five months later, in November 1898, it merged with the Tōhō kyōkai and the Zenrin kyōkai to form the Tōa Dōbunkai (East Asian Shared Culture Association). The Ajia kyōkai also merged with the new association in 1900 (Kuroki 2007: 48). The Tōa Dōbunkai aimed to establish branch offices in the major cities of China and Korea and to facilitate exchanges of students between China, Korea and Japan, presumably to foster a common East Asian consciousness and identity. Prince Konoe’s aristocratic status ensured support for his cause from the imperial navy and army and from business circles, but also from the Foreign Ministry (Jansen 1980: 114–5).The ministry possibly sensed the opportunity to ‘outsource’ some of the policy tasks it could not properly (or officially) address by itself, as its primary focus was improving relations with the Western powers. Konoe died prematurely at age 42 in 1904, but the organization he founded proved durable. By 1945, when the Tōa Dōbunkai was dissolved at war’s end, it had become the longest-lasting and most influential Pan-Asian association. With hindsight, it is easy to dismiss these various bodies as mere advance guards of Japanese imperialism. Yet they also embodied a strong element of idealism and a genuine desire to assist other Asian nations. It is impossible to doubt the lofty motives of some members of the Pan-Asianist movement. Even Arao Sei, though initially posted to China by the Army General Staff as an intelligence officer, was, as we have seen, critical of the Japanese government’s harsh 30

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policies toward China in 1895. Nevertheless, as Japanese confidence grew with continuing military successes in the Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) and the RussoJapanese War of 1904–05, feelings of national superiority among Japanese Pan-Asianists intensified. There was now more talk of Japan becoming the leader (meishu) of Asia and an increased emphasis on Japan’s taking the lead in introducing reform to China and Korea (not to mention the rest of Asia) as a precondition to securing the independence of the region. This emphasis on Japanese leadership of Asia was clearly reflected in the writings and activities of the Kokuryūkai, founded by Uchida Ryōhei in 1901 (see Saaler 2014a). Uchida hailed from Fukuoka, where his uncle, Hiraoka Kōtarō, was a coal-mine owner and a leading member of the Genyōsha. Uchida was proficient in judo and other martial arts. He had been involved in political activism on the Korean peninsula in the 1890s as a member of the Tenyūkyō and in China and Russia. Ostensibly working as a judo instructor in Vladivostok, he devoted himself to gathering military intelligence in the Russian Far East. Uchida remained a prominent leader of the Japanese Pan-Asian movement until his death in 1937; the Kokuryūkai continued as an active association until 1947, when it was outlawed by the Allied occupation authorities as an ultranationalist society. Although, in contrast to the Tōa Dōbunkai, the Kokuryūkai was at no time supported directly by the Japanese government, its views influenced some members of successive administrations in their decisions (see Saaler 2014a). The Treaty of Portsmouth (1905), which formally concluded the Russo-Japanese War, reinforced the close relationship between Pan-Asianism and Japanese imperialism and expansionism by extending Japan’s colonial empire to the southern part of Manchuria. Still, the terms of the peace treaty sparked massive riots in Japan. The unrest was triggered by a rally in Hibiya Park in central Tokyo on 5 September 1905 staged by prominent Pan-Asianists, including Tōyama Mitsuru, Uchida Ryōhei, Inukai Tsuyoshi (1855–1932) and other members of the Anti-Russian Society (Tairo dōshikai), which had been formed by Prince Konoe Atsumaro shortly before his death in 1904. The rally quickly turned into a riot. The rioters were disappointed that, under the terms of the treaty, Japan had failed to gain any Russian territory (except the southern part of Sakhalin) or the large indemnities they had anticipated. Misled by the triumphalist tone of government propaganda echoed uncritically by the press, the Tokyo rioters were unaware of Japan’s weak military and economic position following the war. Similar riots took place in Japan’s other big cities. Despite martial law being imposed and the riots quashed by government troops, Pan-Asianists continued to lobby for an anti-Western, Asian-oriented foreign policy. New Pan-Asian societies and journals emerged, representing diverse forms of the movement on both the right and the left of the political spectrum. In 1908, the journal Daitō (The Great East) was launched, which was subsequently declared the official organ of the Ajia gikai, a Pan-Asianist association probably founded in 1910, with members drawn from various Asian countries, as well as the Middle East. Another organization, the Asiatic Humanitarian Brotherhood (Ashū washinkai), was founded in Tokyo in 1907 by socialist activists from various Asian countries. The Chinese journalist and philosopher Zhang Taiyan (Bailing, 1868–1936), in exile in Japan, was elected president. Its founding members included other noted Chinese intellectuals such as the romantic poet and translator Su Manshu (1884–1918); the first secretary-general of the Communist Party of China, Chen Duxiu (Ch’en Tu-hsiu, 1879–1942); and Indian nationalists. There were also participants from other colonized Asian countries such as Korea, Annam, Burma and the Philippines. Japanese participants included some of the leaders of the early socialist movement, such as Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911). Because of its socialist and anti-imperialist views, the Japanese authorities obstructed the activities of the association, which was effectively forced to disband little more than a year after its foundation (see Cai 2011). 31

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Although these smaller organizations proved ephemeral, their activities show that Tokyo had become an important Pan-Asianist hub where activists from China, Korea, India, the Philippines and Vietnam nurtured their Asian and national identities while swapping ideas and experiences and discussing plans for their struggle against Western imperialism and colonialism.

The impact of World War I World War I, which erupted in Europe in August 1914, gave an enormous boost to Pan-Asianism, while also providing an unprecedented opportunity for Japan to expand its interests in China as the European powers all but withdrew from East Asia to concentrate on their struggle for survival in Europe. The Japanese quickly filled the resulting power vacuum. Whereas before 1914 some ideologues had promoted the idea of a racial struggle between the ‘Whites’ and the ‘Yellows’ (Saaler 2007b), the Japanese government was careful not to give the impression that it intended to lead a racially motivated anti-Western crusade. Consequently, any accusations of this by the sensationalist Western press (the ‘yellow press’) and by Western politicians were strenuously dismissed as nonsense; the Japanese press poured scorn on such charges, and emissaries were sent to Europe and America to deny them (Saaler 2007b; 2011c). After 1914 the situation changed. The government, although still insisting that it was cooperating fully with Britain and France – which, after all, were Japan’s allies – began to conduct an active, even aggressive, policy toward China, taking advantage of the power vacuum created by the war. The occupation of the German territories in Qingdao (Tsingtao) was followed in January 1915 by the so-called Twenty-One Demands to China – in effect an ultimatum, which, if accepted in its entirety, would turn China into a quasi-colony of Japan. However, protests by Britain and the United States forced Japan to soften its stance on this issue. Undeterred, Japan continued its efforts to bring a divided China under its influence. Attempts were also made to gain control over Mongolia and the whole of Manchuria by encouraging various separatist movements (Hatano 2001) with the help of numerous Japanese adventurers and army agents, most notably Kawashima Naniwa (1865–1949). Although the government was pursuing an increasingly aggressive imperialist policy toward China, journalists and intellectuals continued to popularize Pan-Asian ideas, which were more and more characterized by anti-Western rhetoric, directed in particular at the Anglo-Saxon countries. The term ‘Pan-Asianism’ gained currency during World War I. Although the expression had been used occasionally in the period preceding the war, the publication of the first booklength study of Pan-Asianism by the politician and entrepreneur Kodera Kenkichi (1877–1949) stimulated a boom in writings on Pan-Asianism. Dai-Ajiashugi-ron (Treatise on Greater Asianism; Kodera 1916), the first book wholly dedicated to the subject, represented also the first attempt to define Pan-Asianism in concrete terms. Kodera provided a list of commonalities that, in his view, constituted Asian identity.These were a) race, b) language and script, c) the political system, d) the legal system, e) religion, f) popular culture and g) geographic proximity. These elements, he noted, applied only to East Asia at the time of writing, but would inevitably be extended to include other Asian regions in what would be a lengthy process of integration comprising many stages until final unity was achieved (for a summary of Kodera’s views, see Saaler 2007c). Other commentators followed Kodera’s lead by popularizing Pan-Asianism as an ideology, so that by the war’s end the term had entered the Japanese popular lexicon. In the pages of a monthly journal launched in 1917 by the Kokuryūkai, the Ajia jiron (Asian Review), the term ‘Pan-Asianism’ appeared for the first time in 1918. Around the same time, the leaders of the Kokuryūkai had concluded that the Pan-Asian cause must also be propagated 32

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among non-Japanese. To this end, they launched an English-language periodical, The Asian Review. To assure high editorial standards, foreign expatriates were recruited. They included Frenchman Paul Richard (1874–1967), whose Pan-Asian views and condemnation of Western imperialism and hypocrisy found a receptive audience in Japan (Szpilman 2011a), and James Cousins (1873–1956), an Irish poet and a professor at Keio University. Both men had strong links to theosophy and to India, where they had each spent some years; both were opposed to British imperialism and favoured Indian independence. Richard, an obscure figure in the West, was highly influential in Japan at the time. His works, some of which were translated into Japanese by Ōkawa Shūmei (1886–1957), were presented to Crown Prince Hirohito.The newfound respectability of the Kokuryūkai and the Pan-Asian ideology it had been popularizing is clear from the public endorsement of The Asian Review by prominent Japanese figures, including Prime Minister Hara Takashi (1856–1921). Among other things, World War I had the effect of radicalizing the movement and stimulating the formation of further Pan-Asian organizations. Most notably, in 1918, the Rōsōkai (Old and Young Society) was established; its members covered the entire spectrum of political opinion, ranging from the extreme left to the extreme right. The Rōsōkai was founded as a study group, lacking a well-defined political programme or ideological focus. Its members included two Pan-Asian radicals: journalist Mitsukawa Kametarō (1888–1936, organizer of the Rōsōkai) and Ōkawa Shūmei, a freelance translator who had been educated at Tokyo Imperial University (on Ōkawa, see Szpilman 1998a; 2011c; on Mitsukawa, see Szpilman 2007). Unhappy with the ideological vagueness of the Rōsōkai, in August 1919 the pair launched the Yūzonsha (Society of Those Who Remain), an organization dedicated to political reform in Japan and the propagation of Pan-Asianist ideology. In January 1920, the radical Pan-Asianist agitator Kita Ikki (1883–1937) joined the society as its ideologue-in-residence (Szpilman 2011b). In acting as they did, the radicals in the Yūzonsha were reacting to two major factors: the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the global diffusion of Wilsonianism – in particular, the idea of national ‘self-determination’. In the immediate postwar period, the leaders of the Yūzonsha had high hopes for the former and were extremely hostile to the latter. Kita called Wilson a ‘worthless mediocrity’ (Szpilman 2002: 468). He and others rejected pacifism and the League of Nations as Anglo-Saxon tricks. But they were sympathetic to Bolshevism, which they viewed as a threat to the West – but not to Japan, which was supposedly immune to communism because of its unique national polity. Ōkawa even went so far as to claim that the Bolsheviks were pursuing a Pan-Asian agenda. Even mainstream figures such as Prince Konoe Fumimaro (1891–1945), true to the anti-Western Pan-Asianism of his father Atsumaro, published an article in Nihon oyobi Nihonjin in 1918 in which he questioned the motives behind Anglo-American peace efforts. He also argued, very much like Kita, that pacifism and the League of Nations were devices to prop up a status quo that benefited the Anglo-Saxon powers, but was distinctly disadvantageous to Japan (Hotta 2011). Konoe’s stance helps us understand why in Japan, which remained technically at war with Germany until 1919, public opinion tended to sympathize with the enemy, rather than with Japan’s official allies (Saaler 2014a). This attitude of hostility to Britain and the United States was not restricted to radical circles. It was also shared by many bureaucrats, academics and journalists.These diverse critics condemned Japan’s policy of cooperation with the Western powers, including the signing of armament reduction treaties as well as the policy of non-intervention in China pursued by successive cabinets in the 1920s, which was seen as a betrayal of Japan’s ideals as an Asian country. The new prominence of anti-Western and pan-Asian sentiments had a marked effect on the younger generation of Japanese. For example, in 1921 army cadet Nishida Mitsugi (1901–37) organized the Seinen Ajia dōmei (Young Asia Alliance) at the Army Academy. He and his fellow 33

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cadets, soon to receive their commissions, formed friendships with Kita Ikki, Mitsukawa and other radical Pan-Asianists, who told them of their plans to reform Japan and liberate Asia. Such contacts, demonstrating the popularity of Pan-Asianism among the junior military ranks, marked the beginning of the radicalization of junior army officers that led to the terrorist incidents and assassinations of the 1930s. The critics of the government could give further reasons for their anti-Westernism by citing the rejection by the Anglo-Saxon powers of the Japanese proposal to insert a racial equality clause into the covenant of the League of Nations.The issue of racial discrimination emerged again, providing more reasons to lambast Western hypocrisy, when the United States banned practically all immigration from Japan following the Immigration Act (Johnson-Reed Act) of 1924 (see Stalker 2006). In a reaction to such racist attitudes in the United States, Pan-Asianism and Japan’s mission to liberate Asia continued to attract support among the general public in Japan. World War I also expanded the geographic scope of Japanese Pan-Asianism. The movement’s ideologues now turned their interest to India, Western Asia and the religion of Islam. Ōkawa and Mitsukawa were pioneers in this regard; their books devoted much space to discussions of Turkey, Iran and Mesopotamia. By the 1920s, Wakabayashi Han and Tanaka Ippei (1882–1934), both converts to Islam, were advocating grandiose schemes involving Japan’s leading hundreds of millions of Muslims to rebel against European domination (see Worringer 2014). Though these schemes were hardly realistic, during World War II they fed fears in Great Britain and the United States of a united front of Asian peoples marshalled against the West.2

A Pan-Asian utopia in Manchuria When, after World War I, it became clear that the Western powers had no intention of allowing Japan a free hand in China, and given the growing threat posed by Chinese nationalism, Japanese foreign policy focused on securing control over the northeastern region of China known as Manchuria. Here, the idea of extending Japanese influence on the continent without causing offence to the Western powers converged with the grand visions of Pan-Asian ideologues and activists. It was in the course of extending Japanese control over Manchuria that Pan-Asian slogans were employed for the first time in government documents, with the intention of providing an official explanation of Japan’s foreign policy. In the late 1920s, this ideological convergence was exemplified by the actions of the Kwantung Army, the Japanese force stationed in Manchuria to protect the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway (Mantetsu) and the leased territory on the Liaodung peninsula (Kantōshū). Kwantung Army officers drafted plans for an ‘independent’ – but Japanese-controlled – state in Manchuria that would be a ‘paradise on earth’ (ōdō rakudo), founded on the ‘harmony of the five races’ (gozoku kyōwa) that inhabited the area. The ‘five races’ did not include all the nationalities found in the area, but comprised both the predominant ethnic groups and those which the Japanese planners considered to have made the greatest contribution to the cultural development of Manchuria: Japanese, Koreans, ethnic Chinese, Manchurians and Mongolians (Yamamuro 2004: 131). In September 1931, a group of Kwantung Army officers blew up part of the Japanese railway line with the intention of creating a pretext for the annexation of Manchuria. Within a few months, Kwantung Army troops, with the help of other Japanese army units, occupied the whole of Manchuria and, in March 1932, ‘founded’ the state of Manchukuo, a republic which was turned into a monarchy in 1934. It was headed by Emperor Pu Yi (1906–67), the last emperor of the Qing dynasty who had occupied the Chinese throne between 1908 and 1912 and who was now pulled out of retirement to act as a Japanese puppet. 34

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The Japanese land-grab provoked a flurry of criticism in the West.The League of Nations sent in a commission to Manchuria headed by Lord Lytton (1876–1947) to investigate the situation. The report of the Lytton Commission, though it showed some understanding and sympathy for Japan’s actions, was overall critical of the take-over. When in a general session of the League in 1932 Japan’s annexation of Manchuria was condemned, Japan withdrew from the League. Despite the façade of independence, which Japan strenuously maintained, and despite the government’s stream of Pan-Asian rhetoric and propaganda (see Figure 3.1), in reality Manchukuo

Figure 3.1 A propaganda postcard: girls with flags of Japan, China and Manchukuo as a symbol of ‘Pan-Asian unity’. 35

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was not much more than a puppet state. Political power was monopolized by the Japanese military and bureaucrats. The mobilization of manpower and material resources in Manchuria was so comprehensive that historian Yamamuro Shin’ichi has called Manchukuo a ‘concentration camp state’ (Yamamuro 2006). As a result of the war frenzy that followed the occupation of Manchuria, army officers grew convinced of the invincibility of the Japanese army. If professional military planners succumbed to such war hysteria, it is scarcely surprising that enthusiasm for war gripped the majority of the population, who had little access to accurate information. Domestic newspapers, even the hitherto liberal Asahi Shinbun, waxed ecstatic over the nation’s military successes, going so far as to describe Japanese troops as ‘angels of peace’. Japan’s actions were increasingly justified in the domestic press on the grounds that Japan was engaged in a mission to liberate Asia from the yoke of Western imperialism. Even if most Chinese and Koreans, who saw Japanese aggression in action, found such claims completely unconvincing, they were generally accepted at face value by the Japanese public, which was increasingly exposed to Pan-Asian propaganda (see Figure 3.2 and Chapter 18 in this volume).

Figure. 3.2 A propaganda leaflet: Japan breaks the chains of Western colonialism.

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Japan’s military successes in China stimulated radicals to expand their vision from Asia to the entire world. In the 1930s, Kanokogi Kazunobu (1884–1949) talked of the ‘emperorization’ of Asia (sumera Ajia), and Mitsukawa Kametarō advocated the emperorization of the world (sekai no kōka) (Szpilman 2007; 2013). Others came up with grandiose schemes that drew on ancient myths and referred to hakkō ichiu (the eight corners of the world under one roof), a slogan that expressed the idea of placing the world under the rule of the Japanese emperor – in effect, the conquest of the world by Japan. The detachment of such visions from reality did nothing to prevent their use in propaganda, which also extended to the construction of monuments celebrating the concept. Throughout Japan, hakkō ichiu towers and memorials were erected, some of which have survived to the present day (see, for example, Edwards 2003; Saaler 2005: 111–2; Figure 3.3).

Figure 3.3  Hakkō ichiu Tower in Miyazaki (photo by Sven Saaler).

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From fringe to mainstream: Pan-Asianism as government policy, 1932–45 Given the spread of Pan-Asian ideology in government circles as a result of growing war hysteria, it is not surprising that Pan-Asian organizations were now exerting more influence on policymaking than ever before. In 1938, the Tōa Dōbunkai, subsidized by the government, had the ‘academy’ it had founded in the 1900s in China, the Tōa Dōbun Shoin (Same Culture Academy), upgraded to university status. With the exception of imperial universities in Taipei (Taiwan) and Keijō (present-day Seoul, Korea) and Kenkoku University in Manchuria, this was the only Japanese university founded outside the Japanese archipelago. Its role was to educate local elites who shared the vision of a Pan-Asian mission and to train Japanese students as China experts (Reynolds 1989). In Japan, the influence of the Tōa Dōbunkai was rivalled by the Dai Ajia kyōkai (Greater Asia Association), the brainchild of Shimonaka Yasaburō (1878–1961), formerly a member of the now-defunct Rōsōkai and the Yūzonsha. Shimonaka, president of the publishing house Heibonsha, had maintained his links with Pan-Asian activists in the Yūzonsha and in April 1932, together with Mitsukawa and Nakatani Takeyo (1898–1990), he founded the Han-Ajia kyōkai (Pan-Asian Society), a study group which took as its brief Asia as a whole, including Southern, Central and Western Asia. The Indian independence activist Rash Behari Bose (1886–1945), who had been granted asylum in Japan and was now a naturalized Japanese subject (see Nakajima 2005), and the Vietnamese Prince Cuong De (1882–1951) also joined. General Matsui Iwane (1878–1948), the army’s most experienced China hand, well known for his Pan-Asian views, suggested that the Han-Ajia kyōkai be restructured into a broader organization with the aim of promoting a Pan-Asian movement among the masses. The new organization, renamed the Dai Ajia kyōkai (Greater Asia Association), was officially launched on 1 March 1933. Its stated goal was to promote ‘the unification, liberation and independence of the Asian peoples’ (Weber 2011a: 138). It attracted a membership that read like a ‘who’s who’ of the Japanese establishment in the 1930s. In addition to Shimonaka, Mitsukawa and Nakatani, members included two future prime ministers (Prince Konoe Fumimaro and Hirota Kōki), generals and admirals, diplomats, entrepreneurs, distinguished scholars and journalists. The association published a monthly journal, Dai Ajia (Greater Asia), and made attempts to achieve an international profile by setting up branches in Taiwan, Seoul, Tianjin, Manila and other foreign cities. Despite these efforts, the focus of the Dai Ajia kyōkai remained on ‘culture’, and its tone, in the assessment of one prominent commentator, was ‘theoretical’ and ‘dull’ (Weber 2011a: 140). It is difficult to discover any evidence of its activities beyond publishing and the opening of branches. However, as its large and illustrious membership indicates, the organization demonstrated the advances made by Pan-Asianism: by the 1930s the basic principles of radical PanAsianism, such as the East Asia Monroe Doctrine – Japan’s mission on the continent – had been accepted by the mainstream of Japanese public opinion. In April 1934, Pan-Asianism received what amounted to an official endorsement by the Japanese government when Amō (Amau) Eiji (1887–1968), director of the Information Department of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, asserted, albeit in an informal statement (danwa), that Japan had ‘special responsibilities’ to maintain peace and order in East Asia and would therefore brook no interference in China by the Western powers. Amō stressed that Japan opposes any joint action on the part of foreign Powers that tends to militate against the maintenance of peace and order in Eastern Asia. . . . Owing to the special position of Japan in her 38

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relations with China . . . it must be realized that Japan is called upon to exert the utmost effort in carrying out her mission and in fulfilling her special responsibilities in East Asia. (Saaler and Szpilman 2011: 39) The Amō statement effectively amounted to a proclamation by Japan of the 1823 ‘Monroe Doctrine’ transposed to the East Asian region. Its informal character notwithstanding, the Amō statement was widely cited in the Western media as evidence of a troubling shift in Japan’s foreign policy and its increasingly aggressive posture. The Foreign Ministry in Tokyo explained that Japan was committed to maintaining the ‘open door’ policy in China and did not intend to infringe on the rights of the Western powers, but such denials were given little credence at a time when Japanese forces were expanding their operations in northeast China. Although Japanese diplomats sought to deflect Western criticism and denied accusations that Japan harboured ambitions to build an empire in East Asia, other Japanese, officially or privately, spoke enthusiastically of the inevitability of Japan’s imperial mission in Asia and the construction of a ‘self-sufficient’ zone in Northeast China. Predictably, such statements exacerbated tensions with the Chinese government under Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), which by the late 1920s had gained control of most of China. Under the circumstances, some senior Japanese military figures favoured dealing Chiang Kai-shek a knockout blow, thus forcing him to recognize Manchukuo and accept the Japanese position in China. Others, however, believed that becoming embroiled in a full-scale war with China would be a serious mistake and should be avoided at all costs.This view was shared by the architect of the Manchurian takeover, Ishiwara Kanji (1889–1949). Japan, he believed, must first develop Manchuria’s industrial capacity as a major step toward the construction of an autarkic Japanese zone in East Asia (Brown 2011b). A committed pan-Asianist, Ishiwara entertained apocalyptic visions of Japan assuming the leadership of Asia and then going on to conquer the entire world after winning a ‘final war’ (saishū sensō) between the coloured races, led by Japan, and the white race. Despite such flights of fancy, Ishiwara was realist enough to recognize that incursions into China or the Soviet Union, preliminary to this final conflict, could not be made before Manchuria’s resources had been properly developed (on Ishiwara, see Peattie 1975). However, the Chinese Nationalists (Guomindang) showed no intention of abandoning Manchuria to the Japanese. This attitude encouraged some Japanese army officers, imbued with boundless confidence in Japan’s military might, to favour annihilating the Chinese forces in a short campaign rather than continuing to put up with a hostile and unstable neighbour. When in July 1937 a skirmish between Japanese forces and Chinese Nationalist troops occurred, the local Japanese commanders decided that this was the right moment to deal such a blow. They followed up their initial success by expanding the fighting, but failed to deliver a decisive blow. The Chinese refused to sue for peace and continued resistance. Unwilling to make any concessions to the Chinese in the middle of a successful campaign, the General Staff in Tokyo had no option but to escalate operations, and the Konoe Fumimaro cabinet, which had been in office for little over a month, had no option but to support the General Staff. Tokyo sent in more troops as reinforcements and, by year’s end, what had started off as a local skirmish had turned into a full-scale war. Japanese forces captured the nationalist capital of Nanjing, committing war crimes in the process (the so-called Nanjing Massacre; see Wakabayashi 2007). Both Prime Minister Konoe and General Matsui Iwane (1878–1948), the commander of the troops that had captured Nanjing, were pan-Asianists. Konoe gave the escalating conflict in China a distinctly Pan-Asian twist when he issued a statement that described the war as part of ‘a greater struggle to create a “New Order” in East Asia’ (Brown 2011a: 188). Konoe defined his 39

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‘New Order’ as ‘a tripartite relationship of mutual aid and co-ordination between Japan, Manchukuo and China in political, economic, cultural and other fields’, whose object was to secure ‘international justice’ (Brown 2011a: 189). In 1938, as part of Konoe’s vision for reshaping Asia, the Kōa-in (the Agency for the Development of Asia) was created. It was a cabinet-level body whose main role was to coordinate Japan’s political, economic and cultural activities with respect to Asia, as well as to conduct and promote research on China and Asia more widely. Kōa (Raising Asia) had been an influential pan-Asian slogan in the Meiji period: as noted earlier, the Kōakai was the name of one of Japan’s first Pan-Asian associations.The establishment of the Kōa-in can be interpreted as proof that the government had finally adopted Pan-Asian ideology as official policy. It also triggered a vogue for the term Kōa – over the next few years: countless cultural associations, student organizations and political pressure groups (and even businesses) gave themselves names containing the expression, and events were staged to celebrate Japan’s ‘holy war to raise Asia’ (see Figures 3.4 and 3.5). One of the organizations founded in those years – a leading insurance company, Sonpo Japan Nippon Kōa (Kōa Sonpo for short) – is still in business today. From the late 1930s on, successive Japanese cabinets used Pan-Asian rhetoric in their diplomatic relations with China. Baron Hiranuma Kiichirō (1867–1952), who replaced Konoe as prime minister in January 1939, reaffirmed his commitment to Pan-Asian ideals when he proclaimed in an official statement that ‘the forces for construction of the new East Asia are rearing their heads with a strength that nothing can resist’ and described Japan as striving to complete the ‘Heaven-ordained task’ of turning East Asia into a ‘utopia of everlasting peace’ (Szpilman 2011d). Although this message had a hollow ring to countless Chinese in areas occupied by Japanese troops, this high-sounding version of Japanese Pan-Asianism managed to gain some local adherents, such as Guomindang politicians Wang Jing-wei (1883–1943) and Zhou Huaren (1903–76) (Weber 2011b: 23). In 1940, the Japanese had close to 1 million troops in China, but they were no closer to victory than they had been at the outset of hostilities. Chiang Kai-shek continued to resist. In a desperate move, the Japanese army tried to isolate Nationalist China under Chiang by occupying the northern part of French Indochina (modern northern Vietnam and Laos). The French, defeated by Nazi Germany in Europe, were in no position to resist. The Japanese government again resorted to Pan-Asian rhetoric to justify this move. Japan’s Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke (1880–1946) declared in 1940 that Japanese forces had occupied French Indochina because the area constituted ‘an important link in the sphere of common prosperity in Great East Asia, which Japan is endeavoring to establish’ (Saaler 2011d: 224). This attempt to cut Chinese supply routes turned out to be counterproductive. It failed to bring Chiang Kai-shek to his knees and only caused a marked deterioration in the already strained relations between the United States and Japan. Bogged down in a seemingly endless war in China, desperate for war materials and eager to achieve economic self-sufficiency, the Japanese began to make plans to invade the British and Dutch colonial possessions in Southeast Asia. The Dutch East Indies had large deposits of oil, and British Malaya produced rubber and other raw materials, all of which Japan needed for its efforts to achieve self-sufficiency. But an attack on these territories, unlike the occupation of French Indochina, would spark war with Britain and the Netherlands (although the Netherlands was occupied by the Germans, the Dutch government in exile retained control of the Dutch East Indies). Because war with Britain would almost certainly lead to war with the United States, the Japanese decided to act before the Americans inevitably attacked. Thus, on 7 December 1941 (8 December Japan time), in what one historian has recently called a ‘delusional’ move (Hotta 2013), Japanese forces attacked the U.S. naval base in Pearl Harbor, 40

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Figure 3.4 A 1939 postcard to ‘commemorate the second anniversary of (the outbreak) of the holy war’ (seisen): a ‘boy-commander as brave as his father’ with Japanese and Manchukuo flags on his breast.

while, almost simultaneously, invading the U.S. colony of the Philippines in addition to Malaya and other British possessions in East Asia. These attacks marked the start of the Pacific War or, as the Japanese government called it, the ‘Greater East Asian War’ (Daitōa sensō). This appellation was intended to signify the final stage in the struggle to expel the Western colonial powers from Asia, even if the Japanese declaration of war contained no explicit reference to the ‘liberation of Asia’. It was only several months later that the ‘liberation of Asia from Western imperialism’ was included in Japan’s list of war aims (Hatano 1996). However, Pan-Asian rhetoric served to legitimize the war and, the Japanese hoped, to win support from Asian nations for Japan’s war effort. This expectation had 41

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Figure 3.5 A postcard of the ‘Greater East Asian Holy War Exhibition’ (Daitōa seisen hakurankai) held in Kobe, 1 April–31 May 1939, under the aegis of Ōsaka Asahi Shinbunsha (Osaka Asahi Newspaper Company).

also motivated the proclamation of the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, which represented the clearest expression of Pan-Asian ideals ever given by any Japanese government (Saaler 2011d: 224). However, this lofty rhetoric was undermined by the behaviour of Japan’s military forces and civilian agents in China and other occupied territories. Far from living up to its promises of ‘liberating’ colonized nations, the Japanese fobbed off the demands of Southeast Asian independence activists with the argument that ‘the time was not yet ripe’ for independence (Narangoa 2011: 244). Under the circumstances, Japanese professions of Pan-Asianism were no more than rhetoric. The authorities in Tokyo and the armies of occupation saw little need to grant independence or even autonomy to the territories that had come under Japan’s control since the outbreak of the war. In most instances, Japanese occupation turned out to be even harsher than Western colonial rule: between 600,000 and 2 million people died in a famine in north Indochina in 1944–45 (Gunn 2011), and several millions perished in forced or quasi-forced labour – between 2 and 3 million in the Dutch East Indies alone (Kratoska 2002; 2005). As the Japanese suffered a series of military setbacks, by 1943 prospects for victory were rapidly receding. In response, the Japanese government, the military and the civilian administrators of the occupied territories modified their approach. They launched a concerted effort to win the hearts and minds of the Asian peoples under their rule. Specifically, in May 1943, the government published the ‘Greater Asiatic Policy Guidelines’, which made concessions to Japan’s Asian ‘allies’ in the name of Pan-Asian ideals. In the same year, Japan abolished the extraterritorial privileges of Japanese nationals in China; gave chunks of Burmese and Malayan territory to Thailand, whose dictator Phibun Songkhram (1897–1964) was nurturing grandiose ambitions of creating a Pan-Thai empire; and recognized the independence of Burma (August) and the Philippines (October). 42

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These efforts to use Pan-Asian ideals to attract the support of its Asian possessions in Japan’s struggle against the United States intensified as Japan’s military situation grew more desperate. In November 1943, for example, the Japanese government hosted an Assembly of the Greater East Asiatic Nations (Daitōa kaigi) in Tokyo. Political leaders from Manchukuo, China (the Nanjing government of Wang Jing-Wei), Burma and the Philippines attended. Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945), president of the Provisional Government of Free India, was also present as an observer. The Assembly represented an effort by the government to obtain the cooperation of Asian nations for the war effort and to reinforce the Japanese people’s faltering conviction that they were engaged in a ‘just struggle to liberate Asia’.3 By this stage, the policymakers thought it expedient not to insist that the Asian bloc they were building must be kept firmly under Japanese control. Instead, they emphasized the principle of mutual respect for sovereignty. This was intended to cast the Greater East Asian CoProsperity Sphere in a new light, where no single country, not even Japan, appeared to hold a dominant position. As if to test the limits of this newly granted independence, the leaders of the Japanese-backed government in the Philippines refused to declare war on the United States, as did Thailand’s dictator Phibun, who in addition did not show up at the Tokyo Assembly, instead sending a minor royal figure as his representative. Japan’s Pan-Asian propaganda was belied by the reality in the territories occupied by the Japanese, where the troops continued to behave arrogantly and often criminally toward subject Asians.The ideals of Pan-Asian brotherhood had a hollow ring in these areas and, unsurprisingly, attracted few recruits to the Japanese cause. The situation was different in those Asian countries beyond the reach of the occupying Japanese armies, notably India, where people had little reason to doubt Japan’s Pan-Asian claims or suspect its motives. The Indian National Army, set up by the Japanese, had no trouble finding recruits among captured Indian soldiers, as well as civilian volunteers drawn from the Indian communities of Southeast Asia. In a short time, Chandra Bose, placed in charge of this force, had tens of thousands of men under his command. In contrast to the Philippines and Thailand, the Government of Free India declared war on Britain and the United States on 23 October 1943, and the Indian National Army was despatched to fight the British in Burma. Their attempt to invade India proper ended with the defeat at Imphal in July 1944. Down to the present day, this battle has remained a potent historical symbol of the struggle for PanAsian ideals and figures prominently in the discourse of apologists for the nation’s war record in contemporary Japan.

The postwar demise of Pan-Asianism and its resurgence Japan’s propaganda efforts, drawing as they did on ideals of Pan-Asian solidarity, did nothing to change the outcome of the war, which by late 1943 had become a foregone conclusion. On 2 September 1945, Japan signed an instrument of unconditional surrender, and the subsequent Allied occupation (1945–52) ended the country’s Pan-Asian aspirations. Pan-Asianism now appeared thoroughly discredited. In the countries that had borne the brunt of Japanese aggression, like Korea and China, Pan-Asianism was condemned as a hostile ideology and was proscribed. In Japan, the occupation authorities took the view that Pan-Asianism was simply window dressing to disguise Japan’s imperialist and colonialist ambitions and refused to acknowledge any of its positive features. Proponents of Pan-Asianism were purged from office and Pan-Asian organizations outlawed. Pan-Asian slogans such as the ‘Greater East Asian War’ and ‘Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity’ were banned, and official censorship ensured that they did not appear in print. 43

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Japan’s government and its mainstream politicians preferred to forget Pan-Asianism following the country’s complete defeat in a war fought ostensibly ‘to liberate Asia’. Besides, in the immediate postwar period, the Japanese concentrated on rebuilding their devastated country and had little inclination to get involved in Asia. They blamed a clique of militarists, ultranationalists and fascists and their Pan-Asian views for starting the war and for the disaster of Japan’s defeat. The mass media spurned Pan-Asianism as forever tainted by its associations with Japanese militarism and fascism. As a mainstream ideology, Pan-Asianism was dead, in Japan and everywhere else. The division of Asia by the Cold War also undermined the rhetoric of Asian solidarity. The communists under Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong, 1893–1976) gained control over continental China, whereas Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Party, the Guomindang, were confined to the peripheral island of T   aiwan. Korea was divided between the Soviet-supported communist North and the American-occupied South. Vietnam, which in 1954 won its independence following a long war with the colonial power, France, was also split between the communist North and the American-backed, ‘capitalist’ South. In these circumstances, national unification took precedence over the ideals of Asian solidarity – ideals that were in any case tarnished by their wartime associations with Japanese imperialism. Yet although they vanished from the mainstream, Pan-Asian ideas did not disappear completely, either in Japan or in other Asian countries. In Japan, they survived in diluted form among a diverse range of both right- and left-wing critics of the government and other opponents of the country’s dependence on the United States. For example, in 1949, Ōkawa Shūmei, who had gained fame before the war as a right-wing ideologue with Pan-Asianist leanings, wrote of the ‘close resemblance between today’s communists and the early Muslims’. He envisaged ‘a second battle of Tours-Poitiers’ to be fought between the communists and the Western powers – a contest which would result in victory for the communists who, in his view, represented Asia (Szpilman 1998a: 61). Another prewar right-wing activist, Tsukui Tatsuo (1901–89), developed a highly positive view of China (Tsukui 1956). According to a U.S. counter-intelligence report, in the mid-1950s Tsukui brought a large sum of money from mainland China to Japan, which he handed over to former Japanese Army colonel Tsuji Masanobu (1902–61?). Tsuji, who had been on the run as a wanted war criminal during the occupation, emerged from hiding after it ended to become a National Diet member, making no secret of his Pan-Asian sympathies (Tsuji 1950). One of the earliest examples of the revival of Pan-Asianism in the international arena was the Bandung Conference of 1955. Although officially it was a conference of non-aligned nations from Asia, Africa and Europe (the Non-Aligned Movement), its Pan-Asian roots could be traced back to the First International Asian Relations Conference held in Delhi in 1947. The Ban­ dung Conference, to which Japan sent a delegation, proposed a new Asian leadership cohort that would help solve global conflicts and bring the ongoing struggle against colonialism to a successful end. Thus, at Bandung, although prewar Pan-Asianism was echoed in its critique of Western colonialism, the Cold War division of the world prompted a new emphasis on nonalignment and the idea of a ‘Third Way’ (Dennehy 2011: 301). In response to the Vietnam War (1955–75) an anti-war movement developed in Japan, which, as elsewhere, was characterized by anti-imperialist and anti-American sentiment and also by a sense of Asian solidarity. A leading citizen group within the peace movement, the Betonamu ni heiwa o! shimin rengō (Citizens’ League for Peace in Vietnam, usually abbreviated to Beheiren), frequently appealed to Asian brotherhood in its statements.

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Rightist and conservative circles also continued to nurture Pan-Asian sentiments, which occasionally found their way into statements by political figures. In 1973, for example, Diet member and the founder of the Kajima Institute of International Peace, Kajima Morinosuke (1896–1971), who during the war had maintained that ‘the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere is inconceivable without Japan’s leadership’, publicly abandoned his insistence on Japanese leadership and proposed a Union of Asian Countries for the ‘cooperation of Asian countries[,] comprehending both politics and [the] economy with the view to establishing peace and order in Asia’ (Kajima 1973: 24). This informal confederation, Kajima explained, would be a union of ‘Asia by Asians for Asians’ that would be ‘controlled and administered by international institutions formed by voluntary agreement of its members’ (Kajima 1973: 26).

Prospects In 2017, political relations in East Asia are overshadowed by territorial disputes involving China, Japan and the two Koreas.4 Nevertheless, China, Japan and South Korea hold regular meetings in the form of trilateral summits (see http://tcs-asia.org) or within the enlarged framework of the Association of Southeast Asian States (ASEAN), known as ASEAN+3. Occasionally, statements advocating Pan-Asian solidarity are made by representatives of these three countries. The current Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is on record as praising Pan-Asianism as an important historical movement linking China and Japan (see Weber 2011c). In Japan, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – well known for their critical views on neo-imperialist tendencies in international relations – have also espoused the ideals of Pan-Asianism and Asian solidarity (for an example, see Hatsuse 2007). Hatoyama Yukio, a former Japanese prime minister and an outspoken advocate of friendship between Japan and its Asian neighbours, is well known for his advocacy of an ‘East Asian Community’ (see Victoria 2016; Mulgan 2009), which he has been promoting since his retirement from active politics through his think tank, the East Asian Community Institute (www.eaci.or.jp/). At the time of writing, it appears unlikely that any form of close regional integration will develop in East Asia in the near future. However, the frequent references to transnational solidarity made by intellectuals, politicians and educators throughout the region (see Fuchs, Kasahara and Saaler 2017) suggest that the idea of regional integration, underpinned by the growing – and seemingly irreversible – interdependency of East Asian economies, is likely to assume an important role in regional and global politics.

Notes 1 Several Japanese terms have been used to describe this ideology, including Ajiashugi (Asianism), HanAjiashugi (Pan-Asianism), Dai-Ajiashugi (Greater Asianism) and Zen-Ajiashugi (All-Asianism). See Saaler and Szpilman 2011. 2 See Office of Strategic Services, Research and Analysis Branch (1943), R&A No. 890: Japanese Infiltration Among the Muslims Throughout the World, Washington: State Department, 15 May 1943. 3 For a newsreel covering the conference, including excerpts of speeches by the delegates, and the Daitōa kokumin kesshū kaigi (Greater East Asian People’s Solidarity Rally), which took place at the same time, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPB_ecvLyhc. 4 Japan has territorial disputes with China, Korea and Russia. For the Japanese government’s perspective on these issues, see www.mofa.go.jp/territory/index.html; for the official South Korean view of the Japanese-Korean territorial controversy over the Takeshima/Dokdo islets, see http://dokdo.mofa.go.kr/ eng/. See also the introduction and Chapter 30 in this volume.

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Further reading Aydin, Cemil (2007) The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia:Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought, New York: Columbia University Press. Hotta, Eri (2007) Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War 1931–1945, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jansen, Marius B. (1954) The Japanese and Sun Yat-sen, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Saaler, Sven, and Koschmann, J. Victor (eds) (2007) Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History, London: Routledge. Saaler, Sven, and Szpilman, Christopher W. A. (eds) (2011) Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, 2 vols, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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4 Unequal treaties, consular jurisdiction, and treaty port society Harald Fuess

The so-called unequal treaties are considered the main instrument of Western imperialism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century diplomacy. Unequal treaties were forced upon a variety of Asian countries, including Japan, China, Siam, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire. The key features of these treaties were as follows: (1) ports (the ‘treaty ports’) were opened to foreign trade, and access to the interior of the non-Western signatory was restricted for nationals of Western powers; (2) legal extraterritoriality existed for nationals of Western imperial powers residing in a non-Western country who were therefore subjected to consular jurisdiction; (3) fixed tariffs (mostly at a low level) were in place and tariff autonomy of the non-Western signatory was restricted; (4) the most favoured nation clause was applied; and (5) there was a de facto impossibility for the non-Western governments to revoke these treaties, despite the fact that some treaties included a renegotiation clause. Among these features, extraterritoriality and consular jurisdiction are most frequently associated with the age of Western imperialism in Japan and have become the symbol of foreign powers’ infringement on the sovereign rights and territorial integrity of non-Western countries. The unequal treaties in Asia evolved from an early modern legal system in the Ottoman Empire (1280–1923) by means of which different religious groups regulated their lives according to their respective customs. Foreign trading communities represented in the Ottoman Empire by their consuls were included in this system. The British exported this system of law and governance to the rest of Asia, and after the Opium War of 1839–42, it provided the framework upon which diplomatic and commercial relations in East Asia were based for almost a century. Previous research has focused on the origins and end of the system, especially on the problem of treaty revision, looking in particular at attempts by Asian governments to ‘restore’ national sovereignty through multiple forms of resistance or attempts at renegotiation. Japan was a pioneer case in this context. The country managed to get the unequal treaties revoked in several steps, beginning with the abolition of consular jurisdiction in 1899 and ending with the restoration of tariff autonomy in 1911 (see Wippich 1999; Iokibe 2010; Howland 2011; Fuess 2014). However, accommodation, collaboration, and integration also were options for Asian governments. As recent scholarship has emphasized, in China the imposed system of extraterritoriality and consular jurisdiction in the treaty ports that had partly been instituted to protect British opium traders blended into a legal tradition that, just as in the multi-religious Ottoman Empire, provided for 47

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different laws and tribunals for different ethnicities in the Empire (Cassel 2012). Although some Asian countries resented their place in a Western-centred hierarchical world order, they did not always challenge its principles. Japan, for example, after its own display of gunboat diplomacy negotiated the Ganghwa (Kanghwa) Treaty with Korea in 1876 that included extraterritorial rights for its subjects. Moreover, when it unilaterally abrogated the treaties between Korea and the Western powers in August 1910, it thereby terminated Western judicial and trade prerogatives in that country, initiating a period of Japanese colonialism (Fuess 2013). Important studies have shown the contentious nature of extraterritoriality and consular jurisdiction in Japan and the means by which it was contested. The strong and pervasive claim is still made that consular jurisdiction was an important infringement on Japanese sovereignty and independence turning its treaty ports into semi-colonial borderlands. Nevertheless, the reality of the workings of the consular courts is virtually absent from the larger narratives of modern Japanese history, and they feature, at most, in local port history (Hoare 1994). Their potential transformative power as an actual model for the incipient Japanese judicial system has been utterly neglected. Despite the political uproar they created, consular courts may not have caused the same level of animosity in daily life as studies on British and American consular courts show (Chang 1984; Roberts 2014). These mostly emphasize that, despite widespread contemporary Japanese and Western claims of unfairness and incompetence, the courts operated within the legal norms of their home countries and did not display a systematic bias against Japanese plaintiffs. Other studies have explored court cases as a window to understand treaty port merchant society and lower-class culture (Honjo 2003).This chapter surveys consular jurisdiction in Japan with a focus on Japan’s four main Western trading partners in Yokohama, which was Japan’s main harbour for international trade, especially its exports. Based on archival sources and local press coverage, it argues that the vilified symbol of imperialism, the consular court, served as a reasonable institutional facilitator of international commerce, created a transcultural system of economic values, and restrained individual rogue behaviour in the Western-centred transient treaty port society.

Development, legitimization, and contestation of the system of consular jurisdiction After the opening of Japan in 1853–54 by U.S. gunboat diplomacy, the treaties signed between Japan and the Western powers in 1858 set the legal basis for the start of extraterritorial life in the main treaty ports of Yokohama, Kobe, and Nagasaki as well as Hakodate and Niigata.1 Marius Jansen (2000) and Michael Auslin (2004) have shown that the Tokugawa shogunate negotiated a weak hand with great skill on behalf of Japan, especially considering resistance by the imperial court and the feudal domains that eventually contributed to the shogun’s fall just ten years after these ‘treaties of amity and commerce’ were signed. The treaty port era with its consular jurisdiction lasted for over four decades (1858–99). During that time Japan experienced a rapid political transformation also marked by war periods around the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, and the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. One may, however, divide the forty years of Japan’s extraterritorial experience into two roughly equal periods with the year 1880 as a boundary point. In the first period, Japanese foreign treaty revision policy focused on commerce and tariffs and in the second one on the consular court and extraterritoriality. During this period, the Japanese leadership, occupied with domestic state building, worried most about preventing potential foreign military encroachments and dealing with disruptive economic trade issues such as unfavourable trade

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balances, which were a result of the limited tariff autonomy. Iokibe (2012) notes that Foreign Minister Terashima Munenori emphasized ‘the customs house’ as the main concern of Japanese foreign policy. In a similar way, the second period, beginning with the appointment of Inoue Kaoru as foreign minister, is characterized by a focus on ‘the courthouse’, with consular jurisdiction playing the most prominent role in Japanese negotiations with foreign powers, which in turn were increasingly eager to obtain better access to Japan’s growing domestic market. The second period was marked by the rapid development of the Japanese press and a politicized public which pressured the government not to accept anything less than a full treaty revision. It is this second period that has attracted the most scholarly attention and exerted the most influence in forming the views of later historians on the significance of consular jurisdiction in Japanese and global history. The notorious Normanton shipwreck court case of 1886, in which the British captain of a ship was acquitted of any wrongdoing after he and his foreign crew abandoned twenty-five Japanese passengers and twelve non-European crew members to drown falls in this period (Chang 1984). But the reason for general attention is not that practices of consular jurisdiction deteriorated at that time; it was that the goal of ‘full independence’ became an easy rallying point in the decade immediately preceding establishment of the Imperial Diet in 1890, a point on which all political actors or parties agreed in principle. The divergences of opinion over the means and speed of reaching these aims were nevertheless a source of bitter contention. A trial and error approach of what was feasible to obtain from foreign powers and acceptable domestically characterized the period ranging from multilateral negotiations led by Inoue Kaoru through a bilateral approach under Ōkuma Shigenobu to the final success by Mutsu Munemitsu with an Anglo-Japanese agreement concluded in spring 1894 just prior to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. As elsewhere, foreign powers in Japan justified the need for special legal protection of their nationals from the underdeveloped and outdated local system of law and governance. Codes of law; court institutions; trained judges; and the division between legislative, judicial, and executive state functions were features foreign diplomats and treaty port residents found either entirely absent or utterly deficient in nineteenth-century Japan. A central and recurrent Western demand was the reform of the Japanese legal system – in conformity with Western models and expectations. Foreign images of the Japanese justice system until the 1880s were hardly favourable with ‘incompetence’, ‘evil’, and even ‘venality’ being the standard elements of the discursive language. Diplomats and experienced courtroom lawyers shared the general hostility of the foreign Yokohama community to Japanese treaty revision. William Kirkwood, a British lawyer practicing in Japan, considered ‘the judges . . . incompetent and without qualifications’, and another Westerner summarized his seven years of experience with Japanese tribunals ‘as plain denial of Justice’. Western treaty port press opinion resented treaty revision and exposure of Europeans to Japanese prosecution. Their complaints were often rather general: What shall we think of the cavilling at justice in Japanese Courts – and they are very far from being without reproach – when we are reminded of a state of things where, in the Courts to which Christian suitors must bring their complaints, the oath of a Christian weighs not a feather? (Japan Weekly Mail, 12 June 1881) Yet Western powers increasingly acknowledged the progress Japan made in terms of judicial reform. Legal measures such as crucifixions and the public display of decapitated heads were

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abolished. In 1879 the American Minister to Japan John Bingham rejoiced that physical torture was no longer an officially approved means of obtaining a confession in Japan, removing one of the most basic facets of the image of Japanese brutality just as the Japanese started lamenting the injustice of consular courts. At that time, legal reform was already an ongoing process though. In 1875, Japan had introduced a court structure with local courts and the possibility of appeals to a Court of Cassation (Daishin-in). Codification showed marked results with the enacting of criminal (1880), commercial (1890), and civil codes (1898) as well as with the promulgation of the Constitution in 1889 and the inauguration of the Imperial Diet one year later. German, French, and English schools of law served as reference, and elite legal training programmes at public and private universities often specialized in one of these national legal traditions to educate Japanese students. Foreign presence in Japan facilitated the transformation by reminding the Japanese government that it would only achieve the goal of treaty revision when it had a ‘modern’ system of law (i.e. one modeled after Western ideas). Parallel to the establishment of a new Japanese legal system, foreign powers developed a consular court system of their own in East Asia. The British, with the most significant commercial interests, took the lead and established the largest, most sophisticated, and most integrated system of consular courts in the region.The British experience with the Ottoman Empire influenced the East Asian version as one of its chief architects was the lawyer Sir Edmund Hornby (1825–96) who had founded both the British Supreme Consular Court in Istanbul and then in Shanghai in 1865, the British Supreme Court for China and Japan, which after 1899 dropped Japan and added Korea to its name. For a while, these judicial activities seemed so crucial that the most important English newspaper in East Asia, founded in 1850, was called The North-China Herald and Supreme Court and Consular Gazette. Great Britain, however, was the only Western power that maintained such an appellate court for East Asia.The ultimate British court of appeal was the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London. France established consular courts of appeals for Asia first in a French-controlled enclave of Pondicherry in India, then in Saigon in the French protectorate of Annam. No other Western nation maintained official higher courts in East Asia, and the location of appeals was in their respective home country, in the case of Germany, Berlin, and later Leipzig, and the United States, mostly California. In Japan,Yokohama was the prime centre of consular courts, and one may call it the capital of foreign justice. It served both to decide cases for the local Yokohama community and to hear appeals from other Japanese treaty ports. Despite the powerful image in the Japanese popular mind of the harm done to national sovereignty by the existence of consular jurisdiction, it was only the major powers that had the capacity to maintain actual courtrooms throughout the entire period. Others asked friendly nations for judicial support, either through longer-term agreements or on an ad hoc basis. For example, the Imperial German government sometimes took care of Swiss affairs, or the judge of the ‘Danish Court’ could be either the German or the English consul. Great Britain was the only country that invested in a distinct court building, which it erected on the grounds of its consulate in Yokohama. More common were arrangements whereby consulate administrative offices served as places to hold court, whilst consuls also acted as judges. The Tokio Times introduced main consular courts to their readers while indulging in the perpetuation of national clichés. The German court was thus portrayed as a stern, efficient, and rather unwelcoming place. In Western discourse on Japanese civilization and progress in the late nineteenth century the prison played a pivotal role. By contrast, Britain maintained a designated ‘gaol’. The American jail was so dilapidated that for years, its diplomats begged for renovation funds. Higher-ranking community members were sometimes placed in custody in the consulate instead of the official jail, and in some cases the vilified Japanese prison 50

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system was utilized as an alternative. No detention facilities existed in Yokohama for long-term Western prisoners, who had to be repatriated. The consular courts in Yokohama may have appeared as a uniform system of foreign jurisdiction to the Japanese, but as a matter of fact, each national court was applying a variation of ‘legal modernity’, according to its respective national laws. The principle of consular jurisdiction was introduced through international treaties, but these often provided nothing more than an agreement that the citizens of foreign treaty powers be judged by the laws and institutions of that power without further specifying the applicable laws and responsible institutions. How extraterritoriality worked and what it covered remained an issue of constant international negotiation. Great Britain regulated the jurisdiction of its courts in the most systematic way through socalled Orders in Council. Its court in Yokohama was first called the Kanagawa Consular Court (1871–78) and later was referred to as Her Britannic Majesty’s (H.B.M.) Court for Japan with Jurisdiction for Yokohama. It also functioned as an appellate court for other British consular courts in Japan. The United States maintained a consular court system, which, as the Japanese government eventually realized, had no legal basis for existence in American domestic law. The Japanese chose to remain silent on the issue so as not to provoke Americans into passing laws on U.S. consular jurisdiction that would also have strengthened the system in Japan. Prussia (until 1867), the North German Federation (1867–71), and the Imperial German government (since 1871) operated courts whose procedures were covered by domestic legislation for consular jurisdiction passed in 1865, 1879, and 1900. France established a consulate in 1859 in Edo and only opened one in Yokohama in 1870, which was followed by Kobe in 1879. In 1880, the French government installed a reform commission to revise the regulations ‘of another age’ (d’une autre époque) for its consuls in ‘non-Christian countries’, which dated back to 1681 (L’echo du Japon, 17 May 1880).

Consular jurisdiction in Yokohama: national, multinational, and transnational Yokohama now commemorates itself as Japan’s first centre of modern Western culture, but it was also Japan’s centre of Western law. A mere fishing village until its designation as a treaty port, the city seemed rather litigious and contentious given its small population. Foreign-language newspapers carried law-and-police columns to inform readers about decisions in the consular courts. The mainstream English-language press such as the Japan Mail, the Japan Times, the Japan Gazette, the Japan Herald, or the Kobe Chronicle (see Chapter 5 in this volume for details regarding the foreign press in Japan) regularly discussed legal issues ranging from larger serial installments to rather repetitive short notices. From the 1860s onwards at least one newspaper in each treaty port covered court affairs. Needless to say, so did the emerging Japanese press, whose opinions foreign newspapers often translated. Western consular courts regulated, adjudicated, and influenced the daily life of Yokohama to a large degree. To what extent the ‘theatre’ of consular courtroom became the central location for media reports depended on respective national legal traditions. The American journalist Edward House (1836–1901) distinguished four principal judicial establishments in Yokohama. He praised the British and American courts because they conducted trials in public in contrast to the continental European legal systems. The German and French only brought cases into the open ‘midway’ after a thorough non-public preliminary investigation, and officials were reluctant to discuss preceding events with journalists. In contrast to general Western treaty port opinion, House took a critical attitude to extraterritoriality and ridiculed its extent: ‘Belgians, Danes, Russians, Spaniards, Peruvians (!), Portuguese, Hawaiians (!!), Italians, Swiss and now even Chinese are all amenable to the laws of their own countries’ (Tokio Times, 11 November 1878). 51

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Reliable overall figures for Western consular courts during extraterritoriality do not exist, especially for disaster-prone Yokohama. Many of the records were destroyed during fires, earthquakes, or wartime air raids. Circumstantial evidence suggests that in Japanese treaty ports, despite an increase in their population, court cases may have decreased over time as economic life became more stable and court cases such as bankruptcy resolutions less prominent. We do have official numbers for foreigners suing Japanese in the Yokohama District Court after the Japanese government established it in 1875. These suits showed a precipitous decline from 400 in 1875 to fewer than 100 five years later. For the next quarter century, the number of cases remained at this lower annual level, ranging between 80 and 140 cases (Morita 2012: 6). In a similar way the trend among consular court cases also declined from the late 1870s. However, there seems to have been an initial surge from the 1860s to the 1870s as the treaty port population expanded and economic relations remained unsettled and volatile. The unrest in the wake of the Meiji Restoration had the short-term effect of altogether stopping suits between Japanese and Westerners between 1869 and 1870, whereas criminal cases among Westerners rose due to an increased British and French military presence when sentencing for unruly behaviour and drunkenness increased in the late 1860s and early 1870s (Honjo 2003: 76, 144). One of the reasons for such a trend may have been that in the late 1860s ‘trade was dull’, as commerce seemed in perennial crisis. The ‘transcultural norms’ of customary business and social relations were not yet established within the foreign trading community and among their Japanese partners, which were unfamiliar with international practices. Over time Japanese and foreign newspaper reports disseminated basic legal precedents regarding the standard procedures of transactions. British sentenced drunken or insubordinate sailors to a certain number of days in custody (unless their ship left the harbour earlier), showing to the port public that lower-class misconduct was not tolerated in the foreign community. The Russian court, however, in similar cases usually decided to return a rowdy culprit back on board his ship right away, because the country lacked detention facilities in port. The Japanese Justice Ministry recorded the number of cases between Japanese plaintiffs and foreign defendants in consular courts from 1878 to 1898. The development followed a predictable pattern, with most suits involving members of the largest treaty port communities (see Table 4.1). Japanese most frequently sued Chinese, and Chinese ended up being accused in a disproportionate number of criminal deeds. But unlike other powers, Japan had a mutual extraterritorial jurisdiction arrangement with China until the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, so politically Table 4.1 Japanese civil and criminal suits against foreigners in consular courts, 1878–98. Country

Criminal

(%)

Civil

(%)

Total

China Great Britain United States Germany France Russia Portugal Holland Italy Total

1,306 739 326 150 143 259 41 36 7 3,007

61 36 34 32 36 73 28 35 13 45

838 1,294 625 326 255 94 104 67 47 3,650

39 64 66 68 64 27 72 65 87 55

2,144 2,033 951 476 398 353 145 103 54 6,657

Sources: (Katō 1980b, 121); compiled from various editions of yearbooks published by the Justice Ministry of Japan, Shiho ¯ sho ¯ (Justice Ministry), Shiho ¯ sho ¯ minji to ¯ kei nenpo ¯ (Justice Ministry Statistical Yearbook of Civil Affairs), and Shiho ¯ sho ¯ , Shiho ¯ sho ¯ keiji to ¯ kei nenpo ¯ (Justice Ministry Statistical Yearbook of Criminal Law).

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the issue was less charged. The exception was the Nagasaki Incident, when rowdy Chinese sailors got involved in a fight with the Japanese police in 1886 (Cassel 2012: 135). China court cases were followed in number by Japanese suits in the courts of the four great Western trading nations: Great Britain (2,033), the United States (951), Germany (476), and France (398). The dominance of the British court and the British community is visible by the fact that Japanese suits against British nationals (2,033) amounted to almost as many as those against the other seven nations put together (2,480). The exceptionally high Russian crime rate of over 70 per cent of the cases must have been a result of its resident population being much smaller than the visitors from (relatively frequent) shipping traffic. In most other cases, except from the tiny community of well-behaved Italians, the ratio of Japanese-foreign proceedings was roughly onethird criminal cases versus two-thirds civil cases. Between 1878 and 1898, the total number of Japanese-foreign consular court cases amounted to 6,657. If one were to project the numbers backward in a linear fashion for the missing two decades before 1878, also taking into account that the Chinese court only started operating in the late 1870s, one would arrive at a rough estimate of about 10,000 to 12,000 cases with Japanese plaintiffs. Even if one were to disregard the cases of the Chinese, this estimate would be significantly higher than the 3,500 cases previously estimated for all suits in Western consular courts during the period of extraterritoriality (Chang 1984: 120–3). For Japanese, who until recently have been considered ‘reluctant litigants’ (Haley 1978), how much more daunting it must have been to appear in a court whose language they did not understand. Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) exhorted his fellow countrymen, in his widely read Outline of a Theory of Civilization, to press legal charges even if they thought it might be ‘impossible to obtain justice’. If people swallow their anger and act submissive, ‘they act like a young bride before her old mother-in-law’ (Fukuzawa 2008: 183). Such encouragement may have helped Japanese to seek justice in consular courts, but more important must have been the fact that Japanese government officials often represented Japanese plaintiffs in court, even the modest rickshaw puller and the unpaid maid. Transcultural civil litigation benefited from translation and interpretation services, sometimes by student interpreters such as Ernest Satow (1843–1929) or Alexander von Siebold (1846–1911). In the British courts, registrars in later years were expected to be fluent in Japanese and act as interpreters for Japanese present in court. Unlike Westerners, Japanese plaintiffs did not have to pay an initial court deposit, so if they were confident of their victory, they could pursue their case ‘at almost no cost’ (Honjo 2003: 81; Roberts 2014: 84–6). An unknown characteristic of the development of consular courts – and one in contradiction to the widespread popular and academic perception – is that the majority of the cases were not mixed cases at all (i.e. did not involve Japanese suing foreigners). Instead, they mostly served to resolve problems within the local foreign communities. Most commercial cases may even have remained within the same national group. The German Consular Court might serve as an example. There were only 16 Japanese plaintiffs among 98 civil suits during 1876–77. For the preceding two years, 70 per cent of the plaintiffs were unspecified ‘foreigners’. A decade later, of 750 civil suits in all Western consular courts in the years between 1886 and 1888, Japanese only initiated 150 (Katō 1980b: 120). It seems that Japanese-European cases usually accounted for less than a quarter of all cases.

Her Britannic Majesty’s court for Japan and the United States consular court The British and American consular courts were the central foreign legal institutions inYokohama.The Tokio Times acknowledges the premium standing of the British court and thus introduced it in 53

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its 1878 consular courts survey: ‘[a]s it transacts probably more business than all the other local tribunals taken together’, with the exception of the Japanese Court in Yokohama (Tokio Times, 9 November 1878). The institutional standing in the community was stressed by the centrality of the building and the magnificence of ‘the court house, by far the largest and most imposing temples of justice in the town’ (Tokio Times, 9 November 1878). To the American journalist House the British institution projected law as well as power and prestige. ‘So intimately connected in the extreme east are the diplomatic, judicial and consular departments of the British empire, that it is hard sometimes to say where the functions of one officer ends and the other begins’ (Tokio Times, 9 November 1878). The content he found rather less pleasing, defining ‘dull and pompous stiffness’ as its most conspicuous features. In civil cases and those with juries the ‘majesty of the law’ was vindicated. ‘The entry of the judge, arrayed in wig and robe, is made amid profound silence’ (Tokio Times, 9 November 1878). Despite his tongue-in-cheek description, House rated the British consular court highest, stressing that the judges were at least trained in law. Trials are in constant occurrence . . . in either its civil or criminal jurisdiction. The hall where cases are heard is large, lofty and well-ventilated . . . At the east end is the president’s throne or chair, the only comfortable piece of furniture in the room. To the left is the jury box, a narrow and inconvenient pen, in which the unfortunate subjects who, to the number of five, are called upon to try a compatriot accused of violating the law. (Tokio Times, 9 November 1878) Even in the British court, public proceedings barely attracted visitors except for those summoned to court, the reporters, and the often very reluctant jurors and assessors, which relented to this ever unpopular and time-consuming unpaid civic duty. One British consular court case even dealt with the issue of contempt of court by jurors who were upset about the judge’s slow handling of the proceedings. The American diplomatic compound with a court building ‘of smaller proportion and less agreeable aspects’ was located between the British consulate and the Japanese Prefectural Office. ‘The court is a room and nothing more, not a hall like that of the institution over the way’ (Tokio Times, 16 November 1878). It also attracted less traffic, only ‘unimportant civil disputes between residents or unimportant police cases’. The jail was connected to the courtroom, which made it unnecessary to walk an escorted prisoner through town. He contrasted his own country’s court to the British one positively in terms of the punctuality of the proceedings, jocularity of the judges, and the absence of a jury, except in very important cases. In key criminal cases, he explained, the local tribunal simply investigated and then referred the decision to a United States Court for trial. Written by a man known for his critical attitude toward extraterritoriality, the unabashed praise for the American Consul General and Judge Van Buren comes as a surprise: ‘The community knows and values the man, and the man is at home in the esteem of his community’ (Tokio Times, 16 November 1878: 272). By contrast, the New York Herald in 1881 bluntly criticized the ‘cruel, barbarous American institutions known as American courts of consular jurisdictions’, stating that the use of Japanese and Chinese laws would be more appropriate. If Americans did not want to obey these laws, they should simply stay at home in the United States (Japan Weekly Mail, 26 June 1881). Taken together, the British and American courts were responsible for the majority of the cases during Japan’s period of extraterritoriality. They also shared English as a common courtroom language. The British, a few Americans, and even some French formed the small professional group of foreign lawyers in Yokohama (Roberts 2014: 356–7). Although their legal systems differed, this may have mattered less to the Western population of Yokohama as both courts fulfilled 54

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similar functions. More than anything else they seemed to have been the key institution of ‘law and order’ in Yokohama society because their nations also provided the vast number of ‘lowerclass Western men’ due to the predominance of British-owned shipping. Besides the usual image of sobering up the ‘drunken sailor’ in port, they also provided a more important mercantile service of maintaining the strict hierarchies of maritime life on board of ships (Roberts 2014: 172–3). In the words of Edward House, ‘intempestously bellicose “Jack ashore” generally figures as the dolefully interested party’ or ‘Jack’s inimical hosts . . . denizens of the Honmura road and its vicinity’ (Tokio Times, 16 November 1878). Besides handling annoying, but rather harmless, rowdy behaviour, perusing the cases one gets the impression as if they were almost maintaining a Confucian world order. Consular courts meted out severe punishment to disobedient and deserting sailors, whereas rough behaviour by officers may have been tolerated to a far greater extent as an acceptable part of their supervisory roles. In the case of sailors, Japanese treaty provisions of extraterritorial privileges clashed with contemporary maritime legal practices. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in an 1891 landmark case:‘a foreign seaman duly enrolled on an American vessel, . . . although not an American citizen, he is unquestionably an American seaman’ (Jones 1931: 60–1). Extraterritoriality meant that in the ports of Japan international treaties should have been the base to settle jurisdiction over foreigners, but disputes between the courts show that the main consular courts also extended their jurisdiction to foreign nationals aboard ‘their’ ships if they had just disembarked temporarily at Yokohama. Needless to say, when the Japanese government realized this, it also started claiming jurisdiction over all foreign seamen working on Japanese ships. Due to the higher volume of cases they handled and their higher visibility, the British and American courts, more than others, mandated and set the boundaries for acceptable commercial (and social) norms of behaviour in a transcultural community. Let us now turn to the less wellknown German and French consular courts to explore their commonalities and differences with Anglo-Saxon practices.

Kaiserlich Deutsches Konsulargericht and Le Tribunal Français In 1878, the ‘Teutonic element in Yokohama’ was not large, the Tokio Times observed, but formed ‘a prosperous, united and entirely respectable community’ (Tokio Times, 21 December 1878). The German diplomatic buildings outwardly projected an ‘unsightly and prison-like appearance’, but its central location adjoining the Catholic Church made up for these ‘deficiencies’. The German court took a low-key approach and avoided publicity ‘for a vast deal the business transacted by the magistrate with or on behalf of those under his jurisdiction is private in all its stages’ (Tokio Times, 21 December 1878). The judge only heard major cases which needed publicity in open court such as police cases falling under the penal code. House respected Prussian rectitude, which was rather of the ‘frigid kind’. He also praised the multilingual judge for being casually able to switch between German, English, and French in the proceedings (Tokio Times, 21 December 1878). Consul and Judge Eduard Zappe (1843–88) had studied at a naval academy in Greenwich in England from 1862 to 1864 and worked for the West India Steam Navigation Company and the Chinese navy prior to joining the German Foreign Office, which posted him at Yokohama from 1871 until his death in 1888. Even though Zappe spoke English, the Japan Weekly Mail wrote several times in their German court reports that the reader would need to wait for the justification of the judgment until the newspaper obtained a translation. Statistics for the German consular court for Yokohama and Hyogo-Osaka for seven years from 1874 to 1881 show 111 criminal and 359 civil cases as well as 1,968 entries for ‘voluntary jurisdiction’ (see Table 4.2). If one assumes similar averages as in these seven years for 55

Harald Fuess Table 4.2 German consular court cases in Yokohama, 1874–81. Year

Criminal

Civil

Total

Voluntary

1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 Total Per cent

14 10 9 12 12 5 10 6 78 20

59 30 74 24 24 32 10 37 310 80

73 40 83 36 36 37 49 43 388 100

185 165 70 130 121 67 n/a 166 904 –

Source: Compiled by the author from the Annual Lists of Consular Court Cases in the Archive of the German Foreign Ministry, Berlin (Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, PAAA).

all thirty-eight years of German extraterritoriality (1861–99), one arrives at an estimate of about 1,950 civil and 600 criminal cases. These would be behind estimates for the British and American courts, but ahead of those of France. Criminal cases played a smaller role in the German consular court system than in those of the larger Anglo-Saxon institutions, amounting to about 20 per cent of the cases. The percentage was much higher in Kobe at 40 per cent with a smaller group of German residents in relation to higher shipping traffic. Incidentally, the most frequently recorded legal events are in the category of so-called ‘voluntary judicature’ (freiwillige Gerichtsbarkeit), which refers to notary certifications, land ownership, confirmation of contracts, marriages, the issuing of birth and death certificates, passports, and other state-sponsored legal documents. Prussia passed legislation for consular courts as early as in the 1860s despite being a latecomer imperial power. According to the 1865 Prussian consular court law, criminal cases were tried by the consul himself or a consular court and two assessors. In more serious accusations the court was simply meant to conduct preliminary investigations and then pass these cases on to higher judicial authorities. The lack of legal gravity of the community squabbles shows in the fact that the most frequent civil suits were 166 ‘other’ and 53 ‘minor affairs’ (Bagatellsache) between 1874 and 1881. Noteworthy were thirteen bankruptcies and two ‘marriage affairs’. Article 3 of the German Consular Court Law of 1879 stipulated the application of ‘customary commercial law of the consular district’ in mercantile affairs. Thus, according to their statutory laws, German consular courts should have implemented local law in Yokohama.Which ‘law’ German consuls in fact applied is difficult to ascertain because explicit references to Japanese, German, or other foreign laws in the published court statements are absent – unlike in the case of the French court. The overall impression one gains, however, suggests the existence of something like a Yokohama treaty port customary law strongly influenced by British legal and Japanese commercial practices, but with less consideration of evolving Japanese commercial codes only passed in the 1890s (Fuess 2013). The German consular laws of 1865 and 1879 limited the jurisdiction of consular courts. In the case of serious crimes, they were merely permitted to pursue preliminary investigations. German murder/manslaughter cases did not appear before its consular court for judgment. After German seamen killed a Frenchman in a brawl in 1878, for example, they were returned for trial to Germany (Japan Weekly Mail, 26 January 1878). By contrast, the 1884 murder of a German policeman in Hakodate by French and Spanish sailors occupied the respective consular courts 56

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(Japan Weekly Mail, 16 October 1884). Suspiciously absent in press reports is the German court sentencing the misconduct of German sailors, possibly due to the limited role German shipping played in Japan in the late nineteenth century. The German courtroom failed to attain the media coverage that the Anglo-Saxon courts received. Nevertheless, a few well-known conflicts related to extraterritoriality erupted between Germany and Japan. These included the 1870 Gärtner incident in which the Hakodate government cancelled a ninety-nine-year land lease over 10 square km of farmland in Hokkaido for fear that this would be a stepping stone to colonization (Pantzer and Saaler 2007); the 1879 Hesperia shipping incident to assert Japanese quarantine law and sovereignty (Saaler 2016c); and the 1880 Suita Incident, during which German Prince Heinrich von Hohenzollern, grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm I, was placed in police custody for violating local hunting regulations (Fuess 2014; Wippich 1999). However, these international conflicts were resolved at higher diplomatic levels and the courtroom played a less prominent role. There is evidence suggesting the involvement of the Japanese government in the German courtroom. It initiated two cases in September 1874 to protect the Japanese working population of Yokohama. The office of Kanagawa Prefecture sued foreign employers on behalf of their Japanese workers. The German court ordered the merchant Rothmund to pay a fine of $5 and medical expenses of $4.75 for injuries to his labourers, whom he had beaten after they allegedly refused to work. In the other case the judge admonished the Japanese police inspector for bringing frivolous cases to court that included rickshaw coolies unable to identify the defendants, thus causing ‘inconvenience to innocent persons, and wasting the time of the Court’ (Japan Weekly Mail, 12 September 1874 and 26 September 1874). Several Japanese plaintiffs pursued financial claims against German companies, in which the court usually decided, placing emphasis on written evidence. The Ōkura company case against Busch, Schraub and Co. was a straightforward example. A contract existed and the delivery of the goods was not doubted, so the excuse of the defendant that the debt had been cancelled did not convince, with the result that the German firm was sentenced to pay the contested 1,000 yen (Japan Weekly Mail, 26 June 1875). The judge dismissed a similar case in 1877 because the plaintiff, Ōhama Chūsaburō, could not prove the damage created by non-delivery of goods (Japan Weekly Mail, 16 June 1877). A German consular court case of 1880 reveals the problem of the coexistence of multiple legal systems in Yokohama. Joseph Heid persuaded a newspaper delivery man by the name of Ozawa to steal each day a copy of the Japan Gazette for public display in his restaurant. As a result of this arrangement, instead of the regular price of 2.5 yen for fifteen months, Heid paid 1 yen, thus saving a total of about $38. Judge Zappe rejected Heid’s defence that in Germany newspaper delivery boys received free copies with the remark that he had lived long enough in Yokohama to know that such customs did not exist in Japan. Under Article 259 of the German Criminal Code, Heid was sentenced to seven days in jail for handling stolen goods. By contrast, a Japanese court had previously sentenced Ozawa to a very harsh term of one year’s imprisonment for stealing from his employer because the Japanese criminal code of the time did not recognize extenuating circumstances (Japan Weekly Mail, 31 January 1880). The French consular court was mostly covered by French media interested in French plaintiffs suing other Frenchmen in the French consular court. There, even relatives sued each other. One Frenchman, for example, sued his nephew and brother-in-law who had taken a loan from him to start a hotel in Tokyo that subsequently failed. Commercial cooperation also turned sour when two French artisans could not agree on settling their accounts after their metalworking shop had failed. They had set up a business together without formally registering it with their consulate in Yokohama as they would have been required to do by their country’s commercial code. For several years they kept a joint account and did not separate their business and 57

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private expenses.When M. Rambert Maigre wanted to get reimbursed by M. Boudou, the court decided that it was ‘legally and equitably impossible’ to determine which one of the two had taken more money out of the account for private expenses (L’echo du Japon, 8 November 1878). The most high-profile case, which was even translated into English for the Banker’s Magazine as a commercial precedent, was a suit between M. Deniaud and the Yokohama branch of a Parisian bank, Comptoir d’Escompte in 1876. The problem revolved around the question over the right of early withdrawal of a fixed-term deposit prior to maturity if one forfeited the interest. The court cited the French Code Civil as a guide for finding out the intent of the contract as a whole and rejected the suit. By doing so it justified its decision as ‘in conformity with Yokohama commercial customs’ (L’echo du Japon, 9 September 1876; ‘Banking and Commercial law’, Bankers’ Magazine, Journal of the Money Market, and Commercial Digest, vol. 37). Just like the other consular courts, it maintained its traditional French rituals and procedures, for example, explaining to a British lawyer that according to French legal practice he is only permitted to ask the other party questions through the intermediation of the court (L’echo du Japon, 16 December 1878). Missing in the L’echo du Japon description of the French court are the endless lists of sailors punished for minor misconduct so common in British and American consular court records or Englishlanguage newspapers. Unusual among the consular courts, the French newspaper mentions a few cases of litigious women. A ‘young man’ wanted his jewelry gift returned from a woman ‘known in Yokohama’, and the journalist ridiculed the male plaintiff in need of the support of an attorney in his suit against a single woman (L’echo du Japon, 1 October 1877). The Yokohama French press paid little attention to Japanese-French mixed suits. Socially interesting is the suit of a Japanese widow asking her deceased husband’s family for child support of their child, showing like a few similar child support suits in other consular courts that some Japanese women of the treaty ports asserted rights and claims quite unlike the popular image of the Madame Butterfly in Western imagination. One of the most financially significant cases involved payments of silk worm cartoons amounting to the sum of $17,516 (L’echo du Japon, 14 July 1876). Politically sensitive were a series of cases in which the city of Tokyo with the help of British attorney Lowder sued several French landlords of the Tsukiji foreign settlement for the non-payment of taxes. Their excuse was that the Japanese government had not prevented foreigners from living outside the treaty ports and thereby violated international treaties. This was noteworthy. Here foreigners interested in maintaining a property monopoly in Tokyo wanted to prevent other foreigners from full access to Japan and blamed the Japanese government for its relative open access policy. Their argument ran counter to the entire treaty revision debate imagined as a quid pro quo of abolishing Western extraterritoriality in return for full access to Japan for economic activity or residence. To some French, the loss of extraterritoriality in 1899 was so important that they left the country. The most famous example is cartoonist Georges Bigot who divorced his Japanese wife, took the custody of their child, and returned to France. For most foreign residents, however, their anxieties regarding the end of extraterritoriality proved unwarranted.

Foreign plaintiffs in Japanese courts Despite extraterritorial privileges, a treaty power foreigner was still subject to the Japanese legal system when suing a Japanese individual or institution even before 1899. After makeshift arrangements in the 1860s with foreign consuls and Japanese officials negotiating procedures almost on a case-by-case basis, after 1875 it became institutionally possible to sue Japanese in the new Yokohama Court House. Just like the grand Yokohama Custom House inaugurated in 1873, the representative building of the Yokohama court physically overshadowed any nearby consular 58

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court authority. By 1890, the Japanese government had established a set of judicial appeal procedures with the Yokohama District Court (Yokohama chihō saibansho) followed by the Higher Court in Tokyo (Tōkyō jōtō saibansho) (Röhl 2005: 711–70). One of the recurrent practical problems foreigners had with Japanese court decisions was their inability to enforce them, especially in the case of bankruptcy of a Japanese counterpart from whom they could not recover losses. In 1881, British Minister Sir Harry Parkes complained: ‘Whenever foreigners have lent capital to Japanese they have been cheated and robbed of it and can get no redress in Japanese courts’ (McMaster 1964: 230). R. Holme of Nagasaki wrote to the prominent merchant house Jardine Matheson & Co. that obtaining a favourable judgment from a Japanese court in a claim against a Japanese firm ‘would be hopeless’ (McMaster 1964: 230). If that had been the general opinion, foreign firms would have been most reluctant capitalist investors. In fact, the famous Takashima mine series of court cases 1877–78 reflects an eye-catching intermeshing of big politics and big business, and in the end Jardine Matheson had to cut their investment losses in what at the time was Japan’s largest mine as they had been outwitted by the politically savvy Gotō Shōjirō and his Japanese government connections. The mine’s best customer, the Mitsubishi Steamship Company, then took it over at what was a bargain price (McMaster 1964). Although the general foreign mood was critical or at least skeptical, there is a notable lack of obvious injustice done to a foreign plaintiff, especially in criminal cases. One of the odd suits due to its mix of business and international politics was that of the German merchant Oscar Heeren, then resident in Peru. Heeren had hired sixty Japanese for work in Peru with all contracts signed at the consulate. The agreements had to be dissolved as the Japanese government broke its promise to issue the necessary overseas visas to its nationals and Heeren lost a substantial amount of money. The Japanese Higher Court in Tokyo rejected the suit on the grounds that only specific agencies of the state and not the Japanese government at large could be sued. The visa agency refused to answer the claims of the suit, so it had to be dismissed (Japan Weekly Mail, 26 April 1879). One of the conclusions to be drawn is that the cases of Westerners suing Japanese resembled those of other plaintiffs in Yokohama society. In the opinion of one scholar, what is most remarkable about lawsuits in consular courts and the Yokohama district is that ‘they were not remarkable at all’ (Honjo 2003: 85).

Conclusion: Western consular courts and treaty port society Western consular courts have become the symbol of extraterritoriality and serve as proof of what was ‘unequal’ about Japan’s standing in the world of the late nineteenth century.The diplomatic and domestic history of treaty revision and the legal history of consular courts have so far been narrated by historians as if they were not interrelated parts of Meiji Japan’s modernization efforts. This has resulted in two almost distinct and incompatible stories either with exclusive focus on either Japanese nationalism, international diplomacy, and the treaty revision process or microhistories of Japan’s treaty port societies without much relevance to Japanese history as a whole.With regard to Western consular jurisdiction, only those of Great Britain and the United States have received any scholarly attention so far, so considering the role of Germany and France gives us a more complete picture of the system of Western consular jurisdiction in treaty port Japan. Consular courts functioned as a local institution of conflict resolution within the foreign community, very often among people with the same national background. Japanese plaintiffs also used the court to settle conflicts usually regarding the fulfilment of contracts.Variations in legal culture and language barriers mattered to participants. Courts in Yokohama maintained special translation facilities for foreigners suing Japanese or Japanese suing Westerners, especially 59

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in the case of business conflicts. Courts across national divides negotiated and usually respected each other’s jurisdiction, denying litigants attempts to go ‘court shopping’ by claiming a different nationality or instituting counterclaims in the same case. Unlike other countries subjected to extraterritoriality, Japan firmly rejected two additions to the system implemented elsewhere. First, from the very beginning it was very strict about limiting foreign influence to the treaty ports and preventing its extension to other parts of the country. Travel into the interior only became possible in the early 1870s after obtaining written permissions. Direct trade in the interior of Japan, economic investment, and ownership of land, railways, or mines were absolutely forbidden to foreigners, and in order to buy or sell anything from Japan, foreign merchants had to conclude agreements with Japanese partners. The effective establishment of transcultural trust and cooperation was thus a competitive advantage in the respective marketplace. These restrictions, and the Japanese government rigorously preventing further encroachments upon its sovereignty, real or imagined, prevented large-scale foreign capitalist investments in modern industries outside the small treaty port area and provided ownership protection to Japan’s ‘fledgling industry’ well into the late nineteenth Low tariffs, moreover, enabled a free flow of goods indicating potential domestic demand to would-be entrepreneurs. Second, ‘mixed courts’ were an innovation that stabilized and prolonged the system of consular jurisdiction elsewhere but was rejected by Japan. In 1875, Egypt introduced such a system to unify its multiple legal systems while retaining the dimension of Islamic law and overcoming consular jurisdiction. Shanghai from the 1870s to 1927 also operated mixed courts to deal with cases among Chinese living in the international settlement. The French maintained such a system in Siam. Foreign diplomats had proposed to the Japanese government the system of mixed courts as an institution to replace consular courts. The Japanese government sent three missions to Egypt in 1873, in 1877, and in 1885–86 to study mixed courts. In the end, however, the Japanese decided against the adaptation of such a system because of the presence of foreign judges who might remain accountable to their own governments.The great public uproar in the 1880s against the possible inclusion of foreign judges in Japanese courts prevented even a diluted form of ‘mixed courts’ from being adapted in Japan. Japanese opposition perpetuated consular jurisdiction, but then it facilitated the attainment of complete legal autonomy more quickly. It may be one of the great ironies of the age of extraterritoriality that foreign laws were less influential in Yokohama than foreign judicial institutions themselves. The value of the courts to the community across national boundaries was the provision of independent judgments regardless of the laws they represented. Merchants in fact adhered or at least invoked another set of norms and values than may have been legislated in a Western capital. Terms such as ‘Yokohama commercial custom’, ‘custom of the port’, or the ‘custom of trade’ were invoked in the consular courts of all nations by plaintiffs, defendants, and judges even if the participants disagreed on their meanings. Sometimes suits were brought with the express purpose to set a legal precedent for the business community to follow.Whereas adherence to customary law was an explicit legal provision in the consular court regulations of the German Empire, other courts were also in a continuous negotiation process with the merchant community in the creation and adaptation of customary law under changing circumstances. On the whole, the process was effective enough for international commerce to be conducted in Yokohama and may have restrained individual imperialists from pushing further into Japan when it was still vulnerable. The consular court institution came under strongest Japanese criticism in the 1880s, at a time when it was functioning most effectively and common business norms were more widespread than ever before. It was not institutional failure or anti-Japanese bias that terminated the consular court era. In the end, it was big power politics that overrode the conservatism of the Western treaty port community 60

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and led to the conclusion that Japan had learned its lesson. The transition in 1899 through the end of extraterritoriality proved smooth beyond anticipation. The British Empire connected Shanghai and Yokohama commercially and legally in the nineteenth century, with Shanghai dwarfing any other treaty port as the regional centre of a network of governance and trade. After 1899 Yokohama was no longer an extraterritorial British area.The city had become the hub port of imperial Japan, victorious in the war against China in 1895 and moving toward an alliance with the world’s foremost maritime power, Great Britain. Goods sent overseas as well as large numbers of Japanese emigrants travelled through Yokohama. By World War I Yokohama had evolved from a secluded trading enclave into one of the world’s most important international ports. The problem of containing Western imperialism was superseded by its new function of spreading Japanese trade and influence into neighbouring regions and the wider world.

Note 1 The initial treaties were signed with the United States, Great Britain, Russia, France, and the Netherlands. Japan agreed on mutual extraterritoriality with China and Russia, but due to the most favoured nation clause, this was never implemented in the case of Russia.

Further reading Auslin, Michael R. (2004) Negotiating with Imperialism:The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fuess, Harald (2014) ‘Informal imperialism and the 1879 Hesperia Incident: containing cholera and challenging extraterritoriality in Japan’, Japan Review, 27: 103–40. Pantzer, Peter and Saaler, Sven (2007) Japanische Impressionen eines Kaiserlichen Gesandten: Karl von Eisendecher im Japan der Meiji-Zeit, Munich: Iudicium. Perez, Louis G. (1998) Japan Comes of Age: Mutsu Munemitsu and the Revision of the Unequal Treaties, Madison, NJ: Associated University Presses.

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5 The English-language press networks in the transnational history of East Asia, 1850–1950 Peter O’Connor

The English-language press of East Asia belongs as much to the history of Japan, China and Korea as it does to the history of the West in the region. The newspapers and magazines discussed in this chapter and published in Kobe, Tokyo, Shanghai, Canton, Beijing, Tianjin, Seoul and elsewhere constitute important primary source materials for the transnational history of East Asia.The study of this history includes and broadens the national histories of the region and their interaction with the world. This chapter attempts to place the English-language press of East Asia in the context of the transnational history of the region. It analyzes the networks formed by the English-language newspapers and journals over time and shows their contribution to informal diplomacy in the region. It also seeks to provide an assessment of the power and significance of these publications as networks of influence and channels of access to power, a contest in which major East Asian news hubs, particularly Tokyo and Shanghai, eagerly participated. Information structures reveal far more during periods of stress and crisis than they do in times of peace and amity. In order to demonstrate the structure of press networks and the varieties of news management that flowed through them, this chapter focuses on the crisis that began with the Manchurian Incident in 1931. By concentrating on the affiliations and allegiances demonstrated in the editorial lines taken by these press networks during the years of crises and war from 1931 to the early 1950s, we can see the press networks in their most overt stages of operation. For in these years Japan’s semi-official press networks became ever more closely identified with the spirit and culture of systems of international relations established by the Japanese government, most notably the New Order in East Asia (Tōa shin chitsujo) proclaimed in 1938, and the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere (Daitōa kyōeiken) declared in August 1940. As Japan’s semi-official press networks increasingly dovetailed with the national message, they displayed not only their own agendas, but also those of opposing networks, notably those promoting the Chinese Nationalist cause and those of the independent and semi-independent networks protecting and upholding Western interests in East Asia. A great many English- and non-Asian-language newspapers were published in East Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: between 40 and 50 in Japan, between 50 and 60 in China, and fewer than 10 in Korea. The earliest, the Canton Register, was published in Canton in 1829. The second oldest appeared in Hong Kong in 1845, and the last independent foreign 62

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newspaper in Japan, Japan News-Week in Tokyo, and the last dozen or so independent foreign papers in China, in Shanghai, and throughout Southeast Asia were closed in December 1941. In the wake of the phenomenal series of military successes following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese newsmen took over and set up first Japanese-, then English-language and finally vernacular newspapers in their expanding news empire. A network of wartime titles was established in place of the previous colonial press, often taking over the plant and premises of previous newspapers.The press capitals of East Asia were reordered around news hubs in Tokyo, Singapore and Hsinking, the capital of Manchukuo. From the 1890s until the absorption of the foreign-owned Japan Chronicle and Japan Advertiser by the Japan Times & Mail in 1940–41, these three newspapers constituted the main sources of Japanese and international news for a readership of between 4,000 and 6,000 Japanese and nonJapanese in Japan and abroad. The networks formed around them or, in the case of the Japan Times, the agencies behind them, were more than national groupings. Most journalists in the Chronicle network were British, but their work created too many difficulties for the diplomatic establishment for this to be called Britain’s network. Most journalists writing for the Advertiser network were American, and a few were closely connected to power elites in Washington, and the network was well represented on the American ‘China Compub’ (Committee on Publicity) chaired by George Creel in 1917–18, but on the whole the Advertiser network was too private an initiative to be described as America’s network or, despite its efforts on its behalf, China’s. The English-language press network promoting the Japanese viewpoint employed many Anglophone journalists, but the key players throughout were almost invariably Japanese publicity experts from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Gaimushō), and compared to the other two, this was very much Japan’s, or the Gaimushō’s, network. The power of the English-language press networks stemmed from a linguistic deficit. Very few foreigners learned Japanese between the wars. In Britain, at the School of Oriental Studies, the average annual intake of students of Japanese from 1918–23 was in single figures. An Australian survey in 1935 found only seven people familiar with Japanese. In the United States in late 1941, only 50 Americans (other than Japanese-Americans) knew Japanese. More germane to this discussion, in 1941 none of the Anglophone foreign correspondents in Tokyo could read Japanese (though about a third of Axis correspondents could). Some local English-language journalists spoke Japanese well, but very few could read it. Journalists with any competence in Chinese were just as rare. Thus, the underlying rationale of Japanese propaganda in English, whether in the press of East Asia or in book form, depended on the fact that most of those responsible for telling the world about Japan were, in Japan, illiterate. Unable to read vernacular newspapers and seldom able to consult the man in the street, most correspondents took their information from the Information Department (Gaimushō jōhōbu) press conferences established by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1921 (see Matsumura 1971) and balanced that with what they could glean from the local English-language press. The agencies producing Japanese propaganda therefore concerned themselves with making the case for Japan in newspapers and books in English and making these sources available to Anglophone and other journalists, and through them, their foreign readerships. To this end, foreign journalists were hired to present Japan’s case in English-language books and in newspapers. In this way, at a time of dwindling credibility for Japanese spokesmen, Japan co-opted the credibility and authority of foreign journalism, foreign journalists and foreign newspapers to present its case more effectively. Thus, propaganda itself became another commodity in the mix of interests and causes operating in the foreign communities of Japan and China. This supplies a larger context to appeals 63

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like the following for a reassessment of the place of the foreign communities in the history of imperialism: It is also clear that far from the simple dichotomy of imperial states/subjects and colonized states/subjects we must re-envisage the East Asian experience for what it was: a network of multiple overlapping imperialisms, in the interstices of which opportunistic groups carved out new livelihoods and new roles. (Bickers and Henriot 2000: 2)

The press networks Each newspaper in a network is the distributor of a living, growing body of ideas and reports accumulated in the writings of its journalists and editors (O’Connor 2010: Introduction). If we approach networks as accumulations of people and journalism, we should arrive at conclusions that may be greater than the sum of their parts. Here is a definition: A press network is a group of media institutions and journalists linked by common, more or less binding, interests. These interests should be held in common to the extent that they distinguish one network from another. (O’Connor 2010: 11–2) Five broad accumulations of newspapers and journalists in East Asia can be identified: 1) the Gaimushō network, 2) the Japan Advertiser network, 3) the Japan Chronicle network, and 4) the Guomindang1 network and, later, 5) the relatively skimpy English-language press network of the Communist Party of China (O’Connor 2010: chapters 2–4). Of these, the first and the last, the semi-official Japanese and the outlawed, but then consolidated, Chinese Communist networks, proved the most durable. With the Guomindang network these three persisted well into the Cold War in East Asia. The corporate descendants of some of these newspapers are still publishing today. The articles in these four and then five networks helped shape Western ideas of Japan and East Asia and contributed to Western policy formation on East Asia. The Gaimushō and Guomindang networks enjoyed state funding for their publications, which were known as ‘semiofficial’, whereas the Japan Advertiser and Japan Chronicle networks were independent but had strong ties to opinion shapers and official interests in China, the United States and Great Britain. The flagship newspaper of the Chronicle network in China, the North-China Daily News, tended to trade on its reputation as the voice of British imperial policy, but in Shanghai where, as in Kobe and Yokohama, the symbols of empire were everywhere, the weaknesses of imperialism, whether informal or multiple (as in ‘imperialisms’), whether rigorously maintained or merely paid lip service to, had become increasingly evident by the 1930s. Had these ties been stronger or more obviously official, it would have been easier to call the Japan Chronicle network the ‘British’ network and the Japan Advertiser network the ‘American’ network, but in the period under review, neither British nor American interests were conspicuously defended or upheld in East Asia. This was particularly the case after the First World War, when the undeclared consensus at the Gaimushō was that the United States implicitly recognized China as Japan’s ‘special’ zone of interest, whatever the State Department might say in public or however it might disavow such statements as the 1917 Lansing-Ishii agreement (which the President of the Japan Times, John Russell Kennedy [1861–1928], helped to negotiate), and 64

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that Britain simply lacked the wherewithal to uphold its considerable investments, especially in Shanghai. A policy rift between Britain and America on East Asia meant that these networks more closely represented their own interests, affiliations and investments in East Asia than they did the interests of either nation. For this reason, I name both the Japan Chronicle and Japan Advertiser networks after their flagship newspapers. These networks represented varieties of organizations that were neither homogeneous nor consistent.Their development and the growth of their influence on policy and access to policymakers were shot through with inconsistencies and contradictions.They were not the fruits of a master plan cooked up by British or any other elites or oligarchies. Certainly, the China Association made its voice heard in the North-China Daily News. Similarly, the American Club in Tokyo delighted in any expansion of its news power and influence in Tokyo and Shanghai through the work of a close-knit group of U.S.-trained journalism majors working on the Japan Advertiser and newspapers in its network, but there was never a blueprint or a master plan. That is one reason why it is not easy to quantify the influence of these networks on domestic readerships in East Asia during the era of rising nationalism in early Shōwa Japan, or in post-1911 China, or in Korea after 1910, when Japanese censors effectively shut down the public sphere. These newspapers had tiny circulations running at most at around 7,000, for the North-China Daily News and averaging a daily run of 4,000 copies for the most successful American-owned daily in East Asia, the Japan Advertiser. The newspapers’ influence and access to centres of power in the West and in East Asia were always out of proportion to their circulation, whether in peaceful times or in the ‘paper wars’ that broke out during periods of open hostility. Because, prior to 1941, few Westerners knew East Asian languages, these English-language press networks constituted points of observation and contact that were trusted as sources of information for scholars, journalists, officials in Western foreign ministries and small but influential domestic readerships in East Asia. These examples demonstrate the transnational nature of the English-language press networks of East Asia. Nevertheless, for all their linguistic and cultural homogeneity, these newspapers only sporadically conveyed the influence of the imperial press system of the British world, whose reach extended most easily and naturally into the British Dominions and South Africa. As an influential body in the formation of the Japan Chronicle network, the mercantile lobby known as the China Association and the more loosely defined British Association had branches in London, Shanghai, Kobe and Tokyo, but neither group paid much attention to the representation of the British world of the Dominions, let alone Ireland. For most of the inter-war period, the independent English-language press networks were, at best, tolerated by officials in London and Washington, but more often treated as obstacles and irritants to the smooth conduct of diplomacy. Foreign Office and United States State Department officials made financial overtures to the British- and U.S.-owned independent newspapers at crisis points in the late 1930s and on the brink of war in the early 1940s in the hope that British- and American-born journalists might sound the voice of reason and appeal to the middle ground or the much-vaunted ‘liberal’ element in Japanese society, but these initiatives offered too little and always came too late.

People, access and credibility Among the Western journalists working on the English-language newspapers of East Asia, a significant minority had close connections with important players in the extension of Japanese influence in Asia. A standout example, Edward Pickering (1881–1957) had been a Liberal Party Member of Parliament in Britain, worked in Tokyo on the Japan Times and on the Japan 65

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Advertiser after its acquisition by the Japan Times in October 1940 and was also a professor of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, but he was neither a journalist nor a serious academic. Pickering owed these positions to his friendship with the politician and Pan-Asianist Nagai Ryūtarō (1881–1944), a friend from their time as students at Oxford University. Nagai, who was later to become one of Japan’s most vocal denouncers of the ‘White Peril’ in Asia, represented the louder end of a Pan-Asianist continuum running from excitable commentators such as Ōkawa Shūmei (1886–1957), through Ishiwara Kanji (1889–1949) to Matsuoka Yōsuke (1880–1946), with Yanaihara Tadao (1893–1961) offstage, a little-heeded voice of reason warning of the dangers of colonialism both for the colonized and the colonizer. Promoted by internationalist circles around the Japan Times and the Foreign Ministry, Pickering went on to write Japan’s Place in the World (1936), setting out Japan’s case in East Asia (O’Connor 2016). Within their small but bustling and noisy market, the one commodity on which all the networks would at least profess to compete was credibility, for it had been hard won, wrested over time from armchair experts and commentators at home by journalists on the spot in East Asia. The locus of credibility shifted toward ‘our man’ in East Asia through the authentic appeal of topical books and memoirs by journalists in the region. Arthur Morgan Young (1894–1942), Hugh Byas (1875–1945), Hallett Abend (1884–1955), Thomas Millard (1868–1942), Edgar Snow (1905–1972), George E. Sokolsky (1893–1962) and many other journalists from these networks published accounts that complemented their newspaper reports and features and helped to shape international perceptions of contemporary issues in East Asia. The human components of networks, the journalists, each had their own network of contacts, depending on class, status, origin and the like, but at the very top of the network some journalists moved adroitly between the networks and their vernacular constituencies. In 2004, Bryna Goodman mined the George E. Sokolsky manuscripts archive at Columbia University to piece together Sokolsky’s 1920s/1930s Shanghai network to great effect, looking at his family relationships, social contacts, mentors, paymasters and influences. Sokolsky, the son of a Russian-born rabbi, was a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism. He enjoyed close and cooperative contacts with China-based Australian newspaperman William Henry Donald (1875–1946), Roy Scott Anderson (1883–1925), a legendary American advisor to Standard Oil and a North-China correspondent under the byline ‘Bruce Baxter’, and Tang Jiezhi, his employer and mentor. Sokolsky had close access to the leader of China’s revolutionary movement Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), Sun’s successor Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) and the Manchurian warlord Zhang Xueliang (1901–2001). He was on familiar terms with Soong Meiling (1898–2003) and other members of the influential Soong and Kwok (Guo) families in Shanghai.Through his wife, Rosalind Phang (1893–1933), a Jamaica Cantonese, he got to know diplomat and journalist Eugene Chen (1878–1944), like Rosalind Phang, a descendant of Chinese immigrants to the West Indies, who became his friend and an intermittent rival. Sokolsky waltzed across all the networks, writing for Sun’s Shanghai Gazette, for the China Press owned by John Benjamin Powell (1886–1947) and partly financed by Benjamin Wilfrid Fleisher’s (1870–1946) Japan Advertiser, for their rivals, the North-China Daily News and the Japanese-financed Far Eastern Review (housed in the Yokohama Specie Bank Building, an easy stroll from the North-China building), for the Japan Advertiser, for Shangbao and, as a correspondent, for the New York Post, Philadelphia Ledger and more. Sokolsky’s institutional network was also extensive: from the Shanghai Students Union to the influential Shanghai Roads Committee, the Chinese Bureau of Public Information (CBPI) and their newsletter, to consultancies with U.S. Consuls and State Department officials, work on the Chinese Bureau of Economic Information and the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce. After his return to the United States in 1935 Sokolsky wrote for Hearst’s New York Sun, for the 66

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Japanese Embassy in Washington and in the mid-1950s, as the ‘high priest’ of militant U.S. antiCommunism, for the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals where he was known as the ‘Clearance Man’ (Goodman 2004). Sokolsky’s ability to operate across the networks demonstrates great skill and an innate sense of professional advantage, but such skills were sheer necessities in Sokolsky’s Shanghai, which reflected in microcosm the disintegration of Yuan Shih-kai’s (1859–1916) post-revolutionary republic and the growing strength of a broader Chinese nationalism aided and abetted by a mixed group of non-Chinese and diasporic Chinese personalities and institutions working through the press: a transnational press network. Sokolsky’s gift was to perceive these movements and to position himself to move with and between them. Henry George Wandesforde (H.G.W.) Woodhead (1883–1959) of the Peking  & Tientsin Times and then the Shanghai Evening News & Mercury worked the interstices of Shanghai society to attack the Chinese nationalists and to promote Japan as a bulwark against Chinese ‘chaos’ and threats to extraterritoriality, while making arms deals on the side. In the early 1930s, Woodhead rode to the rescue of the maverick New Yorker Harold Robert Isaacs (1910–86), founding editor of China Forum, not because he sympathized with Isaacs’ communism but because the Nanjing government, infuriated by Isaacs’ hostile portrayal of Guomindang forces, had demanded that Isaacs be thrown out of Shanghai. Nanjing’s demands exposed the fragility and inequity of the treaties that underpinned extraterritoriality, and Woodhead felt bound to protect Isaacs’ extraterritorial rights. Taking far greater risks than any of the other fellow travellers, the youthful Isaacs had made himself a contact point for the Communist Party of China, taking their information and publishing ‘Five years of Kuomintang reaction’, effectively a charge list of what he saw as Guomindang repression in an omnibus edition of China Forum published in May 1932. Isaacs stretched the degree of protection afforded him by extraterritoriality as far as it would go and was probably near the top of a Guomindang hit list when he learned that the murders of a number of his Communist informants, which he had attributed to Guomindang murder squads in China Forum, had been ordered by Moscow and executed by Chinese Communist agents. Greatly disillusioned, Isaacs closed his presses and wrote his account, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (1938), which carried in its first edition an introduction by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Transnational network journalists like Woodhead, Isaacs and Sokolsky demonstrated a far more accurate appreciation of the system than institutional journalists such as Owen Mortimer (O. M.) Green (1876–1959) or Rodney Gilbert (1889–1968) at the North-China Daily News or even, on some issues, Robert Young (1858–1922) at the Japan Chronicle in Kobe who at all times worked the system to advance their own agenda. One reality of power that all newspapers had to deal with was the postal system in China. For a newspaper to be ‘barred from the posts’ was, in effect, to cut it off from its readers. Guomindang news managers were able to use this weapon against the China papers in the Englishlanguage press networks to great effect. In another context, Weipin Tsai has described the postal service as ‘the country’s most crucial information-bearing network’ (Tsai 2013: 1753). Access to the postal service became a factor in editorial decisions.The English-language press networks in China mined the ‘interstices of multiple overlapping imperialisms’ (Bickers and Henriot 2000: 2). Working these interstices meant exploiting the gaps between the interests of the vernacular, host community and those of the institutions upholding the more than 20 ‘unequal’ treaties signed between China and the Western powers between 1842 and 1933. It would not have been possible for the operators of the networks to occupy these niches without long and fruitful collaboration with the fixers and dealers known as compradors. 67

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Alongside their fellow settlers, foreign journalists and media entrepreneurs scrambled for seasoned and capable compradors to exploit collaborative opportunities, and work the seams holding together the patchwork of nineteenth-century treaties between the powers and a failed, bankrupt China, a bemused and wary Japan and, for Britain, Russia and finally Japan, a vulnerable Korea. These ‘interstices’ became increasingly workable as old understandings faded and younger journalists broke ranks with the ‘Shanghai mindset’ in order to promote a united China. Another grouping of Western journalists supported a China united under Communism by awarding the Communist Party of China (CPC) the ‘just war’ title. Until Hans van de Ven (2012), Frank Dikötter (2013) and others began their constructive reappraisal of the chaotic processes by which China imploded under the Nationalists and was pulled back toward unity by the Communists, ownership of this historical trophy by the CPC has been one of the most consistently held assumptions in the historiography of East Asia. The wealth and size of the Guomindang’s English-language press network, especially where the magazine chain of Time, Fortune and Life, owned by Chinese-born Henry Luce (1898–1967), brought it into American homes, worked to the Guomindang’s disadvantage in post-1949 assessments, when the very skimpiness of the Communists’ English-language press network was held up as evidence of their essential uprightness. Whatever the images, whether of well-ordered godowns and prosperous compradors or of desperate refugees packing bridges or abandoned babies in bombed-out stations, all served as the schemata of a failing system in which institutional loyalties could not be taken for granted and individual enterprise and collaboration were the norm.

The view from Japan An important historical subtext to this discussion is the extent to which informal networks of newspapers, expatriate and settler interests and foreign correspondents based in Japan and China have acted as a corrective to official ideas and sometimes as a primary lens through which the world has seen Japan. In sponsoring the Foreign Ministry (Gaimushō) network of pro-Japanese newspapers and magazines, the Japanese government hoped to shape and colour this lens. Making the old narrative work again for Japan in the world meant hiring outsiders to tell the story anew. Consequently, our view of the issues – master narratives, intellectual hegemony and catch-up imperialism – is clouded by the involvement of so many foreign, non-specialist writers and journalists on both sides and at all levels of the process of informal diplomacy. Irishmen, Englishmen, Scotsmen, Australians and Americans wrote and sometimes ran Japan’s informal diplomacy in Britain’s ‘informal empire’ in China. Although some of these publicists were sincerely committed to Japan, their compatriots writing for the independent, unsubsidized English-language newspapers of East Asia and serving as consultants to the Chinese government bitterly resented the efforts of these intellectual recruits to Japan’s semi-official press and radio. This resentment led to subterranean rivalries and vendettas that paralleled the conventional international competition between the Western powers and Japan. Yet another complication was the presence of a vocal, expatriate, Anglophone public in China and Japan, among whom a significant proportion welcomed Japan’s interventions in China. Japan experienced no shortage of public relations failures in the modern era: over the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the century, at the Portsmouth Conference in 1905, at Versailles in 1919–20, over its withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933 and with great frequency in the years 1937–41, but can we confirm historian Richard Storry’s view of Japan as a consistently poor propagandist? (Storry 1979)

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A thorough examination of the different media networks, including 1930s radio propaganda, prewar English-language press networks, censorship and postwar lobbying in Washington yields a generally positive picture of Japan’s overall capability in propaganda. Beginning with the inauguration of the Foreign Office Information Department (Gaimushō jōhōbu) in 1921, Japan built and funded an efficient, comprehensive propaganda programme and ran it with verve, skill and ample funds. Led by the approachable, media-friendly Shidehara Kijūrō (1872–1951), then ambassador to Washington, Japan’s information management at the Washington Conference was well organized and effective, especially compared with that at Versailles. Any survey of the history of the postwar Japan Lobby in Washington or of the vitriolic Japan-U.S. relationship of the 1990s will show that this progressive improvement, alongside Japan’s commitment to informal diplomacy, developed and survived the last war undiminished. Overall, Japan has been consistently proactive, not passive, in a long-term initiative to present its story on its own terms in international forums and in its own media. In the immediate postwar years, Japan took the battle to the victors in Washington and gained the lasting trade and security benefits that it tends carefully to this day, although the Japan Times long ago ceased to function as the flagship of the Foreign Ministry network, and the network itself is far more diffuse and far less discernible than wood-and-trees newspapers could ever be in the interwar period. Japan’s real problem in presenting its case before 1941 lay not in assembling and managing the structures and processes of informal diplomacy, nor in any inherent ineptitude or diffidence, but in the accumulation of contradictions between the content of its presentations and events on the ground. These contradictions became most obvious in the later 1930s when Japan stepped up military activities in China at a pace and in a variety of directions that defied sympathetic presentation. Under these circumstances, it was hard for Japan to make even its best case stick.To Hugh Byas, reporting from Tokyo in 1937, Japanese politicians and publicists seemed woefully out of touch with events. Incredible as it may seem, the Japanese are permeated with a belief that they have received nothing but rebuffs and insults from the Chinese . . . Japan’s view is that she wants to be a friend to lead, develop and defend China, and so Japan is humiliated by China’s hostile refusal. The Chinese masses’ deep fear of and animosity towards Japan are treated as if they were noxious products of the Kuomintang propaganda. Not a single Japanese statesman, publicist or newspaper has ever suggested that the Manchurian affair, the Shanghai bombardment, the Jehol campaign, the creation of the East Hopei regime, the orgy of smuggling associated with that regime and other events may have been responsible for Chinese fears. (Byas 1937) By the early 1930s, Japan’s publicity managers were facing growing international indifference to their presentations and a persistent, almost overwhelmingly articulate hostility from both the international press and the unsubsidized English-language press networks of East Asia. However, at home, the presentation of a domestic image so much at odds with internal and external realities faced little challenge from the press. In the late 1930s, a few did speak up from the middle ground between anguished silence and the military agenda for Japan’s role in East Asia: politicians such as Saitō Takao (1870–1949) (cf. Kinmonth 1999), academics such as Rōyama Masamichi (1895–1980) (cf. Han 2011) and Yanaihara Tadao and publications in English such as the Foreign Affairs Association’s Contemporary Japan (published from 1932 to 1970) and the Tokyo Gazette (1937–39) all delivered an approximation of moderate, critical thinking that, for all its consideration and balance, was not much heard above the semi-official chorus.

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The contradictions between the narratives conveyed by Japan’s news managers and realities on the ground were symptoms of a fundamental deficiency. Japan lacked the coherent ideological structure that would have helped support the more controversial planks of its informal diplomatic policy. The homemade material was flimsy. Slogans that circulated so easily in Japanese seemed comically overblown and even provocative in English translation. The concept of the kokutai (national polity), for example, pervaded domestic political discussion and provided an amuletic shield for politicians of all stripes, but it was not easy to hang an argument on it, let alone use it to justify a military campaign (on the concept of kokutai, see Chapters 11 and 12 in this volume). Given these polemical weaknesses, it is not hard to see why, to Japan’s storytellers, victimization and isolation may have seemed the most sympathetic hands to play. In this way, almost by default, misunderstood or unrecognized nobility became the recurring theme in Japan’s master narrative. The further contradiction between Japan’s well-organized, largely on-message, promotional framework and national victimhood, together with mounting discrepancies between the content of Japan’s presentations and events on the ground, increased Japan’s international isolation almost to the point of self-fulfilment.

The English-language newspapers as organs of propaganda Japan made a considerable investment in radio propaganda in the 1930s, but the bulk of its propaganda effort in the modern period was in print media, in subsidizing and organizing the production and distribution of hundreds of books, half a dozen news agencies, a good dozen English-language newspapers and about twice as many Chinese-language journals and newspapers. With the exception of Korea (Chōsen), where Japanese had been successfully imposed on the media, the main languages of production were Chinese and English. Japan made a substantial investment in propaganda, but how substantial is hard to show with any accuracy. In the early 1920s, the secret budget (kimitsuhi) for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Information Department was set at ¥5,000,000 a year for general expenses and subsidies to publications in East Asia, the United States and Europe. We know that after the propaganda debacle at Versailles, Japan raised its propaganda investment in China, spending £50,000 per annum on its revamped news agency, Shin-Tōhō. One British journalist, Putnam Weale (Bertram Lenox-Simpson, 1877–1930), estimated that in 1927 Japan was spending ¥2,000,000 a year on propaganda in China, of which the $60,000 that went to one English-language newspaper, the North China Standard, was a fairly typical sum. Weale thought £25,000 a year would let Britain compete with Japan, but British Foreign Office policy forbade overt subsidies to newspapers, books or writers.2 Three years later, a Shanghai report put Japan’s annual subsidy to the Far Eastern Review at US$100,000 a year.3 By the early 1930s, according to Miles Vaughn (1891–1949), Far East Manager of the United Press Agency, Japan had spent $2,000,000 in its campaign to bring the League of Nations round to a sympathetic understanding of its position in Manchuria. Operating in the Meiji (1868–1912) and early Taishō (1912–26) eras through networks of gifted amateurs in Japan and abroad, Japanese propaganda grew exponentially to become the sophisticated product of not one but several institutions. From Meiji to Taishō, Japan’s external propaganda was in the hands of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, from August 1921, the Information Department set up within the ministry, and its successors, the Cabinet Information Committee (Naikaku jōhō iinkai, 1936), the Cabinet Information Department (Naikaku jōhōbu, 1937) and the Cabinet Information Bureau (Naikaku jōhōkyoku, 1940). Internal, domestic propaganda was the responsibility of the Home Ministry (Naimushō) and the Education Ministry (Monbushō). The Ministry of Communications took responsibility for 70

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the spreading of the military ethos among the large membership of the Imperial Reservists’ Association (Zaigō gunjinkai; see Smethurst 1974). Both branches of the armed services had propaganda commitments, particularly in China. By the late 1930s, the North China Army Propaganda Department (Hokushigun hōdōbu) was running most of the Chinese-language newspapers through ‘reoriented’ editors and had organized a merger of all China’s Japanese-language newspapers into a single publication, Tōa shinpō (East Asia Report), in a joint effort with the Dōmei News Agency (Dōmei tsūshinsha). Although legally a private corporation the South Manchuria Railway (Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki gaisha) held a special brief for propaganda on matters relating to China and after the Manchurian Incident of September 1931 effectively answered to the propaganda and research requirements of the Kwantung Army (Kantōgun).The Concordia Association (Hsieh ho hui; Jp. Kyōwakai) oversaw the propaganda effort of the newly created state of Manchukuo (see also Chapter 18 in this volume). The creation of the Greater East Asia Ministry (Daitōashō) in November 1942 should have unified army and navy propaganda in and about China, Manchukuo and the former Dutch, French and British colonies in Southeast Asia within the brief of the Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere (Daitōa kyōeiken). Four different bureaus within the Greater East Asia Ministry (General Affairs, Manchukuo, Chinese Affairs and Southern Affairs) were established, but the change came at a critical point when the war began to turn against Japan, and the two services continued their own programmes without coordination. In the 1920s and early 1930s, divergences in outlook and priority between the military and civilian bodies were frequent, and the focus of propaganda was considerably dispersed.Turf wars in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs flared up periodically and were marked in the Information Department by sudden retirements and by unexpected returns and promotions in the middle echelons. By the late 1930s, however, most propaganda units had become interlocked in the Cabinet bodies, the Naikaku jōhō iinkai and the Naikaku jōhōkyoku. The concentration of power in the person of General Tōjō Hideki (1884–1948), prime minister from 1941 to 1944, improved the coordination of propaganda between the Army General Staff (Sanbō honbu) and the Cabinet Information Office, but not with the Navy Ministry (Kaigunshō). This may seem like a recipe for chaos, but there was little rivalry between the different agencies of propaganda production and a strong consensus in favour of changing the way Japan was presented to the world. By 1936, the objective of controlling the presentation of Japan was partially realized by the establishment of the Dōmei News Agency, successor to the Kokusai (International) News Agency (Kokusai tsūshinsha, founded 1913), and Rengō (1923). In 1931–32, and after the outbreak of total war in China in 1937, military realities on the ground accelerated Dōmei’s ‘effectiveness’ as a news agency and certainly gave it plenty to report, but stalled Japan’s more covert media professionals in their efforts to convey a positive view of its aims in East Asia and win friends to its cause. Just when Japan had finally built a propaganda system and a news agency capable of taking on the world and operating on an equal footing with foreign news agencies, its armies decided to do the job instead. This was the central contradiction bedevilling Japan’s presentation of its case: Japan’s media structure became so closely associated with the state at a time when the state was so clearly a maker of news, and unwelcome news at that, that the distinction between Japanese media and the Japanese military became too blurred for either to gain credibility.

A question of language In order to make a convincing case for its place in China, in Korea and among the great powers, Japan had to use the language of those who would deny its recognition: English. In Meiji and 71

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Taishō this was a requirement that many in Japan found acceptable, indeed some gifted Japanese writers – Suematsu Kenchō (1855–1920), Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933), Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin) (1862–1913), Fujisawa Rikitarō (1861–1933) and Karl Kiyoshi Kawakami (1873–1949) – were more than adequate to the challenge. In early Shōwa (1926–89), however, Japan made a determined effort not only to spread the use of Japanese in her colonies, but to make Japanese the language of propaganda through Japanese-language newspapers, books and pamphlets. This endeavour was so unsuccessful that even at the height of the war in Asia and the Pacific, Japanese front-line and Dōmei News Agency staff worked together to set up or maintain Englishlanguage media to carry the imperial message. The local politics of the treaty port system and its media fed into and energized the relationship between independent or foreign-owned English-language newspapers of China and Japan and the semi-official organs set up or subsidized by Japan. Alongside more conventional political differences they were reflected in the development of editorial commonalities – the editorial line – by the three most ‘Western’ press networks in East Asia: the Japan Advertiser network, headed by that newspaper in Tokyo and by the China Press in Shanghai, the smaller but no less vociferous Japan Chronicle network in which the most influential voice was that newspaper, based in the sometime treaty port of Kobe, and Japan’s semi-official network, headed by the Japan Times of Tokyo.

The shift in the locus of credibility Many English-language press journalists wrote books on Japan, as well as contributed regular bread-and-butter writing, such as book reviews and feature articles, for the English-language press, using back numbers as sources. Those authors of explanatory and propaganda books who had newspaper connections tended to be associated with the Japan Times or other semi-official organs sponsored by the Gaimushō. Authors of critical or hostile books on Japan were usually associated with the two English-language newspapers, the Japan Chronicle and the Japan Advertiser. Chronicle journalists sometimes wrote for the Advertiser and vice versa, but few Chronicle or Advertiser journalists wrote for the Japan Times. Such overlaps helped to produce a long shift in the locus of credibility granted to writings on Japan. In this shift, Japan’s independent English-language press was the magnet pulling, and books on Japan published in the West by Japan-based authors the motor pushing the locus of credibility from foreign scholars and Japanese writers publishing in Western capitals to writers and journalists in East Asia. Over time, the tendency of Western readerships to trust or grant credibility to Japanese writers and Western-based scholars publishing in English was transferred to Western writers, many of them journalists, and scholars based in Japan and China. Naturally, this increased the credibility granted to the English-language newspapers of East Asia, which employed Western writers ‘on the spot’ in East Asia. One example can be seen in the reception of the works of Nitobe Inazō. Historian Hamish Ion has tried to explain why the influence of Nitobe, so great before 1914, was so diminished after 1919 and how Western writers based in Japan gained in influence. Ion wrote, ‘The rise and fall of Nitobe as a popular spokesman for Japan was paralleled by the reverse fall and rise in influence of the Western intellectuals in Japan. These two phenomena are closely related’ (Ion 1996: 80). The two groups whose influence Ion compared were Western intellectuals and commentators based in Japan, including missionaries and journalists, and their counterparts in the West, who were supported by prominent Western-educated Japanese like Nitobe. From the highs of Sidney Gulick’s (and Nagai’s) The White Peril of 1905 and Nitobe’s Bushido of 1900, Japanese 72

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writers on Japan and Western-based foreign writers lost credibility to writers who were ‘on the spot’ and adopted a more critical approach to the description of Japan. Nitobe’s fall from fashion did not occur because of any inherent weakness in his argument, which was always persuasive and seldom critical of Western values, but because of the shift of credibility from Japanese spokesmen to more critical writings by Western authors based in Japan. The agencies and writers involved in this shift can be very crudely divided between those associated with the Gaimushō (and after 1921, the Gaimushō jōhōbu) network of semi-official publications and news agencies in East Asia, who lost credibility, and the more critical foreign correspondents and writers associated with the Japan Chronicle and Japan Advertiser and their networks in China, who steadily gained it. One example was an intense anti-British campaign conducted in the Japan Times and by the Kokusai News Agency in Japan and China in January 1916, at the very time that Kokusai was trying to suppress news of the Twenty-One Demands made on China by Japan. In this instance, the writer whose credibility was most challenged was Japan’s premier Anglophone media professional in the Taishō period, John Russell Kennedy, who issued, first, denials that the Demands had been made and then sent a heavily watered-down version to British and other concerned governments. Japan might have escaped censure, had not China, in a campaign managed by President Yuan Shih-kai’s political advisor, the former London Times correspondent George Ernest Morrison (1862–1920), and by The Times Beijing correspondent (in loco) William H. Donald (1875–1946), leaked details of such authenticity that Japan was eventually forced to make considerable revisions to its demands and abandon, for the time being, its ambitions to control China (Lo 1978: 352–99). Kennedy’s reputation was tarnished by this debacle, but more serious damage may have been done to the spirit of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. The Gaimushō jōhōbu worked hard to regain credibility for books by Japanese spokesmen. In the 1930s, faced with an irresistible rise in the Western appetite for news and opinion from ‘the man on the spot’, the Jōhōbu attempted to subvert the genre by hiring Western journalists based in Japan and China to put their credibility at the service of Japan. This tactic had worked in Meiji with newspapers such as the Tokio Times founded and edited by Edward Howard House (1836–1901) from 1877–80 and the Japan Mail, edited in Yokohama by Captain Francis Brinkley (1841–1912) from 1881 until his death. Both journalists were skilled and spirited champions of Japan. In Taishō and early Shōwa, the same tactic was applied to the journalists John N. Penlington, a veteran editor and Japan correspondent for the London Times, and Miles W. Vaughn of the United Press, a capable and amusing writer whose memoirs put the Japanese case with unusual verve. The shift in the locus of credibility both supports and undermines some of the assumptions common to the notion of Orientalism. From the 1870s to the early 1940s, Western readers showed less confidence in the ability of Japanese authors to write about their own nation and its policies and showed more interest in the ability of Western authors to write about ‘the Orient’. It is probably true to say that at the turn of the century, for reasons of scarcity alone, almost any writing on Japan found a market in the West, but that over time that market came to favour Western views of Japan produced in the East to Japanese views of Japan, wherever they were produced. Location became everything, but the origins of the author were not far behind.

The nature of victory In November 1943, in an article for a gathering of friendly editorial staff and political leaders of Japan’s newly established empire in East and Southeast Asia, written for the Nippon Times, 73

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Amō (Amau) Eiji (1887–1968), head of the Cabinet Information Board (Naikaku jōhōkyoku) observed the following: The Anglo-Americans not only encroached upon East Asia politically and exploited East Asia economically, but also converted East Asia into their ‘news colony’ . . .Thus, though we all lived in East Asia, our eyes looking at East Asia were kept covered. (Nippon Times, 18 November 1943) After 1913, when it concluded a deal with Reuters in London to receive Reuters telegrams at the far end of a long stretch of submarine cable, the Japan Times and the Nippon Times, its successor from 1943 to 1956,4 became the most frequently and widely cited Japan-based organ on Japan, the nature of the Japanese, Japanese intentions toward the West and its colonies and related issues. Recent re-assessments (van de Ven 2012; Dikötter 2010; 2013, Mitter 2013a; Kushner 2015) have sharpened our understanding of the forces that shaped twentieth-century China and demonstrated the importance of news management to the participants, especially on such issues as the ‘Just War’. Again, the influence of the English-language papers of East Asia is hard to measure, perhaps simply because, as historian Ernest May observed, ‘The opinions of individuals are not necessarily direct functions of the information they receive’ (May 1973), but also because influence is such a slippery factor. Figure 5.1 was compiled from British and American newspaper databases and shows the number of references to the English-language press of East Asia in British and American national dailies, from the 1913 Reuters-Japan Times contract to October 1949, that is, the unification of China by the Communist Party of China. On this chart, the Japan Times/Nippon Times was indeed the most-cited newspaper in the United States and the U.K., but most of these references came with a rider that the Japan Times was ‘the semi-official mouthpiece of the Foreign Ministry of Japan’ or words to that effect.

250

200

Foreign Ministry network: Japan Times, Far Eastern Review, Seoul Press

Chinese Unifica€on

Hiroshima

Tripar€te Pact Pearl Harbor

Amō Statement

Manchurian Incident

U.S. Exclusion Act

Washington Conference

Lansing-Ishii

50

21 Demands

100

2nd Sino Japanese War New Order

150

Japan Adver€ser network: Japan Adver€ser, Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury, China Press, China Weekly Review Japan Chronicle network: Japan Chronicle, North China Daily News, Peking & Tientsin Times

1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949

0

Figure 5.1 Runners and riders: U.S. and British press citations of newspapers in the networks of the English-language press of East Asia, 1913–49. 74

English-language press networks

The most-cited Chinese paper, the China Press enjoyed considerable credibility in the West and benefited from the support and access to lawmakers and opinion leaders accruing to Henry Luce’s network of successful pro-Nationalist China pictorial magazines, Time, Look and Fortune. But even this underpinning, with huge sums raised by Madame Chiang Kai-shek on tour in the United States and in full flow in Congress, did not help the Chinese Nationalists in the final analysis. Thus, although we can measure the access of the Japan Times and its declared enemy in this war of the press networks and see that, leading the Japanese and largely pro-American Japan Advertiser networks, the Japan Times and the China Press were among the titles most widely available to American and British readerships, this access did not help Japan or, again, Nationalist China between 1945 and 1949. Why, then, did the semi-official Japanese and Chinese networks and their backers pour so many resources into presenting their case to American and British readerships? One reason was that both the Chinese and the Japanese nationalists, alongside independence campaigners in China and Korea, overestimated the importance of influencing popular opinion in order to change foreign policy decisions. Yes, a mandate was needed, but for foreign policymakers, other factors, long and short term, transcended local opinion, which could always be managed by domestic ministerial institutions. This misjudgement was, again naturally, one of the reasons so many foreign newsmen were hired to write for Japan and China. These imported authorities naturally inflated their own degree of access and referred to the spectacular successes, as they saw them, of such campaigns as The (London) Times and Japan Advertiser network’s campaign to expose the Twenty-One Demands made on China by Japan in 1915, or the China Press, Daily Telegraph, Japan Chronicle and other newspapers’ campaign against the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which was indeed abrogated in Washington in 1921–22 despite a fierce counterattack by Japan’s Foreign Ministry network. But Japan’s diplomats, and in particular, the Japan Times’s clumsy handling of the fallout from the 1915 Twenty-One Demands shows that the issue was as much Japan’s to lose as it was the independent foreign networks to win.

Institutions that think Very few newspapers in these press networks reached their century. In Japan, the 48-year-old Nippon Times, which since 1941 had been distributing the hymn sheets of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, became the default bulletin board for the occupation forces (displacing the Stars & Stripes, which The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) had moved into the same building). The last item on General MacArthur’s to-do list was getting the Advertiser or the Chronicle up and running again: as media institutions the only reminder of these newspapers’ existence takes the form of a typographical gravestone laid under the masthead on the Japan Times leader and letters page, where the one unquestionable survivor of the Englishlanguage press of East Asia is described as ‘incorporating’ these titles, as if the act of incorporation was no more than a matter of business as usual. It is much easier to think of newspapers and therefore networks as institutions, because that reduces the inconsistencies of journalists who adjust their writing to change and manifold circumstance often entirely unrelated to matters editorial or political. The institutional approach means that the core of a newspaper, its journalism, is less essential to the power and direction of the newspaper as a commercial institution. The institutional approach would apply to Mary Douglas’s Sociology of Perception (Douglas 1982) and to a broad application of cultural theory, but if we really want to gain a larger understanding of any given institution as a producer of thought, 75

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we would need to examine a multiplicity of strategies, for example, the constitution of authority deployed in different locations and at different levels of analysis. Spatial and temporal analyses are particularly relevant to illustrating the dynamics of change and development. Over the century of Shanghai English-language journalism that began with the North-China Herald in 1850, the distribution of information developed from the postal services and shipping routes that linked the treaty ports and ‘outports’ of China to the rest of East Asia to the cable system, where the news was effectively controlled by the Reuters News Agency but available for management by arrangement with official regional consumers, then to distribution by airline and telephone and fax, and now to the Internet where we understand and are confused by events in an unstoppable 24/7 news stream. The growth of the press networks outlined here was organic and dynamic. It is a history that cries out for the sort of representation that is better demonstrated in data visualizations than in static charts, for these networks changed constantly and the directions they took challenged developments in the history around them as much as they followed them. By their very immediacy and despite their relative lack of professionalism, the newspapers in the English-language press networks offer refreshing perspectives on the transnational history of East Asia. The wars of words raised by these networks must have left some long-suffering treaty port readers befogged entirely. But now and then, watching, listening and writing from the spot, these fallible, often ill-informed, yet always curious journalists came up with snapshots of the zeitgeist so bright and so sharp as to wholly illuminate the clash of regional interests, Western concerns and the chaotic and vicious realities forming on the ground in East Asia, not only for their readers but for anyone who seeks to read East Asia today.

Notes 1 2 3 4

The Nationalist Party of China, founded in 1912, sometimes also rendered as Kuomintang (KMT). FO 395/419 [P331/57/150], B. Lenox Simpson Memorandum, February 1927. FO 371/445 [P1870/260/150], Lampson, August 1930. In 1943, at the height of journal and newspaper mergers and closures, all English-language newspapers in Japan were absorbed by the Japan Times, now renamed Nippon Times.

Further reading Kushner, Barak (2006) The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. O’Connor, Peter (2001) ‘Informal diplomacy and the modern idea of Japan’, Japan Forum, 13(1): 1–13. _____ (ed.) (2004) Japanese Propaganda: Selected Readings, 10 vols, Folkstone: Global Oriental. _____ (2010) The English-Language Press Networks of East Asia, 1918–1945, Folkestone: Global Oriental. Wei Shuge (2017) News under Fire: China’s Propaganda against Japan in the English-Language Press, 1928–1948, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

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6 Japan’s colonial empire Sandra Wilson and Robert Cribb

For most of its history, Japan has been confined politically to the Japanese archipelago and adjacent small islands. Between 1845 and 1945, however, Japanese governments, primarily through military force, created an empire which extended well beyond the archipelago to encompass significant areas and large non-Japanese populations on the East Asian mainland and in Southeast Asia and the western Pacific. Japan’s expansion was in part modelled on Western imperialism in the region; thus the Japanese government created colonies which were economically valuable to the metropolitan power, while remaining politically separate and subordinate. Japan was the only Asian power to establish a formal colonial empire in this way. Japan’s colonial rule was based on exploitation of subject peoples and their lands. Nonetheless, its imperial ideology stressed both mutual respect for different Asian cultures and economic complementarity in a way that foreshadowed the modern global order of sovereign states. This chapter is divided into two sections. The first section examines the history of Japan’s acquisition of and rule over a colonial empire between 1845 and 1945. By colonies we mean territories that were ruled by Japan but were administratively and ethnically distinct from the metropolitan heartland. These colonies were acquired by imperial expansion, that is, expansion that resulted from government policy and action that had been deliberately designed to subjugate the populations of other territories. The second section introduces the historiography of Japan’s colonial empire.

Historical overview Japanese sovereigns have used the title tennō, usually translated as ‘emperor’, since at least the sixth century, but Japanese polities until the nineteenth century are normally not considered to be empires because they did not govern territories that were administratively and ethnically distinct from the metropolitan heartland. From the fourteenth century, Japanese people settled on the northern island of Ezo (now Hokkaido), and from the fifteenth century the island was effectively part of the domain system of Japan.The indigenous Ainu of the island were governed, partly through their traditional leaders, under a system of indirect rule, but the territory as a whole was not designated a colony. In 1609, the lords of the southern feudal domain of Satsuma defeated the kingdom of Ryukyu in the island chain southwest of Kyushu. Ryukyu was 77

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thereafter tributary to both Satsuma and the Qing rulers of China. Tributary status denoted an inferior rank in international affairs, but it did not mean external administrative control.1

Early imperial expansion Japan’s formal imperial expansion commenced in 1845 when it claimed sovereignty over the northern islands of Sakhalin and the Kuril Archipelago, which were then also the object of Russian expansion. At this time, Japan was still ruled by the military authorities of the Tokugawa shogunate. In 1868, the Tokugawa were removed from power and replaced by a group of progressive oligarchs who embarked on an ambitious modernization programme under the nominal authority of the Meiji Emperor. As well as promoting industrialization and the adoption of modern technology, the Meiji oligarchs sought to consolidate Japanese control of outlying regions. In 1869, they established a Colonization Commission for Sakhalin and the Kurils. Extensive Russian settlement on Sakhalin, however, blocked the work of this commission, and under the 1875 Treaty of Saint Petersburg Japan abandoned its claims to Sakhalin in exchange for Russian recognition of Japanese sovereignty in the sparsely populated Kurils. In 1872, the Meiji Emperor declared Ryukyu to be a domain within Japan, thus ending its status as tributary to Japan. He recognized the Ryukyuan king as part of the Japanese peerage and in 1879 incorporated the islands into metropolitan Japan as the prefecture of Okinawa. In 1876, the Japanese government annexed the Bonin (Ogasawara) islands, a thousand kilometres south of Tokyo in the Pacific Ocean, which had been claimed by Britain in 1827 and settled thereafter by a small group of Britons, Americans and Pacific Islanders. Neither the British nor the American government objected (see Map 6.1). The most important target of Japanese imperialism was Korea. The Joseon Kingdom on the Korean peninsula had been tributary to the Qing rulers of China since the seventeenth century but, like Ryukyu, had been entirely self-governing. Japan’s accelerated modernization and industrialization following the 1868 Meiji Restoration fed a new sense of superiority over its immediate neighbours. In using Western models for development, moreover, the Japanese authorities concluded that territorial expansion and the acquisition of formal colonies were a necessary part of national success. Adjacent to Japan, Korea was also a source of food, coal and iron ore. Some Japanese planners saw it as a potential base for outside powers wishing to attack Japan. In seeking influence in Korea, however, Japan faced both resistance from the isolationist Joseon government and competition from Western powers. In 1875, Japanese authorities engineered a clash with Korean forces on Kanghwa (Ganghwa) Island, providing the pretext for an armed mission which negotiated the 1876 Korea-Japan Treaty of Amity, which was modelled on the ‘unequal’ treaties Japan itself had been forced to sign with Western powers in the 1850s. Amongst other things, it gave Japan trade and extraterritorial rights in Busan and two other, yet-to-be-identified ports. In 1882, a further treaty gave Japan the right to protect its citizens in Korea, but Qing China invoked its tributary authority to station a military garrison there, thus thwarting the Japanese government’s further plans. In the 1885 Sino-Japanese Convention of Tianjin, the two powers agreed to withdraw their forces and stipulated that neither would intervene militarily in Korea without informing the other (Duus 1995).

First territorial acquisitions In 1894, an anti-Western rebellion broke out in Korea. When the Chinese government sent troops to assist the Korean government in suppressing it, the Japanese authorities judged that China had breached its obligations under the Tianjin Convention and sent an army of its own, 78

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RUSSIA/SOVIET UNION

Siberia (Japanese intervention 1918-22)

Northern Sakhalin (occupied 1920-25)

Sakhalin (claimed 1845, surrendered 1875)

MONGOLIA

Southern Sakhalin (annexed 1905)

MANCHUKUO (client state, 1932)

Kuril Islands (claimed 1845)

Changchun Southern Manchuria (sphere of

Kwantung Leased Territory (taken and surrendered 1895; taken 1905)

Hokkaido

1905)

KOREA (colony from 1910)

Port Arthur SHANDONG from 1915)

Ganghwa Qingdao (occupied 1914-22)

JAPAN

Busan

CHINA

Honshu

Kyushu

FUJIAN (sphere of

Penghu Islands (Pescadores) from 1915) (annexed 1895)

RYUKYU (tributary 1609, annexed 1872-79) TAIWAN (colony from 1895)

Bonin (Ogasawara ) Islands (annexed 1876) c Robert Cribb

Map 6.1  Japan’s expansion in Northeast Asia, 1609–1932.

which arrived as Chinese forces were withdrawing. The Japanese forces captured the Korean king and installed a new government in July 1894. Hostilities with China broke out two days later.Well trained and equipped, the Japanese forces quickly drove the remaining Chinese troops out of Korea, defeated a Chinese fleet at the mouth of the Yalu River and occupied the Liaodong Peninsula in southern Manchuria. The war concluded in April 1895 with the Treaty of Shimonoseki, under which China ceded to Japan the Liaodong Peninsula, Taiwan and the Penghu Islands (Pescadores) ‘in perpetuity’, as well as renouncing its suzerainty over Korea and giving Japan access to ports (Brooks 2000; Esselstrom 2009). In Taiwan, Japan gained its first substantial colony. In what was known as the Triple Intervention, however, Russia, Germany and France forced Japan to relinquish the Liaodong Peninsula in 1895, in exchange for a larger indemnity from China. Despite its victory over China, Japan’s influence on the mainland receded as Britain and Germany seized leased territories on the Shandong Peninsula opposite Korea, and Russia both took over Port Arthur on the Liaodong Peninsula and greatly expanded its influence in Korea. In the course of Russian operations as part of the international contingent fighting the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, moreover, Russian troops occupied Manchuria, remaining there long after the rebellion had been suppressed. These events heightened 79

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Japanese perceptions that the West was disinclined to play fair with Japan. In 1903, Japan and Russia negotiated over a division of power between them in Korea and Manchuria. Following long delays on the Russian side, however, Japanese troops abruptly attacked Russian forces in Port Arthur in February 1904, thus starting the Russo-Japanese War. Japanese forces quickly occupied Korea and besieged Port Arthur, which fell in January 1905. The Russian Baltic fleet, which took seven months to sail to the East, was destroyed in the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905. The war concluded with the Treaty of Portsmouth in September 1905, which confirmed Japan’s preponderant position in Korea and gave it a sphere of influence in southern Manchuria as well as sovereignty over the southern half of Sakhalin. The principal resources held by Japan in Manchuria were the Kwantung Leased Territory, including Port Arthur, and the South Manchurian Railway. The railway included a strip of quasi-sovereign territory a thousand kilometres long and one to two kilometres broad, stretching from the Leased Territory as far north as Changchun. Victory over Russia also gave Japan a free hand in Korea. A treaty coerced from the Korean authorities in 1905 made the country a Japanese protectorate; a second treaty in 1907 required the Korean government to accept the advice of a Japanese resident general, putting Korea on the same footing as indirectly ruled colonies of the Western powers. In 1910 the Korean king was forced to make a ‘complete and permanent cession’ of his sovereignty to Japan. Korea thus became Japan’s second substantial colony. Japan’s imperial expansion was made possible by the country’s spectacular success in modernization from the late nineteenth century onwards. Building on the human and capital resources that had accumulated during more than two centuries of internal peace, Japan developed an industrial base that enabled it to avoid being colonized and to become a significant economic and military power in East Asia. Japanese ambitions in Asia blended extravagant self-interest and romantic idealism. The colonies were an economic resource. Korea grew rice; Taiwan grew sugar; Manchuria produced soy beans. All three had mineral resources. They became outlets for Japanese industrial investment; Japanese farmers also settled in Korea and Manchuria, purchasing or appropriating land from local people to create large agricultural enterprises. Some Japanese thinkers began to envisage a free and prosperous East Asia in which many cultures would co-exist under Japanese leadership. Japanese adventurers (tairiku rōnin), for instance, supported attempts by Manchu and Mongol nationalists to break away from the new Chinese Republic after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911. The notion of Japanese leadership in Asia later crystallized in the term hakkō ichiu (‘all the world under one roof ’). This idea was strongly tinged with hostility to Western imperialism in Asia and was fed by memories of the Triple Intervention of 1895. It was further reinforced by the Washington (1922) and London (1930, 1936) Naval Treaties, which, amongst other things, imposed restrictions on the growth of Japanese naval power in the Pacific. Many nationalist Japanese saw these restrictions as an unreasonable limit on Japan’s capacity to pursue its maritime interests.

Colonial policies The first years of Japanese rule in Taiwan and Korea were marked by the harsh repression of local resistance movements. Opposition to Japanese rule was stronger in Korea than in Taiwan, which had never been independent and where the Japanese authorities gave their opponents an early opportunity to leave for the mainland. Military force was a significant factor in repressing opposition in Korea before 1920. Thereafter, there was a constant tension in Japanese policy in both Taiwan and Korea between an impulse to assimilate the territory and population to Japan and an impulse to maintain the colonies’ subordinate status and separate cultures. The 80

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assimilationist impulse was reflected in the extension of Japanese law to the colonies and in the gradual integration of branches of the colonial governments into the metropolitan government. Inhabitants of Korea and Taiwan were encouraged to learn and use Japanese. Especially in Taiwan, Japanese administrators aimed for a policy of benevolent social development, promoting public health and education and providing infrastructure (Ching 2001). The outbreak of the First World War in Europe in 1914 presented Japan with an opportunity to consolidate its international standing by joining the Western alliance against Germany (Dickinson 1999; Frattolillo and Best 2015).With Western powers distracted, and focused on the European conflict, the Japanese military quickly occupied the German-held leased territory of Qingdao (Tsingtao) in northern China and German colonies in the North Pacific.The Japanese government also presented the so-called Twenty-One Demands to the Chinese government in January 1915. They included an extension of Japan’s sphere of influence and measures to limit the access of Western countries to Chinese markets. When the demands provoked outrage in China and consternation in the West, the Japanese government trimmed them to thirteen and the two sides signed a treaty which excluded the most controversial of them. The treaty effectively confirmed a Japanese sphere of influence in the coastal provinces of Shandong and Fujian. At the end of the war, Japan was granted a League of Nations mandate over the former German colonies of the Marianas and Caroline Islands, which it referred to as Nan’yō (Peattie 1988). The terms of the ‘Class C mandate’ allowed these territories to be ruled as Japanese territory, provided they were open to international trade and provided Japan reported to the League on their administration. The collapse of tsarist rule in Russia and the rise of Bolshevik power led Western countries, especially Britain and the United States, to intervene in eastern Siberia to support the antiBolshevik White forces. In 1918, alert to the possibility of removing Russian power from the region and unwilling to see it replaced by Anglo-American influence, the Japanese government joined the operation and sent its own forces, at one point numbering more than 70,000, into Siberia. They occupied Vladivostok and ranged as far west as Lake Baikal. The intervention, however, was financially costly and politically mishandled, and Japanese forces were unable to win serious political support amongst Siberians. In 1922 Japan withdrew the last of its forces, keeping control only of northern Sakhalin (Narangoa and Cribb 2014). Whereas Japan’s industrialization and its defeat of Russia had inspired Asians in regions as far away as India by showing that an Asian people could succeed in the modern world, the conquest of Korea and the Twenty-One Demands against China led to widespread disillusionment. AntiJapanese nationalist movements emerged in Korea and China, encouraged by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, outlined in January 1918 as a basis for peace negotiations. On 1 March 1919, Korean nationalists declared independence in Seoul, and hundreds of thousands of Koreans joined in protests against Japanese rule. On 4 May 1919, demonstrations and strikes broke out in China, especially to oppose the transfer to Japan of German interests in China.

Ambitions in Manchuria and China proper Sections of the Japanese military were increasingly willing to act autonomously in the field.The most self-willed was the Kwantung Army, a Japanese force located in the Kwantung Leased Territory. Its distance from Tokyo made it hard for central governments to control this force. Apart from the regions under Japanese control, Manchuria was dominated by the warlord Zhang Zuolin (Chang Tso-lin, 1875–1928), who presided over a peaceful and prosperous territory that was effectively independent from the rest of China. Zhang’s rule both supported and benefited 81

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from Japanese investment in Manchuria, which amounted to 68 per cent of Japan’s total foreign investment by 1927. After 1925, however, Zhang began to drain the Manchurian economy to feed his broader military ambitions in China. Believing that he had become a liability, officers of the Kwantung Army assassinated him in 1928 by setting a bomb underneath his train as he approached his capital, Mukden (now Shenyang). The Kwantung Army officers believed that Zhang’s son, Zhang Xueliang (Chang Hsueh-liang, 1901–2001), who succeeded him, would be more pliant than his father, but in the event he aligned himself with the Guomindang (Nationalist Party) government against Japanese influence. In September 1931, the Kwantung Army embarked on an ambitious clandestine venture. Military operatives set off a small explosion on the South Manchurian Railway line near Mukden. They blamed it on Chinese sabotage and, disregarding the central authorities in Tokyo, used the incident as an excuse to invade Manchuria. By February 1932, forces from the Japanese Kwantung and Korea Armies had occupied the whole of Manchuria.Their success made it difficult for the Tokyo authorities to repudiate the military action, but the Japanese government nonetheless rejected the idea of annexing the territory outright. Instead, on 18 February 1932, the Kwantung Army created a ‘new state’ which it called Manchukuo (Manchu State), installing the last emperor of the Qing dynasty, Aisin-Gioro Puyi (1906–67), as head of state (later emperor). Creating a formally independent state to mask the reality of Japanese domination was a novel move. It was probably an ad hoc response to the unwillingness of the Tokyo government to annex the territory, but it also enabled the Kwantung military authorities to argue that they were acting to facilitate the self-determination of the inhabitants of Manchuria, rather than as straightforward imperialists.The Kwantung Army also presented Manchukuo as a microcosm of the potential for inter-racial harmony in Asia in which Japanese settlers would provide leadership for the indigenous Mongols and Manchus and the immigrant Chinese, Koreans and Russians (Duara 2003). The Japanese government formally recognized Manchukuo in September 1932. By this time, Japan’s prestige and economic and strategic interests were so bound up with the new state that it could not repudiate the actions of the Kwantung Army. In response to an appeal from China, the League of Nations established a commission to investigate whether Japan’s intervention had been justified. The commission’s report was relatively sympathetic to Japan, but concluded that the explosion on the railway was not sufficient justification for the Japanese invasion and that the new state had no significant support amongst the majority Chinese population. It recommended that the two sides negotiate to reach a compromise. When the League Council voted to accept the report in February 1933, the Japanese delegation walked out in protest. This withdrawal has commonly been taken as a sign of Japan’s growing isolation from the international community, but its significance should not be exaggerated. Although Manchukuo was recognized by only eight states before 1939, many powers, including the Guomindang government of China, put in place practical measures to ensure diplomatic and commercial contact with the state. In 1936, Japan was selected as host nation of the (subsequently cancelled) 1940 Olympic Games, suggesting that it was still a respected member of the international community. With a relatively sparse population and rich natural resources, Manchukuo initially became a model for Japanese developmental colonialism. Changchun was reshaped as a magnificent, planned capital called Xinjing (Jp. Shinkyō). The Japanese authorities encouraged settlement by Japanese and Korean migrants, who were able to obtain lands far more extensive than was possible at home. A large number of Japanese personnel were employed within the Manchukuo bureaucracy. The Kwantung Army continued to expand its power. Over three months at the beginning of 1932, Japanese and Chinese troops clashed in Shanghai over reported anti-Japanese

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SOVIET UNION

Japanese conquests to mid-1942 NOTE: In 1942 and after, Japanese authorities made several changes to colonial-era boundaries in Southeast Asia. Those changes are not shown on this map.

Aleutian Islands (United States)

Sakhalin MONGOLIA

MANCHUKUO

Kuril Islands

Xinjing (Shinkyo) Jehol (annexed 1933)

Hokkaido KOREA

Beiping

REPUBLIC OF CHINA

Honshu

Additional territory captured by Japanese forces 1944-45

Nanjing

Kyushu Ryukyu

BRITISH INDIA

TAIWAN

BRITISH BURMA

THAILAND FRENCH INDOCHINA

THE PHILIPPINES (United States)

Marianas Islands GUAM (United States)

NAN’YO to Japan 1919 Marshall Islands

BRITISH MALAYA

Caroline Islands NEW GUINEA (Australia) NETHERLANDS INDIES

c Robert Cribb

Map 6.2  Japan’s expansion in Asia and the Pacific, 1933–45.

activities by Chinese nationalists. In January 1933, the Kwantung Army seized the Jehol region, adjacent to Manchukuo, and incorporated it into the new state. Kwantung Army border troops, supervising the new Manchukuo army, clashed repeatedly with Soviet and Mongolian troops along Manchukuo’s northern borders. In 1933 they created a semiautonomous enclave between Beiping (modern Beijing) and the Manchukuo border. In 1935 they established a form of puppet government over the larger Beiping region. The Guomindang government of China acquiesced in the new arrangement in order to preserve its formal sovereignty over the region and to avoid the creation of a second Manchukuo, but it had to concede effective political control of north China to Japanese managers (Dryburgh 2000; see also Map 6.2).

The Second Sino-Japanese war On 7 July 1937, Japanese and Chinese troops clashed again at Marco Polo Bridge (Lugouqiao), south of Beiping. This time, the conflict escalated to a full-blown war that is known as the Second Sino-Japanese War. Japanese forces attacked and captured China’s largest city, Shanghai, in August 1937 and took the capital, Nanjing, in December. Japanese troops perpetrated an extensive massacre, targeting especially Guomindang soldiers trapped in the city, many of whom had

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discarded their weapons. There was also widespread rape of Chinese women. The scale of the massacre is highly contested, both in terms of the number of victims – serious estimates range from 40,000 to over 300,000, depending partly on the temporal and geographical scale of the estimate – and in terms of the circumstances of the killings. Chinese sources commonly present the massacre as an act of unspeakable cruelty against a defenceless population; some Japanese sources emphasize that the killings took place in conditions of ongoing fighting. One of the best-known incidents in the massacre – an alleged competition between two Japanese officers over who could first reach the target of beheading 100 Chinese soldiers – has now been shown to be a fabrication by a Japanese newspaper. There is no serious doubt, however, that Japanese troops slaughtered tens of thousands of helpless civilians and disarmed Chinese soldiers as well as raping thousands of women (Wakabayashi 2007). Conscious of the difficulty of conquering the whole of China, the Japanese authorities were keen for a negotiated settlement that would consolidate limited and manageable gains. China’s President Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), however, refused negotiations except on the basis of a return to the prewar borders. Japanese troops had to fight determined resistance from Guomindang forces, guerrillas working behind Japanese lines, and the Chinese Communist Party (Mitter 2013a). Japan thus became embroiled in an exhausting and brutal war that stretched over most of eastern China. Alongside its military strategy, Japanese authorities sought to forge coalitions with sympathetic groups in China. These arrangements rested on a variety of appeals. Japanese forces recruited significant support amongst the Mongols of Inner Mongolia, who had failed to achieve independence at the time of the 1911 Chinese revolution and who faced continuing loss of land and political influence at the hands of the Guomindang.They also attracted Chinese people who saw Japan as the power best able to promote China’s economic development, as well as some who supported the strong anti-communist orientation of the Japanese army. In 1938, leading Guomindang politician Wang Jing-wei (1883–1944) joined forces with Japan’s war effort.Wang believed that the West was a greater danger to China than was Japan and disapproved of Chiang’s developing rapprochement with the United States as an ally against Japan. In 1940, he agreed to head a Reorganized National Government of China in Nanjing under Japanese auspices (Brook 2005).

The Pacific War The United States government had become convinced that Japan’s control of China was inimical to its own interests and it began to impose trade restrictions on Japan in 1938. In 1940, it banned the export of metals to Japan and prohibited Japanese vessels from using the Panama Canal. The following year the embargo was extended to oil, and all Japanese assets in the United States were frozen. Because Japan’s foreign currency reserves were held in the United States, this measure effectively prevented Japan from trading internationally. In the Hull Note of November 1941, the United States government laid down a full Japanese withdrawal from China as condition for lifting the embargoes. Unwilling to back down so comprehensively, the Japanese government chose a risky strategy of military attack to gain control of oil resources in Southeast Asia and to cripple U.S. naval capacity (Ike 1967). On 8 December 1941, Japanese forces attacked Thailand and British Malaya and, shortly afterwards, the U.S. Pacific naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. During the following six months, Japanese forces overran nearly the whole of Southeast Asia, defeating British, Dutch, American and Australian forces and capturing approximately 130,000 Western prisoners of war (Tarling 2001).

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Although Japan had been a major economic presence in Southeast Asia since the 1920s, Japanese authorities had given little thought to the practicalities of governing so large and diverse a territory. In June 1940, Japan’s foreign minister announced plans to create a ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ based on mutual respect for different Asian cultures, anti-communism, and economic complementarity. In conquering Southeast Asia and in consolidating their wartime empire there, the Japanese authorities used the slogan ‘Asia for the Asiatics’ and made much of their role in liberating colonized peoples from Western rule. To emphasize this point, they restored to Thailand territories it had lost to Britain and France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and in 1943 granted nominal independence to Burma and the Philippines, both of which had been well along the road to self-determination before the war. With their forces stretched thin by the demands of the war, moreover, the Japanese authorities launched propaganda campaigns to win the direct support of local people in a way that had never occurred under Western colonialism. These campaigns helped generate a new feeling of political engagement amongst the broad masses and thus contributed directly to the widespread nationalist revolutions that broke out in Southeast Asia after the end of the war (Benda 1958; Friend 1988). Ideas for a Co-Prosperity Sphere, however, never materialized, partly because the Japanese economy was too small to absorb the products of a region that had once sold in large volumes to the United States and Europe, partly because U.S. submarine warfare seriously disrupted shipping. Lack of consumer goods and employment opportunities, along with over-management of rice markets, led to catastrophic famines in northern Indochina and Java. Japanese rule also faced serious guerrilla resistance from communist forces in Malaya, the Philippines and Indochina. The urgent need to complete military projects, including a railway linking Thailand and Burma through exceptionally difficult terrain, led the Japanese authorities to force local workers and Western prisoners of war to labour in harsh and unhealthy conditions in which tens of thousands died (Kratoska 2005). In Manchukuo and China proper, difficult financial circumstances led the local Japanese military authorities to rely increasingly on the sale of opium to fund their operations (Brook and Wakabayashi 2000). In the latter part of the war, Allied armies drove Japanese forces out of the Pacific islands, the Philippines and Burma. Intensive aerial bombing of Japanese cities began in late 1944, culminating in the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945. The Soviet Union entered the war against Japan on 9 August 1945. Japan surrendered unconditionally on 2 September. The fate of Japanese soldiers who were in the occupied territories at the war’s end was mixed. After processing by Allied authorities, millions joined the general repatriation and returned to Japan. Some stayed behind to become embroiled in the independence movements and civil wars that soon broke out in China and Southeast Asia (Bayly and Harper 2007; Spector 2007). In the meantime, thousands of Japanese military personnel had been captured in Manchuria by Soviet forces and interned in labour camps in Siberia, where many died in the harsh conditions. Others remained incarcerated for years before they could return to Japan (Barshay 2013). In 1946, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (also known as the Tokyo Trials), under Allied auspices, indicted twenty-eight Japanese military and political leaders for crimes against peace and for war crimes (Totani 2008). The charge of crimes against peace constituted a formal repudiation of the right once attributed to all states to seize additional territory by military force. Under the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1952, Japan abandoned all claims to its former empire, retaining only the four main islands, the Ryukyus (which were placed under U.S. administration) and a few smaller offshore islands.

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Historiography of the Japanese empire Research on Japanese imperialism and colonialism was stimulated in the mid-1980s by the publication of two works, Myers and Peattie (1984) and Beasley (1987), which examined the Japanese imperial venture as a whole, rather than focusing on its operations in specific regions.2 Notable studies produced up to the late 1990s that did deal with specific regions included, on China, Duus, Myers and Peattie (1989) and on Taiwan,Tsurumi (1977); on Korea, Conroy (1960), Nahm (1973), Eckert (1991), and Duus (1995); on Southeast Asia, McCoy (1980), Friend (1988), Sato (1994), Kratoska (1997), and Ikehata and Jose (1999). On Nan’yō (Micronesia) Peattie (1988) remains the key work. Duus, Myers and Peattie (1996) examined the wartime empire. Under the influence of postcolonialist theory and of theoretical and empirical work on other areas of the globe, a new wave of scholarship appeared from about the late 1990s (Wilson 2005). Like specialists on European and U.S. colonialism, historians of Japan showed a greater understanding that any colonial relationship is a two-way affair, and is shaped by the responses and aspirations of the colonized as well as the intentions and actions of the colonizers. Life in the metropolis, too, was seen as affected deeply by its colonies: the ‘mother’ country was no longer accepted as the modern, civilized nation that imposed its will abroad through its colonial agents, while following its own historical trajectory at home, independent of its imperial role. Historians increasingly acknowledged that mainstream studies of Japanese history should consider the colonies as a matter of course: all or most topics in modern Japanese history were relevant to the colonies, and vice-versa, and colony and metropolis should no longer be in separate baskets.3 This newer understanding of colonialism – that it should be treated as part of ‘mainstream’ history rather than a set of more or less separate topics – is a demanding one. It requires the identification of new types of sources, the ability to read sources in more than one language and engagement with the research of specialists on other parts of Asia, not just those who work directly on Japan or its colonies (Peattie, Myers and Schmid 2001). The results of such efforts have been uneven and are still emerging, but they have refreshed the field of studies of Japanese colonialism. Some works of scholarship from the early twenty-first century continued to examine the formal aspects of empire as well as other matters (Dickinson 1999; Matsusaka 2001; Wilson 2002; Dudden 2005). Many, however, explored at least some of the complex links between the colony and the metropolis (Young 1998; Duara 2003). Works from this period also tended to emphasize the culture of empire rather than its formal, administrative aspects, reflecting not only the approach we have just outlined, but also an increased focus on the same issues in mainstream studies of Japanese history. Scholarly works on Japanese colonialism produced in the early twenty-first century often examined a wider range of themes than their predecessors – including film, radio, art, music, tourism, education, technology, law, gender, religion, sport and daily life (Shin and Robinson 2000; High 2003; Tamanoi 2005). Historians also analyzed the roles and experiences of a wider variety of colonial agents: not only bureaucrats and soldiers, for example, but also doctors, anthropologists and other professional groups (Shimizu and Van Bremen 2003; Lo 2002; Ching 2001; Kleeman 2003). Some studies focused on the differential impact of Japanese occupation on particular ethnic minorities in Southeast Asia or China (Kratoska 2002; Narangoa and Cribb 2003; see Wilson 2005 for a more detailed discussion of works published in the early 2000s). These trends have continued to characterize scholarship on Japanese colonialism. In notable recent works on the culture of empire, Baskett (2008) examines the presentation of imperialism in Japan’s film culture; Skabelund (2011) discusses the place of dogs in modern Japan, arguing that dogs facilitated Japanese colonialism and imperialism both physically and symbolically; and Kim (2014) extends the discussion of medical doctors’ involvement in the imperial project. 86

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Putting more of the state back in: new studies of the northeast Asian empire Recent works, however, also show signs of a return to studies of key institutions and central actors and to analyses of how power actually worked, at least in the Northeast Asian colonies. Ts’ai (2009) makes the point explicitly: ‘cultural studies [of the Japanese empire] risks ignoring the hard facts of economic life and political rule’ (2009: 5). Or, as Uchida (2011) comments, colonialism was not just a matter of coercion, but nor was it ‘simply diffused through culture or disembodied as discourse’. Studies of colonialism, she adds, therefore need to treat it simultaneously as ‘an economic, political, cultural, and discursive phenomenon’ (2011: 30), rather than concentrating on one or other aspect to the neglect of the whole. Ts’ai (2009) examines the institutions through which the Japanese government ruled colonial Taiwan. A central argument is that the Taiwan Government-General was able to establish and maintain its rule by appropriating the local: colonial authorities mobilized the existing local system of mutual responsibility and surveillance (hokō), which was linked to the police administration but had wide social responsibilities. Eventually, the hokō system supported virtually all key aspects of colonial administration. Mimura (2011) shows the value of the scholarly linking of metropolis and empire, in this case, the puppet state of Manchukuo, in her book on reformist Japanese bureaucrats (kakushin kanryō). She focuses on a generation of state planners who rose to prominence in Japan after the First World War. These new managers, whose leader and best known representative was Kishi Nobusuke, rejected free enterprise in favour of what Mimura calls ‘techno-fascism’, that is, ‘a radical, authoritarian form of technocracy’ (2011: 3, see also Chapter 15 in this volume) which was expected to lay the foundations for an ultramodern Japan. At home their ideas were often stymied by more conservative forces, including other bureaucrats and party politicians, but the new regime in Manchukuo, which had a great need of planners, provided many of them with space to test novel ideas and to develop their skills in economic planning. On returning to Japan, these bureaucrats attempted in turn to apply their Manchurian models to Japan and to other parts of the wartime empire. The gathering focus on politics, state structure and central actors in Japan’s overseas territories has been reinforced by the appearance of Fogel’s translation into English of Yamamuro Shin’ichi’s 1993 study of Manchukuo. Yamamuro (1993; 2006) deals with both the ideas that led to the creation of the new state and the administrative means by which it was constructed. One of his major aims is to contrast Japanese myths about Manchukuo – especially the conviction that it was different from other colonies because it operated as a harmonious, multi-ethnic society – with actual conditions in Manchukuo, which he calls a ‘concentration camp state’, where Chinese, Koreans and other ethnic groups were subordinated to Japanese people, dispossessed of their lands and oppressed by the Japanese military in their daily lives. Three recent works address key questions about the nature of Japanese imperial control in Korea. Caprio (2009) highlights a core imperial policy in his analysis of the Japanese debate about assimilation of Koreans as colonial subjects and Korean responses to the assimilation policy. Japanese politicians, academics, businessmen and journalists argued in the public sphere about whether the full assimilation of Koreans was possible or desirable and how and to what extent it could be achieved. Caprio concludes that the rhetoric of assimilation had no significant results because it was not backed by substantial practical initiatives. It remained mere rhetoric because, in reality, the Japanese and Korean communities in Korea were segregated and Japanese officials and settlers considered Koreans inferior. Koreans had few political rights and suffered discrimination. Policy decisions strengthened difference rather than integration, especially in education, and Koreans actively or passively resisted assimilation. 87

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In her study of Japanese settlers in Korea from 1876 to 1945, Uchida (2011) makes the point that state power cannot be understood solely from a focus on the state itself, arguing that settlers who were not servants of the state functioned as important mediators of colonialism. By the final year of the Second World War, 700,000 Japanese civilians lived in Korea, as well as 300,000 army personnel (Uchida 2011: 3). The civilians included merchants, community leaders, writers, ideologues, reformers and religious leaders. According to Uchida, such Japanese residents became ‘brokers’ of empire: they ‘not only oversaw their communities but actively mediated the colonial management of Korea as its grassroots movers and shakers’ (2011: 5). Though they were themselves excluded from local governance, they ‘pushed the empire from below’, thus consolidating imperial control (2011: 8). Through their commercial activities they helped to integrate the colonial and metropolitan economies; in their daily lives they introduced Japanese culture and modernity to Koreans. At the same time, they always remained a superior social and economic force, thereby limiting Korean access to the economy, education and employment, spreading inequality and provoking resentment. Studies of Japanese colonialism, especially of Japanese rule in Korea, were dominated for decades by the paradigm of brutal repression by the Japanese authorities and resistance by the colonized. For some years this oversimplified dichotomy has been on the retreat; all the works on Korea mentioned here contribute to the much more sophisticated and complex picture of Japan’s rule that now prevails. All serious scholarly studies now recognize that, although agents of imperial Japan undeniably oppressed the Korean people, they did not do so uniformly or all of the time or under all circumstances, because their power was limited, and because some of them were genuinely interested in reform. Moreover, Korean suffering was not universal or evenly distributed. As Kang (2001) observed, ‘some people, some of the time, led close to normal lives’ under Japanese occupation (2001: xi). Moreover, some Koreans worked with rather than against the Japanese occupiers, out of conviction that it was best for Korea, or for personal gain. In an examination of the historiography of Japanese colonialism in Korea, Akita and Palmer (2015) launch a frontal attack on what they call the ‘nationalist historical paradigm’, as expounded by Korean and nonKorean scholars. They offer instead the provocative conclusion that Japanese colonialism in Korea was ‘moderate and proportional by global standards’ (2015: 104) and that, at least on the level of policy, it was ultimately ‘almost fair’ (2015: 204). Although Japanese colonialism has often been presented as uniquely malevolent, Akita and Palmer argue that it was no worse, and was often better, than British, French, Dutch or American imperialism. The Japanese authorities in Korea did not use forced labour or internment for the purposes of pacification, as other colonial powers had in various places, and, at least after 1919, they went to greater efforts to build a modern infrastructure, economy and education system. Akita and Palmer take a different approach to colonial education from Caprio’s.Whereas Caprio emphasizes schools as instruments of assimilation, Akita and Palmer note that a comparatively high number of Korean children at least received an education.A third of Korean children went to primary school by 1940, including many girls, a figure that far surpasses the record of the French in Vietnam or West Africa or the Dutch in Indonesia.

Collaboration and complicity The polarity of repression and resistance is undermined, above all, by studies of outright collaboration between colonial subjects and their Japanese overlords, or more ambiguous cases of complicity. Studies of collaboration also provide insights into how power was established and maintained in Japanese colonial territories. Several recent works have tackled these subjects. Earlier analyses include China historian Mitter’s (2000) study of Chinese resistance to and collaboration with the Japanese occupiers of Manchuria after September 1931. Mitter argued that 88

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actual Chinese resistance has been exaggerated and that although there were undoubtedly ‘many notable instances of resistance’, in fact ‘cooperation with the Japanese became the norm’ at the provincial and local levels in Manchuria (Mitter 2000: 100). Caprio’s volume on assimilation in Korea (2009) includes a discussion of Korean elites’ co-operation with Japanese rule. Brook (2005) offers five case studies of collaboration between Chinese people and Japanese occupiers, all taken from the lower Yangtze Valley, including Shanghai and Nanjing, in the first year of occupation. In an account that inevitably highlights the political and social ambiguities of life under military occupation, Brook shows that many Chinese people collaborated in one way or another and that resisters were few. People collaborated because they saw no alternative, because compliance was the best means of survival or, sometimes, because they believed that working with the Japanese invaders was likely to deliver solutions to China’s problems. Collaboration and complicity could take many forms: from the actions of a handful of Westerners who made deals with the Japanese military in order to protect refugees in Nanjing to those of a recruiter of prostitutes or transporter of food supplies, to people who helped Japanese officers identify defeated fighters trying to hide among crowds of refugees. In a basic sense, collaborators enabled the occupation to survive. Brook’s study also offers accounts of the work and the apparent motivations of the Japanese pacification agents who sought and recruited collaborators. Many, it seems, genuinely believed in Japan’s mission to lead and reconstruct East Asia. The issue of cooperation between colonizer and colonized arises especially starkly in the case of participation in imperial military forces. About 240,000 Korean men fought on Japan’s side in the Second World War, roughly half as military personnel and half as civilian auxiliaries (gunzoku). They have often been portrayed as unwilling conscripts, but, as Palmer (2013) shows, a great many were volunteers. Coercion – by both Japanese and Korean agents – was sometimes used to procure recruits, and inducements were offered, but many men were willing to serve because the pay was good and it was the best available option. Palmer’s study of the Korean volunteer soldier systems offers strong evidence that resistance was not the dominant response to Japanese occupation and that the Japanese administration went to some lengths to persuade as well as to coerce Koreans to support Japan’s cause. Contributors to a volume edited by Lingen (2017) provide further analysis of wartime collaboration and complicity, in essays on, for example, Korean camp guards, Korean debates about collaboration and Dutch trials of suspected collaborators in the Netherlands Indies.

How it all ended Historians of Japan and other parts of Asia share in the current worldwide scholarly interest in the late 1940s and the 1950s. A thriving sub-field on Japan’s empire deals with the immediate aftermath of the war and the departure of Japanese soldiers and civilians from the colonies and occupied territories. It also examines how empire has been recalled and commemorated in later years. Japan lost its colonies overnight: in marked contrast to the European empires, there was no long, drawn-out process of decolonization. Nevertheless, losing an empire was messy in practice. Scholarly work on the dismantling of empire encompasses a wide variety of its consequences. Some topics are already relatively well established, as shown by the volume edited by Lim and Wong (2000) on war memory in Malaysia and Singapore. Others have only recently come to the fore. One collection of essays, edited by Kushner and Muminov (2017), takes the dismantling of the Japanese empire explicitly as its topic, covering a broad range of issues prompted by the loss of the colonies, including matters of politics, law and diplomacy. The fate of Japanese civilians in the former colonies, especially Manchuria and Korea, is the subject of several works. In Manchuria in the direct aftermath of Japan’s defeat, large numbers 89

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of women and children were left behind, or chose to stay behind, as settlers fled in the face of Soviet advances and possible retribution from local residents. They included up to 5,000 children under thirteen years of age, mostly girls. The children and adult women were adopted by Chinese families or married Chinese men. From the 1970s on, many of them returned to Japan, often with the support of the Japanese government, but life in Japan was frequently precarious for them, as they had few resources and little useful employment history, and many did not speak Japanese. Chan (2011) discusses both the children and the adult women left in Manchuria, while Itoh (2012) focuses on the children. Tamanoi (2009) discusses the recollections, recorded from 1945 onwards, of several different groups of people who were affected by the project to send Japanese farmer-settlers to Manchuria: Japanese farmers who emigrated; their children who were left behind in 1945–46; Chinese couples who adopted these children, and other Chinese who experienced the Japanese occupation of Manchuria; and the Japanese-Chinese children of the Japanese left behind – that is, the grandchildren of the original settlers. More than 6 million other civilians and military personnel had to be repatriated to Japan in a complex and lengthy process that stretched from 1946 to the end of the 1950s; returning repatriates then had to fit back in to life in Japan, where, at least in the immediate postwar years, food, housing and employment were in short supply. Watt (2009) examines this process, focusing especially on the cultural construction of the figure of the repatriate in postwar Japan. Chapman (2016), as part of his historical account of the small but eclectic group who inhabited the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands, describes their evacuation to the Japanese mainland in 1944, the return of some of them after the end of the war, when the islands were administered by the U.S. Navy, and the reversion of the islands to Japanese sovereignty in 1968. Barshay (2013) discusses the surrender of more than 600,000 Japanese soldiers to the Soviet Red Army in Manchuria at the end of the war and their subsequent incarceration, mainly in Siberian labour camps. His focus is on impressions and recollections recorded by the former internees.The great majority of the prisoners were held for between two and four years, though some remained much longer. Other Japanese military personnel were detained by the Allies, in Japan or in territories Japan had occupied, as suspected war criminals. From late 1945 onwards, about 5,700 of them were brought before proceedings run by separate Allied governments in courtrooms all over the Asia-Pacific region. The connection with Japan’s empire was close: suspects were tried not only for crimes against Western prisoners of war, but also for mistreatment and murder of the local inhabitants of occupied territories during wartime. In Tokyo, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East prosecuted leading Japanese political and military figures between 1946 and 1948. The pioneer work on war crimes trials of Japanese suspects was Piccigallo (1979). Because of the release of new archival sources and, perhaps, the prevalence of war crimes trials around the globe since the 1980s, the study of war crimes trials in the Asian region is currently booming, with no fewer than eleven books appearing between 2008 and 2017, eight of them from 2015 to 2017. Chinese trials of Japanese suspects are examined by Kushner (2015), Australian trials by Aszkielowicz (2017) and in a volume edited by Fitzpatrick, McCormack and Morris (2016). Totani (2015) treats a selection of the national trials in detail. The Tokyo Trial is newly analyzed by Totani (2008), by Boister and Cryer (2009), and in a volume edited by Tanaka, McCormack and Simpson (2011). A recent trend is to treat the whole gamut of trials of Japanese war crimes suspects in a single volume (as Piccigallo also did in 1979), rather than separating the national from the international proceedings. Such an approach is taken in books edited by Sellars (2016) and Lingen (2016, 2017) and in a research monograph jointly written by Wilson, Cribb, Trefalt and Aszkielowicz (2017).

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Notes 1 This historical survey of the Japanese empire is based on Cribb (2016). 2 In this analysis of scholarship on Japanese colonialism, we have not addressed the very substantial literature on Japan’s imperial and colonial wars. The survey is restricted, moreover, to material published in English. The introductory paragraphs in this section draw on Wilson (2005). 3 See Schmid (2000) for a trenchant critique of what he regards as the ‘top-down, metrocentric’ (2000: 952) work of earlier scholars of Japanese colonialism, including Myers and Peattie, who replied in Peattie, Myers and Schmid (2001).

Further reading Duus, Peter, Myers, Ramon H., and Peattie, Mark R. (eds) (1989) The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Duus, Peter, Myers, Ramon H., and Peattie, Mark R. (eds) (1996) The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–45, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McCoy, Alfred W. (ed.) (1980) Southeast Asia under Japanese Occupation: Transition and Transformation, New Haven, CT:Yale Southeast Asia Studies. Myers, Ramon H., and Peattie, Mark R. (eds) (1984) The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mitter, Rana (2000) The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance and Collaboration in Modern China, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ____ (2013a) China’s War with Japan, 1937–1945:The Struggle for Survival, London: Allen Lane. Narangoa, Li, and Cribb, Robert (eds) (2003) Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia, 1895–1945, London: RoutledgeCurzon. Young, Louise (1998) Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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7 Race and racism Rotem Kowner

This chapter examines the question of race in modern Japan and traces the development of indigenous strains of racism. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Western scholarship had devised a comprehensive system of racial classification of mankind.1 The Japanese were classified in this system as belonging to the East Asian branch of humankind, first as members of the ‘Homo Asiaticus variety’ and then as the ‘Mongoloid race’. This classification contained an explicit value judgment and assumed the existence of a hierarchy of ‘human races’. In this context, many Western scientists regarded the Japanese, just as any other Asian peoples, as inferior to Westerners. Before the opening of Japan in 1854, knowledge about the Japanese had been largely based on sixteenth-century Jesuit reports and observations of physicians serving in the Dutch factory in Nagasaki. The second half of the nineteenth century, especially the three decades after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, saw a boom in the racial discourse on Japan both in the West and in Japan itself. Japan was the first non-Western country where native scholars participated actively in, and eventually dominated, the discourse and research on their own people, their origin and relationships to other ethnic and language groups in the region. The question of race, however, was not the exclusive domain of scholars. Politicians and officials, too, implemented race-based, and often also racist, policies, both domestically and in the colonial possessions of their countries. Japanese victories in wars with China (1895), Russia (1905) and Germany (1914)2 affected Western racial attitudes toward Japanese, giving rise to ‘yellow peril’ scares and fanning racism. This racism was a factor in the estrangement between Japan and the Anglo-Saxon powers in the early twentieth century. With the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, race became a decisive marker of difference between the two main rivals – the United States and Japan – and a predominant theme in their wartime propaganda. Following Japan’s surrender, the centrality of race diminished but did not altogether vanish, remaining a factor to this very day in domestic politics and foreign relations. As before 1945, the question of race is inseparable from the conflicting impact of Japan’s encounter with the West: the quest for modernity on the one hand and the urge to maintain a distinct identity on the other.

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The Japanese encounter with race, 1868–1905 The modern concept of race is a product of Western European scholarship. Its emergence can be pinpointed to the period between 1735 and 1775, even if its roots can be traced back to the ‘Age of Exploration’ (i.e. the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries). Rudimentary and sketchy ethnological reports of the early modern age gradually developed into a system of knowledge and classification. This system divided humankind into several groups, which were portrayed as separate species or sub-species, each characterized by a different – and qualitatively unequal – set of physical and spiritual attributes. By the mid-nineteenth century, race had become a ubiquitous, influential and purportedly scientific concept in the West, as well as a source of disparaging and generalizing value judgments about non-Western peoples and domestic minorities, that is, of racism (Demel 2013; 2015; Demel and Kowner 2013; Kowner 2004; 2014; Kowner and Skott 2015). The hierarchical concept of race was the product of the keen sense of military, technological and cultural superiority Westerners had felt in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Western imperialism was at its zenith. Beginning with the first Opium War of 1839–42,Western superiority was seemingly validated in a series of military victories and territorial acquisitions throughout East Asia. In this context, the concept of race served as a justification for exploitation and discrimination against non-White peoples (see Brantlinger 2003). Western views of Japan, however, were more complex. Japan seemed attractive, its inhabitants exotic; very few Western visitors ever talked explicitly of subjugating the country (Jones 1974: 305–27; Jones 1980: 145; Muramatsu 1995: 21–8). Nonetheless, Western writers provided typologies of the Japanese ‘race’ within the existing racial system. Despite the claims of ‘scientific objectivity’, these attempts often were shaped by contemporary political and moral attitudes toward the country and the non-Western world (see Fält 2015; Kowner 2000). Apart from Japan’s place in the international and racial hierarchy, the origins of the Japanese and their racial composition were considered the most important scholarly questions at the time. Western scholars, mostly German physicians who taught medicine in Japanese schools and engaged in part-time anthropological pursuits, argued that the first settlers of the archipelago were not necessarily the ancestors of the modern-day Japanese. They asserted that the Japanese were not a pure race but a mixture of peoples who had come to Japan in several waves of invasions (Kowner 2000; 2013; 2016). As we shall see later, these theories soon found an echo in Japan’s growing scientific community that led to diverse indigenous theories about the ethnogenesis of the Japanese. The contemporary Western racial worldview in general and Western impressions of the Japanese in particular were tinged with explicit racism. Although impressed by the rapid modernization of Japan and by certain qualities of the Japanese character, Western observers also tended to portray the Japanese as belonging to a race inferior to themselves (viz., members of the ‘Caucasian’ or ‘White’ race), and as members of a group that could imitate others successfully but was incapable of spearheading human progress by originating a culture, making scientific discoveries. Many observers also described the local population, and notably Japanese adult males, as having an unattractive physical appearance marked by a weak body, low stature and yellow skin. Some even dismissed Japanese as effeminate, childlike people who resembled apes and monkeys (Keevak 2011; Kowner 2004; Townsend 2015). Western attitudes apart, Meiji Japan (1868–1912) had its own indigenous racism. Early modern Japanese society exhibited strong prejudices and xenophobia, based at times on crude biological assumptions (Iesaka 1986: 1–25; Kowner 2014: 178;Wagatsuma and Yoneyama 1967: 51–65).These

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attitudes did not necessarily mean the presence of an elaborate concept of race. It is true that in the second half of the Edo era (1603–1868), Japanese scholars, who developed basic taxonomies of plants and other objects, showed awareness of human diversity, formed ethnological generalizations about a number of foreign nationalities and pondered the origin of some ethnic groups in the neighbouring regions (Keene 1969; Marcon 2015; McCormack 2013a). Nevertheless, these scholars did not seek to construe an explicit notion of race, even on a rudimentary level. In the same manner, prior to the 1868 Meiji Restoration, very few Japanese, if any, were aware of the Western racial worldview or bothered to debunk foreign images and perceptions of Japan. Indeed, the opening of Japan did not bring about an instant influx of ideas on race and, apart from the limited adoption of a few items of contemporary Western fashion, foreign concepts of race remained largely unknown in Japan until the late 1860s. Thereafter, the change was gradual as the diaries of members of the Iwakura Mission demonstrate. Sent in 1871–73 to observe the West firsthand and learn from its progress, they accepted the basic concept of race and the idea of innate differences among the various races, but rejected the notion that the Japanese or any of the peoples living in the region (the ‘Yellow race’) were inferior to Europeans (the ‘White race’) (Kume 1975, vol. V: 146–60, 271–5). During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Japanese intelligentsia adopted various modes of the concept of race (jinshu or minzoku) and used them to demarcate boundaries between themselves and the foreign – and domestic – Other (Kawai 2015). By doing so, it also internalized broader aspects of the racial worldview that was prevalent at the time. This worldview was not adopted independently but was part of a larger parcel of science and culture that Meiji Japan imported from the West. Inevitably, members of the Japanese intelligentsia found it distressing to have to accept Western racial views that contained strong racist connotations and disparagement of the Other, including themselves. Some reacted by expressing their desire to ‘leave Asia’ and be accepted instead by those considered superior (i.e. Europe).These racial views were often caused by personal feelings of inferiority and spiritual torment exacerbated during visits overseas and in interactions with Westerners (see Konoe 1981: 138; Natsume 1993–99, XII: 11–14, 68–9; see also Duus 1971; Saaler 2007c). This self-consciousness, however, did not prevent a growing conviction that racial characteristics could be altered, and eventually ameliorated, and that the Japanese, if not other Asians, could reach parity with the West (Kitahara 2007; Majima 2014). In diplomatic relations, the Japanese government since the start of modernizing reforms insisted that its nation and people would be treated as equal, legally and in practice, and developed special sensitivity to any infringement of this expectation (Auslin 2004). The feeling of inferiority and helplessness, at least on the national level, faded away quite rapidly.The rapid and successful modernization in many fields, such as the founding of modern armed forces based on conscription (see Chapter 13 in this volume), the introduction of compulsory education and the promulgation of the Constitution in 1889, could not be dismissed as mere parroting of the West. Self-confidence in the Japanese academia was also on the rise. As early as 1883, Japanese instructors for the first time exceeded the number of German lecturers in the Faculty of Medicine at Tokyo Imperial University (Kim 2014: 41). A year later, a small group of young anthropologists established Japan’s first anthropological association under the name ‘Jinruigaku no tomo’ (The Friends of Anthropology). By 1888, the new association had boasted some 217 members who represented the first generation of noteworthy Japanese scholars educated in Japan or in the West (Sakano 2005). Soon these scholars began to express their views on Japanese origins and racial composition and eventually assumed the leading role in the discourse on this issue (Askew 2004). Due to the initial interest of Westerners in the Ainu, their origins and ethnic relation to the Japanese 94

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became the subject of a major debate. In 1887, Tsuboi Shōgorō (1863–1913), one of the pioneers of Japanese anthropology, reiterated the earlier speculations of a Western scholar, that the pit dwellers who in antiquity inhabited Hokkaido were pigmoids (Tsuboi 1887; see also Kudō 1977; Shimizu 1999). Tsuboi was soon challenged by German-educated Koganei Yoshikiyo (1858–1913), a professor of anatomy at Tokyo Imperial University. Koganei argued that the Ainu were similar to the prehistoric population of the Japanese mainland, whose direct descendants they were. Critically, he concluded that the Ainu once inhabited the entire Japanese archipelago, but were largely displaced by the population that gave rise to the modern Japanese (Koganei 1893; 1894). The true bone of contention, however, was whether modern Japanese were ‘pureblooded’ or a hybrid nation. For some, the discussion of Japanese origins reinforced the sentiment of Pan-Asianism (Saaler and Szpilman 2011) and, indeed, Japanese theories suggesting common ancestry with the Chinese and Koreans were soon postulated (Oguma 1995; 1998). Toward the end of the nineteenth century, some Japanese scholars began to cast doubt openly (and even in foreign journals) on the presumed racial superiority of Westerners (Sakano 2005: 59–61). For instance, in 1903 the anatomist Adachi Buntarō (1865–1945) found the odour of Europeans to be stronger and more pungent than that of Japanese, due, he argued, to their larger sweat glands (Adachi 1903). Two years later, by which time the last German anthropologist employed by the Japanese government had left for home, Japanese scholars formed a majority of participants in the international racial discourse on Japan and within a period of little more than thirty years, the Japanese came to dominate (or even monopolize) the production of new knowledge in this field. By dominating the local discourse on race, Japan became the first non-European nation that effectively took over a European intellectual domain. Outside the intellectual realm, the first decade of the twentieth century witnessed another transformation. After Japan’s victory in the war with Russia in 1904–05, an increasing number of Japanese were no longer willing to accommodate foreign manifestations of arrogance, let alone tolerate racial slurs. By then, some Japanese had begun to wonder whether the Western world order was acceptable to them and whether Japan could create a world order of its own. It was at that time that the path to a future racial conflict, though by no means inevitable, became clearly visible (Saaler 2007b). Paradoxically, the growing opposition in fin-de-siècle Japan to the Western racial paradigm and even more so to its stereotypical view of the Japanese, did little to prevent the Japanese state and many of its officials from employing the same paradigm and using similar stereotypes. Starting in the late Meiji era, members of the ruling elite and the intelligentsia formed a national identity that was based on racial lines (Weiner 1997;  Yoshino 1992; 1997). Likewise, they accepted the social Darwinist notion that great powers are entitled to subjugate other culturally, technologically or physically inferior nations and peoples; and they also systematically measured, classified and arranged hierarchically their own population and the peoples under their rule (Kim 2013; Kuo 2015; Russell 1996, 24; Tamanoi 2013). By the same token, they established a legal system that discriminated on the basis of race against colonial subjects (Zachmann 2013), against non-Japanese in the neighbouring areas and non-wajin (ethnically non-Japanese) peoples and other minorities in Japan (Sato 1997; Siddle 1997;Young 1997).

Immigration and anti-Japanese racism in international relations, 1905–1931 The condescending attitude that characterized Western observations of Japan during the latter half of the nineteenth century turned in the early twentieth century into a mixture of admiration, fear and racial animosity, notably in nations that competed with Japan in Asia or absorbed 95

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Japanese immigrants (Daniels 1962). By then, Japan’s international position had improved dramatically: it established an impressive diplomatic network including an alliance with Great Britain (see Chapter 2 in this volume); its unequal treaties were revised (see Chapter 4 in this volume); and its military power gained international recognition after its victories over China and Russia. Still, this progress had a downside, exemplified in its extremity in disputes over immigration. Starting as early as 1868, Japanese individuals, mostly peasants from the poorer regions of Japan, immigrated to the west coast of North America, among other destinations (see Chapter 8 in this volume). Their number initially was trifling, especially when compared with the concurrent wave of immigrants from Europe, or even from China, but economic competition, racial hostility and fears of Japanese immigrants serving as a fifth column in the absorbing countries made this human movement a source of increasing embarrassment and bitterness for Japan (Iikura 2006; Masuda 2009). Japan’s victories over Qing China in 1894–95 and then over tsarist Russia in 1904–05 had a tremendous effect on the discourse on race both domestically and overseas. At a time when the ‘survival of the fittest’, or rather ‘survival of the strongest’ as Herbert Spencer’s original phrase was commonly interpreted, was accepted as gospel, no success could be greater than a triumph in war. After Russia’s defeat, and even more so five years later, with the commission of the battleship Satsuma – the most complex weapon system of that time and the first warship of this kind to be designed and built domestically – it was difficult to deny that the Japanese proved themselves capable of mastering the latest technologies. This mastery was the key factor for Japan’s becoming the hegemonic power on land in Northeast Asia and a threat to Anglo-American naval supremacy in the Pacific. Never before was this country so strong but at the same time its people so unwelcome (Saaler 2007a). In continental Europe, signs of alarm and antipathy appeared first following Japan’s victory over Qing China, with Germany leading the bandwagon. If one figure could be singled out among those anxious about the rise of Japan, it was Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941). His antiJapanese outburst took place when he heard about the Treaty of Shimonoseki that concluded the Sino-Japanese war. Under the terms of the treaty victorious Japan obtained Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula on the Chinese mainland. In less than a week, Germany joined Russia and France in the Triple Intervention to demand that Japan give up its acquisitions in mainland China. Japan had no choice but to accept this ultimatum. The kaiser, motivated in part by a realpolitik desire to acquire a colonial foothold in East Asia, added a personal tinge to the conflict by sketching a picture of the danger looming from the East entitled ‘Against the Yellow Peril’ (Gegen die gelbe Gefahr). To produce a sharper visual representation, he soon commissioned the painter Hermann Knackfuss (1848–1915), who drew a group of warrior goddesses, representing major European nations, led by the Archangel Michael. The only symbol of the Orient was a Buddha looming in the distance over conflagration and carnage but the message was unmistakable. When the drawing was distributed among the monarchs of Europe, the fear of Chinese hordes led by Japanese began to spread (Röhl 2004: 754–5; Gollwitzer 1962; Lyman 2000; Saaler 2017). In the United States, too, racial animosity toward Japan increased after its victory over Russia. Although President Theodore Roosevelt loathed the tsarist regime and admired Japanese military performance in Manchuria, he and his successor,William Howard Taft, were not free of racism in their attitudes toward Japanese and other Asian immigrants. This led to attempts to limit Asian immigration to the United States (Esthus 1967; Sinkler 1971, 395–400; Henning 2007: 162–4). Much of this was not new, but the Russo-Japanese War accentuated earlier prejudices and concerns, which subsequently spread also to Great Britain, Japan’s principal ally (Best 2015; Towle 2013), although there was no Japanese immigration to Britain at the time. But, Japan’s 96

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proven military might, coupled with growing population pressures internally and its unmistakable course of external expansion, seemed threatening to the United States’ interests. In 1906–07 these heightened fears, especially on the West Coast, led to the implementation of domestic measures against East Asian immigrants (Iriye 1972; Bean 1952). Faced with the discrimination against its nationals, the Japanese government insisted that its country and its subjects overseas be treated as ‘honorary Whites’, but to no avail. Thereafter diplomatic and economic relations between the two nations became more and more strained and they began to regard each other as major rivals (Tovy and Halevi 2007; Saaler 2014a). During World War I, Japan fought on the side of the Allied Powers and cooperated with the United States in Siberia. Neither this military involvement nor the fact that the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was still in effect prevented Western writers, scholars and politicians, mostly Americans, from musing at the time on the possibility of an all-out racial war in which Japan would be the archenemy (Lea 1909; Pitkin 1921). During this period, Japan, too, had its share of fantasies over a racial war (Satō 1920; 1921). Partly as a response to Western demonization and anxiety of international isolation, and closely related to growing Pan-Asian sentiments, these fantasies evolved into an explicit discourse on race (jinshuron), in which an alliance with China in a race war against the West was occasionally mentioned (Hackett 1971). With the end of World War I, Japan gained at last wide recognition as a great power (ittōkoku; lit. first-rate nation) and in due course played a substantial role in the establishment of the League of Nations. As the only non-White great power and under the reverberations of the discourse of race at home, Japan began to act as the champion of the ‘coloured’ races and submitted a proposal for racial equality at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Although the aim of the proposal was seemingly defensive and self-serving rather than altruistic, it was rejected, due to opposition by the British Empire and the United States (Shimazu 1998). Another disappointment followed two years later at the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22. Some in Japan suspected that Great Britain, its long-standing European ally, was moving closer to the United States whose main objective was to impede Japan’s military rise and imperial ambitions. The U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 turned race into an even more important international issue (Lee 2007; Hirobe 2001). Although not directed exclusively at Japan, the Act attempted to preserve White supremacy in the United States by establishing quotas for undesirable immigrants, among them Japanese. This caused outrage in Japan (Stalker 2006). Around the same time, in 1925, Adolf Hitler published Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which would make its sinister contribution to racial discourse in Europe. It included a number of references to Japan. Hitler divided humankind into three groups: culture founders, culture bearers and culture destroyers and placed the Japanese in the second category. If Europe and America were to perish, Hitler mused, the Japanese development would dry out in a few years and the culture would ‘stiffen and fall back into the sleep out of which it was startled seven decades ago by an Aryan wave of culture’ (Hitler 1939: 398; Maltarich 2005: 175–212). As part of the growing Japanese view of the world as increasingly violent and racially polarized, Japan witnessed the rise of a domestic form of eugenics. The idea was conceived in Britain in the late nineteenth century, the word itself being coined in 1883 by Francis Galton (Galton 1883), but the first associations to promote the improvement of the population’s genetic traits through selective reproduction were established in Japan in 1924. The most prominent organization was the Japanese Association of Racial Hygiene (Nihon minzoku eisei kyōkai), which soon urged forced sterilization of ‘inferior people’, the encouragement of reproduction among the fittest, alongside the prohibition of birth control based on women’s discretion. Although the implementation of these policies never came close to the scale witnessed in Nazi Germany, during the 1930s the influence of the eugenic view in general and the association in particular grew stronger and its legacy continued even after the war (Frühstück 2003; Suzuki 1983). 97

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Overall, during the first decades of the twentieth century, Japan still maintained its Western orientation while becoming ever more sensitive to the way it was viewed in the West and aware of actions taken against its subjects. And yet, the five-year period between 1919 and 1924 marks a watershed when many politicians, military men and intellectuals lost any hope of Japan’s ever gaining acceptance as an equal by the West, and by the Anglo-Saxon powers in particular (MacMillan 2003: 321). Thereafter, influential visionaries such as the army officer Ishiwara Kanji and Pan-Asian ideologue Ōkawa Shūmei (see Peattie 1975; Szpilman 1998a) increasingly turned their energies to the construction of a self-sufficient Asian empire under Japan’s leadership. In this future autarkic sphere, they mused, there would be no place for members of the ‘White race’ whereas Asian peoples would co-exist in harmony under Japanese rule (cf. Brown 2007; Miwa 1973: 389–90).

The rise of the idea of a race-based empire and racial war against the West Although Japanese imperialism did not emerge necessarily in response to Western racism, during the first three decades of the twentieth century the two interacted with and stimulated each other. By 1932, however, Japan ventured onto a new course: giving up on the liberal West and building instead a self-sufficient Asian-Pacific empire. The occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo a year later provided an opportunity to experiment with this form of a race-based empire (Mimura 2011; Hotta 2007). Until then, the territorial expansion of the Japanese modern state had been of a different character.The peoples inhabiting the islands in the immediate vicinity of Japan, which were annexed in the 1870s, became Japanese subjects, and even the relatively large populations of Taiwan and Korea, taken over in 1895 and 1910 respectively, became Japanese subjects and were gradually Japanized. However, in Manchukuo, and even more so in Southeast Asia, which the Japanese occupied in 1941–42, the populations, which were too large and ethnically and culturally too different from the Japanese were treated differently. In the racial hierarchy established during the war, the Japanese constituted the ‘master race’ and the peoples of Southeast Asia remained in a subordinate position. Japanese efforts in the region mainly concentrated on the extraction of urgently needed raw materials, and to that end, Southeast Asians were harshly exploited as workforce (Kratoska 2005). A large number of labourers (rōmusha), often forcedly conscripted, died as a result of the treatment they received in territories such as the Netherlands East Indies (presentday Indonesia), Indochina and Malaya. Thus, while maintaining the rhetoric of Pan-Asianism and Confucian harmony, Japan exploited the territories it occupied not less intensively than the Western powers had done before. In some instances, however, it was also willing to delegate a certain degree of autonomy: both Burma and the Philippines were granted formal (though incomplete) ‘independence’ in 1943 (see Chapter 3 in this volume). The outbreak of the war against the Western Allies in December 1941 marked the start of a ‘racial war’. While Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, Japanese units invaded Southeast Asia and in the course of the following months occupied Western colonies there. Popular writers in the United States were not far off the mark when they stated that the conflict was ‘a holy war, a racial war of greater significance than any the world has here forth seen’ (Dower 1986: 7). It was also a struggle of extreme ferocity and savagery. Whereas the Japanese were bent upon driving out the ‘White man’ from ‘their’ continent, the Americans were equally determined to destroy their racial ‘Yellow’ enemy and to this end brought to life all kinds of abominable racist images. The Japanese government regarded the sweeping Japanese triumph over the Western colonial powers in 1941–42 as a mere prelude to the formation of a great modern Japanese empire 98

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in East Asia. To this end, in 1942 it declared its intention to establish the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ (Daitōa kyōeiken) and created a separate ministry for that purpose, the Daitōashō (Greater East Asia Ministry). Although the Co-Prosperity Sphere was a euphemistic term for Japan’s colonial rule, the propaganda represented it as an embodiment of freedom and equality, using long-established slogans such as ‘Asia for Asiatics’ and ‘same culture, same race’ (dōbun dōshu) (Hotta 2007; see also Chapter 3 in this volume). As for Japan’s enemies, their propaganda directed against Japan was viciously racist, but it was not, as sometimes claimed, the main cause of the aerial bombings the United States carried out against Japan in the final year of the war. Germany was the target of at least as devastating bombings over several years, without a manifest racial element in the propaganda against it. Similarly, one can only speculate whether the United States would have dropped an atomic bomb on Germany had this weapon been available before the war in Europe ended. Be that as it may, by most accounts, racism was not a crucial factor in the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nevertheless, there was evidently little in the contemporary image of the Japanese to counter this inhuman decision inasmuch as there was no ‘Japanese counterpart to the “good German” in the popular consciousness of the Western allies’ (Dower 1986: 8). This racial difference had been even more obvious on the American home front. By the spring of 1942, the United States incarcerated some 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry (62 per cent of them were American citizens), while leaving its citizens of German or Italian ancestry free (cf. Fujitani 2011: 82–108). The latter were probably too numerous to be interned, but numbers were not the core issue, racism was. ‘A Jap’s a Jap’, is how Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, the commanding officer of Western Defence Command and a vocal supporter of the internment, explained this unprecedented measure, ‘You can’t change him by giving him a piece of paper’. (tenBroek et al. 1954: 35; on the treatment of Japanese in Nazi Germany, see Krebs 2015). Japan, too, applied racist policies to its Western enemies during the war. Although it did not rely on demeaning and vicious propaganda campaigns on the same scale as the Americans, it routinely humiliated Western prisoners of war in public parades in the conquered cities. Similarly telling are the death rates among Western prisoners of war that were much higher than in any previous war fought by modern Japan (cf. Kowner 2009). Notwithstanding tendencies to avoid the demeaning of the enemy, Japanese racial propaganda continued to elevate the self by stressing spiritual rather than physical strength (Dower 1986). The wartime recollections of the novelist Ōoka Shōhei (1909–88) nicely illustrate this tendency. Captured in the Philippines in early 1945, Ōoka’s impression of the first GI he saw appears to reflect the racial ambivalence his generation felt toward the enemy: The beauty of his face struck me with wonder. From the contrast between his pure white skin and the bright red of his cheeks to the individual features of his face so different from our own, I gazed upon a simple yet undeniable beauty – a beauty whose sudden appearance before me held a particular freshness because the world it represented had been banished from my sight since Pearl Harbor. (Ōoka 1996: 20)

Postwar Japan and the re-emergence of ethnic nationalism after 1945 The Allied occupation of Japan (1945–52) is associated today with reconstruction and recovery and marks a turning point that ended a period of imperial expansion and incessant international 99

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conflicts. Despite the terrible war, the human toll and the devastating urban destruction caused by air raids, the Japanese public embraced the U.S.-led occupation and their culture almost instantly. On the other hand, surrender and occupation brought back old feelings of racial inferiority. Largely as a reaction to the Nazi atrocities, it was exactly in this period that the importance of the concept of race diminished considerably in the West, at least in the official discourse. In Japan, however, this transformation was delayed.The relative benevolence of the new rulers, and the resulting admiration for American soldiers revealed, for example, in postwar novels, did little to repress worn-out concepts of racial difference. The debate on what to do with children born to American soldiers and Japanese women during the first years of occupation is evidence that such racial attitudes remained. Critics insisted that these children would be a stain on the nation as they would never be successfully integrated into Japanese society. As it turned out, the number of these children was far smaller than feared, and thus, although plans to send the majority of them for adoption overseas failed, the issue was gradually forgotten (Dower 1999; Koshiro 1999). With the end of the occupation, the beginning of reconstruction and the first signs of the economic ‘miracle’, Japan’s national confidence began to grow again. Extensive surveys on the ‘Japanese National Character’, conducted every five years since 1953, provide an eloquent testimony to this growing confidence. Among several categories, the surveys examined the image of Japan’s national status vis-à-vis the West by asking whether Japan is superior, inferior, or equal to the ‘West’. In 1953, more Japanese found their country to be inferior rather than superior, but five years later, there was a reversal in responses, and subsequently responses affirming Japan’s superiority increased considerably, reaching a peak in the 1980s (see Figure 17.1 in Kowner and Befu 2015; Yoshino 1992). It should also be pointed out that the focus on Japan vis-à-vis the West in these surveys was not accidental. Postwar Japan, particularly during its first decades, repeated the Meiji era’s ‘escape’ from Asia. In the early 1970s, discourse associated with ethnicity and race resurfaced and has been widely popular ever since. Known as Nihonjinron (literally, ‘theories/discourses on the Japanese [people]’), it has sought to account for the characteristics of Japanese society, culture and national character and so to provide building blocks for a new identity. Nihonjinron has also served as a broadly based ideological support for Japanese nationalism through its emphasis on the nation as the people’s preeminent collective identity. Using books and the media as its main channel, this discourse is based on an ethnocentric, unmistakably racial, and at times even racist, common denominator, which stems from the fact that Nihonjinron treats Japanese culture, national character and individual personality as a unique and unparalleled product of racial, historical and even climatic elements (Befu 2001; Dale 1986; Kowner and Befu 2015). Advocates of Nihonjinron tend to perceive their compatriots as members of a distinct group in both cultural and biological terms and to elaborate the special relations between race and culture in Japan (Oblas 1995). There are some similarities between this approach and Japan’s prewar ideology, but public discourse in postwar Japan has emphasized the homogeneity of its population in a more explicit manner than before (Dale 1986; Minami 1994). For instance, it tended to disapprove tacitly of inter-marriage with other Asians, and with Asian males in particular (Oguma 1995; Koshiro 2013). Still, Nihonjinron is not particularly inward looking. Its ethnocentric character is amplified by its reliance on comparisons between Japanese culture and other cultures, predominantly Western ones.The biological unity of the Japanese people has been another recurrent theme in Nihonjinron writings, which have promoted extensive research on the genetic markers of the Japanese population throughout history and stirring up tremendous interest in ‘Japanese’ bodily and facial appearance. It is not a surprise, then, that a number of Nihonjinron theorists have referred to Japanese ‘blood’ and the question of blood purity 100

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(    junketsushugi). In using these racially charged terms, they assumed a shared biological heritage and immutable features that allegedly characterize the Japanese as a coherent group (Fish 2009; Yano 2013; Yoshino 1997). As critics have pointed out, the claims of homogeneity and purity, which are based on the alleged lineage of the Japanese inhabiting the archipelago since time immemorial in isolation from other nationalities, are often used to discriminate and exclude various minorities in Japanese society (Arudō 2015; Beije 2009; Chapman 2008; Cleveland 2014; Fukuoka and Tsujiyama 2011; Kearney 1998; Tsuda 1998). By the mid-1980s, new economic tensions between the United States and Japan showed that ostensibly forgotten racial images in either country could easily be resurrected. In Japan, Nihonjinron tenets seem to have underlain, at least partly, expressions of Japan’s spiritual superiority. One vocal, if not atypical, advocate of this view was Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro (b. 1918). At a political meeting in 1986, Nakasone praised the achievements of the Japanese education system, but his speech soon turned into a comparison between ‘us’ (Japanese) and ‘them’ (Americans and the West in general). ‘Our average [intelligence] score’, he boasted, ‘is much higher than that of countries like the United States’. Still, Nakasone’s own attribution could not disguise a century of Japanese racism, the legacy of emulation of Western racism alongside indigenous views of differences. Compared with the Japanese ‘monoracial society’, he explained, ‘[t]here are many blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in America. As a result of this, the average score over there is exceedingly low’ (Bowen 1986: 40; Ivy 1989). Thirty years on, despite the ongoing recession, present-day Japanese society enjoys high levels of affluence and political stability and has overcome many of the difficulties and obstacles experienced by earlier generations. Japan is one of the most homogeneous societies in the world, both linguistically and culturally, with ethnic Japanese accounting for 98.5 per cent of the population. However, this homogeneity and apparent social stability mask a lingering legacy of arguably moderate but nonetheless deep-seated discriminatory attitudes, which are based on racial grounds and are directed both against minorities (including the indigenous people of the Ainu, the people of Okinawa and people of Korean descent) and against foreign residents. This social attitude serves as a tool to ensure cohesiveness in the majority, but it haunts those excluded and hinders Japan’s efforts to integrate as a member of the international community as well as its ability to compete in world markets.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that race and racism have been powerful factors in the history of modern Japan, even if their impact varied considerably at different times. Japan entered the modern era without a well-defined outlook on the question of race. In the late nineteenth century, however, it was forcibly exposed to this question, and soon began to adopt certain aspects of it. As a concept, race held powerful appeal in Japan because it was associated with the West, modernization and the quest for a greater national status. This appeal was double-edged as the Western race-based Weltanschauung caused considerable frustration, while stimulating endeavours for civilizational attainment and facilitating imperial expansion. Modernization was largely achieved but because the quest for status remained unresolved, the question of race became important in highlighting international differences with regard to territorial expansion and use of resources and manpower overseas. Following World War II and the demise of the Japanese empire, the issue of race lost its earlier importance but its reverberations still linger today. Racism, by contrast, does not require elaborate knowledge and may thrive in the presence of foreigners and domestic minorities without any familiarity with the concept of race. Certain strains of racism that had their origins in pre-modern Japan had remained dormant and 101

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undeveloped for centuries. After the opening of Japan, they developed rapidly once the concept of race was introduced and crucially when the unified state acquired a colonial empire of its own. During this period, foreign racism toward Japan and Japanese overseas added an emotional element to Japan’s tensions with the major colonial powers and so were a factor in bringing about its ultimate ‘revolt against the West’. Imperial Japan also had its own share of racist attitudes toward other groups, although this does not necessarily mean it developed a unique form of racism (Kowner and Demel 2015). This said, certain observations about the form and manifestations of racism in Japan can be made. First and foremost, the geographical remoteness and political seclusion that characterized pre-modern Japan had an impact on the emulation and usage of racism soon after the country was opened. Remoteness, seclusion and a relatively high degree of (often celebrated) ethnic homogeneity, helped to minimize contacts with foreigners and nourished xenophobic attitudes. Historically unaccustomed to the presence of foreigners or even compatriots from remote regions, the Japanese have displayed a relatively low tolerance for internal non-conformity, let alone for ethnic Others who do not conform to the local ways of life. It is possible to argue that the exposure to Western race theories and racial ideology reinforced this intolerance in Imperial Japan and at times even provided it with an ideological pretext for racial discrimination. Furthermore, high value given to status and ranking within modern Japanese society made foreign notions of Japan’s racial inferiority particularly obnoxious, and so, in the long run, exacerbated even further the conflict whose roots lay in realpolitik.

Notes 1 The term ‘West’ is used here to mean ‘Western Europe and North America’. 2 Although the so-called Japanese-German War (Nichidoku sensō) ended in November 1914, Japan remained formally at war with Germany until the conclusion of the Versailles Treaty in 1919.

Further reading Azuma, Eiichiro (2005) Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dower, John (1986) War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, New York: Pantheon Books. Fujitani, Takashi (2011) Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kowner, Rotem, and Demel, Walter (2013–2015) (eds) Race and Racism in Modern East Asia, 2 vols, Leiden: Brill. Shimazu, Naoko (1998) Japan, Race and Equality:The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919, London: Routledge. Weiner, Michael (ed.) (2008) Japanese Minorities:The Illusion of Homogeneity, London: Routledge.

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8 Overseas migration, 1868–1945 Martin Dusinberre1

In the early summer of 1868, in the midst of the chaos that accompanied the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate, an 855-ton sailing ship left Yokohama bound for the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. The Scioto carried the first government-sanctioned group of labourers to leave Japan since the early seventeenth century. When the ship arrived in Honolulu on 19 June, 141 men, six women and one child disembarked, ready to begin work as contract labourers on the kingdom’s sugar plantations. In future years, this group would become known as the Gannenmono, literally ‘people of the first year’, referring to the foundational year of the Meiji Emperor’s reign (Marumoto 1972; van Sant 2000: 97–116). By the end of the Meiji period, in 1912, there would be hundreds of thousands of Japanese residing and working overseas; by 1945, around 4 million Japanese civilians lived overseas, out of a total population of around 70 million.2 Told in this way, the story of overseas migration in modern Japan would seem to be intrinsically tied to the history of the nation-state. That is, overseas migration would seem to exemplify the key transition in modern Japanese history from Tokugawa to Meiji, from a long period in which ordinary Japanese were banned from travelling overseas to a new era of government engagement with the outside world. Yet for all the terminological convenience of a group of migrants coinciding with the Meiji foundational year, migration has traditionally been overlooked as an important feature of Japanese history between 1868 and 1945. Scholars have all too often excluded from their narratives of modern Japan serious discussion of the Japanese in Hawai‘i, or in North America, or later in Latin America and throughout the southwest Pacific (e.g., Tsutsui 2007). In this way, they have deployed an ‘island nation’ lens similar to that which for many years insisted that the history of the colonies, too, could be viewed as somehow separate and distinctive from that of Japan ‘proper’ (Schmid 2000). That, fortunately, has recently begun to change, as I shall discuss below. Perhaps more importantly, even if the history of overseas migration had been better integrated into the historiography of the nation-state to date, that nation-state framework itself would be limiting and problematic. Take, for example, the language with which the organizer and sponsor of the Gannenmono, Eugene van Reed (1835–73), described his envisaged programme to the Hawaiian Foreign Minister in 1867: ‘Any proposition by the [Hawaiian] Government for Japanese Emigrants or Coolies, I think would be favorably received [in Japan]’ (Marumoto 1972: 13). With the word ‘coolie’, van Reed indicated that he saw the Japanese labourers within the 103

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broader historical movement of Chinese overseas labour in the post-Opium War (1839–42) decades (Kuhn 2008: 110–12). This demand in the Pacific world and in North America for ‘coolies’ was bound, first, to the longer story of the abolition of slavery, starting with the Haitian revolution in 1791 and continuing through the British colonies in the 1830s to the United States in 1865; and, second, to the geographical shift in sugar production both within the Caribbean – from Haiti to Jamaica and then to Cuba, where between 1847 and 1874, 125,000 Chinese crossed to work in appalling conditions (Hu-Dehart 1994) – and to the Pacific Ocean region more generally. Planters were willing to ‘recruit labour wherever possible’ to compensate for the abolition of slavery (Hoerder 2012: 446; McKeown 2001: 67–9). Later, the abolition of the trans-Pacific coolie trade, in 1874, and the War of the Pacific (1879–83, between Chile and the alliance of Bolivia and Peru) would shape the demand for Japanese labour in Peru (Takenaka 2004: 82–93). Historians would miss these contexts if we viewed migration in modern Japan solely through the lens of nation-state Japanese history – if we allowed the gannen label to suggest a timeline of migration that begins in 1868. Instead, historians should consider the Gannenmono and the emigration of hundreds of thousands of Japanese in subsequent decades in terms of a broader story: both of Japan’s engagement with the ‘post-emancipation moment’ (Botsman 2011), and of its participation in the opening of the Pacific world (Endō 2007) and the ecological transformation thereof (Cushman 2013). Set against a longer history of Chinese trans-Pacific ‘coolie’ labour in particular, the history of Japanese overseas migration clearly has roots that predate 1868. But we need also to move beyond a Gannenmono-inspired spatial framework which assumes that Japanese migration was primarily a trans-Pacific phenomenon. To ask the apparently innocent question, ‘who was a migrant?’, as I do in the second section of this chapter, is to open a terminological can of worms concerning the meaning of ‘emigrant’ (imin) as opposed to ‘colonist’ (shokumin). To get around these problems, Japanese-language historians increasingly use the framework of people ‘movement’ (idō) to describe the phenomenon of Japanese overseas migration in the period 1868–1945 (the third section of this chapter). People’s movement, in turn, forces us to reconsider the basic question of who may be included in a history of Japanese migration: the worms keep coming (the fourth section of this chapter). But if this is a complex history, it is also intellectually liberating. To deal with the topic of migration is to gain new insights into the history of Japanese nation building, imperialism and global engagement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and thus to gain new tools by which to consider Japan’s place in global history (the final section).

Who was a ‘migrant’? Part of the problem with the question, ‘who was a migrant?’ is that large numbers of Tokyo bureaucrats were asking the same question at the end of the nineteenth century, and the answers they came up with then have had a profound impact on those historians have given since. To define and thereby be able to count migration is therefore a classic exercise in trying to deconstruct the ontologies of the archive (Stoler 2009) – that is, how the archive would have us think. At the end of the nineteenth century, for example, officials in Japan’s Foreign Ministry were greatly concerned about the numbers of Japanese women working as prostitutes throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Reports of how these women were sullying the good name of Japan were compiled by the ministry’s growing network of overseas consuls and conveyed back to Tokyo, where bureaucrats began to use the label ‘women in unsightly professions’ (shūgyōfu). Many of these reports were filed under the general category ‘Judiciary and Policing’, thus framing the women’s work as a law and order problem.This was in contrast to Japanese men and their wives 104

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employed on overseas sugar plantations, or men working as traders and merchants: their paperwork was filed under the category ‘Trade/Commerce’. But in thus deferring to the declared moral standards of, say, British colonial officials in Singapore or Queensland, Tokyo bureaucrats rejected the idea that sex work could or should be considered as a form of labour – in contrast to the Meiji government’s acceptance of licenced quarters at home (see Botsman 2011). By this logic, Japanese men who left rural poverty in the hope of finding new working opportunities overseas were generally separated in the Foreign Ministry files from Japanese women who left for the same reasons (although coercion and deception was also a factor in the departure of some women from Japan, and thus arguably a matter for ‘policing’). Moreover, the surge in archival materials about women engaging in what the Acting Consul for Japan in Singapore called (in 1892) ‘vice’ and ‘immoral business’ (DRO 4.2.2.27) reflected not only a new empirical reality but also, crucially, a new way of describing and categorizing an existing historical practice, in which women from poor families in southwest Japan had moved overseas from the 1870s onwards in order to make money (see also Warren 1993: 81–8). The diplomatic records of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs thus today preserve an ‘ocular regime’ (Mihalopoulos 2011: 41), a lens by which ‘unsightliness’ was in fact a marker of overseas Japanese women becoming more visible to Tokyo bureaucrats. The practical consequences in terms of understanding ‘migration’ are threefold. First, the neat vertical lists of thousands upon thousands of Japanese overseas ‘emigrants’ (imin) in the ‘Trade/Commerce’ archival section (DRO 3.8.2) are in some ways an illusion, for the messier economic realities that lay behind a decision to move overseas are often better revealed in ‘policing, enforcement and punishment’ files (DRO 4.2). Second, just as the women who appear in the latter files were generally unmarried, so almost all those who appear in the former were the wives of male migrants. But what ‘wife’ meant in this context was sometimes open to question: in 1880s and 1890s Hawai‘i, there were enough cases of prostitution or ‘wife selling’ to suggest that some of these marriages existed on paper only (Mihalopoulos 2011: 43). Prostitutes from this initial group of ‘wives’, it has been argued, ‘were an important part of the pioneering Japanese society in Hawai‘i’, and some overseas officials from Japan’s Foreign Ministry even profited from these transactions (Hori 1981). In other words, the assumption made by Tokyo bureaucrats about what it meant to be a migrant’s wife was often undermined by the reality of gender relations on the ground in Hawai‘i (or in the mainland United States: see Tsu 2009). And third, the rationale that drove the archiving of prostitution under ‘Judiciary and Policing’ was in many ways a reflection of moral and geopolitical perspectives that resulted as much from debates within and between overseas Japanese diaspora communities as from policy discussions only within Japan – such as the concern in 1890s San Francisco for Japanese women not to be considered comparable to Chinese ‘slave girls’ (Oharazeki 2013: 189). Such a transnational context is central to understanding the Foreign Ministry archive, a substantial and wonderfully preserved collection of documents on which historians depend for calculating even basic numbers of migrants – and yet an ontological minefield we must navigate with caution. All this is before we even begin to consider the bureaucratic framing of emigration according to geography.The 1896 Emigrant Protection Law (Imin hogohō), which grew out of an 1894 government ordinance, defined ‘emigrants’ (imin) as ‘persons or their families who cross (tokō) to foreign countries for the purpose of labour’. In February 1902, this was revised to those ‘who cross to foreign countries other than China or Korea for the purposes of labour’ (Duus 1995: 299, emphasis added). This geographical distinction underlined the early twentieth-century idea that Japanese on the Asian continent both reflected and contributed to the prestige of the expanding Japanese empire, unlike their compatriots elsewhere. Consequently, whereas the ‘migration’ subsection of the ‘Trade/Commerce’ diplomatic files (DRO 3.8.2) contains volumes of 105

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information about the Japanese in Hawai‘i, North America, Latin America, Australia, the Philippines, New Caledonia and so on, it has only a few files on the two regions of northeast Asia to which Japanese people moved in the greatest numbers before 1945. This suggests that the early twentieth-century definition of ‘emigrant’ is too geographically narrow to be very useful to scholars today. And yet ‘emigration’ has for many decades been a key geographical marker of research within Japanese-language historiography. At the risk of oversimplification, to study emigrants (imin) and be a member of The Japan Association for Migration Studies (Nihon imin gakkai) has traditionally been exactly to follow the logic of the Emigrant Protection Law and study Japanese overseas migrants in places other than northeast Asia, whereas to study ‘colonists’ (shokumin) and be a member of Society for Japanese Colonial Studies (Nihon shokuminchi kenkyūkai) has been to study the Japanese in northeast Asia and Micronesia but not elsewhere. In English-language historiography, the problems have been no less great, with what Eiichiro Azuma calls a ‘disciplinary and epistemological compartmentalization’ in North American academia between U.S. ethnic studies (where the topic of emigration has traditionally been categorized as belonging to Japanese American studies) and Asian area studies (where colonial expansion is a topic for historians of Japan) (Azuma 2008: 1189). But as Azuma has shown, some first-generation Japanese migrants in the early twentieth century were themselves confused by this distinction between ‘emigration’ and ‘colonization’ (Azuma 2005: 17). It therefore behooves scholars to find a way of describing Japanese migration without reverting to bureaucratic, disciplinary or geographical determinism.

People movement and the state As a first step toward grasping the complex histories of migrating Japanese from approximately 1868 to 1945, we can follow recent Japanese-language scholarship and think simply in terms of ‘movement’ (idō) (e.g., Araragi 2008; Iijima 2010; Enogawa 2011; Ishihara 2011; Shiode 2015). The significance of this framework is that it avoids – or at least aims to avoid – the epistemological weight that has long attended the words ‘emigrant’ (imin) and ‘colonist’ (shokumin). In very general terms, building on the idea of ‘sight’, it is then possible to register the movement of different types of people at different times and for different purposes on a broad conceptual continuum which ranges from state sponsorship and direct management of migrants on the one hand to beyond the state’s sight on the other, with various degrees of state oversight in between.The hundreds and then thousands of Japanese women who worked as overseas sex labourers from the 1870s onwards, for example, may initially be considered as beyond the state’s sight: Tokyo bureaucrats began to try to control this particular movement of people in response to events on the ground. The same was true of the ‘transgressive mobility’ practiced by marginalized Japanese moving within and along the networks of late-imperial Qing China, including trafficked children, ‘abducted’ women and pirate wives (Ambaras, forthcoming). By contrast, the passage of the Gannenmono labourers and another group of 42 Japanese who crossed to Guam in 1868 was sanctioned by the state (although this became a point of dispute given the problems that the Gannenmono subsequently encountered), and thus may be considered as occurring under (loose) state oversight.

Toward state sponsorship Part of the problem, of course, is how we define ‘state’. Some of the earliest contributors to the Japanese ‘discourse of overseas development’ (kaigai hattenron) were intellectuals who were neither bureaucrats nor government ministers, but who were nevertheless extremely influential 106

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in the 1870s and 1880s. The exemplar of this group was Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), who envisioned a mercantilist expansion of Japanese businessmen and traders and even prostitutes throughout the Asia-Pacific world (Mihalopoulos 2012). The tri-directional expansionist ideology of these intellectuals – north to the Asian continent, southwest to the Pacific, and east to North and later South America – was inspired partly by U.S. frontier discourses (Azuma 2011). These intellectuals also appropriated and adapted the ideas of Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), to imagine overseas migration as a way of alleviating what was then perceived to be Japan’s overpopulation problem. Significantly, the early Meiji neologism, ‘colonization’ (shokumin), literally meant ‘increasing people’; only in the 1910s did the shoku character come to be replaced by the homonym ‘to plant’, such that ‘colonization’ was now rendered as ‘planting people’ (Lu 2016: 255–6). Fukuzawa promoted such an expansionist vision in his Keiō Academy (established 1858) and later in his Jiji Shinpō newspaper. It was a Keiō graduate who established San Francisco’s first Japanese import business in 1880; Fukuzawa himself helped finance the establishment of a 30-strong Japanese agricultural ‘colony’ in California under the leadership of a Keiō graduate in 1887; and by 1906 more than 1,000 Keiō graduates had emigrated to the United States (Azuma 2005: 22; Ichioka 1988: 10). In 1890, there were about 2,500 Japanese in California alone, many of whom were student-labourers and some of whom had come to escape both the crackdown on the People’s Rights movement in the mid-1880s and the tightening of Japan’s conscription laws in 1889 (Ichioka 1988: 14–6). The founding of Japanese ‘colonies’ in California, which dated from an initial experiment with 22 samurai families from Wakamatsu in 1869 (van Sant 2000: 117–30), continued into the early twentieth century, with settlements such as the Japanese Village and the Nippon Colony (both 1905) or the Yamato Colony (1906) (Azuma 2005: 24). What Azuma (2005: 20) calls the ‘heterogeneity of the Japanese emigrant population’ suggests a grey zone between those student-labourers who moved to the United States escape the state’s sight and those who initiated projects of which Tokyo was aware if not actively sponsoring. In contrast to these smaller North American ‘colonies’, the most important example of state sponsorship of Japanese overseas migration in the late nineteenth century was the JapanHawai‘i emigration programme (kan’yaku imin, literally ‘government contract migration’). This started with the first shipload of 944 Japanese labourers arriving in Honolulu in February 1885 and continued until the twenty-sixth official crossing in 1894. Under this programme, more than 29,000 Japanese crossed to work on Hawaiian sugar plantations under the umbrella term dekasegi-nin (out-migrants). ‘Out-migration’, like ‘crossing’ (tokō) in the 1896 Emigration Protection Law, may suggest a temporary period of overseas labour followed ultimately by return to the homeland; it may thus imply that emigration to Hawai‘i was merely the geographical extension of a practice dating from the Edo period, in which farmers had sought employment away from the village during the agricultural off-season. This idea of temporary migration was certainly the expectation of local officials in the villages and towns of southern Hiroshima and Yamaguchi prefectures, whence the majority of the government-sponsored migrants hailed (Ishikawa 1967; 1991): they urged the men and women (mainly men) going to Hawai‘i to return after their three-year contracts ‘dressed in brocade’ – that is, with the trappings of material wealth (Doi 1980; Dresner 2006). But contrary to Japanese government expectations (although not to the initial hopes of influential English-language newspapers in Hawai‘i), fewer than 14,000 of the government-sponsored migrants had returned to Japan by 1902; 2,000 of the 29,000 had died on the islands, and nearly 1,000 had moved on to the United States (Ichioka 1988: 46). Thus, for many of the first migrants, the initial three-year contract marked the beginning of life-long labour circulations between Japan and different parts of the Pacific world (Dusinberre 2016b). 107

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From state sponsorship to oversight With the establishment of the short-lived Republic of Hawai‘i in July 1894 and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war a few weeks later, the government-sponsored emigration programme was terminated and the movement of Japanese to Hawai‘i entered a new phase of state oversight. This was characterized by the proliferation of private emigration companies that took over the recruitment, shipping and contractual management of migrants from the Meiji government. Profits were to be made in fees charged to migrants for these services (usually 20 yen), but the companies were equally required to work within a legal framework established first by the aforementioned 1894 ordinance and then by the 1896 Emigrant Protection Law (Kimura 2011: 138). Between 1894 and 1908, almost 125,000 Japanese crossed to Hawai‘i through the services of private emigration companies, and there were additionally about 16,500 ‘independent’ emigrants (who went without company assistance) during the same period. As Alan Takeo Moriyama showed in his classic study (Moriyama 1985), one of the key issues that determined the success or failure of these companies was the strength of their infrastructure, in particular the number and quality of their recruiting agents in Japan.This level of infrastructure partly explains the much greater number of labourers who moved across the Pacific at the turn of the twentieth century than, say, the 4,000 or 5,000 Japanese who were living in eastern Russia (mainly Vladivostok) by 1913 (Saveliev 1997: 107–10). A similar number of Japanese – about 4,500 – moved to the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, mainly to work on large construction projects (Moriyama 1985: 154). Other companies specialized in other parts of the Pacific world: the earliest and most active of these was the Nihon Yoshisa Emigration Company (Nihon Yoshisa imin kaisha, also known as Kissa), established in December 1891 by the then vice-president of Nippon Yūsen Kaisha, which was contracted to ship government-sponsored emigrants to Hawai‘i, and by a Tokyo businessman (Ichioka 1988: 47). In January 1892, Yoshisa sent 600 labourers to French New Caledonia, to work on five-year contracts in what turned out to be the appalling conditions of the colony’s nickel mines. Between 1901, when Japanese emigration to New Caledonia was once again permitted, and 1911, other companies shipped a further 3,000 Japanese there (Wakayama-ken 1957: 619). The Yoshisa Company was also active in sending emigrants to Australia, where government-sanctioned emigration predated even the official programme to Hawai‘i, with 37 Japanese being given permission to work for a British company operating in the Torres Straits pearling industry in 1883. Under the auspices of the Yoshisa Company, the first official group of contract labourers to work for sugar companies in Queensland left Japan in 1892, and over the next four years Yoshisa organized five further crossings to the British colony. By 1897, there were officially nearly 3,000 Japanese working in Australia, either in the Queensland sugar industry or in the Thursday Island pearling industry. Other companies continued to organize the emigration of hundreds of contract workers to Queensland until 1901, when Federation and the White Australia policy brought an end to Japanese immigration (Kodama 1978: 20–7). The web of British colonial sugar interests between Australia and the southern Pacific world also led to a group of 305 Japanese crossing to Fiji in 1894, although a major outbreak of beriberi led to the experiment being aborted and the surviving Japanese being repatriated (Bennett 2001). Growing out of the same domestic discourse of ‘overpopulation’, the first initiatives to encourage Japanese migration to Mexico and Latin America also began in the mid-1890s. One key player here was Meiji politician Enomoto Takeaki (1836–1908), a contemporary of Fukuzawa Yukichi. As Foreign Minister between 1891 and 1892, Enomoto placed great emphasis on the strategic importance of emigration, having previously supported Japanese expansion 108

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to Hokkaido and to the southwest Pacific in the 1870s and 1880s respectively (for Micronesia, see Peattie 1988). In 1893, Enomoto founded the Shokumin kyōkai (Colonial Association) partly to promote emigration to Latin America, and in 1897, having left government, Enomoto and others sponsored an agricultural colony of 34 migrants to southern Mexico (Peddie 2016). At the same time, first generation Japanese intellectuals in San Francisco also turned their attention to Japanese expansion into Mexico and Latin America (Azuma 2005: 224). Although Enomoto’s Mexican colony was ultimately a failure, 11,000 Japanese labourers migrated to Mexico between 1901 and 1907 (Masterson and Funada-Classen 2004: 30). Moreover, the first group of 790 Japanese labourers crossed to Peru in 1899 (a tiny group of technicians, miners and mechanics had arrived to work on a short-lived mining venture 10 years earlier), and the signing of the Japanese-Brazilian Treaty of Amity and Trade in 1895 would pave the way for the beginning of Japanese emigration to Brazil in 1908 (Takenaka 2004: 77; Endoh 2009: 27–9; Masterson and Funada-Classen 2004: 15). To capture the dynamism of Japanese overseas migration in the first decades of the twentieth century, it is necessary to go beyond the ‘snapshot’ view, namely a table of how many Japanese resided in which countries in a particular year. Instead, and at the risk of statistical overdose, we must focus on the movement of people across particular periods. Until 1908, for example, Hawai‘i and North America continued to be the most popular destinations for Japanese migrants. Four thousand Japanese left for Canada between 1894 and 1900, followed by another 4,400 between 1902 and 1908 (Ichioka 1988: 55; Moriyama 1985: 153). In the decade 1891– 1900, 27,500 Japanese – mainly labourers – emigrated to the United States, followed by 42,500 more between 1901 and 1907 (Ichioka 1988: 51). By the early twentieth century, Hawai‘i had become not only a destination in its own right but also a transit point for labourers: from 1902 to 1905, 20,000 Japanese left the islands for the United States, with an additional 13,500 departing Honolulu for either Seattle or San Francisco in 1906 alone (Moriyama 1985: 133). Mexico served a similar transit function, with one contemporary estimate suggesting that nearly half of the 11,000 Japanese who entered Mexico between 1901 and 1907 transmigrated north to the United States (Masterson and Funada-Classen 2004: 32). It was in these years, coincident with Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War, that the antiJapanese movement began in earnest in California, symbolized by regulations such as the segregation of Japanese and Korean students from public schools in 1906, the anti-miscegenation law of 1907 and later the Alien Land Law of 1913 (Masuda 2009; Tanaka 2004). Under the U.S.Japan ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’ of 1907–08, the Meiji government agreed not to issue passports to ‘labourers’ bound for the U.S., and Washington shut down entry routes from Hawai‘i, Canada and Mexico (Sawada 1991; see also Saveliev 2016). But the flow of Japanese across the north Pacific continued, with almost 6,000 men and 13,700 women entering Hawai‘i between 1908 and 1915, and 3,000 men and 10,000 women entering the United States during the same period (Moriyama 1985: 139).The majority of these women crossing to Hawai‘i and the United States were ‘picture brides’, women who had never met their future husbands and who were often deeply disappointed by the ragged physical appearance and socioeconomic standing of the men awaiting them on the pier (Tanaka 2004). With a ban on Japanese migration to Australia from the early 1900s and restrictions in Hawaiian and North American migration in place from 1908, Latin America became the most important destination for Japanese trans-Pacific migrants in the 1910s and 1920s. Already by 1909, 6,300 Japanese had been sent by emigration companies to Peru, first to work in sugar haciendas; only 6 per cent of these migrants returned to Japan (more actually died in Peru), and after the end of their contracts, many Japanese went to Lima, where they came to dominate the laundry sector and owned the majority of barber shops (Takenaka 2004: 84–5). In this respect, 109

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the Japanese community in Lima bore many similarities to the occupational profile of the contemporaneous community in Vladivostok (Saveliev 1997: 107). Meanwhile, in the first years of Japanese migration to Brazil (1908–13), emigration companies sent nearly 12,000 migrants, mainly to work in coffee plantations; more than 20,000 more followed between 1914 and 1923 (Endoh 2009: 30).

Toward renewed state sponsorship The year 1923 marked the beginning of a shift away from state oversight once again to state sponsorship. Soon after the Great Kanto Earthquake, proponents of overseas migration proposed a programme of state subsidies for earthquake victims wanting to emigrate to Brazil. Though the proposed numbers were tiny – only 110 people – the central government budget to support Brazilian emigration was tripled to 1.21 million yen in 1924, which effectively meant that the subsidy per individual migrant increased from 25 to 200 yen.These funds were channelled through state support of a company, the Kaigai kōgyō kabushiki kaisha (Overseas Development Company, established 1917), which, though it was originally the affiliate of a private emigration company, merged with other emigration companies and effectively became a quasi-public enterprise charged with administering the migration of Japanese to Brazil. From 1929, under the oversight of the new Colonial Ministry (Takumushō), the Kaigai kōgyō kabushiki kaisha offered subsidies of 350 yen to each migrant (rising to 520 yen in 1931), and annual migrant numbers rose yet further, from 1,349 in 1922 to 18,016 in 1929 and a peak of 24,032 in 1934, when many prospective migrants sought to escape the collapse in agricultural prices that characterized the Shōwa Depression (1929–32) (Endoh 2009: 66–71). In all, more than 110,000 Japanese migrated to Brazil in the decade 1924–33, and although the Japanese population of Peru doubled in a similar period (1918–30), there were only 20,000 Japanese there in 1930, 87 per cent of whom lived in Lima (Endoh 2009: 30, 22; Takenaka 2004: 90). One factor in the popularity of Latin America as a destination for Japanese was the 1924 Immigration Exclusion Law, by which the United States prohibited any immigration from Asia. The law, which took effect on what Japanese newspapers dubbed ‘the day of national humiliation’ (1 July), provoked a furious popular response in Japan, with some commentators even proposing that the Japanese navy and merchant vessels should ‘bring every one of the 100,000 odd Japanese immigrants [in the U.S.] back home’ (cited in Stalker 2006: 164). The U.S. legislation, in turn, was just one manifestation of what Erika Lee calls ‘hemispheric Orientalism’: the rise of anti-Asian racism throughout the Americas, from Canada to Peru (Lee 2007). An overview of Japanese overseas migration during the half-century between the 1880s and the 1930s would thus suggest a broad arc, from state sponsorship and direct management of emigration in the 1880s to state oversight of private emigration companies in the 1890s, followed by a return to the pattern of state sponsorship in the 1920s. According to this view, Tokyo’s investment in Brazilian emigration may be best understood as part of a longer trans-Pacific history beginning with the 1885–94 Japanese-Hawaiian programme. Such a view is not incorrect, but it is complicated by the fact that the quasi-public company at the heart of the Brazilian emigration policy ‘was fitted with business expertise in immigrant recruitment, land acquisition, and agrarian colonization inherited from the Tōtaku era’ (Endoh 2009: 78). ‘Tōtaku’ refers to the Tōyō takushoku kabushiki kaisha (Oriental Development Company), itself established in 1908 to send agricultural colonists to Korea – and it is this overlap between government policy in Korea in the 1910s and Brazil in the 1920s that renders the history of Japanese overseas migration even more complex. 110

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Disaggregating ‘Japanese’ migration By the time that the Oriental Development Company was founded as a quasi-public company, Japanese had been moving to Korea for several decades, primarily from Nagasaki and Yamaguchi prefectures. As with Hawaiian migrants, those who went to Korea were trying to escape the vicissitudes of economic crises in the homeland. In contrast to the Hawaiian emigration programme, however, many migrants to Korea were small-scale merchants or shippers who had been active on Inland Sea routes during the Edo period (Kimura 1989: 30–66). Moreover, these migrants’ early lives, particularly in the cities of Busan, Wonsan, Seoul and Incheon, where the first Japanese communities were concentrated, were effectively beyond the control or even the oversight of the Meiji state, even though they benefitted from the legal framework of the ‘unequal treaty’ that Japan had imposed on Korea in 1876. As late as 1919, when the Japanese population in Korea numbered more than 300,000 (up from almost 16,000 in 1900), leading opinion-makers were complaining that Japanese settlers could ‘outflank the authorities and take the law into their own hands’ (Uchida 2011: 151, 165). Focusing not on prospective city dwellers but rather on farmers, the Oriental Development Company was partly a state response to the reduced opportunities Japanese agricultural labourers had to cross to Hawai‘i or to the United States after the 1908 Gentlemen’s Agreement. It was also partly a response to the on-going official concern with ‘overpopulation’ in Japan (Lynn 2005: 26–9). Compared to government-sponsored emigration to Hawai‘i or later to Brazil, however, the Oriental Development Company was a failure, sending only 5,100 agricultural households to Korea in the decade immediately after annexation (1911–20), peaking at 814 households in 1913. This was far below optimistic projections that officials had made when establishing the company: drafters of the Oriental Development Company Law predicted 240,000 Japanese migrants to work on company-acquired land within the enterprise’s first decade (Duus 1995: 301–12). In this sense, the state’s difficulty in managing Japanese migration to Korea in the 1910s foreshadowed problems in Manchuria.There, the 1931 Manchurian Incident and subsequent establishment of Manchukuo (1932) offered Tokyo bureaucrats a major new opportunity for encouraging mass, state-sponsored emigration. Previously, the Japanese migrant community had been centred in the cities and in South Manchurian Railway Company zones. But during the first years of ‘trial emigration’, only 3,000 Japanese households came to settle in Manchuria’s experimental farming settlements; then, during the first five years (1936–41) of a state-sponsored 20-year plan to move 1 million households (or 5 million Japanese) to the so-called ‘new paradise’, only 77,600 households (270,000 individuals) actually moved (Wilson 2003: 160–1). In the Korean and Manchurian programmes, unlike government-sponsored migration to Hawai‘i, the key unit of migration was the household, not the individual. The point here, however, is less the success or failure of the Korean and Manchurian agricultural emigration programmes than what they suggest about a historiographical framework – and, indeed, the geographical framework of the 1896 Emigration Protection Law – that has traditionally considered ‘emigration’ across the Pacific to be a separate topic from emigration to China or Korea. If, according to emigration proponents such as Nagata Shigeshi (1881–1973), migrant-settlers in Manchuria and migrant-settlers in Brazil were both serving the Japanese national mission (Wilson 2003: 165–7), and if key emigration organizations considered Japanese government land purchases in Brazil, Peru, Paraguay and elsewhere to be part of a migrationcolonization enterprise that in terms of state sponsorship bore some similarities to contemporaneous efforts in Manchuria (Endoh 2009: 72–3,Young 1998: 354–62), then we are forced to ask in what other ways an open-ended framework of ‘people movement’ muddies the waters between ‘emigration’ (imin) and ‘colonization’ (shokumin). 111

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For a start, the ‘movement’ framework suggests that a history of overseas migration in modern Japan should begin not (as did this chapter) with the Gannenmono labourers going to Hawai‘i but rather with migrant settlers going to Hokkaido. Ezo, as both Hokkaido and Sakhalin were known to the Japanese before 1869, had long been an object of expansionist desire for some Tokugawa intellectuals, who in some cases dreamed of claiming the ‘barbarous’ land of the Ainu through the mass migration of ‘outcaste’ communities from Japan proper (McCormack 2002; see also Chapters 3 and 6 in this volume). In the first 15 years after the establishment of the Hokkaido Development Agency (Kaitakushi) in 1869, almost 84,000 people migrated to Hokkaido from the main islands, not including the more famous but numerically less significant ‘farmer-soldiers’ (tondenhei) – that is, displaced samurai who began to settle there with state support after 1875 (Imanishi 2007: 25; Mason 2012: 31–55; Nagai 1998: 194–215). This was nation building through migration, based on a model of the U.S. conquest of the American West (Fujita 1994; Hirano 2015: 200–2; see also Endoh 2009: 60). Indeed, just as Fukuzawa Yukichi’s acolytes promoted Japanese expansionism across the Pacific, so Keiō Academy graduates were also deeply involved in the organization of Japanese emigration to Hokkaido (Lu 2016: 261). But this history is ignored if scholars insist that migration to Hokkaido was only a ‘domestic’ phenomenon, one to be separated from the movement of Japanese across the Pacific. Indeed, it has been argued that one reason Meiji leaders prohibited trans-Pacific Japanese migration between 1868 and 1885 was not only the mistreatment of some of the Gannenmono in Hawai‘i and the fear that Japanese subjects would become victims of the ‘coolie’ trade, but also a desire to prioritize the settlement of Hokkaido (van Sant 2000: 115). The ‘people movement’ framework thus connects the history of the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido to the subsequent history of Japanese migrants moving to Asia and the Americas (Shiode 2015; Lu 2016), and so bridges a divide between ‘island nation’ and ‘overseas’ history. Perhaps the best example of a sustained movement of people that blurred the boundaries of ‘island nation’ and ‘overseas’ migration was Okinawa. Like Hokkaido, Okinawa (previously the Ryukyu Kingdom) also became a colony of Meiji Japan after the ‘disposition’ of 1879 (Christy 1993; see also Chapter 9 in this volume). In a pattern not dissimilar to Japanese migration to the United States, the first Okinawan migrants to Japan were self-financed students who in 1886 formed a youth association in Tokyo. Though there were examples of individual Okinawans crossing to Qing China, Taiwan and the United States in the 1880s and 1890s, the first migration of labourers to Hawai‘i did not occur until 1899. Thereafter, however, there was an explosion of overseas emigration, including to mainland Japan. By 1924, almost 20,000 Okinawans had crossed to Hawai‘i or North America and 11,700 to Latin America. Between 1924 and 1938, more than 14,000 Okinawans crossed to the Philippines – the majority to Davao, where they worked on hemp plantations (Abinales 1997); another 18,000 Okinawans migrated to Latin America (mainly Brazil and Peru). By 1937, there were 34,000 Okinawans in Micronesia and by 1940, 14,700 in Taiwan (Enogawa 2011: 180–3). By 1940, there were also 88,000 Okinawans in Japan, of whom 54,000 resided in the Osaka region (Rabson 2012: 226). To put these figures in context, the population of the Okinawan islands themselves in 1940 was just under 600,000. But to be part of this diaspora of so-called Uchinanchū peoples was not necessarily to be considered ‘Japanese’. Okinawans in Hawai‘i faced discrimination from other prefectural groups, especially the large numbers of migrants from Yamaguchi and Hiroshima prefectures: they were considered inferior and dirty, their work in the hog-farming industry was derided and Okinawan children were ostracized at school. To emphasize their superiority, non-Okinawan Japanese called themselves ‘Naichijin’ (people of the naichi), drawing on the same discourse of ‘core’ (naichi) and colonies, or ‘outer territories’ (gaichi), that framed contemporaneous colonial 112

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discourse in East Asia (Kimura 1992: 64–79). Yet ‘Okinawa’ itself needs to be disaggregated in this period. As early as 1877, fishermen from the main island of Okinawa began to migrate to the outlying islands of Yaeyama, where in the early twentieth century they developed and then dominated the bonito flake industry. Yaeyama islanders also experienced an influx of farmers from Japan proper (especially Kagoshima and Tokushima prefectures), who reclaimed land and attempted to develop the local sugar industry. Between these settlers from the Okinawan main island and Yaeyama residents, there existed a gulf not only in language but also in economic practices (Matsuda 2008). At the same time, however, Yaeyama islanders forged close ties with Taiwan, such that the islands became effectively a ‘satellite’ of colonial Taipei by the 1910s. By 1934, approximately 1,400 Yaeyama islanders lived in Taiwan out of an Okinawan immigrant community of around 9,000 in the colony (Matsuda 2008: 522–3, Enogawa 2011: 188). There, Yaeyama migrants were officially ‘Japanese’, a label which barely begins to describe the complex daily negotiations that arose from their positioning between mainland Japan, main-island Okinawa and Taiwan (Matsuda 2012). For if the Okinawans in Hawai‘i were ostracized for being outside the naichi of Japan, then Yaeyama islanders, in turn, were both outside the naichi of Okinawa and yet simultaneously – when in Taiwan – representatives of the ‘Japanese’ naichi in a colonial periphery. This is a history which highlights the perils of historians attempting to apply too rigidly the labels ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’ (Matsuda 2012: 689). But it also raises the problem of what it means to talk about ‘Japanese’ overseas migration.The people who moved away from the Japanese archipelago in the late-nineteenth century were not fully formed national subjects; indeed, ‘the process of molding them into imperial subjects had barely begun at home’ (Azuma 2005: 26). Instead of taking the migrants’ sense of national belonging as a given, therefore, historians need to consider how they became Japanese through migration (McCormack 2002; Matsuda 2012).We need also to focus on hitherto understudied sites – such as the migrant ships – in which new ideas about national belonging emerged (Dusinberre 2016a). This reconsideration of what it means to speak of ‘Japanese’ migration from Okinawa, and even ‘Okinawan’ migration from Yaeyama, speaks to a decentred perspective that has driven much recent scholarship on migration (e.g., Ishihara 2013). But one then wonders how far we should push such an approach. If the migration of Yaeyama islanders to Taiwan was, in some ways, an example of what Araragi Shinzō terms gaichi-to-gaichi movement (2008: xiv–v), then we also need to discuss the movement of Koreans within the frame of ‘Japanese’ migration. For example, as imperial subjects of the Japanese Empire, Koreans were also involved in a gaichito-gaichi movement, namely the ‘Japanese’ settlement of Manchuria. In 1935, there were over 800,000 Koreans in Manchuria, up from 459,000 in 1920 (Hanai 2008: 345) – although these numbers pale before the millions of Han Chinese who moved to Manchuria between 1895 and 1942, when Manchuria’s population increased from 3 million to 46 million. Nevertheless, between 1940 and 1945, the number of Koreans in Manchuria increased from 1.65 million to approximately 2.3 million (Araragi 2013: 6–7, 11;Tanaka 2008: 185). And if we are to talk about Koreans in Manchuria within the framework of ‘Japanese’ migration, then we also need to discuss Koreans and other imperial subjects who migrated – or were forced to migrate – from the colonies to Japan proper, or to Karafuto (southern Sakhalin). In terms of Koreans to Japan, this was a movement that began in a serious way in 1917 and then grew exponentially in the 1920s and 1930s, partly due to the establishment (in 1922) of a direct shipping line between Jeju and Osaka (Sugihara 1998; see also Ryoo 2011). Another 700,000 Koreans were brought to Japan as forced labourers from 1939 onwards, bringing the total population of Koreans in Japan to approximately 2 million by 1945. Between 1942 and 1945, around 42,000 Chinese were also brought to Japan as forced labour (Rabson 2012: 240). 113

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To discuss Korean migrations to Manchuria, or Korean and Chinese labour in Japan, within a framework of ‘Japanese’ migration is thus an attempt to move beyond a nation-state-inspired understanding of people movement which takes ‘Japanese’ as a historically given entity (see Hoerder 2012: 480–86). The more interesting approach is to ask how a sense of belonging to Japan – or of being excluded – emerged for individual migrants through the lived experience and memories of migration in different places at different times. Key to this construction of belonging, especially within the realm of memory, was the experience of the massive disruption that accompanied the dissolution of the Japanese empire. At the end of the Second World War, there were 1.55 million Japanese civilians in Manchuria, more than 80 per cent of whom lived in the cities, and 664,000 soldiers of the Imperial Army. Of the 223,000 Japanese agricultural settlers who were directly exposed to the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, only 140,000 made it back to Japan in the repatriation programmes between 1946 and 1953; approximately 78,500 of those settlers died, and the rest were either left behind or became part of the 600,000-strong group – mainly soldiers – who were transported to work in Soviet labour camps. Overall, 1,050,000 Japanese civilians in Manchuria were eventually repatriated to Japan (Young 1998: 410–1; Araragi 2013: 21–2). Meanwhile, there were more than 500,000 Japanese civilians in China and Hong Kong in 1945, 720,000 in Korea, 350,000 in Taiwan and almost 400,000 in Karafuto, all of whom needed to be repatriated (Watt 2009: 39). Of the 2.3 million Koreans in Manchuria in 1945, between 1.3 million and 1.5 million would end up having to stay (or choose to do so), whereas approximately 800,000 returned to the Korean peninsula. The same was true of 600,000 of the approximately 2 million Koreans in Japan; and 20,000 Koreans also remained in Karafuto (Araragi 2013: 23; Tanaka 2008: 185). Highlighting the fraught politics of ethnic labelling, 180,000 Okinawans in mainland Japan were also ‘repatriated’ by the end of 1950. In the aftermath of empire, there was a massive, traumatic ‘unmixing of peoples’ (Watt 2009: 193, 195) as a ‘post-empire nation-state system’ began to emerge (Kahm 2016: 143).

Remixing historiographies The epistemological divide in the postwar English- and Japanese-language historiography of overseas migration in many ways reflected this historical unmixing of peoples in 1945. Separating the overseas movement of Japanese people into categories of ‘emigrant’ and ‘colonist’, traditional historiography took the comparatively unmixed world of the postwar as its normative framework and starting point for analysis of Japanese migration. Even a ground-breaking scholar such as F. Hilary Conroy, whose research interests bridged the Asia-Pacific divide, ended up addressing the history of the Japanese in both spheres through separate monographs: The Japanese Frontier in Hawaii, 1868–1898 (1953) and The Japanese Seizure of Korea, 1868–1910 (1960). But in the early 2000s, a new paradigm emerged, one which took not the post-1945 world as its normative standard but rather the world of November 1940, when the Tokyo Conference of Overseas Japanese (Kaigai dōhō Tōkyō taikai) was the occasion for nearly 1,500 representatives of the Japanese communities in China, Manchuria, Southeast Asia, Micronesia, Latin America and the United States (including Hawai‘i) to commingle and celebrate the 2,600th anniversary of the mythical foundation of Japan. Just as the conference took as its inspiration the totalitarian notion that every corner of the world could be unified under one roof (hakkō ichiu), so migration scholars, eschewing the totalitarian rhetoric, have begun to examine what happens if a singular framework of ‘people movement’ replaces the divided categories of ‘emigrant’ and ‘colonist’ in our analyses. For example, the scholarship of Eiichiro Azuma has been particularly important in highlighting anew the histories of Japanese migrants who lived ‘between two 114

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empires’ (2005). Azuma and others have drawn on the work of John J. Stephan (1997), who by focusing on the 2,000 or so first- and second-generation Japanese in North America who re-crossed the Pacific in the 1930s to make new lives in Manchuria, began to suggest the contours of what Azuma calls the ‘two-empire paradigm’ (see also Azuma 2011). Meanwhile, the history of the 1940 Tokyo Conference itself prompted both Azuma (2008) and later Kenneth J. Ruoff to consider ideological triangulations from Japan across the Pacific and back to the Japanese empire as a way of situating ‘communities of overseas Japanese located in areas outside of Japanese political control (e.g., Brazil)’ within ‘the story of Imperial Japan’ (Ruoff 2010: 10; see also Lu 2013). To be clear: this is not to suggest that the politics of overseas Japanese migration to, say, Brazil or Manchuria were the same, and therefore to underplay the story of Japan’s colonization of Asia. Rather, it is to suggest that a singular epistemological framework of analysis might help historians better understand the nature of Japanese colonialism as well as of Japan’s diaspora communities elsewhere in the Pacific (see also Espiritu 2014), including the hitherto understudied connections between communities across the Pacific. The criss-crossing of ideas between metropole, diaspora community and colony (though not necessarily in that order) was partly a consequence of Japanese subjects who carved out extraordinary trans-Pacific careers. Among them might be mentioned first-generation agricultural experts in San Francisco who emigrated to Dairen in the early 1920s to advise the South Manchurian Railway Company (Stephan 1997: 22); a Russo-Japanese war veteran in Hawai‘i who became an authority on pineapple cultivation and who from 1924 started to supervise the Japanese pineapple industry in Taiwan (Kimura 1992: 35–7); a sugar expert who trained in Louisiana, worked for many years in Taiwan and then pioneered sugar production in mid-1920s colonial Saipan (Peattie 1988: 124–32); and a lawyer, trained in Michigan, who was a successful merchant in Thursday Island in the 1890s, returned to Japan to be a two-term Diet member, and then spent the last nearly two decades of his life in colonial Korea, where in 1924 he became a founding leader of the Dōminkai (Association of One People) (Dusinberre 2017). In all this scholarship, such trans-Pacific lives are sketched only briefly: there remains a need for a comprehensive study of Japanese who lived the hyphen in ‘Asia-Pacific’. But the work of Azuma, and of the large network of scholars affiliated to Araragi Shinzō’s ‘Human Migration & Social Integration in 20th-Century East Asia’ (http://dept.sophia.ac.jp/pj/asianmigration/), is fleshing out a new framework to transcend what one historian calls ‘the traditional divide between a “diaspora” in the Americas and “empire” in East Asia’ (Matsusaka 2007: 234). Indeed, much of the new work seems to be moving toward the idea of empire as diaspora (for comparison, see Ho 2004: 214). At the same time, historiographical divides have been challenged by detailed empirical research from below. In some ways, this focus on the provenance of the migrants is not new: the scholarship of Ishikawa Tomonori, which constitutes a bibliography of trans-Pacific migration in itself, is a key starting point for anyone wanting to examine the socioeconomic contexts that lay behind a migrant’s decision to move overseas. Alongside Kimura Kenji’s analysis of early migrants to Korea (Kimura 1989), this body of scholarship demonstrates that the socioeconomic disruptions caused by the Meiji government’s reformist zeal were a major factor in explaining the departure first of thousands and then of tens and hundreds of thousands of migrants from Japan. In other words (and focusing for a moment on the divide between ‘island nation’ and ‘diaspora’ history), overseas migration was as significant a historical phenomenon as other popular responses to Meiji reforms, in particular the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. It follows that overseas migration should be more explicitly acknowledged by historians as a key element in the domestic history of reaction and counter-reaction in late nineteenth-century Japan. 115

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The newer point that emerges from these studies of migrant provenance is the acknowledgement that in some cases – how many requires new research – the basic socioeconomic reasons for leaving one’s village in Yamaguchi or Hiroshima or Okinawa were the same, regardless of whether one went to the Americas, the South Pacific, or Asia. It follows that where these reasons were indeed the same, then a historiographical framework which categorizes migrant experience solely according to destination makes little sense. Research in the migrant-sending villages of rural Japan thus further underlines the arbitrariness of the ‘emigrant’ – ‘colonist’ divide. For example, Kuga county, in southeast Yamaguchi Prefecture, saw particularly high numbers of migrants leaving to Hokkaido, Hawai‘i, the Philippines and later Brazil. One village, Ozegawa, sent migrants from 218 households to Hawai‘i during the government-sponsored period (1885–94); in the period 1891–1902, migrants from 32 Ozegawa households also migrated to Hokkaido, 3 of whom were Hawaiian returnees who used their Hawaiian-earned savings to fund their subsequent ‘internal’ migration (Kimura 2011: 130–5). Yasui Manami has similarly shown how the success of Hawaiian emigrants served as a stimulus for islanders in Okikamuro, Ōshima county (also in southeast Yamaguchi), to seek work in Taiwan or Korea: here, the hometown itself became a kind of transitpoint for Hawaiian returnees subsequently to move elsewhere (Yamaguchi-ken 2010: 824–6). My own work on Murotsu village, in neighbouring Kumage county, has highlighted a pattern of sons and daughters of Hawaiian returnees subsequently moving to Korea (Dusinberre 2008: 314). Moreover, the pattern of remittances from Murotsu’s diaspora communities all over the Asia-Pacific world – money which grateful village bureaucrats used to build new schools in the 1910s and 1920s, or priests used to repair parish shrines and temples – complicates the idea that those who remained in the hometown imagined their overseas neighbours in Hawai‘i or Korea to be qualitatively different from each other (see also Dusinberre 2014). In Okikamuro, there were similar examples of what we might call ‘remittance mixing’, in which villagers in Hawai‘i, Taiwan and Korea contributed with equal enthusiasm (if not always equal value: Hawaiian donations were considerably higher) to the rebuilding of the Ebisu shrine in 1921 (Yamaguchi-ken 2010: 833). What is significant in these examples of remittance mixing is that institutions of the nationstate – schools, shrines, in some cases war memorials – were built in the local community through the beneficence of overseas migrants: that is, the global facilitated the construction of the national in the local. Here, once again, the perspective gained through a study of overseas migration throws new light on concepts of ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese’ as historically given entities. In other words, we can go beyond Sandra Wilson’s observation that in the 1920s and 1930s, ‘emigration provided an emotional focus for a cluster of issues concerning Japan’s place in the world’ (Wilson 2003: 166, emphasis added). I would argue that in the wider period 1868–1945, overseas migration offers scholars an analytical focus for considering a cluster of issues concerning Japan’s place in global history. For a start, the stories touched upon in this chapter suggest that nation-states are ‘the products and vehicles of global interaction’ (McKeown 2008: 6), not the predetermined blocks through which global interaction occurs. It bears repeating that [l]umping together under the category of “Japanese emigrants” all the individuals who departed the area now known as the archipelago of Japan suggests the presence of a sense of national affiliation that might have been inchoate among some of the early emigrants (Ruoff 2010: 11). Second, studying overseas migration from the perspective of Japan helps historians better understand one of the key developments in late nineteenth-century global history, namely the construction of race as an allegedly objective category by which white societies attempted to defend their territorial borders. Across much of the Pacific world, from Australia to Hawai‘i to North and South America, Japanese migrants found themselves at the sharp end of such constructions (McKeown 2008: 149–84; Jung 2006: 78–84), even as Japanese intellectuals were similarly drawing on notions of racialized ‘civilization’ in 116

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order to justify colonial expansion into Hokkaido and later Asia (e.g., Hirano 2015: 210–5). And third (although lying beyond the temporal scope of this chapter), prewar overseas migration offers an important and still underutilized framework by which to understand postwar Japan’s interactions with the Asia-Pacific world. Such ‘interactions’ include the lingering legacy of empire and decolonization in East Asia and the Pacific (e.g. Tamanoi 2009; Narangoa 2003; Dvorak 2014), the nearly 80,000 Japanese (not including Okinawans) who emigrated to Latin America between 1952 and 1970 (Endoh 2009: 36), and the significance of Nikkei labour migrations ‘back’ from Latin America to Japan from the 1990s onwards (e.g. Urano 2013). These are but three issues: there are many others. Perhaps they suffice, however, to suggest that what Philip Kuhn argues for China (Kuhn 2008: 5) might also be true for Japan: overseas migration has been inseparable from Japan’s modern history. Henceforth, historians who write on modern Japan will hopefully be more attentive to the theme of global migration; and those working in the field of global migration history should be strongly encouraged to study the case of Japan.

Notes 1 My thanks to Lina Zbinden for editorial assistance in the preparation of this chapter; to Steven Ivings, David Möller and Gonzalo San Emeterio Cabañes for commenting on earlier drafts; and to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for funding research trips to the Diplomatic Records Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo, 2012–14 (hereafter DRO). I also gratefully acknowledge the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation for its support of my co-led research project, ‘Lives in Transit: steamship passages in the late-19th and early-20th century world’ (2017-2020). 2 ‘Overseas’ here refers to territories outside of the Japanese-Okinawan archipelago and includes the colonial and quasi-colonial territories of Taiwan, Korea, South Sakhalin and Manchuria, which were, strictly speaking, parts of the Greater Japanese Empire. The figure of 70 million refers to the population of the Japanese-Okinawan archipelago, whereas the Greater Japanese Empire had a population of around 100 million.

Further reading Azuma, Eiichiro (2005), Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McKeown, Adam (2008) Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders, New York: Columbia University Press. Mihalopoulos, Bill (2011) Sex in Japan’s Globalization, 1870–1930: Prostitutes, Emigration and Nation Building, London: Pickering & Chatto Ltd. Moriyama, Alan Takeo (1985) Imingaisha: Japanese Emigration Companies and Hawaii 1894–1908, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

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9 Ryukyu/Okinawa’s trajectory: from periphery to centre, 1600–2015 Gavan McCormack

The ‘Okinawa Problem’ is commonly seen today in terms of the determination of the U.S. and Japanese governments to impose a major new facility for the U.S. Marine Corps on Ōura Bay in the north of Okinawa island, and the long, determined, and ongoing struggle by the Okinawan people to prevent it. But this chapter argues that Henoko, the designated base site in Nago City, is but the visible surface of a mighty iceberg that has been building in these seas over four centuries and more. In order to contextualize the present and envisage possible futures of an Okinawa-centred East China Sea, it offers a bird’s-eye view of that troubled past (see also McCormack and Oka Norimatsu 2012; Terashima 2015: 36; Dower and McCormack 2014; McCormack 2015a; 2015b). The backdrop to today’s problem is the evolution of Okinawa from the independent Ryukyu Kingdom of the late fourteenth century through partial integration into pre-modern Japan at the beginning of the seventeenth century and full incorporation in Japan’s modern state in the latter half of the nineteenth century. For this, Okinawa paid a terrible price in 1945. The catastrophic Battle of Okinawa at the end of World War II wreaked death and destruction on the islands and has cast a shadow of militarism over the archipelago ever since. Particular attention is paid here to the post-2006 struggle by Okinawans to oppose the project to reclaim much of Ōura Bay for base construction.Today, the doughty citizens of Okinawa confront not only a base project – but a trend, slowly gaining momentum, for deepening militarization and dispute across the East China Sea. In drawing a line in the sand and saying ‘No more!’ Okinawans stand at the forefront of the effort to build a cooperative and demilitarized order in East Asia. Their struggle consequently has serious implications not only for Okinawa itself (its physical environment as well as its people), but also for the Japanese state, the Japan-U.S. relationship, and the region as a whole.

Modernity’s maelstrom The Ryukyu archipelago emerged in the late fourteenth century as a unified kingdom stretching from Kyushu through the Ōsumi, Amami, Okinawa, and Sakishima island groups to Taiwan. For roughly half a millennium (1372–1879), the Ryukyu Kingdom constituted part of the China-centred tribute system, enjoying a close relationship with the Ming (1368–1644) and the 118

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Qing (1644–1912) dynasties but, despite ritual submission, managing its own internal affairs. For the latter part of that era, from 1609 to 1874, that nominal independence was compromised and effective rule imposed by the Satsuma feudal domain (present-day Kagoshima Prefecture). Satsuma rule, however, was covert, so that to the eve of the modern era Ryukyu remained formally an independent state. Even though it was thus dependent in a complex way on both China and Japan it could assert its autonomy by negotiating treaties of diplomatic recognition and friendship with the United States (1854), France (1855), and Holland (1859), before being integrated into Japan as Okinawa Prefecture in 1879. Thereafter, Okinawa experienced in uniquely concentrated form the contradictions of modernity: as Japanese prefecture (1872–1945), site of catastrophic war (1945), territory under U.S. (military) administration from 1945 to 1972, and then, from 1972 to today, again as a Japanese prefecture but essentially a semi-colonial territory dominated jointly by the United States and Japan, still partly occupied by U.S. forces. Today, no Japanese prefecture is so alienated from the policies and direction of the national government as Okinawa. Ryukyu/Okinawa offers a unique perspective on this long span of history, alternately in and out of surrounding states, exploited, struggling to formulate a subjectivity. The Okinawan folk-song ‘Jidai no nagare’ (time trend) captures this experience, of a China period giving way to a Japan period, giving way to an American period, giving way again to a Japan period, in a maelstrom of change. Tō no yu kara Yamato no yu, From the Chinese era into the Japanese era, Yamato no yu kara Amerika yu, From the Japanese era into the American era, Amerika kara Yamato no yu, From the American era into the Japanese era, Hirumasa kawataruku no Okinawa. Okinawa is changing at a mind-boggling rate (Kadekaru Rinshō, 1920–99, cited in Ōyama 1997: 178) Contemplating the long sweep of Ryukyu history, and the present confrontation, one Okinawan has proposed a new verse, the Japan period giving way to an ‘Okinawa period’, thus projecting the vision of an Okinawa-centred twenty-first century East China Sea and East Asia (Ōyama 1997: 178).

Tribute state/theatre state The stability of the long-continuing China-centred pre-modern world rested on relations by which rulers of ‘lesser’ states pledged fealty to the emperor in Beijing and in return were guaranteed their security and granted privileges as trading partners. New kings were expected to declare their fealty to investiture missions from Beijing and in return could send diplomatic and trading missions at appropriate intervals. The Ryukyu Kingdom (only formally adopting that name in 1429) was from the late fourteenth century an autonomous state. Its tribute missions were inaugurated in 1372 by then King Satto. In all 24 imperial missions crossed the East China Sea from Foochow during the half millennium to 1866 (Suganuma 2000: 46; 70). Through the centuries of Ryukyu engagement in the China-centred tribute world, despite close proximity and regular contacts for more than 500 years, there was no territorial dispute between China and the Ryukyu Kingdom (Suganuma 2000: 70). Sixteen of the seventeen investiture missions sent from China during the Ming dynasty’s 300 years were to Ryukyu, which sent 384 return missions (and another 122 between 1662 and 1875, during the following Qing era) (Suganuma 2000: 47; Kang 2010: 435). Eight more were sent from China over the roughly 220 years of the Qing dynasty. The frequency of Ryukyu missions to China attested to the closeness of the 119

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relationship. Only the geographically contiguous Korea, commonly sending several missions each year, surpassed it (Clark 1998: 280; Kang 2010: 59; Takara 1998: 60). The imperial convoys carried between 300 and 800 men, were entertained in Ryukyu at Shuri Castle, the seat of the Ryukyu King, for between four and eight months, usually on the occasion of the investiture of a new king. In return, Ryukyu sent a much greater number of emissaries to China.The supply of Ryukyu horses to the Ming rulers (900 per year according to one source) was so important that the ships for such tribute missions were sometimes supplied free (Takara 1998: 63). Ryukyu vessels, probably acting directly at the direction of the king, also plied the coast of East Asia beyond Foochow, north to ports in Japan and Korea and south to those in Malacca (Malaysia), Siam (Thailand), Annam (Vietnam), Java, and Sumatra. Ryukyu’s music and performing arts, and its crafts, including lacquer ware, dyed textiles, and pottery, were widely known. The world-view and self-identity of Ryukyu during this period is expressed in the inscription on the great bell that once hung in the main hall of Ryukyu Palace. Cast in bronze in 1458 at the time of King Shō Taikyū (1415–60) and known as the ‘Bridge of Nations’ bell (Jp. Bankoku shinryō), it may be taken as a statement of the ‘orthodox’ world view of the time. (The bell is today held in the Urasoe Art Museum in Urasoe City.) Rising splendidly in Southern seas, the Kingdom of Ryukyu gathers the virtues of the three Koreas, follows in the path of the Great Ming, hews as close to Japan as lips and teeth. Islands of longevity nestling between the two countries, the Kingdom forms a bridge between all nations, from which to venture out by ship, so that our land is filled with the exotic and precious goods of foreign lands; while the hearts of our people emulate the virtues of Japan and China. (Takara 1998: 120–1) In the late sixteenth century, however, the East Asian state system was shaken by the rise of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–98), who first seized power over Japan and then attempted (from 1592) to supplant the Ming and establish his own East Asian hegemonic order. He failed, though only after despoiling Korea, exhausting Japan, and indirectly causing the collapse of the Ming. For his expedition against Korea, Hideyoshi demanded Ryukyu (estimated population at the time 100,000) supply him with 14,000 troops and one year’s supplies. Ryukyu sent just half that number (7,000).That recalcitrance was not forgotten and eventually, in 1609, using various pretexts, the Satsuma domain sent a punitive expedition. Ryukyu’s 4,000-strong defence force was no match for Satsuma’s 3,000 musket-armed samurai, many battle–hardened from the wars in Japan itself and from the Korean campaign. Satsuma’s forces crushed the Ryukyu resistance and exacted surrender of the king, Shō Nai (1564–1620), dispatching him, with 100 of his closest officials, to Kagoshima, and only allowing him to return to Ryukyu two years later. One prominent member of the Ryukyu nobility and commander of the forces defeated by Satsuma in the invasion (Smits 1999: 16–7), Prince Jana Teishu (Jana Uekata Rizan, 1549–1611), was executed because of his refusal to swear allegiance to the new overlord (Terashima 2015: 36). He is also believed to have attempted to secure Ming help to resist the invasion (Smits 1999: 17). In the aftermath of the invasion, Satsuma seized direct control of Ryukyu’s northernmost islands. Thus from 1609, the Ryukyu king and court continued, but it was henceforth a theatre state: Kings were obliged to look simultaneously to the Japanese domain of Satsuma and through it to the shogunate in Edo (present-day Tokyo), and to the Chinese court in Beijing. They and their retinue travelling to Edo were ordered by Satsuma to wear Chinese costume, speak Ryukyu 120

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dialect rather than Yamato (Japanese) language and pretend continuing incorporation within the Chinese tribute world (Smits 1999: 27–8). Dual vassalage meant that Shuri Castle was the stage upon which Okinawan officials performed theatre designed to conceal the locus and nature of political authority. The incorporation of these islands into Japan’s pre-modern state after 1609 was thus marked by violence and dissembling, the same characteristics as were to mark its inclusion into the modern state 270 years later (McCormack and Oka Norimatsu 2012: ch. 1). It satisfied the shogunate, and the Kagoshima-based Satsuma domain, to allow Ryukyu to retain the façade of sovereignty, even as Satsuma (660 kilometres away) monopolized its trade (especially the profitable sugar industry) and orchestrated its external relations including the China missions.

Nineteenth-century upheaval The curtain did not ring down on this peculiar theatre state until the late nineteenth century. For a brief period, the omens for Ryukyu seemed good. Initially, at least, the waves of Western imperialist encroachment upon East Asia in the early nineteenth century seemed to offer as much opportunity as challenge. French (1844) and British (1846) and eventually (in the 1850s) American ships appeared seeking food, water, coal, and a base for their regional activities. Left more than usually to its own devices by the crisis accompanying the transition from the Edo shogunate to the Meiji government, Ryukyu courts negotiated modern, ‘opening’ treaties, as an independent kingdom, with the Americans, French, and Dutch (in 1854, 1855, and 1859) (Nishizato 2010: 74). The Edo shogunate accepted that there was little alternative for Ryukyu but to submit to the Western demands. However, Ryukyu’s ambiguous, dual sovereignty status was incompatible with the new world order of expansive, rapacious, and militarized modern states. While the island elite debated possible responses and struggled to explain Ryukyu’s status to U.S. Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794–1858) on his 1854 visit as a dual attachment to China and Japan – and their wish to maintain things as they were – the governing elite of the new modern Japanese nation-state in Tokyo adopted a strict, legalist (modern) view of the world, in which sovereignty was absolute and indivisible and frontiers had to be secured. With a detachment of some 200 men, Perry and his ‘black ships’ entered the capital city of Naha on 26 May 1853 en route from Shanghai to Edo. They spent 85 days there on five visits, culminating, on 11 July 1854, in the signing of the Ryukyu-U.S. Friendship Treaty. Similar treaties with France (1855) and Holland (1859) followed. The negotiation of such treaties attested to the existence of Ryukyu as a sovereign state. However, such a view was intolerable to the government in Tokyo. In 1872, the Meiji government abolished the Ryukyu Kingdom, setting up in its place the Ryukyu domain (han) under the Ryukyu domain lord (han-ō), a Japanese aristocratic status and title conferred directly on the sometime king by the Meiji emperor. Because this status was already abolished in Japan in 1871, it meant that for the years up to 1879 Okinawa was a deliberately constructed feudal remnant in the otherwise modernizing state. The Japanese flag was raised for the first time over the main island in 1872 and in 1873 over the outlying islands of Kume, Ishigaki, Miyako, Iriomote, and Yonaguni. In the words of the song, the Yamato no yu, or Japan period, now began. As the Meiji government stabilized, it determined to incorporate Ryukyu thoroughly within Japan. It initiated a process of intimidation, subjugation, and compulsion, eventually leading to complete incorporation. In 1875, it despatched Matsuda Michiyuki (1839–82), a Home Ministry official, to Ryukyu with a set of demands: an end to the China relationship, adoption of 121

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the Japanese calendar (in accord with imperial reign years), and the despatch of the king (now domain lord) to Tokyo to signify submission to the new order. In repeated pleas and petitions, the Okinawans insisted that Ryukyu was child of two parents, Japan as father and China as mother, and to be filial to the one but not the other was to offend against proper (Confucian) principle of filial piety. Die-hard Ryukyuan nobles constituted a ‘Ryukyu Salvation Movement’, determined to retain their China affiliation. They sought precedents in international law for dual or even triple affiliation on the part of states – citing the example of Poland to Austria, Prussia, and Russia (Nishizato 1987: 35–6). But in its spirit and increasingly in its practice the Westphalian principle of exclusive, indivisible state sovereignty was the iron rule. However much the die-hard Ryukyuan ‘Salvation’ movement elites attempted to cling to China and appealed to Tokyo to allow it to continue, it was unrealistic to hope for the Meiji state to concede such an exemption and equally unrealistic to hope that the Qing court could come to Ryukyu’s relief at a time when the Chinese ‘world order’ was under siege from central Asia to Indochina and Korea and much of the country was only slowly recovering from the calamity of the Taiping rebellion and civil war. For the ‘Middle Kingdom’, Ryukyu was just a ‘small kingdom in the sea’ (Li Hongjang quoted in Nishizato 2010: 99). After years of intense diplomatic manoeuvring, in Naha, Tokyo, Beijing, and Foochow, Disposal Official (shobunkan) Matsuda, heading a contingent of 160 police officials, 41 Home Affairs Ministry staff, and 400 infantry, made his third and decisive visit to Okinawa in late March 1879. He took over Shuri Castle, dictated the terms of the new order, and despatched the king (Shō Tai, 1843–1901 and invested by the last Chinese mission to Naha in 1866) and his family into exile in Tokyo (Nishizato 1987: 36). The sometime kingdom, briefly a feudal domain, now became a prefecture. Officials suspected of loyalty to the old regime were dismissed or demoted, with over 100 of them being arrested and some of them tortured (Nishizato 1987: 50), while a network of reliable and loyal (to Tokyo) officials was cultivated and promoted (Arakaki Tsuyoshi in Ryūkyū Shinpō, 11 June 2015). In retrospect, it was the failure of the Ryukyuans of the Salvation Movement to formulate their principles in ‘modern’ terms that made it impossible for them to attract broad support, even within Okinawa itself. Ryukyuans proved unable to respond to the dawning of the new era or to facilitate any kind of ‘nationalist’ united front of resistance. Part of their problem was that of communication between members of a movement scattered at various times in Ryukyu/Okinawa itself, Tokyo, Foochow and Beijing. It was also the case that they were unable to take account of the proposals of contemporary ‘progressives’ such as Guo Sungtao (1818–91) or Ueki Emori (1857–92),1 or to forge links with other states similarly struggling to adapt to a new global order, such as the kingdoms of Korea, Hawaii,2 and Annam. Their ‘historical limitation’ was that they ‘treated the traditional tribute order as absolute and just sought the help of the Qing authorities to restore the Ryukyu kingdom’ (Nishizato 2010: 120). As earlier Ryukyu had been de facto incorporated into the then pre-modern (Edo) state by force, at a time when the Ming was already in decline, so now it was incorporated in the modern state, again by force, as the Qing was in terminal decline. As Shimazu, the Lord of Satsuma, then spoke of ‘Ryukyu subjection’ (seibatsu), now (between 1872 and 1879) Meiji officials referred to the ‘Ryukyu disposal’ (shobun). Fear that the ‘world system’ – meaning at that time above all, China – would not tolerate appropriation by force led the rulers first of Edo and later of Meiji Japan to dissemble, keeping the new arrangements strictly secret. The fate of Ryukyu/Okinawa as a small country depended on the will of its greater neighbours.

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Division? Belatedly thus part of the Japanese state, Okinawans were obliged to follow a path of selfnegation, casting aside their distinctive language and culture, their ‘Okinawan-ness’, in order to become ‘Japanese’. What in the theatre state of 1609 to 1879 they had been obliged to conceal, now under ‘Yamato no yu’ they were obliged to affirm, re-orienting their identity around service to the Japanese emperor and the myths and rituals of the imperial state. Once the formal punishment and state reorganization was accomplished, Japan’s attention turned to the effort to secure Chinese consent to the new arrangements. China protested strongly, through its ambassador in Tokyo, that Japan’s assimilationist policies amounted to intimidation of the weak by the strong and were a betrayal of trust (fushin); they were moreover illicit (fugi), cruel (mujō), and wrongful (muri) (Uemura 2001: 144–5). In sporadic negotiations in 1880–81,3 the two sides considered various proposals for a deal based on splitting the islands, either into two, ceding the farthest, Miyako and Yaeyama, to China in return for the grant of ‘most favoured nation’ (imperialist) trading rights within China itself, or into three, splitting off the northern and southern sectors to Japan and China respectively while leaving an Okinawan king in office in a rump state carved out on the main island (Namihira 2014: 312–23). The Okinawan islands were bargain counters to advance the interests of the Japanese state, rather than integral elements of any national ‘community’. A draft treaty, effecting the three-part division, was agreed in October 1880, for signing within 10 days and to come into effect following a ceremony in Beijing after three months and to be proclaimed in Miyako and Yaeyama Islands one month after that (Namihira 2014: 315). China, however, having initially favoured the three-part division formula (Smits 1999: 146–7), had second thoughts. The pressure from Ryukyu dissidents in Beijing, anxious at all costs to avoid splitting the kingdom was one factor, and China’s key statesman, Li Hongzhang (Li Hung-chang, 1823–1901), doubted the worth of gaining the two small island groups, both of them narrow and mountainous and with only poor soil (Namihira 2014: 319). After several further years of sporadic negotiation, ‘more urgent matters’ elsewhere caused China to ‘give up’ the attempt to negotiate a resolution of the Ryukyu question (Smits 1999: 146). Unable to challenge the Japanese claim to sovereignty, China never actually accepted it. It was moved largely by considerations of face and tradition, intent on behaving ‘properly’ as tribute power acting to defend its tribute state and seemingly unmoved by ‘modern’ considerations of international law or territorial expansion (Namihira 2014: 320–1). The 1881 treaty remained unsigned, and the border unsettled for a further 15 years, until victory in the 1894–95 SinoJapanese War empowered Japan to impose its terms (Uemura 2012). When in 2013 Chinese scholars and officials expressed the view that the East China Sea border between Japan and China remained ‘unresolved’ and should be reconsidered (see Jinmin Nippō, Japanese edition, 8 May 2013), and that China should be ready to use Okinawa as a card in negotiations with Tokyo,4 it stirred outrage in Japan (and anxiety in Okinawa), but as a statement of fact it was indisputable: The collapse of negotiations in 1881 did indeed leave the matter unresolved.

Rejection and exclusion: 1945–52 Once unequivocally within the Meiji state, Okinawa was subject to an intense process of cultural, social, and educational assimilation. Loyalty to the emperor substituted for loyalty to the Ryukyu kings or their Satsuma overlords, or a fortiori, to Beijing. This was the Yamato no yu’s second and most decisive phase.

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As the process of incorporation within the state in 1609 and 1879 had been unique in being accompanied by violence and the threat of violence, so, too, was this process of rejection and exclusion from it, and of transition to the Amerika no yu. The culmination of that incorporation in the modern Japanese state was the devastating Battle of Okinawa in 1945. Fought in spring and early summer of 1945, some 100,000 civilians were killed or committed suicide during this battle, in addition to 65,000 Japanese and 14,000 Allied soldiers (see Sloan 2007). The physical disaster of 1945 was accompanied and followed by severe psychological trauma as Okinawa was abandoned and rejected by the emperor to whom it had focused its loyalty over the preceding six decades (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 10 September 2014). First, in February 1945, as the Asia and Pacific wars entered their climactic phase and defeat loomed, former prime minister Prince Konoe Fumimaro (1891–1945, on Konoe, see Chapter 12 in this volume) pressed the emperor, Hirohito, to accept the hopelessness of the Japanese military position and end hostilities in order to preserve the ‘national polity’ (i.e. the emperor system). The emperor responded that it would not be possible to do that unless ‘some success in battle has first been accomplished’. Okinawans then were assigned the role of sacrificial stones, holding off the allied assault on mainland Japan and helping preserve the ‘national polity’. Second, as Okinawa by early July 1945 lay in ruins, one in four of its population dead, and the ‘national polity’ faced a possibly terminal crisis, the emperor instructed Konoe to prepare to undertake a special mission to Moscow to sue for peace. He was to be prepared to abandon Okinawa (along with Ogasawara and Sakhalin) while striving to preserve the main islands. Okinawa once again was seen as a bargain counter.5 A third imperial betrayal occurred in May 1947, when Emperor Hirohito gave his blessing to the separation of Okinawa from Japan and its long-term military occupation by the United States. He told the Occupation Commander, General Douglas MacArthur, that he believed Japan’s security, and its ability to resist communism, depended on ‘initiatives taken by the AngloSaxons represented by General MacArthur’, and, to that end, the United States should maintain its military occupation of Okinawa ‘for 25, or 50 years, or longer, under the fiction of a longterm lease’ (cf.Toyoshita 1996 and Shindō 1979).This high-level blessing to U.S. military control of Okinawa was the earliest explicit statement on the Japanese side of the formula that came to be accepted, and to prevail to this day, giving MacArthur confidence to divide Japan into the constitutional ‘peace state’ (Japan) and de facto ‘war state’ (Okinawa). The priority to U.S. military purposes in Okinawa policy – the defining characteristic of Amerika no yu – was thus settled by imperial consent, even at imperial initiative. However much that ‘25, or 50 years, or longer’ stretches into ‘longer’, the invitation it rests on is not forgotten and the twenty-first-century ‘Okinawa problem’ is rooted in that imperial initiative.

The reversion that was not a reversion: 1972 In the early postwar decades, both mainland Japan’s ‘peace state’ and Okinawa’s ‘war state’ were tied symbiotically within the U.S. Pacific and Asian Cold War system. Where the U.S. occupation ended for mainland Japan in 1952, following the San Francisco Peace Treaty, for Amami, the northernmost of the Ryukyu Islands, in 1953, and for the Ogasawara islands in 1968, it lasted until 1972 for Okinawa and its adjacent islands. For most Okinawans, it has never really ended. Severed from Japan for 27 years as part of the U.S.-dominated ‘war state’, Okinawans sought a ‘reversion’ that would bring them under the Constitution, release them from the parameters of force and restore them their islands, demilitarized and peaceful. However, as the islands eventually reverted from direct American military control to Japanese administration, switching in the process from the Sinitic name Ryukyu to the more Japanese Okinawa, the curtain rose over a new 124

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kind of ‘theatre state’. Like the seventeenth-century construct, nothing on the post-reversion Okinawan stage was quite what it seemed. The reversion was not so much a ‘handing back’ as a ‘purchase’, and a paradoxical purchase in which Japan paid the United States a huge sum (around $650 million according to estimates) to secure the ‘return’ of major Okinawan assets while insisting that those assets actually not be returned (McCormack and Oka Norimatsu 2012: 193–6). Thus the U.S. military continued to occupy and enjoy free use of much of the most fertile agricultural lands and to control much of the seas and skies. Furthermore, following this strange transaction, Japan adopted as national policy the retention of a substantial U.S. military presence in Okinawa, for which it has continued subsequently to pay – to avoid the kind of real ‘reversion’ that Okinawans wanted. The principle was thereby established whereby ‘consideration’ or ‘sympathy’ (omoiyari) or ‘host nation support’ payments would ensure the United States continued its occupation. The payments have continued to this day. Amerika no yu thus called for continuing heavy sacrifice on Okinawa’s part, and widened and deepened the gulf between ‘mainland’ Japan and Okinawa. The secret protocols of reversion, known therefore as mitsuyaku (literally ‘secret agreements’), committed Japan to prioritize U.S. continued prosecution of the war on Indochina and grant it free use of the nuclear option should it deem it necessary (under ‘conditions of great emergency’). Thus, under this reversion that was not a reversion, the United States retained its bases in Okinawa and the freedom to fight wars from them. Because no Japanese government could have survived if it had announced public support for the Indochina war and the legitimation of nuclear weapons, Japan took steps to ensure that the truth of this bizarre reversion transaction be not exposed, and pursued mercilessly those who would venture to lift the curtain on it (see McCormack and Oka Norimatsu 2012). Governments, then and subsequently (to 2009), persisted in denying that any such agreements existed. Secret Okinawa diplomacy fed an antidemocratic structure of deception, cover-up, and lying. Under the slogans of ‘Okinawan reversion’, what took place was truly shameful. The day of this ‘false reversion’ in 1972 (15 May) is thus remembered in Okinawa as a ‘day of humiliation’ (kutsujoku no hi). Post-1972 Okinawa thus performed Japanese sovereignty, constitutional pacifism, prefectural self-government, and regional autonomy, but in reality sovereignty was only partially returned and with the bases retained, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan) continued to serve as Okinawa’s key charter, transcending and, as some would argue, violating the Constitution while important decisions were reserved to Tokyo. All Japanese governments from 1969 to 2009 persisted in lying to parliament and people about the existence of secret protocols and fundamentally about the nature of the U.S.-Japan relationship. The formal documents and instruments of power were as deceptive as the Ryukyu posture on the East Asian stage of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the nation-state to impose a ‘priority of the military’ polity on Okinawa and secure its compliance to an agenda whose core was priority to the U.S. alliance over the Constitution, to military over civil or democratic principle, and to the interests of the Japanese state over those of the Okinawan people, Okinawa’s opposition had to be neutralized. Reversion, therefore, had to be built on trumpery, bribery, and lies. Despite its nominal incorporation in the constitutional pacifist Japanese state with ‘reversion’, therefore, what happened was that Okinawa the American military colony became Okinawa the dual colonial dependency of Japan and the United States.

Post-Cold War Two decades after the ‘reversion’, the Cold War ended and the enemy against whom the base structure had been directed collapsed. The base complex (74 per cent of U.S. military facilities 125

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in Japan concentrated on Okinawa’s 0.6 per cent of the national territory) remained, however, and, to the bitter disappointment of Okinawans, both the governments of the United States and of Japan insisted it be reinforced. In the Gulf, Iraq and Afghan wars, the United States called on Japan to play a stepped-up military role, and governments in Tokyo did their best to comply. ‘Deepening’ the alliance meant deepening and reinforcing Japan’s subservience and increasing the burden on Okinawa. With the military relationship with the United States, not the Constitution, as Okinawa’s key charter, war, its preparation and execution, continued to be Okinawa’s raison d’être. Under this Amerika no yu, Okinawa’s role was that of bastion for the projection of force to maintain a United States–dictated order from the western Pacific to Central Asia and the Middle East. When mass discontent at these arrangements threatened to boil over, especially following the rape of an Okinawan schoolgirl by three U.S. servicemen in 1995, a new round of ‘reversion’ (or ‘base burden reorganization and reduction’, seiri shukushō) measures was promised. Again, however, deception was the keynote.Where ‘reversion’ in 1972 meant retention, so in 1996 ‘base burden reduction’ meant construction of substitute facilities. The scale of the project was concealed by use of terms such as ‘heliport’ (to describe a project rivalling Kansai Airport in scale) and ‘base reduction’ when actually the reverse was happening. The United States was prepared to contemplate withdrawal from Futenma at this point, but the government of Japan insisted that the occupation continue.6 The next phase of Okinawa subjection and manipulation followed by the 2006 Realignment of U.S. Forces in Japan (Beigun saihen) agreement. This agreement was confirmed and given the force of a treaty, binding upon subsequent governments, by the Guam International Agreement of 2009. Again, deception was piled on deception. Japan was not only to build the ‘Futenma Replacement Facility’ at Henoko (FRF), but to pay US$6.01 billion toward the cost of relocating 8,000 marines and their 9,000 dependents to Guam although, as a U.S. embassy despatch (later released by Wikileaks) put it in 2008, ‘[b]oth the 8,000 and the 9,000 numbers were deliberately maximized to optimize political value in Japan’, because there were at the time in Okinawa only ‘on the order of 13,000’ marines, and ‘less than 9,000’ dependents. Furthermore, the number to be transferred was later unilaterally cut by the United States to 4,000 (an additional 1,000 to be sent from the United States; see Kawase 2015: 179). Despite the halving of the troop transfer number, the Japanese financial contribution remained unchanged. The Guam expenditure was further inflated by inclusion of an item for 1 billion dollars for construction of a military road on Guam, which was simply ‘a way to increase the overall cost estimate’.The road was ‘neither necessary nor likely ever to be built’ (McCormack and Oka Norimatsu 2012: 104). Okinawans see that Japan to be paying a steadily rising price for its submission and support for the U.S. hegemonic order even as U.S. credibility shrinks on all fronts – economic, political, and especially moral, with the risk concentrated heavily on Okinawa.

The Abe–Onaga ‘war’: 2012–15 Abe Shinzō took office for his second term as prime minister in December 2012. Thereafter he repeatedly promised the United States that he would deliver the long-frozen Henoko base and concentrated much of his energies on exacting the prefecture’s submission. By the end of 2013 he elicited the surrender first of the Okinawan branch of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and then of the governor, Nakaima Hirokazu, both abandoning their 2010 pledges of opposition to base construction. In 2014, the prefecture fought back in a series of elections – for mayor of Nago City, membership of the Nago City Assembly, National Diet, and governorship – making in combination an unequivocal statement of prefectural will to oppose the base plan.The climax 126

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was the November 2014 victory of Onaga Takeshi in the gubernational election on an explicit ‘everything in my power to prevent construction of the Henoko base’ platform. Onaga won by a huge margin (100,000 votes). Once in office, he appointed a ‘Third Party’ (experts) committee to advise him on the legality of his predecessor’s decision. When that committee reported in July that it had found multiple flaws (McCormack 2015a; Sakurai and McCormack 2015), and that, in particular, the landfill permit for the planned Henoko base failed to meet the criteria for ‘appropriate and rational use of the national land’ and so violated the Public Waters Reclamation Law, Onaga took the long-anticipated action, on 13 October 2015, of cancelling the reclamation license. He thus removed at a stroke the fig leaf of legitimacy under which the Abe government had been acting, plunging state–prefecture relations into unprecedented crisis. The Abe–Onaga battle was joined on several fronts: the courts, national opinion, and international opinion. Onaga presented the Okinawan case in widely reported encounters with key figures of the Abe government in Tokyo in April and May 2015, in appearances before the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Tokyo, to audiences in Washington also in May, again to the Abe government during a one-month ‘concentrated discussion’ in August and September, and to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva in September. And though not officially a prefectural venture, a large (26-person) private-sector and non-governmental organization (NGO) Okinawan delegation did likewise in November. Governor Onaga complained repeatedly of the injustice and undemocratic nature of the state’s imposition on Okinawa, calling the government ‘outrageous’ (rifujin) and ‘depraved’ (daraku) and (before the UN Committee) accusing it of ‘ignoring the people’s will’ (see McCormack 2015b). Such official and nonofficial representations of Okinawan opinion served as counterpoint to the message conveyed by Okinawan citizens with their bodies at their round-the-clock protest encampment at the gate opening onto the Camp Schwab construction site on Ōura Bay. As the confrontation was deepening, Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide made clear that site works would proceed irrespective of any order from the governor. Contracts were let, materials moved, workers hired, a momentum generated.The government of Japan insisted that there was no alternative to the Henoko project, that it amounted to a ‘burden reduction’ for Okinawa, and (late in 2015) that the project had entered the irreversible phase of ‘main works’ (hontai kōji). On 14 October, the day after Governor Onaga revoked the approval, the Okinawa Defence Bureau (ODB) filed a complaint with the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLITT), asking it to review, suspend, and nullify Governor Onaga’s revocation under the Administrative Appeal Act (Press Conference by the Defence Minister Nakatani, 13 October 2015). It maintained that ‘there were no flaws with the land reclamation approval made in late 2013 and that Governor Onaga’s revocation disposition was illegal’. Because it amounted to one section of the Abe government appealing to another (Ministry of Defence to MLITT), the outcome could scarcely have been in doubt. Two weeks later, following a cabinet meeting on 27 October, Minister Ishii Keiichi of MLITT suspended the Onaga revocation order (while his ministry examined its validity) (Press Conference by Defence Minister Nakatani Gen, 27 October 2015. See also Japan Times, 27 October 2015), on grounds that otherwise it would be ‘impossible to continue the relocation’ and because in that event ‘the United States-Japan alliance would be adversely affected’ (Japan Times, 1 November 2015). There was nothing to indicate that it had read, much less paid attention, to the 950-page dossier in which Onaga had presented the prefectural case (Miyamoto 2016: 76). Site works resumed on 29 October, following a two-week hiatus.The government then, on 2 November, launched a suit in the Naha branch of the Fukuoka High Court under the Administrative Appeals Law seeking to compel the prefecture’s compliance. Overall, it amounted to a constitutional coup: stripping the governor and the prefectural government of powers vested in 127

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them by the Constitution and the Local Government Act. By such manoeuvres, the government of Japan sought at all costs to justify the MLITT minister’s reinstatement or ‘proxy execution’ of the land reclamation approval (Press Conference by Defence Minister Nakatani Gen, 27 October 2015). Governor Onaga, for his part, presented a totally different story of an inequitable and increasing burden, building upon the initial illegal seizure of Okinawan land and in defiance of the clearly and often-expressed wishes of the Okinawan people; of a struggle for justice and democracy and for the protection of Ōura Bay’s extraordinary natural biodiversity, worthy, as the prefecture saw it, of World Heritage ranking. He summarily rejected the ‘advice’ (of 27 October) and then the ‘instruction’ (9 November) from the MLITT minister to withdraw his cancellation order (Japan Times, 6 November 2015; 11 November 2015). He reiterated that flaws in the land reclamation approval process were such as to negate it and objected to the ODB’s using the Administrative Appeal Act, for which purpose the state was pretending to be just like a ‘private person’ (ichishijin) complaining under a law specifically designed to allow individual citizens complaining of unjustified or illegal acts by governmental agencies to seek redress.The state was thus adopting a perverse reading of the law. As Onaga noted, although the state sought relief as an aggrieved citizen it deployed its full powers and prerogatives as state under the Local SelfGovernment Law to sweep aside prefectural self-government and to assume the right to proxy execution of an administrative act (gyōsei daishikkō). On 2 November 2015, Governor Onaga filed a complaint with the rarely consulted Central and Local Government Dispute Management Council’s procedures for resolving such disputes’.7 Though it would be hard to imagine a plainer case of ‘dispute’ between central and local government, it took barely six weeks for the Council to dismiss the complaint on grounds that it was ‘beyond the scope of matters it could investigate’ (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 26 December 2015). On 25 December, Okinawa Prefecture launched an action in the Naha court to have the ruling by the minister set aside as a breach of the law. State and prefectural authorities were thus suing each other, over the same matters, in the same Naha court (Okinawa Taimusu, 12 December 2015). Whatever that court would in due course rule would have a profound impact in determining whether Japan would merit the claim to be a country ruled by law, or would, instead, prove to be one ruled by ‘men’ (i.e. the government of the day).

Physical confrontation The Abe government is different from previous LDP governments in the violence with which it treats the resolutely non-violent protest encampment at the Camp Schwab gate that opens to the Henoko construction site.The earlier design of a Henoko offshore base had been abandoned in 2005 because, as then Prime Minister Koizumi put it, of ‘a lot of opposition’ (McCormack and Oka Norimatsu 2012: 98) and, as was later learned, because the Japanese National Coastguard was reluctant to be involved in enforcing the removal of protesters from the site for fear of bloodshed.8 No such inhibitions appeared to affect Prime Minister Abe and his government in 2015. Even former Prime Minister Koizumi referred to the Abe mode of government as one of ‘bulldozing aside all opposition and just governing by force’ (Tsunei 2016). Despite being relatively remote and difficult of access, especially in the early mornings, Henoko attracts steadily growing numbers of participants, exceeding 1,000 for the first time on the 500th day of the sit-in, on 18 November 2015. Although the citizenry remained committed to non-violence and to the exercise of the right of civil disobedience only after exhausting all legal and constitutional steps to oppose the base project, the Japanese National Coastguard and Riot Police flaunted violence, dragging away protesters (quite a few of whom are in their 128

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seventies and eighties), dunking canoeists in the sea, pinning down one protest ship captain until he lost consciousness, and on a number of occasions causing injuries to protesters requiring hospital treatment (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 23 November 2015). The daily scenes from the Henoko site are shown on local television and in the two prefectural newspapers (i.e. the media that in Abe circles is seen as deserving to be shut down). If the Abe government design had been to induce submission by the exercise of overwhelming force at the works site, it has not worked. If anything, it is counter-productive. Okinawan anger deepens. If the ongoing ‘Battle of Henoko’ were to continue indefinitely on its current lines for the five years that the government reckons reclamation and construction would take, ‘unforeseen’ events, with the real possibility of bloodshed, become more likely. In the supposed pursuit of ‘security’, insecurity spreads. In November 2015 the government ordered an additional 100-plus riot police from Tokyo (units with names such as ‘Demon’ and ‘Hurricane’) to reinforce the mostly local Okinawan forces who until then had been imposing the state’s will at the construction site. Such ‘outsider’ reinforcements could be expected to remain relatively insensitive to Okinawan pain and anger. As the Henoko problem is referred to the judiciary, there is a question as to whether Japan, especially Abe’s Japan, enjoys the division of powers and independence of the judiciary that are the hallmarks of modern, constitutional states.The courts have for over more than half a century abandoned their theoretical, constitutional prerogative to adjudicate on contests involving state rights on the grounds that ‘matters pertaining to the security treaty with the United States are “highly political” and concern Japan’s very existence’ (see McCormack and Oka Norimatsu 2012: 53–4).This ruling, adopted in 1959 in the Sunagawa case, means that in effect the security treaty trumps the Constitution and renders it immune from challenge at law. As the Abe government in July 2014 had effectively amended the Constitution by the simple device of adopting a new interpretation, so in 2015 it showed scant respect for the relevant laws in the way it addressed Henoko reclamation. As constitutional lawyers had, overwhelmingly, condemned the 2014 de facto revision of the Constitution, so in 2015 they criticized the Abe government for its manipulation or breach of several laws (Lawrence Repeta in the Japan Times, 15 November 2015). In Okinawa such proceedings are seen as utterly lacking in fairness and objectivity (Editorial, Okinawa Taimusu, 30 October 2015). Lawyers and experts also express concern that the Japanese government’s moves are illegal (Lawrence Repeta in the Japan Times, 15 November 2015), but irrespective of the merits of the case, they expect the state to triumph in the courts (on this point, see Watanabe Tsuyoshi, Okinawa Taimusu, 13 December 2015).

The UN and international law In international law terms, it seems clear that both the 1609 invasion and the 1879 incorporation of Okinawa into the nation-state were exercises of force, first to diminish and then to abolish a state that, as shown by the 1854 Ryukyu-U.S. Friendship Treaty, was sovereign and independent.They therefore fall under the terms of Article 51 of the 1969 (Vienna) Convention on the Law of Treaties: the expression of a State’s consent to be bound by a treaty which has been procured by the coercion of its representative through acts or threats directed against him shall be without any legal effect. (cited in Uemura Hideaki, Ryūkyū Shinpō, 16 February 2015; see also Uemura 2003) 129

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It may well be that the annexation of Ryukyu/Okinawa, plainly illegal by modern standards, was illegal even by the standards of late nineteenth-century international law (Abe 2015: 262). The annexation and incorporation of Ryukyu into the Japanese state in 1879 was replicated three decades later in the case of Korea (1910). In regard to Korea, a consensus has gradually evolved in recent years between a large number of Japanese and Korean scholars around the proposition that the 1910 Treaty of Annexation, imposed by force after a series of acts of aggression, is ‘unjust and wrongful’ and thus ‘null and void from the outset’ (see McCormack 2015c). The 1879 abolition of the Ryukyu Kingdom by force and the threat of force must be presumed equally ‘unlawful’ and ‘null and void’. If such a principle were to be applied to the Okinawan case, it would mean that the decisive chain of Okinawa ‘disposal’ acts taken by post-1945 governments, from the abandonment of Okinawa in 1952 to the ‘fake reversion’ of 1972 and the forced imposition of the Henoko project between 2006 and 2015, would be held in breach of the key principle of modern international law: self-determination. Although the Okinawa government has yet to launch judicial action in an international tribunal, it pays increasing attention to making a political appeal. The first appeal to the United Nations, on grounds of the right to self-determination in accord with the December 1960 UN ‘Declaration on Colonial Liberation’, was launched in February 1962. One signatory was Onaga’s father, Sukehiro (1936–2011) then a conservative (LDP) member of the legislature in American-occupied Ryukyu.To thus challenge the United States at the very height of the Cold War was plainly quixotic. However, UN understanding has advanced considerably in subsequent decades. Okinawans (Ryukyuans) are today recognized as an indigenous people, whose rights, spelled out in the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, include that to self-determination. Furthermore, the declaration is very clear on the principle of ‘free, prior, and informed consent’ (FPIC) that must govern policy on indigenous lands and peoples (Abe 2015: 270). Among other things, it stipulates (Article 10) that ‘indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories’, which is precisely what Okinawans have experienced through the seven decades since their island was occupied. And Article 30 of the Declaration specifically forbids appropriation of indigenous lands for military purposes: Military activities shall not take place in the lands or territories of indigenous peoples, unless justified by a relevant public interest or otherwise freely agreed with or requested by the indigenous people concerned.9 From its inception, Okinawan ‘self-determination’ rights have been consistently over-ruled in relation to the Henoko project, and for the reclamation of Ōura Bay to proceed in the teeth of fierce opposition at all levels of Okinawan society would be the plainest of breaches of this now core UN principle. In 2014, the UN Human Rights Committee referred to the Okinawan problem as follows: The Committee regrets the position of the State party not to recognize the Ryukyu/ Okinawa as indigenous peoples, despite recognition by UNESCO of their unique ethnicity, history, culture and traditions . . . the Committee is concerned that sufficient measures have not been taken to consult Ryukyu representatives regarding the protection of their rights.The Committee is also concerned by information that not enough has been done to promote and protect Ryukyu languages, which are at risk of disappearance.10

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In 2015, the UN Special Rapporteur spoke of Okinawa as being ‘victim of discrimination’ and pledged to do whatever could be done to establish the Okinawan ‘right to self-determination’ (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 17 August 2015). Shortly afterwards, in a short and pithy speech to the Committee in Geneva in September 2015, the governor himself spoke of that ‘right to self-determination’ and asked, rhetorically, ‘Can a country share values such as freedom, equality, human rights, and democracy with other nations when that country cannot guarantee those values for its own people?’ (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 22 September 2015) The problem with any Okinawan claim on the basis of indigeneity is that the government of Japan refuses to concede that status to Okinawans, and Okinawans are reluctant to claim it.They evidently fear that formulation of their case in terms of indigeneity might be seen as an admission of backwardness (see Yokota 2015). However, should they choose to adopt such a strategy, the UN seems open to hearing it. Okinawa’s protests to the UN have also alluded, without yet formulating it as ground for any specific claim, to Article 46 of The Hague Convention on the Laws and Customs of War (1907) which forbids occupying armies from confiscation of private property. Because the Futenma base was built on lands appropriated from their owners at the point of ‘bayonet and bulldozer’ the occupation of Futenma (and other U.S. bases on Okinawa) was illegal in the first place. For this fundamental and ab initio illegality alone, aside from the considerations of right to selfdetermination, or to considerations of danger, noise, and nuisance, it should be closed forthwith.

Prospects Okinawans tend to look back over their troubled pre-modern and modern history and see four centuries punctuated by shobun, or disposals, by superior, external forces depriving them of their subjectivity: the invasion of 1609, the ‘punishment’ of 1875–79, the brutal sacrifice imposed on them in 1945, the abandonment of 1945–72, the 1972 ‘reversion’ that was not a reversion, the 1996 Futenma ‘return’ that was not a return, and (from 2006) the ongoing ‘realignment’ that would increase the burden on Okinawa while declaring it a reduction. The Okinawa that has endured so much, however, has also generated a democratic, nonviolent, citizen’s movement of world-historical significance. After four centuries of being alternately ‘in’ and ‘out’ of Japan, lied to, manipulated and discriminated against, Okinawa from 1996 has steadily built up its challenge to the destiny designed for it as reinforced ‘war state’ in Tokyo and Washington. Confrontation between national and regional government elsewhere in Japan is not unknown, but never has it occurred on a matter of such moment and in such a ‘zero sum’ form, without scope for compromise. The ‘irresistible force’ of the nation-state confronts the ‘immovable object’ of the Okinawan resistance. After these 400 and more years (especially the last 70) the Okinawan struggle for democracy and self-determination challenges the pillars on which the Japanese ‘client state’ and the U.S.-imposed regional and global order rest. Today, as global tectonic plates shift, Okinawa’s once peripheral location on the frontiers of surrounding states shifts to open the potential of it becoming an East Asian centre. Some Okinawans – but less than 5 per cent according to a 2011 newspaper poll: Japan Times, 11 July 2013) – call for ‘independence’, but it is likely that many more, while not going so far as to call explicitly for ‘independence’, would support a demand for comprehensive renegotiation of Okinawa’s status and relation to Japan (Matsushima 2010: 22), and an apology by the government of Japan for the abolition of the Kingdom (1879) and other subsequent acts, including the Reversion Agreement (1972). It is also likely that many would share the dream of recreating the historic role the islands enjoyed prior to 1609 as link between

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Japan, China, and the Asia-Pacific, with civil priorities substituted for the Abe government’s military (and foreign base-dependent) ones, or as a ‘Brussels’ or ‘Luxemburg’ within a European Union-type East Asian community. Philosopher Karatani Kōjin (b. 1941) recently projected the vision of a twenty-first-century Ryukyu/Okinawa as an independent, confederal, self-governing, Article 9-embracing (i.e. unarmed) republic, negotiating friendly relations on all sides and thus helping to ‘dissolve the geopolitical confrontation structure in East Asia that has prevailed ever since the Sino-Japanese war [of 1894]’ (Karatani 2015). In a similar vein, the Norwegian philosopher and peace studies pioneer, Johan Galtung (b. 1930), predicts a regional Northeast Asian community by 2020, with Okinawa a candidate for hosting some of its key institutions, or even its capital (Ryūkyū Shinpō, 23 August 2015). Both incline to prescribe for Okinawa a central, utopian role in the realization of a Kantian ‘permanent peace’ and world republic (Karatani 2015: 31–46). The Okinawan historian Namihira Tsuneo (b. 1954) concurs, pointing to Okinawa’s consistent utopian thread of desire to rest security not upon weapons and force but on ‘hi-bu’ (no weapons) and ‘propriety’ (reigi o motte), treating ‘properly’ all visitors to its shores (see Namihira 2015: 94–5). Such are also the principles inscribed 560 years ago on the Bridge of Nations bell referred to earlier. Namihira notes that ever since the Meiji government dismissed that proposal in 1879 and launched military occupation instead, whenever given an opportunity to do so, Okinawans have formulated essentially that same vision. What they aspire to now is not to host the greatest concentration of military power in East Asia, but rather to become what Namihira refers to as ‘International Exchange Centre for Asian Peace’ (Namihira 2015: 94–5). And yet whatever may be said or done in Tokyo or Washington, in the Japanese courts, in the streets, on the seas, or in the world court of public opinion, the grim fact is that Prime Minister Abe seems determined to impose his will on Okinawa and Ōura Bay. The government that did not hesitate in July 2014 to change its interpretation of the Constitution to suit its political agenda and to impose its will on a recalcitrant prefecture. As writs were issued and injunctions sought late in 2015 to prevent (or to impose) base construction, Abe’s government appeared to be striving to evade any possible adverse judicial ruling by pushing the works with all possible speed beyond a point of no return (Shimabukuro Ryōta, in Ryūkyū Shinpō, 15 December 2015). For the Okinawan resistance to prevail against such a desperate and unprincipled state, it will have to widen the current struggle and gain the support not just of ‘All-Okinawa’ but of an ‘AllJapan’ citizen alliance and an accompanying global movement.

Notes 1 Guo, an official and prominent member of the Chinese ‘Self-Strengthening Movement’ in the 1870s, and Ueki, a prominent figure in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement in Japan of the 1880s, both favoured independence for Ryukyu/Okinawa. 2 King Kalakaua (1836–91) of Hawaii, visiting China and Japan in 1881, expressed a desire to mediate a Sino-Japanese agreement on Ryukyu/Okinawa in the context of promoting Asian unity and resistance against European-American imperialism (Nishizato 2010: 120). 3 Former U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant (1822–85), during a trip to East Asia, played a role in bringing about these negotiations. See Chang 1969. 4 For one representative opinion piece, see Hwanqiu Shibao, 11 May 2013, http://opinion.huanqiu.com/ editorial/2013-05/3924225.html/. 5 The Potsdam Declaration of 26 July 1945 struck the same note: Japanese sovereignty was to be ‘limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine’. 6 Evidence by Walter Mondale, U.S. ambassador at the time, suggests that it was the Japanese government that insisted in 1995 on the Marine Corps staying in Okinawa (Okinawa Taimusu, 13 September 2014).

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7 This is a five-person unit within the government’s Department of General Affairs set up in 2000 but to date only twice called upon to adjudicate a dispute and on neither occasion – both matters of relatively minor importance – making any ruling against the government (Okinawa Taimusu, 2 November 2015). 8 According to Moriya Takemasa, senior official in the Defence Agency (later Department of Defence) from 1996 until 2007, who was closely involved in Henoko-related matters. See his 2010 book ‘Futenma kōshō’ hiroku; see also ‘Henoko shimin 700-nin kesshū, “taishū undō no seika da”,’ Okinawa Taimusu, 25 November 2015. 9 See United Nations, ‘United Nations Declaration on the rights of Indigenous Peoples’, www.un.org/ esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf. 10 (UN) Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination, ‘Concluding observations on the combined seventh to ninth periodic reports of Japan’, 29 August 2014, paragraph 21 ‘Situation of Ryukyu/ Okinawa’; accessible at www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/files/000060744.pdf. See also Ryūkyū Shinpō, 22 August 2014.

Further reading Hein, Laura and Selden, Mark (eds) (2003) Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. McCormack, Gavan, and Oka Norimatsu, Satoko (2012) Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Rabson, Steve (2012) The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan: Crossing the Borders Within, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Shimabukuro Jun and Abe Kōki (eds) (2015) Okinawa ga tou Nihon no anzen hoshō, Iwanami Shoten.

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Part II

Ideologies and the political system

10 From Edo to Meiji The public sphere and political criticism in nineteenth-century Japan Matsuda Ko¯ichiro¯

This chapter examines the role of public opinion and looks at changes in public participation in political debate from the late Edo period (the 1850s and 1860s) to the early Meiji period (1868–1891). After discussing the role of censorship in controlling political satire and other voices of political dissent in Edo Japan (i.e. under the Tokugawa shogunate), it moves on to discuss the origins of public debate (kōron) in modern Japan and the role the media played in propagating the concept among the general public. The final sections of the chapter analyze the government’s efforts to control public discourse by means of laws, censorship and sponsorship of some newspapers and show that none of these measures turned out to be highly successful. ‘Can a robust public sphere coexist with an authoritarian state?’; ‘What made authoritarian rule bearable in Japan?’; ‘What form in practice did the public sphere take?’ Historians who study the politics of the Edo (1603–1868) and Meiji periods have been struggling with these questions for a long time (Berry 1998: 133, 140). The Tokugawa shogunate prohibited any public expression of opinion, comment or information regarding governmental authority. It censored books, prints, or popular entertainment such as kabuki and jōruri and banned stories which addressed political issues or made references to members of the ruling class. However, the censorship was far from watertight. Although the Tokugawa shogunate was undoubtedly authoritarian and one can find only a very few bold voices protesting against the regime, it is not difficult to come across numerous (mostly illegal) printings and transcriptions by hand of inside stories about political incidents, rumors of scandals in upper-class families and satirical thrusts at high officials. If there was no public sphere in Tokugawa society, then how can we explain that so much material containing matters of ‘public’ interest was produced and not completely destroyed by the regime? ‘Public life’ in early modern Japan was developed in the sense that voices critical of the government not only existed, but also were recorded and circulated in manuscript form by networks of educated people that included both samurai and commoners. However, that said, it must be pointed out that criticism of the regime as a whole was quite rare, and people generally seem to have been contented with the authoritarian system of the rule by the Tokugawa family and its vassals. Political literature was generally consumed for the information it contained and did not function as a political device for raising critical voices.

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In contrast to China and Korea, pre-modern Japan had no strong class of intellectuals that served as a political elite. People who wrote about political and social issues usually occupied marginal positions in the political power structure (such as technical advisors in drafting official documents) or led lives as commoners (usually earning their living as doctors, teachers or merchants). This weakness of links between political power and educated social groups made political arguments less important, both for the rulers and the ruled. It is true that famous scholars sometimes authored substantial volumes of political opinion. Though they were not allowed to publish their views in print, numerous transcriptions by hand were made and distributed among high officials, among disciples of the authors and sometimes among general readers who chanced to obtain access to them, usually after the death of the author. Seidan (Political Conversation) by Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), Keizairoku (Essays on Governance and Economy) by Dazai Shundai (1680–1747), Yume no shiro (Instead of Dreams) by Yamagata Bantō (1748–1821), Sōbō kigen (Popular Opinion) by Nakai Chikuzan (1730–1804) and Tamakushige (The Jeweled Comb-Box, see Brownlee 1988) by Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) are representative examples. These were proposals addressed to the rulers that were not intended to arouse public interest in state affairs. Ogyū Sorai, for example, in his postscript to Seidan explained that he did not even allow his disciples to help him because the book’s subject was goseimu (government affairs) and asked that it should be burned after submission to the shogun (Ogyū 1999: 61). Accordingly, such works might be more appropriately categorized as speculum principum (mirrors for princes) literature.

Censorship and satire The Tokugawa government issued an edict in 1673 which banned any publication ‘concerning kōgi; this meant in practice anything concerning the shogun and the bakufu (shogunate) and their politics’. Stricter laws came into effect in 1722: they prohibited expressions of ‘divergent views’ in Confucian, Buddhist, Shinto, medical or waka (Japanese poetry) books. Publication and printing of subjects dealing with the ancestors and family backgrounds of high Tokugawa officials and domain lords (daimyo) were also banned. The Tokugawa government disliked subjects that dealt with the ancestors of the shogun or domain lords, as they might provide seeds of curiosity about their origins (Kornicki 1998: 334, 337–8). Generally, the edicts were rigid but the actual implementation of monitoring was cursory and inspections were ad hoc. In effect, the authorities only sporadically showed their determination to punish writers, publishers and book sellers. Satirical stories that gained popularity among commoners were targeted by the government, too. Baba Bunkō (1718–59), a kōdan (storytelling) performer, was arrested and executed in 1759 for the crime of performing a kōdan about a cruel and corrupt domain lord whose harsh treatment of poor peasants led to an uprising against his rule. He did not mention any names, but the audience knew that he told the story of the recent uprising in the province of Mino. To make things worse, Baba distributed copies of the manuscript of his kōdan to kashihonya (book rental shops). Kashihonya were important hubs for the wide circulation of books and manuscripts, both in Edo and even in provincial towns (Farge 2006: 63–76; Kornicki 1998: 109). Nevertheless, the genre of satirical books survived and remained popular among commoners. They were sold more especially at the time of the governmental reforms. Santō Kyōden (1761–1816), a writer and painter known for sharebon (light comical stories) and kibyōshi (satirical stories with yellow covers), was sentenced to fifty days’ house arrest in handcuffs for writing comical stories that contained clever criticism of the moralistic regulation enacted in the

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so-called Kansei reform (1787–93) (Nishiyama and Groemer 1997: 51). In 1850, Kitaina mei-i nambyō ryōji, a set of three nishikie (woodblock prints) that depicted a female doctor and women who had contracted exotic diseases, drawn by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798–1861; see https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/13030/hb7m3nb7bf/), was circulated widely because people enjoyed the rumour that the characters in the pictures were caricatures of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyoshi (1793–1853) and high officials. The Edo city authorities summoned Kuniyoshi, but he denied the accusation and thus avoided punishment (Iwashita 1996; Thompson and Harootunian 1991). What the Tokugawa government abhorred was the circulation of information about persons of authority and the people’s curiosity aroused by it. Because very few people openly resisted the authority of the ruling class or the political system as a whole, the government did not have to fear the challenge of public opinion. Nevertheless, public opinion remained a factor in shaping government decisions. This is apparent, for example, in Dazai Shundai, who argued in his Keizairoku that the ruler should boldly carry out what he determined to do without being swayed by the opinion (hyōgi) of the people (Dazai 1918: 217). When a natural disaster caused social unrest, popular woodblock prints depicted the people’s rage against social injustice. Only a few days after the Great Ansei Earthquake devastated Edo and surrounding areas in 1855, satirical prints known as namazu-e (catfish pictures) were circulated. Because the operations of the government were badly disrupted by the earthquake, the government was unable to control the circulation of popular prints. Namazu-e were based on the popular myth that a giant catfish was the cause of earthquakes. Interestingly, however, some mythical catfish in the prints were depicted as heroic figures of yonaoshi (reforming society) in chastising the rich and redistributing the wealth to the poor. It is significant that in those yonaoshi pictures, the catfish punished the greedy wealthy class but not the ruling samurai class. In other words, the catfish prints satirized the unfair disparity of wealth but not the corruption or uselessness of the political rulers (Ouwehand 1964: 80). Overall, however, in early modern Japan, it is difficult to find in the public mind any solid conception of political opinion. People outside the governing class were not assumed to have any concern about, or any responsibility for, state affairs. The word yoron, which in the Meiji period acquired the meaning of ‘public opinion’, in Tokugawa Japan only meant ‘voices of humble workers’ (yo denoted craftsmen who made palanquins for aristocrats in ancient China). The ruler had to pay attention to yoron but there was no institution to represent the opinion of the people. In Confucian texts, minshin (literally, people’s mind) was given much more importance. Minshin did not mean public opinion but rather a state of collective mind which was often unstable and unpredictable, so the ruler should always keep guard over it. According to Confucian precepts for the ruler, to follow minshin (Ch. min xin) was to follow tenshin (Heaven’s mind, Ch. tian xin) (Zhu Xi 1986: 2535). But the Chinese Confucian sage Mencius (372–289 BC) also said that ‘Good government inspires the people’s fear, while good teaching inspires their love. Good government delivers the resources of the people, while good teaching gets their hearts [min xin]’, minshin was an object that the ruler should guide and put under his control (Bloom 2009: 146). This method of instructing people’s minds was not exclusive to Confucian political ethics. A kokugaku (native learning) scholar, Nakajima Hirotari (1792–1864), claimed that Japan had its own way of successfully ‘taming and consolidating the people’s minds’. He saw a parallel trick (damashi) of taming the uneducated people’s minds in Western Christianity (Nakajima 1993: 364–6). As this example shows, minshin was the object of political manipulation even for kokugaku scholars.

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Introducing the concept of public debate Kōron (literally, public debate) developed into a key concept in the political arena during the final years of Tokugawa rule and the early stages of the Meiji Restoration, an era covering roughly the 1850s and 1860s, which Japanese historians usually call the bakumatsu-ishin period (see also the introduction of this volume). As the character kō (public) implies, the political arena was gradually opened to a larger number of diverse participants. This development was due to the weakening and destabilization of the Tokugawa regime in its last throes. However, the access to the ‘public discussion’ arena was still very limited, and no publications were available for common people. The term kōron was usually used in proposals and letters written by domain lords and samurai activists, including those from the pro-Tokugawa camp, who were critical of the conservative and indecisive attitude of the shogunate. They accused the conservative clique that dominated the administration of being preoccupied with self-preservation and not sufficiently concerned about ‘public’ matters. Widening the debate meant to prevent the bakufu officials from abusing their power to gain the parochial interests. Matsudaira Shungaku (1828–90), the lord of the Echizen domain (present-day Fukui) and the shogunate’s supreme councilor, submitted a proposal to the effect that the shogun should ‘abandon the selfish mind (shishin) and follow public opinion’ (tenka yoron no kō) (Matsudaira 1988: 10; Kim 2007: 60). Yokoi Shōnan (1809–69), a scholarly advisor to Matsudaira, complained that all government affairs were conducted by ‘the shogunate in the interest of the Tokugawa household without in any way benefiting the empire or the people’. He claimed the need for kōgi yoron (public debate and opinion) by bringing together ‘all the talented men to Edo’ to reform the narrow-minded management of state affairs by the Tokugawa regime (Yokoi 1968: 168; Jansen 1995: 137). Katō Hiroyuki (1836–1916), an assistant at the Bansho shirabesho, the Institute for the Study of Western Books and in the later years the first president of the University of Tokyo (subsequently Tokyo Imperial University), wrote that kōkai (public assembly) was useful for the benevolent ruler to harmonize the people’s mind (Katō 1861: 5, 9). A dictionary compiling the usage of terms as they appeared in the orders of new Meiji government titled Shinreijikai (Dictionary of Characters Used in Government Orders, 1868) had entries for yoron and kōgi. Yoron was defined as ‘varieties of arguments’, and kōgi was ‘opinion that cannot be kept secret’ (Ogita 1868: 15). We should note that the idea of ‘government by public discussion’ did not play a pivotal role in the usage of terms such as kō, kōgi, kōkai, kōron and yoron. It cannot be denied that the implication of avoiding the arbitrary discretion of despots existed in the idea of kō, but claims that kōron indicated the positive evaluation of the free discussion on political affairs by the public are not convincing.

Printing media and ‘civilization’ The Tokugawa government’s mission to Europe in 1864 sent back a report which included the term paburikku ohinion (public opinion). It was one of the earliest examples of the observation about the role of the press in the Western countries. One of the newspapers claims that they represent what they call ‘paburikku ohinion’, meaning kōron. The government of each country and even humble commoners contribute their opinions to the editors of the newspapers, openly or anonymously. They want their opinions to be published and read by the general public in order to appeal to public opinion (kōdō no giron). (Ikeda 1864: 5–6) 140

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This report explained how the people engaged in journalism claimed that they themselves represented public opinion (kōron), and it showed that the members of the mission were well aware of the role of newspapers in the Western countries. Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), who travelled in Europe and the United States in the final years of the Edo period, was impressed by the power of newspapers, especially in England. Arguments in newspapers are not always immune to bias, depending on countries and writers, but the government permits publication of them and they are free to comment on state policies or personalities as long as they keep the principle of fairness (giron kōhei). Therefore, citizens value the opinions in newspapers. When it comes to an important issue, newspapers can lead the public mind and even the discussion in the government may be affected and change. (Fukuzawa 1866: 4) The principle of a free press strongly impressed young generations of Japanese intellectuals. As early as March 1868, in the same month when the shogun left Edo castle and the ‘Restoration’ government moved in, the translation of the English journalist Albany Fonblanque’s How We Are Governed? was published in Edo in the traditional woodblock print format. In the translation, the original sentence of ‘the mighty powers of public opinion embodied in a free press’ (Fonblanque 1858: 17) was translated as ‘shuppan jiyū . . . kōsetsu no chikara kōdai naru’ (Fonblanque 1868: 34). Kōsetsu (literally, fair opinion) was possibly a neologism inspired by kōron and kōgi. Only four years after the 1868 Meiji Restoration, the new government dispatched a diplomatic mission to the United States and Europe. The mission included senior members of the government such as Iwakura Tomomi (1825–83), Ōkubo Toshimichi (1830–78) and Kido Takayoshi (1833–77). In the official report of the mission, edited by Kume Kunitake (1839– 1931), the influential power of newspapers in the United States was recorded with astonishment. Newspapers are regarded as important in Europe and America because they monitor the policies of national, state, county and village governments; they are conducive to learning and scholarship; they provide reports on trade, thereby building and strengthening the country’s economy; and they encourage good habits and moral behaviour. Without leaving home one can learn about conditions all across the country; from one’s house one can obtain a grasp of world affairs. Thus, newspapers truly encourage the spread of culture and are indispensable. The value of a newspaper depends on the editor’s qualities and learning; the might of an editor’s pen exceeds that of a million foot-soldiers. Educated people accept this, so that journalists often have greater influence than politicians. (Kume 2009: 99–100) The print media were a symbol of  ‘civilization’. However, the new Meiji government found that the majority of newspapers published in Edo were still pro-Tokugawa and ‘deceiving people’s mind’. Given this situation, the Meiji government could not afford a free press. Although newspapers were regarded as quite useful for the spread of knowledge and information (jōhō), they were considered harmful for the government when they stimulated discontent among the public. In 1873, the Meiji government issued an edict that regulated newspapers and banned ‘criticism (hihyō) without good reason’. Also, an edict banning ‘defamation’ (zanbōritsu) was issued at the same time. In the edict, anyone ‘defaming government officials’ was to be fined, but there was no official definition of what hihyō or ‘defamation’ actually meant. No one 141

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could tell what conduct was punishable until one was actually arrested. A joint petition signed by several writers of newspapers in Tokyo was submitted to the Home Ministry asking for the clarification of what was being banned (Inui 2010). However, according to the memoirs of Ozaki Saburō (1842–1918), who was in charge of drafting the edicts, even officials of the Home Ministry did not agree on the definition of ‘defamation’, with a significant number opposing strict censorship measures as in the edicts (Sasaki 1999: 56). ‘Opening the route of opinion’ (genro dōkai) was a slogan adopted by the Meiji government (as expressed in the Imperial Declaration of the Restoration in 1867), but opinions had to be submitted in the form of petitions to appropriate sections of the government. Such petitions were called kenpakusho (written petitions), most of which were submitted between 1872 and 1874. A large variety of opinions, complaints and ideas were submitted in the form of kenpakusho, ranging from serious political claims to new ideas about how to make soy sauce. Some 1700 petitions of the first thirteen years of the Meiji period are preserved in the National Archives of Japan. What the government disliked was not petitions, per se, but making them public. When petitioners printed the contents of their petitions in newspapers, they drew the alertness of the government. The most controversial petition of all was ‘the Proposal for the Establishment of a Popularly Elected Assembly’ of 1874, signed by eight former high officials who had recently resigned from the government. It triggered a wide debate on whether the representative government should be introduced to Japan or not (Kim 2007: 103). It became a big political issue less because of its content or the prominence of the signatories and more because it was published in Nisshin Shinjishi, a Japanese-language newspaper founded by John R. Black (1826–80), a Scottish publisher. Nisshin Shinjishi had a special permission by the Left Chamber (sain) of the government to print the minutes of the Left Chamber, edicts and submitted petitions, which made it possible to publish such a controversial petition without censorship by the government. The former officials who signed this petition did not actually intend to make their opinion public. After this event, the government learned its lesson and made it illegal to print petitions without pre-authorization, which eventually led to a reduction in the number of submitted petitions. The Meiji government also banned printing or performance of stories dealing with the ancestors and the family background of the emperor. According to the police ordinance on regulating theatres (1878), ‘acting the roles of imperial ancestors should be prohibited because it would bring dishonour to the imperial virtues’ (Obinata 2001: 289). Fukuzawa Yukichi, in his best-selling book Gakumon no susume (An Encouragement of Learning, 1872–76), criticized journalists who were frightened by government regulations. Newspapers being published at the present time, as well as certain written memorials, also illustrate this trend [of lack of independence]. Though regulations for publication are not very strict, the newspapers never carry opinions unfavourable to the authorities. To the contrary, every commendable trifle about the government is praised in bold letters. They are like courtesans flattering their guests. If we read the memorials, we find that their wordings are always extremely base. They look up to the government as if it were some god. They look down upon themselves as if they were criminals. They use empty phrases which are unworthy of equal human beings.Yet no one thinks it shameful. . . . Their extremes of insincerity are the result of the fact that, never having had an example of equal rights, they are oppressed and blindly led by the spirit of subservience.Thus, they are not able to realize their real capacity as kokumin [people with political rights]. It is generally correct to say that in Japan there is only a government, and as yet no people. My conclusion is that the present

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crop of scholars of Western Learning cannot lead us to eliminate the old spirit of the people and in advancing Japanese civilization. (Fukuzawa 2013: 32, translation modified by the author)

Plurality or unity? The idea of a free press appeared as early as 1868 in Rikken seitairyaku (A Brief Introduction to the Constitutional Government) by Katō Hiroyuki. Katō argued that denying the freedom of publication should be called despotism. At the same time, he added that anyone who wrote something that deceived people’s minds and disturbed public peace deserved severe punishment. Public peace was given priority in Katō’s argument. What made the issue complicated was that the idea of the tyranny of the majority or social pressure on individuals was introduced in Japan at the same time as the idea of freedom of opinion. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, translated in 1872 by Nakamura Masanao (1832–91), contained critical comments about the dominance of conformism in public opinion. Mill wrote that ‘the modern régime of public opinion [in Europe] is, in an unorganized form, what the Chinese educational and political systems are in an organized’ and that the conformism would kill the ‘individuality’. Nakamura translated ‘public opinion’ to shūshin kōron (literally, people’s mind and public discussion). Obviously, Mill advocated the freedom of ‘individuality’ rather than the freedom of public opinion. Also the chapter on freedom of the press in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Book I, ch. 11) was translated from an English edition in 1873. Presumably at odds with the translator’s intention, Tocqueville was concerned about the ‘abuse of the powers of thought’ by the press in the United States. These translations must have been embarrassing to the political activists claiming liberty against the tyranny of the Meiji government (Nakamura 1872: 51–2; Obata 1873: 11–2; Mill 1859: 274; Tocqueville 1873: 200). In contrast, Fukuzawa Yukichi, in his Bunmeiron no gairyaku (An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, 1875), expressed a different view about the function of public opinion. He suggested that it should be the arena of contesting opinions. National [or public] opinion [kokuron shūsetsu] can be called that view which is formed under the pressure of numerous conflicting views. It is the view that prevails in the newspapers and the lecture halls and that is much discussed by the people at large. After all, people are urged on by their country’s men of knowledge and virtue. . . . (Fukuzawa 2008: 83) Fukuzawa stressed that public opinion was not a unified opinion of the whole nation but an arena in which different views were contesting with each other. Freedom of opinion was indispensable, not because one of the contestants would find the correct answer, but because freedom of contestation would keep the arena alive and active, and thus the minds of people. The term genron, which literally meant ‘speech’, was introduced to political debate in the 1880s. Genron was not a neologism. It can be found in ancient Chinese documents, but in the 1880s it implied not only verbal acts of speech but also all forms of expression of opinion. The phrasal usage of genron no jiyū brought in the comprehensive idea of the free expression of political opinion. A pamphlet titled Genron no jiyū (1880) by Ueki Emori (1857–92), a political writer and activist of the Movement for Freedom and People’s Rights (jiyū minken undō),

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was a good example. Ueki quoted an article on freedom of the press by John Stuart Mill and claimed that freedom to criticize (hihyō) institutions of the government was indispensable for the happiness (kōfuku) of the people (Ueki 1880: 21–2; Mill 1825:19). Genron no jiyū was given official recognition by the Constitution of the Empire of Japan of 1889 (hereafter Meiji Constitution) which included an article on freedom of speech, writing, publication, public meetings and associations. As the Movement for Freedom and People’s Rights intensified, political journalism gained recognition and respect as a leading force in public opinion. Numa Morikazu (1843–90), one of the activists of the Movement wrote in 1880: Nowadays the newspapers have become an organ [kikai] that both represent and guide public opinion. Their function is similar to what the ears and eyes are to one’s mind. They are indispensable tools in political society. (Numa 1880) However, scarcely a decade later, editors and writers of the political newspapers had to compete with sensational entertainment papers that increased in influence with the popularization of the media. According to a survey carried out in 1889 by the Tokyo municipal government, newspapers published a total of more than 400,000 copies per day against fewer than 200,000 per day in 1885. As these circulation figures show, popular journalism began to overwhelm political journalism. The strategy adopted by quality papers (ōshinbun) under these circumstances was to attempt (or at least pretend to attempt) to lower the political flags and to advocate political ‘neutrality’ or ‘impartiality’. For example, Chōya Shinbun, which was generally categorized as ōshinbun, declared in 1883 that Chōya Shinbun declines to take the role of an organ of such and such political parties or groups which have become active these days. Our writers are determined to stay impartial [fuhenfutō] and will never submit to the opinions of any particular party. (Suehiro 1883) This manifesto was anonymous but presumably written by the chief editor of Chōya Shinbun, Suehiro Tetchō (1849–96), a political activist, writer well known as the author of the political novel Setchūbai (Plum Blossoms in Snow). It was a strategy for quality newspapers to survive as a business by acquiring a broader readership. Suehiro’s actual intention was to promote a coalition of several different minken parties. However, beyond his original intention, the motto of fuhenfutō (impartiality) was subsequently adopted by a number of newspapers of diverse political stances. In those difficult times for political journalism, Nakae Chōmin (1847–1901) boldly defended the role of political journalists. Nakae stressed that an ‘organ paper’ should not be dependent upon political leaders but ought to be the theoretical axis of policies that politicians had to advocate to the public. In the Western countries, they have ‘organ papers’ [kikan shinbun]. . . . Every time a critical issue is raised in the parliament, politicians and journalists who hold the same banner cooperate and the organ paper presents the opinion to the public at the aim of

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increasing the supporters and holding the majority in the parliament. Also they appeal to the nationwide public opinion. The relation between the leader of the party and the organ was not like the master and the servant in the antiquated feudal society, nor like the bureaucratic one of the director and the subordinate. They are equals under one principle they uphold. (Nakae 1888: 231–2)

Freedom or a concession to public opinion? The Meiji government took a hostile view of public meetings. To repress the so-called Grand Solidarity Movement (daidō danketsu undō), a nationalistic movement against the unequal treaties with the Western powers, the government issued the Ordinance of Public Peace and Security (hoan jōrei) in 1887. This ordinance expelled 570 ‘dangerous activists’, mainly political activists and writers, from the area within the twelve kilometers of the imperial palace (Kim 2007: 428; Fukuzawa 1966: 318). The circulation of newspapers grew rapidly in the urban areas. According to the survey in 1890, the diffusion of newspapers (total copies of newspapers per day per household) was nearly 50 per cent in Tokyo and 30 per cent in Osaka, which meant that at least one out of three households in the big cities regularly bought a copy of a daily newspaper. The rate was much lower outside the urban areas, but the newspaper reading population could no longer be ignored (Sasaki 1999: 123–4). The Meiji Constitution provided in Article 29 that ‘Japanese subjects shall, within the limits of law, enjoy the liberty of speech, writing, publication, public meetings and associations’. The semi-official commentaries on the Constitution, Kenpō gige, published under the name of Itō Hirobumi, but actually drafted by Inoue Kowashi (1844–95), commented: In every constitutional country, full freedom is granted in all of these particulars [speeches, writings, etc.], in so far as there is no abuse of them by way of commission of crime or of disturbance of peace and tranquility: and it is hoped that in this way interchange of thought may be promoted, and that useful materials may thus be supplied for the advancement of civilization. (Ito 1889: 61) ‘Freedom’ of ‘interchange of thought’ could be admitted as long as it promoted ‘useful materials’ might ‘be supplied for the advancement of civilization’. Plurality of opinions was not valued as a citizen’s right but only as a concession within the official principle of freedom of opinion. Though the government wanted to confine public debate to the area of ‘useful’ thought, the arguments about governmental policies and censuring on the authority were expanded upon and stimulated by the printing media. Even the government secretly sponsored several newspapers in order to manipulate, instead of repressing, public opinion. In addition, the government set up the Bureau of Political Affairs (seimubu) in 1891, which took charge of ‘promoting the goals of the government in newspapers and journals’. However, as the Bureau of Political Affairs lasted only a month, the government failed to institutionalize the route to assert influence in the media (Sasaki 1999: 150). Collaboration between the government cliques (hanbatsu), political parties and newspapers or journals continued, but overall the public media began to grow into a self-sustaining business. The next turning point for the media and public opinion came during the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), when both the government

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and journalism found it difficult to lead public opinion and had to accommodate to the irresistible tide of nationalism.

Further reading Fukuzawa,Yukichi (1966) Autobiography, trans. Eiichi Kiyooka, New York: Columbia University Press. Gluck, Carol (1985) Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the late Meiji Period, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kim, Kyu Hyun (2007) The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Centre. Matsuda Kōichirō (2008) Edo no chishiki kara Meiji no seiji e, Perikansha.

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11 State Shinto Kate Wildman Nakai

The term State Shinto and the phenomena subsumed under it have been objects of ongoing controversy. The controversy derives in substantial measure from the topic’s intersection with other large areas of debate – the relationship between religion and the state in Meiji (1868– 1912) and later Japan, the nature of the ‘emperor system’ (tennōsei) and ideological formations associated with it, the influence of militarism and ultranationalism. Controversy also arises, however, from the history of the term itself. In considering some of the issues that have figured in studies of State Shinto, it will be useful to begin by taking a look at the term’s history.

The term State Shinto In English, the term State Shinto dates to the prewar period. D. C. Holtom (1884–1962), one of the foremost prewar chroniclers of modern Shinto in either Japanese or English, used it to describe the government’s policies toward shrines and Shinto ceremonies as these developed from the 1870s on. These policies involved various types of patronage and promotion, such as the distribution nationwide of amulets (taima) of the Ise Shrine dedicated to Amaterasu, the Sun Deity from whom the imperial line was held to descend. From the early twentieth century it also took the form of requiring schoolchildren to offer reverence at shrines. Intertwined with these policies was the assertion that shrines in their relationship with the government were not religious institutions. In the government’s view, they differed in this regard from not only Buddhist temples and Christian churches, but also the places of worship of the Shinto sects (shūha shintō or kyōha shintō), which were defined, distinct from shrines, as ‘religious’. As the government saw it, its patronage, including financial backing, of shrines and promotion of reverence at shrines and shrine ceremonial were thus not tantamount to the promulgation of a state religion. The aim was rather to foster national morality and unity. In his 1922 study ‘The political philosophy of modern Shinto: A study of the state religion of Japan’, Holtom described this package of practices together with the government’s position as to the nonreligious character of shrines as ‘official Shinto’ (Holtom 1922). He pointed out the tensions in the concurrent existence of ‘official Shinto’ with various popular religious practices centred on the same shrines and emphasized the contradictions between the government view of shrines as nonreligious and the fundamental character of Shinto as such, which he saw as 147

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‘kami-cult, with kami understood in the sense of mana’ (Holtom 1922: 49–50, 177–9). He also noted protests by Christian and Buddhist groups of government policy as imposing a state religion, contrary to the provision for freedom of religious belief in Article 28 of the 1889 Meiji Constitution and other official declarations and ordinances (Holtom 1922: 50–68). Holtom revisited many of these same issues in two later works, published in 1938 and 1943 (Holtom 1938; Holtom 1943). In these, however, in place of ‘official Shinto’, he adopted the term State Shinto. (A contemporary German observer, who, like Holtom, was a Protestant missionary, used the comparable terms ‘der Staatliche Shintō’ and ‘Staatsshintō’ to characterize government promotion of shrines in the mid-1920s and early 1930s; Antoni 2016: 305–8.) Particularly in his 1943 book, Modern Japan and Shinto Nationalism, Holtom focused, as the title indicates, on the links between State Shinto and the increasingly fervent rhetoric of nationalism and expansionism evident from the 1930s on. Holtom’s writings were an important source for those assigned the task of formulating the parameters of the Allied occupation’s policy on Shinto, which was set forth in the Shinto Directive, issued on 15 December 1945 (on the background of the drafting of the Shinto Directive, see Woodard 1972: 54–74, 197–9). Declaring an intent ‘to prevent a recurrence of the perversion of Shinto theory and beliefs into militaristic and ultranationalistic propaganda designed to delude the Japanese people and lead them into wars of aggression’, the directive called for the immediate abolition of ‘sponsorship, support, perpetuation, control and dissemination of Shinto by the Japanese national, prefectural, and local governments’ (Woodard 1972: 295). Although the first half of the directive spoke of Shinto broadly, later sections specified ‘State Shinto’ as its core target. ‘State Shinto’, or its Japanese equivalent, kokka shintō, entered the Japanese lexicon largely as a result of the Shinto Directive (Sakamoto 1994: 7–8; Sakamoto 2005: 164–72; Haga 1994: 9–10; Isomae 2013: 26–8; Isomae 2014: 269–71).The term had appeared sporadically in Japanese prior to 1945 (see Sakamoto 1994: 305–6; Sakamoto 2000: 273), and the religious studies scholar Katō Genchi (1873–1965) had coined a similar-sounding word, kokkateki shintō, which he rendered as State Shinto in English (Katō 1926: 1–3). Katō, however, held that shrines and Shinto were religious. He endorsed official promotion of shrines, but for him kokkateki shintō expressed an ideal of what should be, with the religious character of shrines recognized and fulfilled. It was not a description of the actuality of government policy (on Katō’s views, see Nitta 1997: 283–312; Holtom 1922: 110–9; Azegami 2009: 308–11). The government itself did not refer to its policies concerning shrines as State Shinto. To the contrary, from the 1880s on it avoided speaking of shrines in relation to Shinto, reserving that term for the Shinto sects. The Shinto Directive’s rather circular definition of State Shinto tacitly acknowledged that it was not part of official government nomenclature: The term State Shinto within the meaning of this directive will refer to that branch of Shinto (Kokka Shintō or Jinja Shintō) which by official acts of the Japanese Government has been differentiated from the religion of Sect Shinto (Shūha Shintō or Kyōha Shintō) and has been classified a non-religious cult commonly known as State Shinto, National Shinto, or Shrine Shinto. (Woodard 1972: 297) This background left the concept of State Shinto laden with highly negative connotations, a circumstance that has coloured academic and more popular treatments of the topic down to the present.

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Postwar perspectives State Shinto did not become a subject of study until some time after the end of the war and the Allied occupation. A chapter written in 1959 for a series on the history of Japanese religion is generally held to mark the start of academic examination of the topic in Japan (Fujitani 1959), but substantial research in both Japanese and Western languages dates essentially to the 1970s. Approaches to the subject in the four decades since then divide roughly into three types. (For overviews of trends in the study of State Shinto, see Haga 1994: 9–14; Yamaguchi 1999: 1–19; Nitta 1999a; Nitta 1999b; Nitta 2005; Saitō 2006; Shimazono 2009: 94–8; Sakamoto 2010; Okuyama 2011 and Ashizu 2006 include an extensive bibliography of works on State Shinto; almost all are in Japanese, but a few Western-language works are listed as well.) The first approach affirms the concept of State Shinto as a valid analytical tool for grasping the actualities of the prewar situation. The majority of postwar Japanese researchers on the subject have taken this approach, as have Western specialists, including Wilbur Fridell, Ernst Lokowandt, Helen Hardacre, and Klaus Antoni. The view of State Shinto as a major force in prewar society owes much to the formulations of such researchers. But although scholars who take this approach alike utilize the concept of State Shinto, they often differ substantially in their interpretation of its scope and content. Some fully endorse it, whereas others use it more loosely in the absence of other persuasive options for summing up the relationship between the state and shrines or Shinto. The second approach sees the notion of State Shinto as deeply flawed but does not reject it entirely. Those who make positive use of the notion, especially Japanese scholars, by and large do not mention its connection to the Shinto Directive. For many in the second group, by contrast, this is a key issue. They point to the term’s foreign origin and the lack of a Japanese precedent. Often having close connections to the Shinto world, they criticize as well the blanket manner with which the first approach’s adherents have sometimes applied the concept (for such criticisms, see, for instance, Ashizu 2006; Sakamoto 2005: 134–96; Nitta 2000: 268). To counter sweeping generalizations, they have turned to the evidence to be found in the documentary record, in the process bringing to light many pertinent primary materials. Although such researchers’ use of the term State Shinto is marked by repeated querying and qualification, by continuing to employ it, even if in brackets, they have contributed to its currency. A third approach challenges, explicitly or implicitly, the concept’s usefulness. Those who follow this line constitute an amorphous rather than clearly defined group. Unlike some exemplars of the second approach, they are not concerned to defend shrines and Shinto from undue censure. Rather, they see the notion of State Shinto as an imprecise, indiscriminate construct that flattens more than it illuminates the complexities of the historical circumstances on which it has been imposed. In their own writings they thus tend to avoid it, a stance that, together with the criticisms of the second group, has left the notion of State Shinto with a certain instability in academic writing today. A number of Western researchers may also be said to fall in this category, including Trent Maxey and John Breen, who, together with Mark Teeuwen, has helped make available many of the translations of Japanese research cited in this survey. To provide a sense of the interplay of these currents in the study of State Shinto, I will first review an example of the first approach that in many ways set the framework for subsequent debate. I will then turn to some of the issues that have been central to the discussion. As the debate has taken place largely within Japanese scholarship, the main focus will be on writings by Japanese researchers, with contributions by Western scholars introduced only parenthetically.

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The Murakami thesis The person who above all established the parameters of the postwar Japanese debate about State Shinto was Murakami Shigeyoshi (1928–91), who in 1970 published a book titled Kokka shintō (State Shinto) in the ‘Iwanami shinsho’ series of paperbacks intended for a general readership. (On Murakami’s influence, see Sakamoto 2010; in English, see Shimazono 2009; for a further discussion in English of Murakami’s thesis, see Azegami 2012.) In this book, Murakami, a historian of religion who focused particularly on modern popular religion and state–religion relations, presented a detailed overview of State Shinto as a ‘state religion’ that extended its power over people’s everyday consciousness as well as Japanese religious life in general from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 to the end of World War II (Murakami 1970: i). As Murakami described it, this state religion was based on a fusion of ‘shrine Shinto’, a primitive, communitarian folk religion, with ‘imperial house Shinto’, centred on the round of rites performed by the emperor within the imperial palace (Murakami 1970: 16). Some of these rites had ancient roots, but the modern imperial ritual structure as a whole was largely created after the Meiji Restoration (Murakami 1970: 10–1, 149–50).The fusion was consolidated in the course of the first two decades of the Meiji period through a series of government measures, beginning in the third month of 1868 with the declaration of the principle of ‘unity of rites and rule’ (saisei itchi), which announced the new government’s intent to bring all the shrines of the nation under its direct control and make Shinto a national religious cult (Murakami 1970: 85–86). A succession of further steps followed: the forced separation of Buddhism and Shinto, which ended the previously common management of shrines by Buddhist temples and priests; the establishment of a Department of Deities (Jingikan) at the top of the state structure; the declaration in 1870 that to disseminate the Great Teaching, designated ‘proselytizers’ (senkyōshi; also translated as ‘missionaries’) would be dispatched throughout the land. These last were to propagate a national Shinto cult centred on emperor worship and unify the religion of the populace. The following year, the government established the public character of all shrines through a directive that defined them as ‘sites of the rites of state’ (kokka no sōshi; Murakami 1970: 86–8, 93–4). Murakami noted that government policy underwent considerable revision and adjustment in these initial decades and that the content of State Shinto was still fluid. Adjustments included a rapid recasting and repositioning of the offices in charge of matters concerning deities and the national cult. Buddhist priests joined Shinto priests under the new name of ‘national evangelists’ (kyōdōshoku; also translated as ‘doctrinal instructors’) in a joint campaign to promulgate the Great Teaching, only to have the two groups split a few years later into separate organizations, each of which was to continue the common goal of evangelization on its own (Murakami 1970: 106–8, 112–3). Shortly thereafter, responding to a call from Shinto leaders to separate shrine Shinto as the rites of state from ordinary religion, in 1882 the government declared that shrine priests should no longer engage in evangelization or other ‘religious’ activities such as conducting funerals. Although this measure applied initially only to the 120 or so ‘national’ or ‘state’ shrines (kankokuheisha) and not the vastly more numerous ordinary or ‘popular’ shrines (minsha; officially categorized as ‘prefectural and lower shrines’), it removed from shrine Shinto a substantive religious function and made it into something limited to ritual activities. At the same time, the separation of rites and religion enabled State Shinto to secure a privileged position as a theoretically ‘nonreligious’ national cult standing above the religions of Sect Shinto, Buddhism, and Christianity (Murakami 1970: 117–9). This denatured religion became grounded in popular life through the creation of a cycle of national holidays (or ‘ritual days’) linked to the major imperial 150

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ritual celebrations. On these days, shrines throughout the nation conducted rites in coordination with those performed at the palace, a linkage that instilled awe and reverence for the emperor as the sacred centre of the polity (Murakami 1970: 151–3, 158). Shrine Shinto had little in the way of intrinsic teachings, and the separation of rites and religion had thwarted the growth of the seeds of doctrinal development visible in late Tokugawa and early Meiji debates about the otherworld and the pantheon of deities to be worshipped. What supplied State Shinto with its doctrine were inputs from outside intended to strengthen reverence for the emperor and loyalty to the state. Prime among these were the Meiji Constitution, promulgated in 1889, and the Rescript on Education, issued in the emperor’s name in 1890. Article 28 of the Constitution, with its provision that ‘Japanese subjects shall, within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects, enjoy freedom of religious belief ’, served to obscure the contradiction between the premise of freedom of belief and State Shinto’s preeminence as a state cult held to lie outside the framework of religion (Murakami 1970: 128–9). Inoue Kowashi (1844–95), one of the main drafters of the Rescript on Education, sought to keep it from containing any specific religious content. The rescript nevertheless firmly grounded education on a state cult through its allusions to the ‘imperial ancestors’ who ‘founded Our Empire on a basis broad and everlasting’ and its call for subjects to ‘guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth’. Surrounded by an atmosphere of religious awe and reinforced by repeated declarations that the foundation of national morality lay in ‘reverence for deities and ancestors’ (keishin sūso), the Rescript on Education thus became the core doctrinal text of State Shinto (Murakami 1970: 136–40). In 1900 the government took a further step toward strengthening the administrative framework of State Shinto. Shrines had previously been grouped together with Buddhist temples under the jurisdiction of the Shrine and Temple Bureau of the Home Ministry. In 1900, however, the government divided this bureau into two, the Shrine Bureau and the Religions Bureau (responsible for matters concerning Buddhist temples, Sect Shinto chapels, and Christian churches), and put the Shrine Bureau at the head of Home Ministry bureaus (Murakami 1970: 166). The Shrine Bureau henceforth took the lead in setting in place a system of public financing for popular shrines as well as national shrines (Murakami 1970: 175–9). It also sought to reduce the number of small village shrines, which often lacked a permanent priest, by encouraging their merger into larger local shrines that would function effectively as units within the State Shinto system (Murakami 1970: 166–9). Confronting growing social contradictions and the emergence of leftist movements, in the following decades the government enlisted religions in general in an effort to guide the populace in the ‘correct direction’. Simultaneously it intensified efforts to make shrines and their organizations of parishioners (ujiko) the anchors of ideological control at the local level (Murakami 1970: 179–81). From the beginning of the Meiji period the government had created new shrines (sōkensha) linked to the state, including what would become the national shrine to the war dead,Yasukuni Shrine (on Yasukuni Shrine, see Chapter 31 in this volume), and shrines to imperial loyalists (Murakami 1970: 182–9). This movement reached a peak in the 1910s when, after the death of Emperor Meiji, the government orchestrated a nationwide campaign to unify popular sentiment in support of the construction of an immense shrine to him (Murakami 1970: 190–2).The government also erected shrines in the colonies as outposts of Japanese imperialism (Murakami 1970: 192–5). From the 1930s, with the invasion of China and the outbreak of war, State Shinto became the spearhead of ‘imperial-system fascism’ at home and militarist expansion abroad, an instrument for promoting claims that Japan, with its unique, emperor-centred national polity (kokutai), was a divine country (Murakami 1970: 80, 196). 151

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Murakami’s critique of State Shinto had a crusading note to it, stimulated in part by concern over what he saw as signs of State Shinto’s revival, including the reinstitution in 1967 of a national holiday to commemorate the putative founding of the Japanese empire by the legendary Emperor Jinmu (Murakami 1970: 219–21). The picture Murakami painted in Kokka shintō and subsequent works in which he expanded on some of the aspects he introduced in it (Murakami 1974; 1977) was of State Shinto as a totalistic entity, created by an essentially monolithic government (aided by allies within the Shinto world) and imposed upon the populace from above. Despite shifts in emphasis and variation from period to period in the degree of governmental support, it had unfolded in a more or less straight line from the beginning of the Meiji period until 1945. The forcefulness of Murakami’s argument and the comprehensiveness of the book’s scope, covering the entirety of the prewar modern era, were key reasons for his thesis’s influence and appeal. But those same qualities also invited revision and rejoinder. Next we may turn to some of the main foci of the debate they engendered.

Scope and periodization One major objection to the Murakami thesis has been its totalistic, straight-line nature. An example is that voiced by Yasumaru Yoshio (1934–2016), who may be considered a representative of the third approach sketched earlier. A historian of popular religion and thought,Yasumaru took up many of the same topics as Murakami, but generally avoided use of the State Shinto framework as overly schematic and static and thus unable to capture the dynamics of popular engagement with the policies of the Meiji government and the changes they wrought in people’s religious life (see Haga 1994: 11–4). Murakami, Yasumaru suggests, projected back into earlier periods an image based on experience of the ‘ultranationalism and enforced adherence to Shinto’ characteristic of the war period starting in 1931. As a result, he failed to pay due heed to the particularities of what lay between that later development and the early Meiji acclamation of ‘unity of rites and rule’ and promotion of Shinto as a national religious cult (Yasumaru 1992: 194). Concerns of this sort have made the periodization of State Shinto the subject of considerable attention. Murakami proposed a four-stage evolution: a ‘formative’ stage from 1868 to the late 1880s, a period of ‘doctrinal completion’ from the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution in 1889 to the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, a period of ‘completion as a system’ from that point to the early 1930s, and a final stage of a ‘fascist state religion’ from the early 1930s to 1945 (Murakami 1970: 78–80). Looking at developments of the first two stages, Nakajima Michio (b. 1944), came up with an alternative view of what had happened in that span of time. A historian of modern Japan who basically follows the first approach sketched earlier, Nakajima initially worked within the framework of Murakami’s periodization. In an article written in 1972 he sought to clarify the process whereby, subsequent to the breakdown of the early Meiji effort to promote Shinto as a national religious cult, by the mid-1880s the principle had taken shape that Shinto was not a religion. This, he held, paved the way for establishment of the State Shinto system, which was firmly in place by the end of the 1880s (Nakajima 1972: 26–8). As he examined different aspects of the breakdown of the early Meiji effort, however, Nakajima began to revise his picture of when the State Shinto system was established. He noted that from the mid-1870s to the early 1880s the state had adopted a ‘hands-off ’ policy toward shrines (Nakajima 1977a: 169). For the vast majority of shrines, those at the prefectural level and below, earlier provisions for shrine priests to receive stipends paid out of local taxes had been terminated in 1873. Financial support for such priests was to be left up to ‘the people’s faith and devotion’. In late 1879, the government ordered that official ranks were no 152

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longer to be granted to priests of prefectural and lower-level shrines. In terms of status, these priests were to be treated as comparable to Buddhist priests in charge of individual temples. The government also ended the practice whereby local officials were to distribute amulets on behalf of Ise Shrine, declaring in 1878 that ‘whether or not to accept such amulets should be completely a matter of people’s free choice’ (Nakajima 1977a: 170). The 1882 order that shrine priests should no longer serve as national evangelists, which became the foundation for the assertion of Shinto’s nonreligious character, marked a turn away from this ‘hands-off ’ policy and thus the start of the formation of the State Shinto system (Nakajima 1977a: 175). But this system could not be considered to be established by 1890, as Murakami (and previously Nakajima himself) had held (Nakajima 1977a: 177). The period of establishment would begin only around the time of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894–95, and it would not be complete until ca. 1912. Unlike the situation in later periods, for instance, no formal announcement of either the start of the war with Qing China or victory was made at any shrine but Ise. The policy of fiscal stringency toward shrines (high-ranking national shrines as well as prefectural level and below) continued until the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century (Nakajima 1977a: 182–4). Further, ‘establishment of the State Shinto system’ pertained to the orientation of state policy; it did not mean that policy had penetrated to the level of popular life by 1912. Only gradually would changes in the social and political context and the experience of war result in State Shinto’s having a substantive impact on everyday life (Nakajima 1977a: 190). Many researchers, Western as well as Japanese, have adopted a comparable modified timeline for the evolution of the State Shinto system. They note a downturn in support for shrines and Shinto from the mid-1870s, although vary in their estimations of the timing of a renewed upsurge. Wilbur Fridell (1921–1994), for instance, also writing in the 1970s, sees the establishment of the Shrine Bureau as a stand-alone office in 1900 as a key turning point. He concludes that State Shinto ‘was not fully operable until the late Meiji years’ and that even then ‘important qualifications’ need to be kept in mind (Fridell 1975: 144–5). Helen Hardacre (b. 1949) characterizes the years from 1868 to 1880 as a period of ‘experimentation and disillusion’ and those from 1880 to 1905 as one of ‘declining state support’. From 1905, relations between Shinto and the state were consolidated, although to a considerable extent this ‘represented simply a hardening or universalization of earlier policy’. The years from 1905 to 1930 saw Shinto’s ‘expansion and increased influence’, and the period from 1930 to 1945 marked its ‘maximized influence’ (Hardacre 1989: 22–6; for an updated view, see Hardacre 2017, which appeared too late to consider here). Although the trend to locate the establishment of State Shinto sometime in the first decade or so of the twentieth century is widespread, not all researchers agree. Ernst Lokowandt (b. 1944), who focuses on the institutional framework of State Shinto as reflected in government regulations and decrees, sees a three-stage development from 1868 to 1890, where he ends his study. The turning points came in 1872, with the shift from an attempt to establish a Shinto purged of Buddhist elements as the state religion to the incorporation of Buddhist as well as Shinto priests as national evangelizers, and 1882, with the order that Shinto priests should no longer serve as national evangelizers.This latter change in course was the foundation for the conversion of Shinto into a supposedly nonreligious state cult aimed at strengthening imperial and state authority.The evolution of State Shinto was effectively complete with the issuing of the Rescript on Education in 1890 (Lokowandt 1978: 347–52). In his study, written in German, but with an English summary, Lokowandt translates many of the regulations and decrees pertaining to shrines, priests and religion issued between 1868 and 1890. His book provides the most extensive coverage of these basic sources available in a Western language. (Holtom includes translations of some of the most important sources in his 1922 study; see Holtom 1922: 11–48 and passim.) 153

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Miyachi Masato (b. 1944), an authority on late Edo and Meiji political and social history, follows a quite similar timeline. He takes issue with Nakajima’s pushing State Shinto’s establishment to the end of the first decade of the twentieth century (Miyachi 1981: 267; see also Nakajima 1977b). In Miyachi’s view, the principles and structures of State Shinto took shape gradually through a meandering process of stops and starts over the course of the first two decades of the Meiji period, but were basically in place by the early 1890s (Miyachi 1988: 565). He uses this framework to organize the Shinto-related materials contained in the compendium of sources on ‘religion and the state’ he and Yasumaru edited for a series on modern Japanese thought (Yasumaru 1988). The documents included under the heading ‘The road to State Shinto’ (section 1, edited by Miyachi) go up to 1891, as does the extremely useful appendix of regulations and edicts concerning religion. Others emphasizing continuity over ruptures in the unfolding of State Shinto between early Meiji and 1945 include Klaus Antoni (b. 1953) and Shimazono Susumu (b. 1948), both specialists on Japanese thought and religion. Although recognizing that many of the concrete forms through which State Shinto was expressed were created after 1868, Antoni sees it essentially as an organic outgrowth of elements long embedded in Japanese intellectual and religious traditions rather than as a modern ‘invention’ (Antoni 2016: 14–5, 239–43). For him, the issuing in 1890 of the Rescript on Education, which constituted State Shinto’s ‘Bible’, marks ‘the completion of Meiji-period State Shinto’. In the militarist context of the 1930s, the ‘comprehensive State Shinto worldview’ enacted by Meiji politicians ‘developed into a totalitarian, fundamentalist doctrine of salvation for Japan and the world’ (Antoni 2016: 215–8, 257). Shimazono posits a four-stage evolution of State Shinto. He defines the initial stage, extending from 1868 to ca. 1890, as the ‘period of formation’. The second, lasting from ca. 1890 to the time of the Great Treason Incident and the death of Emperor Meiji in the early 1910s, was the ‘period of establishment’. The key developments of this second stage did not revolve around shrines, per se. Their core was rather the fostering of reverence for the emperor through the elaboration of a ceremonial system centred in the schools and the institution of training programmes for shrine priests intended to nurture a heightened sense of national mission (Shimazono 2009: 101–7, 114–8; Shimazono 2010: 143–65). During the third stage of ‘penetration’, from the early 1910s to the outbreak of war in 1931, nationalist sentiments spurred the populace itself, including the lower levels of the shrine priesthood, to become ‘the carriers of State Shinto’ (Shimazono 2010: 166–75). Such support ‘from below’ was an important factor in the intensification of a nationalist, emperor-centred rhetoric during the fourth, ‘fascist’, stage, from 1931 to 1945 (Shimazono 2010: 176, 180). In Shimazono’s view, State Shinto has continued to exert an influence in the postwar period. Failing to take full account of the part imperial ritual played in State Shinto, the Occupation preserved the imperial system. It thereby left the door open to ongoing pressures for revival of various dimensions of prewar emperor-centred ritual structures and ideology (Shimazono 2010: 184–95).

Institutional considerations and popular engagement As the discussion earlier indicates, one consequence of the attention given periodization has been an emphasis (especially among Japanese scholars) on defining stages in State Shinto’s ‘formation’ (keisei, seiritsu) and ‘establishment’ (kakuritsu). That, in turn, has encouraged a focus on institutional issues as offering more concrete criteria for measurement than ideological questions. Researchers such as Sakamoto Koremaru (b. 1950) and Yamaguchi Teruomi (b. 1970) have pursued the specifics of shrine policy by digging deeply into government and other archives. Sakamoto, a specialist on the history of modern Shinto, is a leading representative of the second, 154

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bracketing approach to the notion of State Shinto, whereas Yamaguchi, a historian who openly queries the construct’s usefulness, exemplifies the third approach. From Diet records and correspondence between government ministries they have teased out details of negotiations over matters from shrine financing to regulations for different levels of shrines to the establishment of the Shrine Bureau in 1900. In so doing, they have shone light on the diversity of opinion within the government and revisited other evidence that raises questions about the degree and nature of the government’s commitment to promoting shrines in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Both Sakamoto and Yamaguchi point, for instance, to the Finance Ministry’s persistent reluctance from the 1870s to commit state funds to shrine matters. Beginning in 1885, various elements within the government, including key figures within the Home Ministry and Finance Ministry, embarked on a strategy to make national shrines as well as shrines of prefectural level and below economically self-sufficient, with an eye to ultimately ending state funding for all shrines but Ise and Yasukuni (Sakamoto 1994: 296–9; Yamaguchi 1999: 120–42; see also Nitta 1997: 154–93; Maxey 2014: 181–2). Only in 1906, when the impracticality of this strategy had become apparent, and in the face of strong pressures from shrine supporters in the Diet and elsewhere, did the two ministries come around to the idea of reinstituting permanent state funding for national shrines and establishing a mechanism for local governments to provide monetary offerings to prefectural and lower shrines (Yamaguchi 1999: 277–311). Having surveyed these developments, Yamaguchi concludes that the main line of government policy toward shrines from the early 1870s until into the twentieth century was to limit public expenditure on shrines and to have them, like temples, develop their own means of support (Yamaguchi 1999: 333–4). Another point that has been used to measure shifts in the government’s position on shrines is change in the scope of reference of the term ‘rites of state’ (kokka no sōshi). Sakamoto notes that the inclusion of this term in an 1871 government order to shrines throughout the country endowed it subsequently with symbolic importance. Had the term not been mentioned in this context, the modern history of the relationship between shrines and the state might have evolved differently, and in this sense it became a key element of what may be understood as State Shinto. Its exact meaning, however, was not at all clear. In the 1871 order it served basically as a rhetorical device to support the order’s main point, which was the abolition of the monopolizing of posts at major shrines by a hereditary priesthood as if they were a private possession. At a time when the domains continued to exist and the new government did not yet have direct authority over the entire country, it did not mean the extension of centralized control over all the nation’s shrines (Sakamoto 1994: 20–2, 365–6; see also Fridell 1973: 131–2; Fridell 1975: 142–4). The subsequent measures in the 1870s that cut off prefectural and lower shrines from state funding and the ending of the grant of official ranks to the priests of these shrines effectively excluded them from the category of those responsible for performance of the ‘rites of state’ (Sakamoto 1994: 130–1, 286–8). The historian Azegami Naoki (b. 1969), who has focused particularly on developments among local shrines in the twentieth century, points out that although regulations issued in 1891 for priests of national shrines specified that they were to devote themselves to conducting the ‘rites of state’, parallel regulations issued at the same time for priests of prefectural and lower shrines did not include this wording. Only in 1913 were the two sets of regulations unified and responsibility for the ‘rites of state’ made applicable to shrine priests of all levels (Azegami 2009: 3–4, 134–6; 2012: 72). The association of all shrine priests with conduct of the ‘rites of state’ was, Sakamoto agrees, an ‘epochal’ event (Sakamoto 1994: 309–10; Sakamoto 2000: 274–5). Even then, however, the term’s implications remained subject to varying interpretation. In many ways, its potency derived from this ambiguity; it became a kind of 155

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magical incantation used by different parties for different aims (Sakamoto 1994: 339). For shrine priests and their supporters, it frequently functioned more as a slogan to call for rectification of neglect and insufficient state support than as a description of the actuality of a privileged status (Sakamoto 1994: 10–11;Yamaguchi 1999: 130, 140–1; Azegami 2009; 2012). Consideration of negotiations over shrine financing and status has also served to focus attention on players other than government bureaucrats, in particular the Diet and the shrine priest organizations that emerged from the 1890s. Common connections to particular localities fostered ties between shrines and Diet members, who often served as head of shrine parishioner associations. The creation of the National Shrine Priest Association in 1898 facilitated communication among hitherto disconnected local groups and enabled shrine priests to voice their concerns more effectively (Yamaguchi 1999: 206–8, 232). Motions were brought in the Diet from the 1890s calling for the establishment of a special office to look after shrine affairs, and both houses adopted such a motion in 1896.Yamaguchi points out that the government finally moved in 1900 to establish the Shrine Bureau only after the Diet, in the face of government inaction, again adopted a motion in 1899 calling for a special shrine office, a measure for which the newly organized National Shrine Priest Association also lobbied actively (Yamaguchi 1999: 203–76; Maxey 2014: 194–209, 218–9, 231–2). The Diet and National Shrine Priest Association likewise played instrumental roles in the movement leading to reestablishment of permanent state funding of national shrines and the provision of monetary offerings from local governments for prefectural and lower shrines. At the same time, once a bureau dedicated to shrine matters had been put in place, it became a focal voice within the government to promote shrine-related policy. The extended tenure of two bureau chiefs, Mizuno Rentarō (1868–1949) and Inoue Tomoichi (1871–1919), from 1904 to 1908 and 1908 to 1915, respectively, was particularly important in setting the direction of government shrine policy thenceforth, including the shrine merger movement initiated in 1906 in conjunction with the arrangement for monetary offerings for prefectural and lower shrines (Yamaguchi 1999: 277–311; Nakajima 1977a: 189–90; Fujimoto 2006; on shrine mergers, see Fridell 1973; Morioka 1987; Sakurai 1992; Azegami 2009). Examination of other actors’ involvement in shrine-related developments has resulted also in reevaluation of issues such as the founding of Meiji Shrine. Whereas Murakami depicts the campaign for its creation as a top-down matter orchestrated by the government, Yamaguchi paints a quite different picture. In his telling, it was a variety of other parties, including the media and Tokyo business leaders, who figured centrally in the shrine’s ‘advent’ (shutsugen), a term that contrasts with the ‘government-as-instigator’ connotations of the word ‘creation’ (sōken) often used of the establishment of new shrines such as Meiji (Yamaguchi 2005; on Meiji Shrine, see also Imaizumi 2013). The concern for issues of ‘formation’ and ‘establishment’ that has been central to the debates over State Shinto has led, somewhat paradoxically, to greater attention being devoted to the years up to the first decade of the twentieth century than to the period thereafter, when, it is generally agreed, the government actively promoted shrine-centred policies. Major exceptions have been the work of the historian Akazawa Shirō (b. 1948) and, more recently, Azegami Naoki. Akazawa takes up various aspects of the government’s heightened emphasis on shrines from the mid-1910s on, such as renewed pressures for households throughout the country to receive amulets from Ise, requiring schoolchildren to offer reverence at local shrines and calls for demonstrations of reverence at Yasukuni and local shrines to the war dead. He also explores tensions in the environment surrounding shrines. On the one hand, the shrine-centred policies spurred often heated debate in different quarters, including government advisory committees on religion and on shrines, as to whether or not shrines were religious and the implications of this for 156

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requiring participation in shrine rites (Akazawa 1985; on these issues, see also Holtom 1922: 40–68; Holtom 1938: 289–316; Holtom 1943; Kōmoto 1978; Hardacre 1989: 90–113; Nakai 2013; Breen 2014). On the other, in the late 1910s and 1920s, priests of prefectural and lower shrines became increasingly assertive in expressing frustration over the financial difficulties they faced and the gap between their status and that of priests at upper-level shrines (Akazawa 1985: 51–104). Making use of local shrine association records and periodicals, Azegami explores in depth the situation of shrines at the local level from the late 1910s to the 1930s. He, too, examines the views and activities of lower-level shrine priests, but whereas Akazawa sees a shift among such priests from more democratic tendencies in the 1910s and 1920s to cooption by the government as promoters of the national agenda in the 1930s, Azegami finds greater continuities. He notes that the tensions in lower-level priests’ relationship with the upper echelons of the shrine world led them to emphasize their role as the immediate carriers to the populace – their parishioners – of reverence for deities and ancestors, the foundation of national morality. They, rather than the upper-level shrines, more distant from the people, were thus the true sites of  ‘the rites of state’ and deserved recognition as such. Concerned with issues of local pride and self-identity as well as the national mission, lower-level shrine priest activists held that the shrines’ religious character should be affirmed rather than denied, albeit as something distinct from ‘ordinary’ religion. In various regards they served not only as a conduit for transmitting views from above, but also as a source of inputs into ideas about the place of shrines in national life (Azegami 2009; 2011; 2012). Shimazono notes that his characterization of the third stage in the development of State Shinto as one of its promotion ‘from below’ owes much to Azegami’s findings (Shimazono 2010: 172).

Shrines as religious or not The relationship between shrines and religion is a thread running throughout the State Shinto discourse. Debated repeatedly in the prewar period, it was a focus of Holtom’s 1922 and later works. It lay at the core of the Shinto Directive’s definition of State Shinto, and postwar research has continued to see the demarcation of shrines from religion as one of State Shinto’s defining attributes. Quite naturally, a major theme of that research has been how and why the demarcation occurred. Because it is generally agreed that the separation of shrine priests (shinkan) from national evangelists in 1882 was a turning point in the state’s stance on shrines, one line of investigation has centred on that development, with emphasis on divisions within the Shinto camp as a key factor. Emerging in the course of the initial promotion up to 1872 of Shinto as a national cult, these divisions continued in the subsequent periods of joint and then separate proselytization by Shinto and Buddhist national evangelists, when they took the form of a dispute over which deities to make the central ritual objects. Concerned that the different Shinto groups were turning deities linked to the imperial line into objects of sectarian worship and fearful that the friction might lead to socially divisive religious conflict, government leaders took steps to prevent this by ordering priests of upper-level shrines to cease engagement in evangelization and other ‘religious’ activities. Henceforth these activities were to be reserved for what became the Shinto sects (Nakajima 1972; Hardacre 1986a; 1989: 42–51; Haga 1994: 153–220; Maxey 2014: 142–63). A second line of investigation has focused on the intellectual background of the view of shrines as not religious, giving particular attention to inputs from the Buddhist side. Buddhist leaders, unhappy about being assigned a subordinate role in the joint campaign to promulgate 157

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the Great Teaching and seeking a firm place for Buddhism as a cooperative party within the new national order, pursued a compromise. Accepting reverence for the emperor, the imperial ancestors and those who had served emperor and nation as the foundation of the Japanese polity, they argued that Shinto should be purified of inappropriate religious accretions and upheld as a nonreligious, ritual expression of such reverence. Religious matters, on the other hand, should be left to the Buddhists, who through their activities in this sphere would simultaneously contribute to the flourishing of the imperial house and nation (Yasumaru 1979: 199–205; Yasumaru 1988: 541–53; Ketelaar 1990: 122–30; Nitta 1997, 2000; Tonami 2006; Maxey 2014: 108–39; Krämer 2015: 52–65).The tendency of some intellectuals of the time to see Shinto as not meeting the criteria for a ‘true’ religion has also been identified as shaping a readiness to think of Shinto in nonreligious terms (Yamaguchi 1999: 46–9; Josephson 2012: 196–223). As the earlier discussion shows, however, the government’s demarcation of shrine priests from national evangelists hardly put an end to the debate over shrines’ religious or nonreligious character. Among other things, not all shrine supporters agreed with the government’s attempt to separate shrines from religion. As with the activists described by Azegami, although they were not necessarily ready to put shrines in the same category as religions such as Christianity and Buddhism, some pro-shrine figures saw efforts to limit an association with religion as denying shrines an essential quality. The question of shrines’ relationship to religion thus cropped up again and again, without definitive resolution, throughout the prewar period (for a survey of early twentieth-century views on the issue, see Holtom 1922: 69–128; see also Thal 2002). The question connects with another major issue: How did shrines’ putative nonreligious character (or requiring on that ground the offering of reverence at shrines, reception of Ise amulets and such) bear on the principle of ‘freedom of religious belief ’ inscribed in Article 28 of the Meiji Constitution? Although some researchers, such as Murakami, have seen Article 28 as little more than a veil intended to disguise the ongoing promotion of State Shinto as a national cult, others have held that the Constitution’s formulators did not mean to secure a place for shrine rites outside the parameters of the right to enjoy freedom of religious belief (i.e., ‘within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects’). Both Nakajima Michio and the Shinto studies scholar Nitta Hitoshi (b. 1958) have argued, for instance, that the Privy Council debates on the draft version of the Meiji Constitution prior to its promulgation show that not even the council’s conservative, pro-shrine members assumed that Article 28’s ‘duties as subjects’ included participation in shrine rites (Nakajima 1977c: 136–8; Nitta 1997: 67–8; Nitta 2000: 252–3; on the background to and debates over Article 28, see also Abe 1969; Nakajima 1976; Maxey 2014: 185–90; Nakai 2013: 111–2). The parameters of freedom of religious belief carried a built-in ambiguity, however. Yasumaru Yoshio points out that whereas the surrounding articles defining other rights specified their scope relative to codified law, Article 28’s looser frame of reference left it open to subjective interpretation (Yasumaru 1979: 209–10;Yasumaru 1988: 553–5).The move from the 1910s toward requiring participation in shrine rites aroused opposition, particularly from Christian and some Buddhist groups and from intellectuals, as contravening Article 28. On the other hand, much of the general public, as well as the shrine world and government officials, came increasingly to take it for granted that being a Japanese subject meant joining in shrine rites. This trend in turn encouraged an interpretive shift toward holding such participation to be a duty (see Sakamoto 2007). Although much of the impetus for this shift came from the government, other parties also contributed. Among these was the Catholic Church, which had long forbidden its believers to take part in shrine rites. In 1932, in an effort to resolve repeated friction arising from this stance, 158

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the Catholic hierarchy in Japan came to an understanding with the Ministry of Education. The ministry would issue a statement clarifying that the purpose of having schoolchildren offer reverence was to nurture patriotism, and church officials would cease prohibiting Catholic believers from taking part in shrine rites. In 1936, the Vatican, endorsing this arrangement, declared shrine rites to have ‘only a purely civil value’ (Swyngedouw 1967; Minamiki 1985: 121–58; Schatz 2012; Nakai 2013). By situating shrine rites firmly within the sphere of patriotism, such developments served, even if inadvertently, to reinforce the growing assumption that participation in them was a Japanese subject’s duty. The rapprochement with the church was one further twist in the complicated modern history of shrines underlying the controversies over State Shinto.

Further reading Breen, John, and Teeuwen, Mark (2010) A New History of Shinto, Richmond, UK: Curzon. Hardacre, Helen (1989) Shintō and the State, 1868–1988, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. _____ (2017) Shinto: A History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scheid, Bernhard (ed.) (2013) Kami Ways in Nationalist Territory: Shinto Studies in Prewar Japan and the West, Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences. Shimazono, Susumu (2009) ‘State Shinto in the lives of the people: the establishment of emperor worship, modern nationalism, and shrine Shinto in late Meiji’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 36(1): 93–124.

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12 Conservatism and conservative reaction Christopher W. A. Szpilman

In this chapter, I trace the history of conservatism from the 1868 Meiji Restoration to the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941. Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) defines political conservatism as a phenomenon which arose in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century as a hostile reaction to the ideas of the French enlightenment: equality, fraternity and liberty (Mannheim 1953: 79). Such a hostile reaction can also be detected in Japan during the entire period under discussion in this chapter. When historians talk of Japanese conservatism, they tend to refer to the views of a group of men who opposed the rapid Westernization programme of the government and objected to its perceived negligence of customs and tradition in the period of ‘civilization and enlightenment’ (bunmei kaika) in the second half of the nineteenth century (Matsumoto 1958; Pyle 1998: 100– 3). Still, it is wrong to regard opposition to Westernization1 as the main criterion of Japanese conservatism. Conservatives, except for few diehards, recognized the need to import technology, science and such, even if they opposed the wholesale importation of Western ethics, morality, law, customs and traditions. The issue is complicated by the fact that, as a rule, historians do not regard the founders of the Meiji state as conservative. This is no doubt because in the first decades of the Meiji era (1868–1912) they acted like ruthless revolutionaries. After all, they toppled the shogunate and rammed through a series of sweeping reforms in utter disregard of customs and traditions. Dazzled by the Meiji founders’ reformist zeal, historians tend to interpret the reinstatement of the emperor to the supreme position in the state, the revival (albeit only for a brief time) of the archaic Heian period (794–1185) government structure and the choice of the words ‘restoration’ or ‘renovation’ (ishin or isshin) to describe the 1868 overthrow of the shogunate as expedients used to legitimize the new government’s precarious position in the face of widespread resentment, not as moves stemming from the profoundly conservative views of the founders of the Meiji state. Yet for all their Westernizing fervour and disregard for tradition, there is no doubt that the founders of the Meiji state were conservative by the yardstick of Mannheim’s definition. They rejected individualistic freedoms and subordinated the individual to the state; they spurned equality and imposed a hierarchical social system with the emperor at its apex; and they repudiated the concept of universal brotherhood and instead promoted the notion of the uniqueness 160

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of the Japanese people. In spite of their predilection for ruthless reforms, the founding fathers intended to build, and succeeded in building, a supremely conservative, authoritarian, hierarchical and largely undemocratic state that was antithetical to the ideals of the Enlightenment: equality, fraternity and liberty. If the central question of politics from Plato down to the present day is ‘who should rule?’, then the Japanese conservatives’ response was that it should be men who would work selflessly for the benefit of the emperor, the state and the nation.This idealistic conviction that an enlightened elite could and should rule the state helps explain the prewar conservatives’ dogged hostility to party politics and their fear of democracy in which politicians are chosen at the whim of the enfranchised masses. It is highly relevant in this context that Plato’s elitism and paternalism resembled closely the political values of Confucianism (Szpilman 2013). In the first part of this chapter, I examine the role of conservative ideas in the formation of the Meiji state, 1868–90. I briefly discuss the views of those conservatives (hoshu) who opposed the Westernizing reforms of the government. I also look at the views of the founders of the Meiji state who, under the constant pressure of the opposition Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, strove to create a state that would be conservative, yet modern. This state came fully into being with the promulgation of the Constitution in February 1889 and the opening of the Imperial Diet in 1890. The second part covers the period from 1890 to the outbreak of the war with the United States in 1941. I describe how, after the promulgation of the Constitution, some of the surviving founding fathers and the conservatives outside of the government concentrated on protecting the new constitutional state from real and perceived threats posed by the criticisms of liberal thinkers and activists and by the rise of party politics. In the late 1930s and the 1940s, the conservatives woke up to another danger to their conception of the state, that presented by militarism and totalitarianism. They then did all they could to eviscerate the reforms that the radicals now in power, who were impressed by the totalitarian experiments in Germany and the Soviet Union, were putting into effect. Finally, I will outline the highlights of this conservative resistance to militarism and point to certain continuities as well as differences between prewar and postwar conservatism.

Conservative reaction in the Meiji period In 1868, the Meiji Restoration reinstated the emperor to the position of real authority and supreme prestige under the slogan of sonnō (revere the emperor).2 Early that year the emperor moved from his dilapidated residence in Kyoto to Edo, now renamed Tokyo (Eastern Capital), where he was installed in the former shogun’s castle (today’s Imperial Palace).With the emperor came other trappings of Heian Japan’s polity: the antiquated administrative positions, the antiquated court ranks and the antiquated court rituals. An impartial contemporary observer might have concluded that the events that were unfolding in front of his eyes were a fundamentalist revolution. True, for many members of the new government the slogan sonnō was simply a convenient device intended to legitimize what was in effect a revolutionary takeover; but others took the ‘revere the emperor’ slogan seriously. They had fought the shogunate not because it was an anachronistic feudal entity, but because the shogunate, by implementing an array of reforms, had threatened to undermine Japan’s special character as embodied in the direct rule of the emperor. For such men, the Meiji Restoration was not a revolution, but a return to the state of ancient perfection by removing the intervening impurities of military (shogunal) rule. Predictably, a tension arose between these earnest ideology-driven conservatives and those who used the emperor as an expedient. Expedient or not, the emperor, once reinstated, was at the 161

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centre of power. He may have been an empty vessel, but often the conservatives filled it with their ideas (Banno 1989: 130). Of such reactionary conservatives Motoda Nagazane (1818–91) and Sasaki Takayuki (1830– 1910), advisors and preceptors to the emperor, are perhaps best known. The former was a Confucianist, the latter brought up in Shinto tradition, but the distinction is of little importance for our purposes. That is because by the middle of the nineteenth century, Shintoism had absorbed Confucian values and moral norms and had come to share the same ethical values as Confucianism (Antoni 2004: 58). In fact, these values and moral norms had by then become accepted as ‘the core of kokutai’ (the national polity) (Antoni 2004: 59; 1998).3 Motoda and Sasaki derived their influence within the Meiji government largely from their direct access to the young and impressionable emperor, who on the basis of the advice received from them, intervened to prevent or at least soften the impact of Westernizing policies. Yet it would be misleading to dismiss them as obscurantists (Hashikawa 1968: 18). Motoda may have feared that Westernization would lead to the loss of the political and moral standards that he believed had obtained in ‘the golden age of Confucianism in Japan’ in the Edo period (1603–1868), but he recognized the need to modernize (i.e., to Westernize) the military, trade and industry (Shively 1965: 197). Sasaki was familiar with Western political ideas. He adamantly rejected the democratic views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) that were at the time popular in Freedom and People’s Right Movement circles and showed as early as 1880 a marked preference for the ideas of the Irish conservative thinker Edmund Burke (1729–97) (Itō 2001: 110). Over time, Motoda and Sasaki gained many allies as some modernizers abandoned their proWestern zeal and rediscovered the benefits of authentic Japanese culture.These included Nakamura Masanao (1832–91) and Nishimura Shigeki (1828–1902), both one-time members of the progressive Meirokusha (Meiji 6 Society), who combined extensive knowledge of the West with a thorough understanding of Confucianism. They were also joined by three retired generals, viscounts Torio Koyata (1848–1905), Miura Gorō (1847–1926) and Tani Tateki (1837–1911), who had resigned from the government, partly because they were alarmed by the rapid tempo of, and the social dislocation caused by, the government reforms. They also objected strongly to what they perceived as servility of the government toward the Western powers (Matsumoto 1958; on Tani, Pyle 1998:114). Torio deserves a close look. Born in Chōshū (present-day Yamaguchi Prefecture) and a prominent figure in the Meiji Restoration,Torio, like the other two, objected to the excesses of modernization and the general contempt for tradition shown by the government. He accused the Meiji rulers of arrogance and highhandedness and was highly critical of their neglect of ‘eastern ethics and morality’. He was particularly scathing of the government’s foreign policy, which he reviled as subservient to the Western powers. Like Miura and Tani, he would have preferred the government to cooperate with China to fend off the threat of Western imperialism (see also Chapter 3 in this volume; on Torio and Tani, Swale 2009:136–42). Torio’s extensive travels in Europe between 1885 and 1888, far from weakening his antiWesternizing animus, confirmed his conviction of the superiority of Eastern morality and strengthened his resolve to protect it against the influx of Western ethics. To this end, he participated in founding associations dedicated to the preservation and propagation of Eastern ethics: the Tōyō tetsugakkai (Eastern Philosophy Association) and the Nihon kokkyō daidōsha (The Company of the Great Way of Japan’s State Religion) (Warren Smith 1959: 67). The latter promoted an eclectic mixture of Confucianism, Zen Buddhism and Shinto under the label of Japan’s ‘national religion’, representing it as an alternative to ethics of Western provenance. In 1899 Torio also made an effort to rally politicians to the cause of Eastern morality by setting up a Hoshu chūseiha (Conservative Neutral Faction), a political group that, he hoped, would come to dominate the soon-to-open House of Peers (Hashikawa 1968: 8). 162

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To promote conservative views, Torio also launched Hoshu shinron (New Conservative Review), a journal intended to cater to the audience of all kinds of conservatives from ‘flexible moderates’ to ‘reactionaries and obscurantists’ (Hoshu shinron, 20 January 1889: 1, 4–10). Only eighteen issues of the journal saw the light of day before Torio decided to discontinue it in 1890. His, however, was not the only voice of conservatism at the time. In 1889 Miyake Setsurei (1860–1945), Shiga Shigetaka (1863–1927) and Sugiura Shigetake (1855–1924) of the Seikyōsha (Sacred Learning Association) launched Nihonjin (The Japanese). Like Hoshu shinron, this journal, too, stressed the preservation of national essence (kokusui) (which essentially meant morality, ethics, culture and the like). From that position it opposed an uncritical importation of Western culture and condemned the government’s foreign policy as passive and unduly proWestern.There was also Nihon (Japan), a newspaper launched in 1889 by Kuga Katsunan (1857– 1907). Kuga had resigned from his government job in 1888 in protest against Itō Hirobumi’s (Figure 12.1) ‘Westernizing’ policies. Nihon’s views were often indistinguishable from those of Nihonjin. Both publications in fact cooperated and, in 1907, after Kuga’s death, merged into a

Figure 12.1 The elder statesman Ito ¯ Hirobumi (a Meiji-era postcard). 163

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biweekly publication under the title Nihon oyobi Nihonjin (Japan and the Japanese) that went on to become, in the 1920s and 1930s, Japan’s leading nationalist journal. Kuga showed no nostalgic preoccupation with the past, but otherwise there was not much difference between him and other conservatives. Like them, he insisted that Japan must develop gradually in ‘organic and holistic’ fashion and he agreed with the likes of Motoda that traditional values such as filial piety, loyalty and obedience were essential components of Japanese culture. He too held that ‘successful modernization, without weakening the country’ could only be achieved if Eastern ethics and morality were preserved intact (Pyle 1998: 115). While Nihonjin and Nihon Shinbun popularized conservative ideas among the Japanese public, Motoda and Sasaki presented their views directly to the emperor (e.g., Warren Smith 1959: 77) and Torio and Tani promoted them in the House of Peers. Under the circumstances, the government found it hard to disregard conservative criticism. A good example of the strength of conservative influence is the 1890 failure to enact the Civil Law Code drafted by the French legal expert Gustave Émile Boissonade de Fontarabie (1825–1910), even though it had already been passed by the docile Privy Council dominated by government appointees. The conservatives objected less to the specific content of the proposed code; rather, they opposed the very idea of codifying Japan’s customs and traditions. As one of the conservatives, Hozumi Yatsuka (1860–1912), professor of law at Tokyo Imperial University, famously put it: ‘Loyalty and filial piety will perish with the enactment of the civil code’ (quoted in Hirakawa 1998: 73). Historians routinely discuss Meiji conservatism by focusing on figures such as Motoda, Sasaki, Miyake,Torio and Kuga (e.g., Hashikawa 1968), but, as I have already indicated above, the founding fathers of the Meiji state also deserve attention in any discussion of Meiji conservatism. The Meiji government was far from monolithic, and in the early years after the Restoration, it was split by disagreements about the wisdom of Westernization and reforms. The attitudes of the Meiji leaders toward Westernization were often highly contradictory. For example, Saigō Takamori (1828–77), who agreed that Western technology was needed to turn Japan into a powerful state, at the same time opposed the construction of railways because he believed them socially disruptive (Sakamoto 1998: 175; on Saigō, see Ravina 2004). Ōkubo Toshimichi (1830–78), who engineered a ruthless modernization programme that showed little respect for tradition, nevertheless believed that to ignore ‘native customs’ would harm the state (Sakamoto 1998: 214). Saigō and Ōkubo may have been in two minds about Westernizing reforms, but that was not the case with Iwakura Tomomi (1825–83) and Sanjō Sanetomi (1837–91), two prominent court nobles (kuge) in the Meiji government, who remained staunch conservatives throughout their lives. The latter was strongly influenced by two reactionary scholars belonging to the Hirata Atsutane school of national learning (on Hirata Atsutane, 1776–1843, see Tsunoda et al. 1964, vol. 2: 35–48), Yano Harumichi (1823–87) and Tamamatsu Misao (1810–72), who acted as his advisors. It was with such formidable conservative sceptics that Westernization enthusiasts like Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909) and Mori Arinori (1847–89) had to contend with in the first decade of the Meiji period. By 1878 Saigō and Ōkubo were dead, but Iwakura, Sanjō, Motoda and Sasaki put a damper on the Westernizing enthusiasm of reformers. Far from having it all their way, Itō Hirobumi, Inoue Kaoru (1836–1915), Ōkuma Shigenobu (1838–1922) and other reformers were often forced to moderate or even abandon their policies as a result of conservative pressure. In 1881, the balance tilted drastically in favour of the conservatives when Itō, until then an enthusiastic reformer, defected to the conservatives (Takii 2010: 55–6). In the first decade of the Meiji era, Itō had been an enthusiastic Westernizer, which had earned him the hostility of the conservatives. He remained also a Westernizer in the 1880s, when he, together with Inoue Kaoru, initiated the Westernizing excesses of the Rokumeikan period.4 But Itō was no rigid ideologue. He advocated Westernization, believing it essential to create a powerful efficient 164

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state and revise the unequal treaties. He would use any means available to achieve these two goals. If tradition and history were in the way, he would sweep them aside. But he was willing to draw on tradition and history, if he judged them useful for making Japan stronger. By the early 1880s, Itō had concluded that a) liberal ideas did not help to achieve modernization and that b) tradition and history had their uses in making Japan a powerful state. Itō’s volte-face was occasioned by the constitutional proposal Ōkuma Shigenobu had submitted to the throne in 1881. Ōkuma’s proposals included national elections to be held within one year, a national parliament to open within two and the principle that a party with most seats in parliament would automatically form a cabinet (Takii 2010: 56). Alarmed by the radical character of this proposal, Itō consulted Iwakura Tomomi, Minister of the Right (udaijin) and the legal expert Inoue Kowashi (1844–95). The two agreed that Ōkuma’s proposal was unacceptable and Iwakura instructed Inoue to draft a counter-proposal (Takii 2003: 87–8). Soon afterward, Ōkuma was ousted from the government under the pretext that he had leaked information about a shady government land deal in Hokkaido. But the government could no longer ignore the increasingly vocal demands by Freedom and People’s Rights movement activists for a constitution (Bowen 1984), so it declared that it would promulgate a constitution and open a parliament by 1890. Itō had now joined the conservative camp, but his conservatism was different from that of Motoda, Sasaki or Iwakura. Itō was a conservative not because he was a stickler for tradition and morality, but because he consciously rejected the values of the Enlightenment: equality, fraternity and liberty, and purposely, even single mindedly, set out to build a hierarchical, exclusive and highly regimented state that, he believed, would be superior to a liberal Japan. Yet rather than claim Confucian classics as an authority to justify his designs, as Motoda, Sasaki or Iwakura would have done, Itō preferred to draw upon German historicism. He had absorbed historicism during a tour of Europe, while attending lectures on constitutional law by Rudolf von Gneist (1816–95) in Berlin and Lorenz von Stein (1815–90) in Vienna. Both scholars were critical of the British system with its weak monarch and powerful parliament; instead they stressed the importance of political organization and the undesirability of democracy and individualism.They dismissed the Enlightenment doctrine of natural rights as outmoded and argued that each country, which they likened to a living organism, must produce a system that was in accordance with its customs and tradition (on Stein, Takii 2003: 112–22; Takii 2010: 77–9; on Gneist, Takii 2010: 62–3). Back in Japan, Itō poured ridicule on Ōkuma and other ‘dilettantish’ students of Western ideas, who blindly worshipped the ‘obsolete’ ideals of the Enlightenment, while wilfully ignoring Japan’s tradition and history (Takii 2010: 79).The latest wisdom, Itō announced, was ‘historicism’ and ‘positivism’, which focused on state and society as a whole, rather than on the abstract individual. Historicism and positivism would form the philosophical/ideological foundations of the Japanese Constitution. Itō was also impressed by Stein’s insistence that a constitution, to be effective, must be supported by an efficient and competent system of government. As soon as he returned from Europe, Itō set out to create such a system. To this end, in 1885 he introduced a new Westernstyle cabinet system that avoided the overlaps and inefficiencies of the previous system that mimicked the archaic structure of the Heian period government. Itō himself oversaw the new system as Japan’s first Western-style prime minister. To the same end, in 1887 he reformed the University of Tokyo (founded in 1876) which was renamed the Imperial University.5 The primary role of this university was to educate a bureaucratic elite for the new constitutional state. While Itō was reforming the machinery of the government, his associate Inoue Kowashi was putting finishing touches to the text of the Constitution. 165

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Though well versed in Western jurisprudence, Inoue showed a conservative attachment to Japanese tradition and Eastern ethics. He was also highly suspicious of Western liberalism. He made his position clear in 1881: Since the restoration, English and French studies have had high priority, and this has caused the sprouts of revolutionary thought to appear in our country for the first time. However, for teaching the Way of loyalty to ruler, love of country, and allegiance – values in danger of disappearing at present – nothing equals Chinese studies. We must revive these values and thereby maintain a balance. (quoted in Hirakawa 1998: 93) Inoue, however, was not against Westernization as such. He only objected to the liberal slant that resulted from too much attention given to English and French language studies. ‘If we want to make men throughout the land more conservative minded’, he argued, ‘we should encourage the study of German and allow it, several years hence, to overcome the dominance now enjoyed by English and French’ (cited in Hirakawa 1998: 93). For Inoue, authoritarian Prussia was the ideal; liberal France and Britain were examples to avoid. Itō Hirobumi, as I have noted above, had reached the same conclusion during his tour of Europe. Itō would later revise his views again, but in the 1880s both he and Inoue viewed democracy with suspicion and hostility. Government, they were convinced, should be the business of a qualified elite. Democracy, which gave the population at large the right to choose politicians, did not accord with Japan’s tradition. Besides, they thought that the Japanese were not ready for it. Just as they rejected democracy, they opposed party politics, which was antithetical to their ideal of Japan governed by a qualified elite. They feared the growing influence of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement – it peaked in the mid-1880s – which to them embodied all the vices of party politics such as corruption, lack of discipline, unrestrained individualism, antielitism and anarchic tendencies.The promulgation of a constitution together with the opening of a national assembly, they calculated, would take the wind out of the sails of the movement, while showing the modern face of Japan to the Western powers as a requirement for revision of the unequal treaties.

The Meiji constitutional settlement The 1889 Constitution, based broadly on Inoue’s 1881 counter-proposal,6 completed the series of sweeping reforms which had commenced with the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The Constitution provided for a bicameral Diet and a Privy Council. It provided for the separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers. But for all these modern trappings, it was a profoundly conservative document. It was represented as a gift from the Emperor to the Japanese people. It harked back to antiquity, proclaiming the divinity of the emperor and the sacredness of the unbroken imperial line. It gave wide-ranging powers to the emperor. The only elected body, the House of Representatives (shūgiin), the lower chamber of the Diet, was hemmed in by the House of Peers (kizokuin), consisting of hereditary nobles (descendants of Kyoto court nobles, daimyo, and others granted titles for a variety of reasons since the introduction of the peerage system in 1884) and imperial appointees (mainly but not exclusively bureaucrats), and by the Privy Council (sūmitsuin) (see Figure 12.2) stacked with retired bureaucrats and legal experts. The Privy Council’s main (but not only) role was to examine the constitutionality of laws enacted by the Diet. The cabinet was not responsible to the Diet, but only to the emperor and, theoretically (though in practice it would prove difficult), could rule without a majority in the 166

Figure 12.2 The Privy Council in session (colour woodblock triptych by Yokoyama Ryo ¯hachi, 1889).

Figure 12.2 Continued

Figure 12.2 Continued

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Diet. The division of powers as inscribed in the Constitution served to ensure the freedom of certain segments of the government, in particular, the military, from interference by an elected Diet (see Chapter 13 in this volume), rather than as a system of checks and balances. In short, the Constitution brimmed with various restrictions and hedges aimed at preventing democratically elected politicians from coming to power or even participating actively in the process of governance. From this perspective, its goal was to restrain democratic impulses of the people and prevent the rise of effective political parties. Little wonder that democracy found it difficult to find acceptance in Japan. The system was designed to keep it out. Under the Constitution, then, the Meiji state was conservative in the sense that it rejected the ideals of the Enlightenment. It rejected individualistic liberty, subordinating the individual to the state. It repudiated equality by perpetuating a hierarchical social system that ranged from the emperor at the top through an artificially formed aristocracy down to the commoners and restored the ancient court ranks that determined the position of each Japanese by their degree of proximity to the emperor (those who did not possess a rank had no precedence). It cast aside the concept of universal brotherhood (fraternity), promoting instead the notion of the uniqueness of the Japanese people. The Imperial Rescript on Education, drafted by Inoue with some input from Motoda and promulgated in 1890, reinforced the conservative nature of the Constitution by stressing the sacredness of the imperial dynasty, by propagating the idea that Japan is a family state (the emperor paterfamilias and the subjects his obedient children), and by reiterating the five Confucian virtues and relationships as the foundation of all social relations (Antoni 2004: 62). The promulgation of the Constitution in 1889, followed by the opening of the Diet in 1890, largely fixed the parameters of the Japanese polity. Yet the Constitution was a document capable of various interpretations, and some scholars found ways to interpret it in a liberal manner. Perhaps more significantly, the Lower House found means to expand its power. One of the few powers the Constitution gave the Lower House was the prerogative to approve the budget. If the House rejected it, the Constitution provided that the previous year’s budget would automatically be carried over. However, in an era of rapidly expanding budgets – and the 1890s and 1900s were such an era – the Lower House used this control over the budget to wrest concessions from the government and expand its power vis-à-vis the cabinet, the House of Peers and other organs of the government, as well as to expand the number of those eligible to vote. The conservatives viewed this growing power of the Lower House with alarm. Among them was General (after 1898 Field Marshal) Yamagata Aritomo (1838–1922; on Yamagata, see Hackett 1971). In the 1890s Yamagata emerged as the most influential conservative, and he would remain a determined enemy of liberalism and party politics for the rest of his life. It was at Yamagata’s prodding that a number of measures were introduced to keep the evil of party politics at bay. They included a ban on the military taking part in politics (or more exactly, joining political parties) and a regulation stipulating that only generals and admirals on active duty could serve as army or navy ministers (Banno 1989: 245–8). Regulations were also introduced to prevent bureaucrats from joining political parties (see Chapter 15 in this volume). In addition, the government spread the conservative message by propagating the myths and moral ideals contained in the Constitution and the Rescript on Education. To that end, in the 1890s primary schools in Japan received a portrait of the emperor and regular ceremonies were held during which the Rescript was read aloud (Ubukata 1978: 61). These government efforts were intended to instill obedience, docility, loyalty and patriotism into the subjects of the emperor. Japan’s triumph over China in the war of 1894–95 also helped in these efforts by ‘stimulat[ing] the national essence [movement], narcissistic patriotism, xenophobic imperialism, and conservative delusions that had already been spreading since the reaction against 170

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Westernization had set in in 1886’ (Ubukata 1978: 60). From that time on, the oracular invocation of ‘loyalty to the monarch and patriotism’ (chūkun aikoku) became the order of the day.

Conservative reaction to the rise of the political parties Yet the conservatives did not have it all their way.Their cause received a blow when, in 1900, Itō, who had switched to the conservatives in 1881, ‘defected’ once again, this time to the cause of party politics. Ever a pragmatist, Itō by the late 1890s had realized that the rise of party politics was inevitable. Rather than fight it, he decided to join it to gain control of the Lower House from within. To this end, in 1900 he founded the Rikken Seiyūkai (The Association of Political Friends of the Constitution), which at a stroke emerged as the leading party in the Lower House. In vain,Yamagata tried to torpedo Itō’s efforts. The Seiyūkai’s influence continued to grow after Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905, which removed the only tangible threat to Japan’s security and made the Japanese voters increasingly reluctant to sacrifice their living standards for the sake of national defence. In 1906, the wartime cabinet headed by General Katsura Tarō (1848–1913) was replaced by a cabinet led by Marquis Saionji Kinmochi (1849–1940), in which the Seiyūkai was given a number of important cabinet posts. Saionji, a descendant of court nobles, had cooperated with Itō in founding the Seiyūkai and for a time even served as its leader. He was sympathetic to the principles of party politics. The electorate regarded the Seiyūkai as their champion against the army’s demands to beef up defence. The party’s popularity was further increased by its pork-barrel policies (Najita 1967: 61–78). The conservatives attributed the meteoric rise of the Seiyūkai, not to the army’s unpopular demands for more funds, but to the ever-increasing influx of novel foreign ideas, such as individualism and liberalism that found ready acceptance among Japan’s middle class. They blamed the popularity of foreign ideas among the middle class on the alleged collapse of Japan’s traditional values. As evidence, they pointed to a number of incidents indicating that the Meiji system was coming apart at the seams. One of these was the 1911 Grand Treason Trial, in which Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911) and twenty-three socialists and anarchists, were sentenced to death on charges of plotting to assassinate the emperor (Kōtoku and twelve others were executed; the rest had their sentences commuted to life in prison) (Notehelfer 1971). The conservatives were shocked by such disloyalty to the monarch, which they blamed on contamination by foreign thought. ‘Had [Kōtoku] only stuck only to the Chinese classics’ rather than study French and English, opined Hiranuma Kiichirō (1867–1952), the procurator in the Grand Treason Trial, ‘he would not have come to such a sad end’ (cited in Szpilman 2015: 231). At his trial, which was held in camera, Kōtoku cast doubt on the legitimacy of the imperial dynasty by referring to the Northern-Southern Court period (1336–92), when for fiftysix years not one, but two imperial lines vied for power (Nezu 1966: 57–8). Such statements by an anarchist in the dock were bad enough. But by 1911 even respectable scholars at imperial universities were beginning to question Japan’s foundational myths. For example, Kita Sadakichi (1871–1939), a professor at the Office for the Compilation of Historical Materials (Shiryō hensanjo), Tokyo Imperial University, asserted in a primary school history textbook that both lines were legitimate.7 (Miyachi 1969: 351–78,  Yamada 1976: 90; Brownlee 1997: 118–30) The conservatives had a field day in lambasting the Ministry of Education for approving such an offensive textbook (Varley 1971: 170). Under the conservative onslaught, the Katsura cabinet, which would have preferred to ignore the incident, rather than give it publicity by taking action, had no option but to force Kita to resign. The offending passages in the textbook were expunged. The crisis had passed; the conservatives had won (Ishida 1954: 134, 276–7). 171

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To conservative alarm, Kita’s offence was no isolated incident. Other scholars, too, committed acts of disloyalty when they openly criticized Japan’s patriarchal family system, which, according to the conservatives, constituted the mainstay of the Japanese state. In 1910, for example, Kawada Shirō (1883–1942), professor at Kyoto Imperial University, did so in his Fujin Mondai (The Woman Question). The book was promptly banned, but that did not deter Okamura Tsukasa (1867–1922), a colleague of Kawada’s at Kyoto Imperial University, from praising Western-style individualism and criticizing as ‘fundamentally flawed’ the Japanese civil law code that enshrined the family system (Isono 1968: 85). Okamura received an official reprimand and was eventually forced to resign from his position in 1914. To the indignation and distress of the conservatives, however, neither professor was prosecuted. The conservatives were even more distressed at the popularity of Minobe Tatsukichi’s constitutional theory. Minobe (1873–1948), a professor at the Law Faculty, Tokyo Imperial University, maintained that the emperor was an organ of the state, the highest organ in the state, but an organ nevertheless. Minobe’s theory provided a justification for the evolution of Japan into a British-style liberal-democratic monarchy within the framework of the Meiji Constitution. In contrast, his colleague at the Faculty, Professor Uesugi Shinkichi (1878–1929), an intellectual heir to fundamentalist Hozumi Yatsuka, held that the emperor was identical with the state and to argue that he was just an organ was a heresy and lèse majesté to boot. By 1911, he launched an attack on Minobe. A debate ensued, in which, to the dismay of the conservatives, Minobe emerged the winner. Uesugi lost the academic debate, but his theory continued to have many supporters among conservative bureaucrats and the military elite (Minear 1970: 192). Prince Yamagata, who, after the assassination of Itō Hirobumi in 1909, had emerged as the most powerful genrō (elder statesman), supported him as did Hiranuma Kiichirō, a rising star of the Justice Ministry, who viewed any supporter of Minobe’s theory as a ‘traitor and rebel’ (Hiranuma Kiichirō Kaikoroku Hensan Iinkai 1955: 34). With such support, Uesugi had no intention to cede the field to Minobe and the liberals. In February 1913, he organized the Tōka gakkai (Paulownia Association).The new body’s declared goal was to ‘destroy political parties’ (Shakai Mondai Shiryō Kenkyūkai 1975: 51) and thwart the emergence of ‘British-style party cabinets’ (Uesugi 1919: 84). The patronage of such distinguished figures as Yamagata, Count Terauchi Masatake (1852–1919) and Count Hirata Tōsuke (1849–1925) helped attract an impressive membership of peers, military men and academics (Sekai, 10 October 1913: 8–10; 10 December 1913: 73–7), but things did not go according to Uesugi’s plan. Under the mixture of public ridicule and intimidation by Seiyūkai-sponsored thugs, members quit en masse and the organization quickly disintegrated (Kōan Chōsachō 1967, vol. 2: 263). Undeterred, Uesugi, in 1915, set up a study group, the Mokuyōkai (Thursday Society) at Tokyo Imperial University. Only few students joined and the group failed to have any discernible impact even on campus. By 1918, Uesugi’s campaign against party politics and liberalism had more or less run out of steam.

The impact of World War I As Uesugi was pursuing his ineffectual campaigns against party politics, World War I was slowly coming to an end. The changes which the war had unleashed were transforming the world. By 1918, the revolutions in Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany had replaced the ancient monarchies with republics. In Russia, the Bolsheviks led by Lenin had seized power. In 1917 the United States had declared war on Germany. America’s intervention proved decisive. By the end of 1918, Germany and Austria-Hungary sued for peace. 172

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Japan, as an ally of Britain, had declared war on Germany in August 1914, but apart from seizing the German-held territories in China and in the Pacific in the first year of the war, it had largely kept out of the fighting. The war brought Japan a great economic bonanza, and this new and sudden prosperity produced changes in Japanese society. The urban classes began to enjoy their leisure. To cater to their new tastes, the existing newspapers increased their circulation and a large number of journals were launched. The public showed an enthusiasm for democracy whose Japanese version, minponshugi, compatible with Japan’s emperor system, was popularized by Yoshino Sakuzō (1878–1933), a professor at the Law Faculty of Tokyo Imperial University and Japan’s leading columnist (Han 2012). Demands for political rights and for universal suffrage were on the increase. So were labour disputes as workers demanded higher wages and better conditions of employment. In the prevailing nervous atmosphere, the August 1918 Rice Riots, in which the population took to the streets to protest the sudden rise in the prices of rice, seemed like the sinister portent of an approaching domestic revolution. No revolution came, but the immediate effect of the riots was the resignation of Field Marshal Count Terauchi Masatake, a Yamagata’s protégé, who epitomized the rule of the military cliques. Terauchi was replaced by Hara Takashi (1865–1921), the leader of the Seiyūkai, who formed the first bona fide party cabinet. To the conservatives this was a shocking development (see Chapter 14 in this volume). The alarm at these domestic developments was exacerbated by the developments abroad.Was the collapse of the three empires not the outcome of some historical law that inexorably turned monarchies into republics? To the conservatives, the collapse of the Hohenzollern Empire in November 1918 was especially alarming, because, as we have seen, Japan had modelled its Constitution on that of Imperial Germany (Saaler 2006), but the birth of the first communist government in Russia, seemingly determined to spread revolution throughout the world, was also a cause for concern. The wartime rise of the United States as a world power was another development that exacerbated conservatives’ sense of foreboding and gloom. From their perspective, the United States, an economically and militarily powerful democratic republic represented an even a greater threat than Bolshevik Russia. Japanese socialists and communists had been emboldened by the wartime changes, but they attracted little support on account of their doctrinaire extremism. In contrast,Wilsonian liberalism had many supporters whom the conservatives regarded as dangerous precisely because their views were moderate. The conservatives regarded Japanese supporters of Wilsonianism as an advance guard of republicanism and possibly even communism. They objected to Wilson’s promotion of democracy, self-determination (which seemed to call into question Japanese colonial rule), pacifism and the League of Nations and his condemnation of autocracy (which, though aimed at Germany, was seen in conservative circles as applying also to Japan). Hiranuma Kiichirō was, as procurator-general, the most powerful bureaucrat in the Justice Ministry. He was devoted to the emperor with a quasi-religious fervour; he disliked democracy and hated party politics, which he believed were bound to weaken the imperial institution. His career at the Justice Ministry had been dedicated to the containment of subversive ideas. He had distinguished himself in the Grand Treason Trial (Szpilman 2015: 222). Hiranuma was alarmed by what he felt was the insidious spread of Wilsonian ideas. Unlike communist ideas, Wilsonianism was firmly within the bounds of legality, yet to Hiranuma, it seemed more insidiously dangerous than communism precisely because it was legal and seemed so reasonable. He made his position clear in 1919. He was, he confessed, ‘gravely concerned’ about the impact of the war. Though it was futile ‘to go against this relentless current’, it was vital ‘to design countermeasures’ and ‘strengthen the foundation of our state’. Foreign ideas must be ‘fused and harmonized with our unique Japanese way’. They must be made to ‘comply with the Imperial Institution’, and 173

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must not be allowed to ‘weaken the family system’ (Nihonkai 1919: 7–8), which together made ‘Japan’s state organization (waga kokka soshiki) superior to that of any other country’ (Nihonkai 1919: 4; Szpilman 1998b: 108). Hiranuma decided to introduce his ‘countermeasures’ first at Tokyo Imperial University, his alma mater, where in 1918 students had founded, with support from Professor Yoshino Sakuzō and other faculty members, a liberal Shinjinkai (New Man’s Society). To neutralize the influences of the Shinjinkai, Hiranuma sponsored in 1919 the Kōkoku Dōshikai (Association of Comrades to Raise the State), a conservative and patriotic student body. But the association proved ephemeral. When, at the end of year, Morito Tatsuo (1888–1984), one of the academic sponsors of the Shinjinkai, published an article on the anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin (1842–1921), the Dōshikai moved to have him punished by complaining to the ministries of Education and Justice. As a result of this campaign, Morito and the editor of the academic journal that had published the offending article were sentenced to prison terms and lost their university positions. But the campaign backfired, when students condemned the Dōshikai’s appeal to the ministries as a violation of academic autonomy. Amid protests from the student body, the Dōshikai disintegrated in February 1920. Hiranuma’s efforts had come to nothing (Szpilman 2015: 222–3). Undeterred by the Dōshikai fiasco, Hiranuma decided, in the second half of 1920, to create a nation-wide conservative organization. As a government official, he discreetly kept in the background, while his proxies set up the Kokuhonsha (National Foundation Society). In the first years of its existence, 1921–24, the Kokuhonsha’s membership was dominated by well-known conservative academics such as Inoue Tetsujirō (1856–1944), Kakehi Katsuhiko (1872–1961) and Hiranuma Yoshirō (1864–1938), Kiichirō’s brother. The Kokuhonsha fought the evils of party politics and liberalism in a number of ways. To co-opt the local elites to the conservative cause, it set up local Kokuhonsha branches throughout Japan; it organized lecture tours to popularize conservative views; and to counter liberal views found in Chuō kōron and other popular liberal-leaning magazines, it published, from January 1921, Kokuhon (National Foundation), a monthly, as well as, from May 1925, a biweekly news-sheet Kokuhon Shinbun (National Foundation Newspaper). In its publications and its lectures the same conservative message was put across. The League of Nations was dismissed as an Anglo-Saxon trick designed to prevent Japan from expanding on the Asian continent. The treaties negotiated at the 1921–22 Washington Conference were described as a treasonous sellout that jeopardized Japan’s security. Pacifism and minponshugi (democracy) were derided as unrealistic fantasies; and there was much criticism of selfish individualism, free love, taste for luxury and other forms of immoral and decadent behaviour that allegedly plagued Japan in the 1920s (Szpilman 1993: 76–84).

Conservativism vs. Taisho ¯ Democracy In the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, Kokuhon declared that the disaster was a ‘divine punishment’ for the immoral behaviour of the Japanese. As examples of crass immorality, they adduced the cases of Y   anagihara Byakuren (1885–1967), the Taishō Emperor’s niece, who in 1921 violated Japan’s family law by leaving her husband to live openly with Miyazaki Ryūsuke (1892–1971), a member of the Shinjinkai, and of the novelist Arishima Takeo (1878– 1923), who in 1923 had caused offence first by bequeathing his ancestral land to his farmers and then by committing a love-pact suicide with a married woman. These are but two of many of the cases of moral delinquency that conservative contributors to the journal cited. In their struggle against immorality, the conservatives thought they discerned signs of the revival of positive patriotic attitudes in the aftermath of the earthquake. For example, ‘brave’ 174

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Japanese vigilantes had massacred thousands of Koreans; the army displayed its patriotic spirit by murdering eleven socialists held by the police in ‘protective custody’; and military policemen strangled the well-known anarchist Ōsugi Sakae; his wife, the journalist Itō Noe (1895–1923); and his six-year-old nephew, Tachibana Munakazu (1917–23). Such approval of criminal behaviour cannot be explained only by post-earthquake hysteria. As contributions to Kokuhon amply show, the conservatives tended to condone violence as long as it was directed against their liberal or left-wing enemies well before the earthquake (Szpilman 1998b: 129). If the conservatives had hoped that the earthquake would make the people abandon their taste for luxury and their hedonistic pastimes and work for the greatness of Japan, they were disappointed. For, far from dealing a decisive blow to corruption and decadence, for which they blamed party politics and foreign influences, the lessons of the earthquake were apparently soon forgotten. By the end of the year, a botched attempt on the life of the crown prince, Regent Hirohito (the future Shōwa Emperor, 1901–89) demonstrated this beyond any doubt: the failed assassin, Nanba Daisuke (1899–1924), was a Japanese youth with anarchist sympathies whose father was a nationalistic member of the Imperial Diet. What else was in store, if such unimaginable things had come to pass? The political parties seemingly also refused to take heed of the earthquake as a divine punishment. Instead, they regrouped, formed a coalition and brought down the bureaucratic cabinet that had been formed after the Nanba Incident. In what is known as the (second) Movement to Protect Constitutional Government, they took power in June 1924, ushering in the period of party cabinets that would continue until 1932. More worryingly from the conservative perspective, in 1925 a party cabinet passed a universal suffrage act which granted political rights to all men over twenty-five years of age. Henceforth, only criminals, madmen, peers of the realm and soldiers on active duty would have no right to vote. As a quid pro quo for the Universal Suffrage Law, the conservatives forced the introduction of the Peace Preservation Law which imposed draconian penalties of up to ten years in prison for forming or belonging to organizations that aimed to change the national polity (kokutai) and tamper with private property. The law was made even more repressive in 1928 when the death penalty was introduced for the same offences (Szpilman 1993: 129). The attempt on the life of the crown prince and the resurgence of the political parties motivated Hiranuma to restructure the National Foundation Society. In 1924, he emerged from the shadows to assume the presidency of the Kokuhonsha, which at that stage was joined by a large number of top bureaucrats and senior military men representing both services, as well as a handful of lawyers, businessmen and dietmen. To bypass the regulation that prevented bureaucrats and soldiers from involvement in politics, the Kokuhonsha was described as a ‘cultural body’ (Szpilman 1998b: 119). The new Kokuhonsha continued to spread its conservative propaganda just as before, though naturally the specifics changed over time. Now it lambasted the ‘weak-kneed’ foreign policy of the new foreign minister, Shidehara Kijūrō (1872–1951), who in their opinion had blundered by abandoning China to the ravages of military cliques and Bolshevik-inspired communists, while his subservience to the Anglo-Saxon powers and his blind faith in the League of Nations put Japan’s destiny in jeopardy. In domestic politics, the conservatives questioned the moral deficiencies of party politicians, the government’s alleged tolerance of left wing ideas and liberalism and their alleged negligence of defence that jeopardized Japan’s security. As before, they poured vitriol on leftists, liberals and immoral academics, whom they accused of acting as American agents rather than as loyal Japanese subjects; they worried about the immorality of elected politicians, who thought only in narrow sectional, rather than national, terms; and they fretted over how to 175

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integrate the outcaste groups (burakumin). They also criticized women and their male supporters who dared to raise the question of women’s rights or advocated birth control and free love (Szpilman 1993: 119–24). Yet these conservative campaigns did little to weaken the two major political parties, the Kenseikai and the Seiyūkai, which continued to dominate the Lower House and even succeeded in extending their influence to the House of Peers. By 1926, the principle of party cabinets was the norm and no conservative attacks seemed to change the fact that government by political parties was a permanent feature. Even when, in April 1927, the Privy Council, dominated by conservatives, forced the resignation of Wakatsuki Reijirō’s Kenseikai cabinet over Shidehara’s non-interventionist China policy under the pretext of financial improprieties, party rule continued. The new Seiyūkai cabinet was headed by Baron Tanaka Giichi (1864–1929), a retired general. From the conservative perspective, the new cabinet was a marked improvement, no doubt partly because in the 1920s the Seiyūkai had been practically taken over by a number of former bureaucrats with little or no sympathy for party politics. One of them, Home Minister Suzuki Kisaburō (1867–1940), a former colleague of Hiranuma’s at the Justice Ministry and a member of the Kokuhonsha, was responsible for the 1928 revisions that made offences under the Peace Preservation Law punishable by death. The conservatives were delighted when Suzuki, in a speech given on the eve of the first general election held under the Universal Suffrage Law, showed his contempt for parliamentary politics by dismissing it as contrary to Japan’s national polity (other parliamentarians disagreed and forced Suzuki’s resignation) (Berger 1977: 47). The conservatives were also happy that, in contrast to the previous cabinet’s non-intervention policy, the Tanaka cabinet dispatched troops to Shandong on three occasions. They certainly preferred this kind of active foreign policy to Shidehara’s passivity. Nevertheless, the Tanaka cabinet came under attack from conservatives over its signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (officially known as the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy) in 1928. Though the conservatives disliked the pact’s pacifistic implications, for tactical reasons they focused their attacks on the phrase ‘in the names of the respective peoples’. This phrase in their view amounted to the crime of lèse majesté, because, they pointed out, under the Meiji Constitution a treaty could only be signed ‘in the name of the emperor’ (Szpilman 1993: 131). These attacks weakened Tanaka’s position as premier, but were not enough to force his resignation. What finally brought him down, in 1929, was his inability to bring to book those responsible for the 1928 assassination of the Chinese warlord Chang Tso-lin (Zhang Zuolin, 1875–1928) by rogue elements of the Kwantung Army, a Japanese army unit stationed in Northeastern China (see Chapter 6 in this volume). Conservative attacks on the government intensified after the formation of the successor cabinet by Hamaguchi Osachi (1870–1931), though, paradoxically, Prime Minister Hamaguchi was socially conservative to the point of being puritanical and, as even his conservative enemies conceded, incorruptible (for his views on morality, see Hamaguchi 1924: 13–8). It was not, however, Hamaguchi’s social conservatism or his economic policy that the conservatives objected to. They loathed his devotion to the principles of parliamentary and party politics; they detested the return of non-interventionist Shidehara as foreign minister, and perhaps most of all, they hated his intention to assert civilian control over the military and reduce military budgets. The London Naval Conference in 1930 provided him with an opportunity to accomplish both of these goals. The Japanese delegation to the conference was headed by former Prime Minister Waka­ tsuki Reijirō (1866–1949) and Navy Minister Takarabe Takeshi (1867–1949). During Takarabe’s absence, Hamaguchi acted as Navy Minister. For the conservatives, to have a civilian in charge of the Imperial Navy was an ominous development, for it threatened to establish a precedent for

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civilian control that would allow elected politicians to dominate the armed services (on civilian control of the military, see Chapter 13 in this volume). Before the conference started, the Navy’s position had been that Japan must obtain the displacement tonnage ratio of 7 for Japan vis-à-vis 10 and 10 for the United States and Britain. The Americans and the British had wanted to give Japan only 6. At the conference, the Japanese delegates managed to get the American delegates to agree to 10:6.95, so close to 7 as to be deemed insignificant. But the Navy Chief of Staff, Admiral Katō Hiroharu (1870–1939) disagreed. He insisted that 6.95 fatally undermined Japan’s security. He tried to intercede with the emperor in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the signing of the treaty, but was not granted an audience in time. Conservative opponents of the treaty accused the cabinet of violating the imperial prerogative of the supreme command by failing to defer to Admiral Katō’s opinion. The only way now to stop the treaty was if the Privy Council, a bastion of conservative reaction, failed to ratify it (Kobayashi 1963: 100–60). Hiranuma, it will be recalled, was the vice president of the Privy Council, and its president, Kuratomi Yūsaburō (1853–1948), tended to see eye to eye with Hiranuma on most subjects.The Privy Council had demonstrated its anti-party animus when it forced the resignation of the Wakatsuki cabinet in 1927 (Kitaoka 1999: 64–6). Katō and Vice-Chief Admiral Suetsugu Nobumasa (1880–1944) were backed by a broad coalition of radical rightists, conservatives and advocates of a strong navy. Both admirals were prominent members of Hiranuma’s Kokuhonsha, which supported them unqualifiedly (Itō 1969: 386; Kobayashi 1963: 121–2). Hamaguchi, on the other hand, was backed by the emperor, the imperial court officials, the major newspapers and many admirals in the Navy Ministry who believed that, given the disparity of economic sizes between America and Japan, any deal was better for Japan than no deal at all (no deal would lead to an unrestrained armament race that Japan was bound to lose). The cabinet’s position was bolstered when Professor Minobe Tatsukichi opined in its favour in a newspaper article. With all this formidable support, Hamaguchi fended off the challenge of the Navy General Staff and, by threats and cajoling, had the Privy Council ratify the treaty on 1 October 1930.Yet Hamaguchi’s triumph turned out to be a pyrrhic victory. A few weeks after the treaty was ratified, in November 1930, he was shot by a right-wing assassin. He survived the attack, but never fully recovered and died nine months later (Nakamura 1989:168–73). The loss of this determined leader was a fatal blow to the Minseitō government.

Conservatism and militarism in the 1930s Hamaguchi’s successor,Wakatsuki Reijirō, was confronted by the Manchurian Incident (the seizure of Manchuria by the Kwantung Army), by military conspiracies (the so-called March and October incidents) and by intrigues within his party. In December 1931, unable to rein in the army or even to control the members of his own party, he resigned.This allowed the Seiyūkai to return to power with Inukai Tsuyoshi (1855–1932) as prime minister. Inukai, who in the 1910s played a key role in the Movement to Protect Constitutional Government that had toppled the bureaucratic-militaristic Katsura cabinet, with his hardliner ‘China-hand’ cabinet secretary, Mori Kaku (1882–1932), acquiesced in the military annexation of Manchuria underway at that time. He also increased military expenditures. Yet even such compliance did nothing to change the accumulated hatred for party politics and party politicians that had been to a large degree of the conservatives’ making. In was in this atmosphere that in February 1932 right-wing civilian terrorists murdered Baron Dan Takuma (1858–1932), head of the Mitsui zaibatsu, and Inoue Junnosuke (1869–1932), finance minister in the Hamaguchi

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cabinet (Amemiya 1970: 400–4). And on 15 May, scarcely six months after he had assumed the post of prime minister, Inukai too was assassinated by young naval officers (Tanaka 1970a: 462). The nationwide wave of support for the terrorists, and a marked lack of sympathy for their victims, can only be understood in the context of the climate of hatred for party politics and liberalism that the conservatives had fanned for many years.With their vicious campaigns of vilification which targeted liberals, moderates and party politicians, they had created an atmosphere where any act of terrorism was considered justifiable, provided it was undertaken for ‘sound patriotic motives’ (e.g., Tanaka 1970a: 477). After the assassination of Inukai, attacks on liberals and party politicians increased in frequency and intensity. A few examples will suffice. In 1933 Takigawa Yukitoki (1892–1961) was suspended from his job as professor of law at Kyoto Imperial University for allegedly criticising the family system and propagating left-wing views. Following his suspension, several other professors at the Faculty of Law resigned in protest. In 1934, Minister of Commerce and Industry Baron Nakajima Kumakichi (1873–1960) was forced to resign from the cabinet headed by Admiral Viscount Saitō Makoto (1858–1936) who had succeeded Inukai as prime minister, because in a literary essay he had praised Takauji, the fourteenth-century founder of the Ashikaga shogunate whom imperial loyalists condemned for his disloyalty to the emperor. In 1935, the so-called National Polity Clarification Campaign attacked the emperor-organ theory of Minobe Tatsukichi, now professor emeritus at Tokyo Imperial University. As a result of this campaign, Minobe, a supporter of party politics and a critic of the military, was forced to give up his seat in the House of Peers and retire from public life and, to top it all, was nearly killed in an assassination attempt. These campaigns were instigated by right-wing extremists and fundamentalists, but the conservatives on each occasion joined forces with them (Miller 1965: 207–10). As this shows, the conservatives had formed an alliance, albeit an informal one, with members of the radical right and military expansionists. From the early 1920s on, the conservative position on foreign policy, on party politics and on liberalism had been more or less identical with that of the civilian radicals and militarists. A high proportion of senior officers from both services were members of the Kokuhonsha. They included Generals Araki Sadao (1877–1966), Masaki Jinzaburō (1876–1956) and Matsui Iwane (1878–1948), who would later be associated with the Kōdōha or the Imperial Way Faction, Nagata Tetsuzan (1884–1935) and Katakura Tadashi (1898–1991) subsequently associated with the Tōseiha (Control Faction), and Admirals Katō Hiroharu and Suetsugu Nobumasa, associated with the gung-ho Navalist Faction. Araki, Masaki and Katō were particularly close to Baron Hiranuma, who had by then emerged as the unofficial leader of the conservative camp. In the 1930s Araki and Masaki and their followers came to dominate the military membership of the Kokuhonsha, whereas those like Nagata and Katakura, who espoused increasingly radical ideas about restructuring Japan’s economy and society in preparation for war, drifted away. It was perhaps because both Araki and Masaki were socially conservative and traditional in their views on the military that they fitted well with civilian members of the Kokuhonsha. After the failed coup attempt of 26 February 1936, army discipline was restored and army leaders associated with the Kōdōha purged. After that date, the army, more monolithic than at any time in the previous five years, came to be dominated by men with radical views on the Japanese economy and mobilization for total war (Tanaka 1970b: 201–2; Tsutsui 2014: 226; Barnhart 1987). After the failed coup, Hiranuma was promoted to the Presidency of the Privy Council and shortly afterwards the Kokuhonsha was dissolved, ostensibly because it had achieved what it had set out to accomplish: its enemies, the political parties and liberals, had been destroyed. Conservatives like Hiranuma and his associates saw no danger coming from the army and the radicals, with whom they had cooperated to destroy party politics and with whom they thought they 178

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shared the same goals and ideals. This was, of course, a conservative illusion. The old enemies of their conception of the state and society were indeed vanquished, but new enemies, much more formidable, appeared on the scene in the form of radical, technocratic soldiers bent on reform. The radicals may have been at one with the conservatives in their hatred of Shidehara’s passive foreign policy and their contempt for party and parliamentary politics, but the radical vision of the Japanese state was substantially different from the conservative vision.The radicals, civilian or military, wanted to reform the economy and mobilize society in ways that would affect private property rights and destroy Japan’s traditional society. But the conservatives, blinded by their hatred of liberalism and party politics, had failed to see this threat. Indeed, with their continuous attacks on party politics, which had created an atmosphere in which the political parties were no longer seen as legitimate by most of the Japanese, the conservatives had helped bring about the demise of the political parties. In doing so, they eliminated the only organized bodies that could have restrained the military and the radicals. The result was that by the late 1930s it appeared that nobody in Japan could question actions of the Japanese Imperial Army or stop the radicals in the bureaucracy and the armed services from remodelling Japan in accordance with their radical projects. Only when in the course of the next few years the army, with the help of radical bureaucrats, began its massive reforms of Japan’s economy, the conservatives realized that the military posed a much greater threat to their conception of the national polity than the parties ever had. For, among the extreme rightists and the military who were in a hurry to put Japan on a war footing, there were advocates of a control or planned economy whose views smacked of state or national socialism. But to the conservatives’ discomfiture, the military were now firmly in charge and the mainstream political parties, liberal courtiers close to the emperor and moderate sections of the bureaucracy that could have served as allies of the conservatives to restrain the military had been eviscerated or silenced. With the liberals and party politicians effectively out of power, the conservatives now discovered that there was a worse threat coming from their erstwhile extreme right-wing allies and the military. They belatedly stirred into action. Though they could no longer at this stage stop the military, they could nevertheless obstruct and delay the process of the radicalization that the military and reformist bureaucrats had embarked upon. In the long run, wartime exigencies would make these efforts futile but that still lay in the future.

The Imperial Rule Assistance Association and wartime mobilization Nevertheless, one conservative campaign deserves mention at this point, namely, the role the conservatives played in neutering the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (IRAA) and in effect foiling Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro’s attempt to turn Japan into a fascist dictatorship. Prince Konoe (1891–1945; see Figure 12.3), who espoused dictatorial ambitions and imagined himself in his more confident moments as the leader of the nation, had launched, with a coterie of radical associates, a Nazi-inspired mass movement that would enable him to concentrate all power in his hands. His plans also included a programme of reforms that would, if put into effect, change Japan’s national polity and transform Japan into a Hitlerite or Stalinist state. This move caused a reaction, in which the conservatives played a leading role. Conservatives like Baron Hiranuma objected to Konoe’s scheme because they disliked the totalitarian aspect of his New Order Movement and because they feared that Konoe’s IRAA would deprive them of political power. Industrialists and financiers objected because they had no intention to allow a takeover of their companies by the state. Party politicians objected because Konoe’s reforms would deprive them of the little that was left of their political influence. Even the army objected 179

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because it did not want to be controlled by a civilian government, no matter how radical. Faced with such opposition, Konoe was forced to abandon his radical plans. On 21 December 1940, he reshuffled his cabinet, replacing radicals with conservatives. Hiranuma became home minister and his Kokuhonsha associate, retired General Yanagawa Heisuke (1879–1945) justice minister (Itō 1983: 184–5; Tsutsui 2009: 233). If there were any doubts as to the fate of the IRAA, they were dispelled early in the following year. On 28 January 1941 Hiranuma made a speech in the Diet, in which he declared that the IRAA was a public association (kōji kessha) as defined by the Peace Preservation Law and as such forbidden to engage in political activities. By the end of March the IRAA was rendered toothless after the radical leaders of the IRAA, Count Arima Yoriyasu (1884–1957) and

Figure 12.3 Prince Konoe Fumimaro in 1940 (Shashin shūho ¯, 1940, 1:1). 180

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Gotō Ryūnosuke (1888–1984) were replaced by conservative Home Ministry bureaucrats.Thus, ended Konoe’s dream of turning Japan into a one-party state (Itō 1983: 211). This conservative action deserves mention as it prevented Japan from turning into a fullfledged fascist state. Conservatives continued to fight against General Tōjō’s dictatorial tendencies and were critical of his war leadership, and when the defeat was looming in 1944, Hiranuma and other conservatives played a decisive role in forcing his resignation (Tsutsui 2009: 260–3). Such efforts against dictatorial tendencies notwithstanding, their overall influence was eroded by social and economic changes during the war. It was then completely obliterated by Japan’s defeat, which radically changed the character of the Japanese state and made prewar conservatism and the issues it tried to defend either meaningless or irrelevant.

Conclusion The views of the conservatives in prewar Japan were diverse, sometimes to the point of being mutually incompatible. It is nevertheless possible to identify some common characteristics: 1 The conservatives regarded society as a product of organic growth embodied by local customs and traditions (Pyle 1998: 99). They considered the Meiji modernizing rulers’ attempt to restructure society by rational planning futile (Pyle 1998: 99), and they deplored the Meiji government’s alleged neglect of customs and tradition. They considered customs and tradition the cement that fused otherwise isolated individuals into a single community and nation. Without customs and tradition, they were convinced, there was only anarchy. Conservatives regarded liberal Western ideas, which were flowing into Japan at an everincreasing tempo from the turn of the century on, as unwholesome (furyō shisō) or even dangerous thought (kiken shisō), precisely because of their conviction that these ideas were not only incompatible with but also destructive of Japan’s customs and tradition. 2 The conservatives tended to view politics as inseparable from morality.They expected their politicians to be morally perfect; small wonder that only rarely a politician managed to conform to their lofty standards. Proper education, they believed, could produce morally immaculate impartial politicians who would work selflessly for the good of the state. No democratic checks and balances were necessary as properly educated elite would always act in the best interest of the state. They viewed democracy as harmful, because it was intrinsically capricious and unreliable as it depended on the whims of the electorate who would invariably put their personal or local interests before those of state and society. 3 Japanese conservatism was paternalistic. Confucian education, which the conservatives imbibed in their formative years, accounts to some degree for this paternalism, which is encapsulated in the concept of bokumin (shepherd the people) shisō (thought). This was the idea of Confucian provenance that maintained that an elite of properly educated and cultivated ‘shepherds’ (bureaucrats) should lead the sheeplike masses who were deemed not competent to make political decisions for themselves (Brown 2009; see also Chapter 15 in this volume). 4 Except for a few diehard reactionaries, the conservatives did not oppose modernization/ Westernization as such. They generally recognized the West’s superiority in science and technology and accepted modernizing reforms as necessary to building a modern state, but believed that Japan’s ‘national essence’ (kokusui) – culture, morality and matters spiritual – was superior and that it would be harmful to replace them with their Western counterparts. Such were the characteristics of Japanese conservatism, and they held true in the period under discussion. 181

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From 1890 on, the conservatives watched with growing alarm the ever-intensifying stream of liberal ideas that flowed pell-mell into Japan. All attempts to stem it had little effect. By the end of World War I the stream had turned into a flood. In their attempt to contain this relentless flood and to destroy what they saw the evil of party politics, democracy and liberalism, the conservatives formed a de facto alliance with right-wing radicals or ultranationalists, who had arisen as a new phenomenon in après-guerre Japan. Over the next fifteen years or so, the conservatives succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in their struggle against liberalism and party politics. To all intents and purposes, by the middle of the 1930s party politics, liberalism and democracy were rendered impotent, if not completely destroyed. However, the political vacuum created by the evisceration of the political parties and liberalism by the conservative-radical alliance was now filled by the military, the reform bureaucrats and right-wing radicals.When in the latter half of the 1930s the army and the navy extended their control over Japanese politics in cooperation with the reform bureaucrats, the conservatives realized that the campaigns they had waged to undermine the parties, discredit liberal advisors to the throne, and weaken the moderate sections of the bureaucracy, had demolished all restraints on the military and radical bureaucrats. The Japanese conservatives’ alliance with the radicals and the military bears some resemblance to the German conservatives’ Faustian deal with the Nazis. In Germany, too, the conservatives, blinded by their hatred of communism and their contempt for liberals, chose to ally themselves with the Nazis. But they grossly underestimated Hitler, whom they assumed they would be able to control. The Japanese conservatives also saw the right-wing radicals in the post–World War I period as useful allies against liberalism and party politics.They, too, grossly underestimated the military and the radicals by blithely presuming that they would be able to control them.The dire consequences of this miscalculation are too well-known to recount here. Given the strength and pervasiveness of prewar conservatism, it is not surprising that conservative attitudes survived Imperial Japan’s defeat and the revolutionary changes introduced under the Allied occupation (1945–52) and that some conservative continuities can still be detected. True, the conservatives generally do not dwell nowadays on the violations of the national polity or the infringements of the emperor’s prerogative. Yet, just as before 1945, they lament the alleged cultural decline and decadence of the younger generation and just as before the war they grumble about the breakdown of the family, even if nowadays the conservative wrath focuses on the issue whether women should vote but whether they can retain their original surnames after marriage (fūfu bessei). Whereas before the war, the conservatives complained about liberal historians’ assaults on the foundational myths, nowadays they rail against the foreign-imposed Constitution, in particular Article 9, and they deplore the distortion imposed on Japanese history by ‘American information space’8 and by the so-called Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal view of history. The vestiges of prewar conservatism also survive in the tone of visceral contempt for party politicians and expressions of implicit trust in bureaucratic impartiality and as well as in generally paternalistic attitudes that are still conspicuous in politics, bureaucracy and even the mainstream media. Some observers, mindful of Japan’s prewar legacy, fear that these conservative tendencies that seem marginal or dormant will one day resurge. Some even worry that they are resurging today. Time will only tell whether such fears are justified.

Notes 1 In this chapter, I use the words modernization and Westernization interchangeably because, in midnineteenth-century Japan, these two terms were regarded as practically synonymous. It would be tempting to argue that modernization referred to the importation of universally valid, value-free science and technology and Westernization to the importation of value-loaded and thus relativistic culture, tradition, legal political systems and such, but such distinctions were blurred in nineteenth-century Japan. 182

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2 In practice, the emperor’s authority was circumscribed by his advisors, civilian and military. The slogan had initially been sonnō jōi (revere the emperor, expel the barbarian), but the jōi part had been relinquished when most opponents of the shogunate realized that it would be impossible to ‘expel’ Western barbarians. 3 Kokutai is an elusive concept which could be translated as a government system where the emperor, descendant of the imperial line unbroken from the beginning of time, rules supreme. 4 Rokumeikan (Deer-cry Hall), built in Hibiya, Tokyo, in 1883, served between 1883 and 1890 as a venue for receptions and balls, where many upper-class Japanese were introduced to Western manners. 5 In 1897, with the opening of Kyoto Imperial University, the Imperial University became formally known as Tokyo Imperial University. 6 Inoue’s influence was overwhelming. The German constitutional experts, Hermann Roesler (1834–94) and Albert Mosse (1846–1925) merely added in effect some relatively unimportant details. 7 In 1902, in the aftermath of a corruption scandal, the Ministry of Education assumed direct control over production and vetting of all textbooks. 8 The term was apparently coined by the literary critic Etō Jun (1932–99) (Ishihara 1991: 94).

Further reading Berger, Gordon Mark (1977) Parties Out of Power in Japan, 1931–1941, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hashikawa Bunzō (1968) ‘Nihon hoshushugi no taiken to shisō’, in Hashikawa Bunzō (ed.) Hoshu no shisō, Chikuma Shobō, 3–43. Matsumoto Sannosuke (1958) ‘Meiji zenki hoshushugi shisō no ichidanmen’, in Sakata Yoshio (ed.) Meiji zenhanki no nashonarizumu, Miraisha, 129–64. Pyle, Kenneth (1969) The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural Identity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. _____ (1998) ‘Meiji conservatism’, in Bob T. Wakabayashi (ed.) Modern Japanese Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 98–146.

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This chapter examines the role of the military in modern Japan, in particular the role of the armed forces in politics and society and civil–military relations.1 When Japan ended its policy of limited contact with foreign powers in 1854, this decision was, above all, a reaction to the superiority of the Western powers in the field of military technology. Japanese elites had become highly aware of this superiority as a result of the defeat of the ‘Middle Kingdom’ in the Opium War (1839−42), but also during the visit of U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry’s flotilla of steamships to Japan in 1853. Though the American flotilla was small, the obvious superiority of Western military technology embodied in the ‘Black Ships’, or kurofune, caused an immense shock. In Japan, the word kurofune even today stands as a synonym for the shockwaves created by Perry’s arrival. In the years following the ‘opening’ of Japan and the conclusion of various ‘unequal treaties’ between Japan and Western powers (see Chapters 2 and 4 in this volume), many samurai who had espoused the xenophobic slogan ‘revere the emperor, expel the barbarians’ (sonnō jōi) came to realize that military resistance against the West was futile, particularly after Western forces defeated the two most ardently anti-Western feudal domains, Satsuma and Chōshū, in 1863 and 1864, respectively. In 1867/68 these dissident samurai toppled the Tokugawa shogunate and staged what is known to history as the Meiji Restoration (cf. Beasley 1972). This led to the founding of a strongly centralized nation-state, whose main objective was to become a ‘rich nation with a strong army’ (fukoku kyōhei). This slogan, although most commonly used in the Meiji era (1868−1912), became a political principle for modern Japan in general (Samuels 1994). Accordingly, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) occupied a central place in the building of the modern Japanese nation-state. The military controlled a considerable share of Japan’s economic and financial resources, influenced social development by means of the conscription system introduced in 1873, and also became a powerful force in politics, culminating in the 1930s and early 1940s. Japan’s surrender in 1945 put an abrupt end to the dominance of the military in Japanese politics and society. The armed forces were dissolved and the military as an organization was abolished. Japan’s prewar militarism was swept away by a wave of anti-military and pacifist sentiment, and the defence of the country during the Cold War – and subsequently – was entrusted 184

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to the United States, now Japan’s ally. The Japanese people concentrated on becoming a ‘rich nation’, but without a ‘strong military’. However, in recent years the balance between these two concepts has begun to shift again in favour of a renewal of the nation’s military power.

The late nineteenth century The Meiji Restoration was a coup staged by a group of young samurai who overthrew an entrenched elite which controlled the feudal government, the shogunate (bakufu), named after the Tokugawa family, from which the shogun himself traditionally came. These young samurai hailed from the so-called outer domains (tozama), in particular from the feudal domains of Satsuma (present-day Kagoshima Prefecture), Chōshū (Yamaguchi), Hizen (Saga), and Tosa (Kōchi), which had traditionally been excluded from the affairs of central government (Craig 1961; Jansen 1961; Beasley 1972; Huber 1981). After a civil war lasting for more than a year (the Boshin War, 1868–69), they successfully toppled the shogunate and established a new central government under the supreme authority of the Emperor. However, although most of the leading figures in the Meiji Restoration came from the ranks of the warrior class – the samurai (or bushi) – there was nothing to suggest that the new government would be dominated by military figures or characterized by militarist policies. Many of these former samurai had followed careers as civilian administrators rather than warriors. Furthermore, the notion of ‘Imperial Restoration’ meant that the emperor as head of the court nobility – a civilian class – was restored to ‘direct rule’.The influential warrior class, on the other hand, was – at least formally – abolished in 1873, and the bushi lost their traditional rights and privileges. Despite these developments, the predatory international environment that characterized the era of imperialism made it a priority for the new administration to improve Japan’s military capabilities. To that end, the new government, following practices already introduced by the shogunate and a number of feudal domains, invited foreign advisors who were entrusted with the task of building up a modern army and navy. Whereas the navy was mostly created with British assistance (Patalano 2015: 28–33), French advisors, who had been employed since the time of the Tokugawa bakufu, played a major role in the formation of Japan’s army (Sims 1998; Presseisen 1965). It was only during the late 1870s and 1880s that the Prusso-German army gradually replaced the French military as a model (Saaler 2006).The introduction of a Germanstyle general staff (sanbō honbu) was the most visible development in this context and became the foundation for the independence of the military from civilian control (Ōe 1985). The origins of the Imperial Japanese Army date back to the establishment of the Imperial Guards, the Go-Shinpei, in 1871 – the first military forces to be placed under the direct command of the new central government. By the 1910s, the IJA had been expanded to 20 divisions. In 1873, hand in hand with the abolition of the samurai as a social class, conscription was introduced based on the French model, though it was handled flexibly in the first few decades, enabling the sons of rich families, for example, to avoid military service (see Katō 1996; Norman 1943). Parallel with the growth of the army, the Imperial Japanese Navy was also expanded to become one of the most powerful navies in the world by the outbreak of the First World War (Evans and Peattie 1997). Although before the 1910s it had purchased most of its equipment – including large ships – from various European powers, during the First World War Japan was forced to produce more of its warships at home due to the shortage of materials on the international weapons market. Although the raison d’être of the IJA and IJN, as with any armed forces, was the defence of Japan’s national sovereignty,2 the IJA was also an important tool for maintaining domestic order. The army was instrumental in the suppression of internal revolts and riots, such as the Satsuma 185

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Figure 13.1 Field Marshal Yamagata Aritomo (postcard, late Meiji period).

Rebellion (the War of the Southwest, Seinan sensō) in 1877 and the Rice Riots (kome sōdō) in 1918. Notwithstanding a clause in the 1882 Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors preventing members of the imperial army and navy from getting involved in political affairs,3 the upper echelons of the army gradually became an important force in Japanese politics and, conversely, developed a strong ‘allergy’ to civilian control of the military. However, throughout the Meiji period, Japan’s military and political leadership constituted a unified body, with members of both groups coming from the same social background (the former warrior class) and working toward the same objective – securing national independence. Some of them, such as Yamagata Aritomo (1838–1922, see Figure 13.1), moved back and forth between the two spheres. Although Yamagata was prime minister twice, justice minister, and home minister, at various times he also served as a military commander, army minister, and chief of the general staff of the IJA (Hackett 1971).Yamagata’s protégé Katsura Tarō (1848–1913) also held top military and civilian positions at various times (Lone 2000). However, ruptures in this unity became apparent during the Taishō period (1912–26), opening the way for an era of intense rivalry between the military establishment and the government.

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Taisho ¯ Democracy and the military Japan’s victory over tsarist Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) at a stroke transformed Japan into a major imperialist and colonial power in East Asia (see Chapters 2 and 6 in this volume) and massively increased the status of the nation’s armed forces at home. This rapidly growing prestige would pave the way for the rise of militarism and the militarization of society. The origins of militarism in modern Japan have long been the subject of heated debate. Some historians argue that its roots go back to the Meiji period. However, recent research has emphasized the impact of the Russo-Japanese War on the militarization of Japanese society. The war led to an intense veneration of the military and its heroes, for example in public statuary (Saaler 2009). This was an outgrowth of the ‘cult of the war dead’ (Shimazu 2009) which emerged during this conflict. The youth leagues and veterans organizations founded shortly after the war (cf. Smethurst 1974) provided an institutional basis for indoctrination of the population with military virtues (or the warrior ethos). The often-cited ideals of bushido (cf. Benesch 2014) as a ‘national ideology’ gained popularity as a result of these developments. The trend toward a society in which military values were increasingly prominent continued in the Taishō period, although for different reasons. By the end of the 1910s, the figures who had represented the unity of the nation’s military and political leadership were gone (the exceptions were Yamagata and Ōkuma Shigenobu, both 1838–1922). This soon led to the collapse of a unified military and the civilian government in Japan. Consequently, the armed forces began seeking a stronger voice in the political decision-making process for themselves. In 1912, for example, the IJA forced the cabinet of Saionji Kinmochi (1849–1940) to resign in an affair that was in all but name a military coup d’état. The army had demanded that its budget be increased to allow for two more divisions. The cabinet rejected these demands on the grounds that it lacked sufficient funds. In response, the army claimed that the cabinet lacked the right priorities. When Army Minister Uehara Yūsaku (1856–1933) then resigned, the IJA refused to nominate a successor. According to military regulations, only generals or lieutenant-generals on active duty could serve as army ministers (this provision was called gen’eki bukan-sei), so in effect no cabinet could be formed without the army’s consent. On this occasion, the IJA made it clear that the civilian government was beholden to it, and that it did not consider the cabinet to be a higher authority. Only the emperor – according to the 1889 Constitution the supreme commander of Japan’s military forces – was accepted by the military as a superior authority (see Figure 13.2). In reality, however, it appropriated for itself the monarch’s authority to secure the ‘independence of the supreme command’ (tōsuiken no dokuritsu), thereby effectively ruling out the possibility of civilian control (Kōketsu 2005: ch. 1). The collapse of the Saionji cabinet was the beginning of what is known as the Taishō Political Crisis (Taishō seihen), a period of political instability where short-lived cabinets were the norm (Duus 1968; Banno 1994). Although the 1910s and 1920s are usually characterized as a period in which liberalism and democracy spread in Japan – the era of Taishō Democracy (see Chapter 14 in this volume) – it was also a time when the military asserted its position as an independent political force. Increasingly, the national press used the term gunbu (literally, the military sector) when referring to the military as an independent political and social factor. During the years of the Siberian Intervention (1918–22) – the East Asian scene of an armed intervention by allied forces in the Russian civil war – the IJA again insisted on the ‘independence of the supreme command’ and unilaterally increased the number of troops in the field from the 7,000 agreed upon with the United States to more than 70,000. It argued that the number of troops deployed was a purely military decision in which the civilian government, considered to be ignorant about military affairs by the Japanese officer corps, should not interfere (Kōketsu 2005: ch. 2; Morley 1957; Dunscomb 187

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Figure 13.2 The emperor as supreme commander reviews an army parade (kanpeishiki), 1913 lithograph.

2011). After the First World War, the army continued to strengthen its influence in politics, society, and the economy by propagating the idea of national mobilization (kokka sōdōin) – a plan which, in the eyes of some officers, had been implemented so successfully in wartime Germany (Saaler 2006). Following the war, Prime Minister Hara Takashi (Kei, 1856–1921; cf. Najita 1967), the first party politician from the Lower House of the Diet to serve as prime minister, introduced a number of reforms aimed at reducing the political power and independence of the military. As early as 1912, the cabinet of Admiral Yamamoto Gonnohyōe (Gonbei, 1852–1933), in a reaction to the resignation of Uehara Yūsaku, had abolished the stipulation that the army and navy ministers had to be officers on active service. Hara went one step further and for a short period acted as navy minister while Navy Minister Katō Tomosaburō (1861–1923) was away attending the Washington Conference. This was, however, an exception to the rule (the only other case of a prime minister replacing a navy minister was when Hamaguchi Osachi deputized as navy minister in 1930). As a general rule, despite Yamamoto’s intervention, only generals and admirals on active service held military ministerial positions until the end of the Second World War. In addition, Hara also reformed Japan’s colonial administration, which had traditionally been a bastion of political influence for the army and the navy. Prior to the Hara reforms, the posts of colonial governors-general of Taiwan and Korea had been reserved for military officers, on the grounds that these roles included military functions (see Yui 1976; Kitaoka 1978). Following his reforms, Hara appointed bureaucrat Den Kenjirō (1855–1930) as the first non-military governor-general of Taiwan. Until 1936, civilian governors continued to be appointed in Taiwan, but from then until the end of the war military officers again monopolized this post. In Korea, no civilian ever 188

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served as the head of the colonial administration. Overall, therefore, Hara’s reforms remained of limited influence, notwithstanding that, as the head of the first party cabinet in Japanese history, today he is considered one of the symbols of Taishō Democracy. It was probably no coincidence that he was assassinated by a fanatic in 1921 (Kōketsu 2005: ch. 4; Yamamoto 1997). Another controversial area involving the government’s right to make decisions affecting the armed forces was the issue of disarmament (Humphreys 1996). At the 1921/22 Washington Conference and, more forcefully, at the 1930 London Naval Conference, the Japanese military resisted what it considered an intervention in military affairs by the civilian authorities. After Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi decided to sign the London Naval Treaty in 1930, he was severely injured in an assassination attempt and died in August 1931 of septicemia as a consequence of the attack (Kōketsu 2005: chs. 4–5; Hatano 2016; Gow 2004).

The 1930s and the Asia-Pacific War In the 1930s, the military became the most influential political force in Japan, although a military dictatorship – or a fascist regime – failed to materialize (on fascism in Japan, see Szpilman 2004; Duus and Okimoto 1979; Morris 1963 and Chapters 16 and 17 in this volume). As Peter Duus notes, the ‘entrenched political elites’ were never overturned and the ‘social status quo’ was never threatened by the social and political developments of the 1930s. ‘Instead’, he argues, ‘the country was reorganized . . . into a “national defense state” (led by the military as a potent political force) – a state devoted to the preparation for war’ (Duus 1998: 214). In a similar vein, some political scientists have dubbed 1930s Japan a ‘garrison state’ (Lasswell 1941). The two characteristics that most clearly identified 1930s Japan as a militarist state were the coup attempts and assassinations undertaken by the military (often in cooperation with rightwing activists) and the fact that, after 1932, most prime ministers came from the ranks of the military, whereas party politicians steadily lost influence and all political parties were dissolved in 1940 (Berger 1977; Sakai 1992). Violence against politicians was not uncommon prior to the 1930s (Saaler 2014a; Murobushi 1962; Orbach 2017). Leading statesman Ōkubo Toshimichi (1830–78) was assassinated by disgruntled samurai in 1878, at the height of his career. In the same year, military rebels narrowly failed to kill the entire Meiji government in what is known as the Takebashi Incident. Mori Arinori (1847–89) was murdered by a right-wing fanatic on 11 February 1889, the day that the Constitution was promulgated. The list of such incidents is long. Even serving prime ministers were not immune to terror; the assassination of prime ministers Hara Takashi in 1921 and the attempted assassination of Hamaguchi Osachi in 1930 have been mentioned earlier. However, such incidents reached a new level of intensity in the 1930s, amounting to ‘government by assassination’, as one contemporary observer called it (Byas 1942; cf. also Duus 1998: ch. 13). Army conspiracies in Manchuria, including the 1928 assassination of Chinese warlord Chang Tso-lin (1875–1928) as well as the 1931 Manchurian Incident, imposed the army’s dominance in foreign policy. The assassination of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi (1855–1932) by a group of young naval officers, in what is known as the May 15 Incident of 1932, put an end to the era of party cabinets.4 In February 1936, a group of junior army officers, inspired by the so-called Kōdōha (Imperial Way) faction, staged a coup aimed at unseating the cabinet and establishing a military government. They led over 1,200 soldiers in what is known as the February 26 Incident, the largest military coup in modern Japanese history.The young officers involved claimed that their objective was to ‘liberate’ the emperor from the ‘evil advisors’ surrounding him; in their eyes, these included not only ‘corrupt politicians’, but also officers who supported rival factions. They 189

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assassinated Finance Minister and former Prime Minister Takahashi Korekiyo (1854–1936, who had kept the military budget under control for many years; cf. Smethurst 2007); Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and former Prime Minister Admiral Saitō Makoto (1858–1936); and General Watanabe Jōtarō (1874–1936), the Inspector General of Military Education. However, the rebels failed to eliminate other politicians they had targeted. Prime Minister Admiral Okada Keisuke (1868–1952) narrowly escaped with his life, while his brother-in-law, Colonel Matsuo Denzō (1872–1936), whom the rebels mistook for Okada, was killed. The insurgents occupied the Army Ministry Headquarters, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Headquarters and other important locations in central Tokyo but, in what turned out to be a fatal blunder, failed to seize the Imperial Palace. They called for the establishment of a government of national unity under the leading Kōdōha figures, Generals Araki Sadao (1877–1966) and Masaki Jinzaburō (1876–1956) – a de facto military government. However, the rebellion collapsed after a few days due to a lack of support from leading figures in the army and navy, who felt threatened by the Kōdōha, as well as the determined opposition of the emperor, angered by the murder of some of his closest advisors (Tsutsui 2016; Shillony 1973). Although Hirota Kōki (1878–1948), a diplomat and former foreign minister (i.e., a civilian), was named as Okada’s successor, the February 26 Incident had shown that a military rebellion could occur at any time. In addition, the rules reserving the army and navy ministerial posts for generals (and admirals) on active service were re-imposed, further strengthening the position of the military vis-à-vis the government. Most historians see ‘no radical break’ (Duus 1998: 229) in these developments – certainly nothing like the emergence of a military dictatorship. But there can be no doubt that during these years Japan mutated into a militarist society – one, however, that was not completely dominated by the military, but governed by a ‘coalition of the brightest and the best in the civil bureaucracy, the military hierarchy, the political parties, and the business world, who had risen through the regular channels of elite recruitment and regarded themselves as servants of the nation. No radical right-wing violence was able to dislodge them’ (Duus 1998: 229). With Japan’s increasing involvement in foreign wars, however, the balance of power within the traditional elites shifted away from the political parties and toward the military establishment. In 1937 Prince Konoe Fumimaro (1891–1945), whom many considered a potential ‘saviour of the nation’, was appointed prime minister. Many hoped that this descendant of ancient court nobles would rein in the army and prevent new outbreaks of violence. But Konoe was unable or unwilling to control the military. During his tenure as prime minister the army embarked on a full-scale war with China, which was triggered by the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937.This rapidly escalating conflict led to widespread calls for national unity in support of the war effort – and the marginalization and isolation of figures opposed to the war as ‘traitors’ and ‘anti-social elements’ (hikokumin).5 Increasing tensions between Japan and the United States accelerated the growth of totalitarian tendencies, culminating in the dissolution of all political parties and the creation of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association in 1940. After Konoe failed to reach an understanding with the U.S. regarding the situation in East Asia, he resigned in October 1941 and General Tōjō Hideki (1884–1948) replaced him as prime minister. Tōjō led Japan into war with the United States and Britain – a decision characterized by some historians as delusional, given that the imperial military forces had not been able to bring the war against China to a successful conclusion (Hotta 2013). A similar assessment can be applied to the Japanese government’s belief that Japan would be able to inflict so much damage on the ‘weak’ and ‘hedonistic’ Western powers that they would eventually sue for peace. This proved to be wishful thinking. The Western powers did not surrender and, following initial successes, Japanese forces were checked and gradually pushed back. In the last years of the 190

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war Japan’s military forces were so overstretched and so poorly supplied that a significant proportion of Japanese soldiers died not in ‘heroic fighting’, but of starvation. This was particularly true of the Pacific theatre (Fujiwara 2001). During the war, General Tōjō served in so many key positions that he came closer to resembling a ‘dictator’ than any other figure in modern Japan. Already prime minister before the outbreak of war, he also served as army minister and minister of munitions. In 1944, he also assumed the post of chief of the Army General Staff, the only time in modern Japanese history that the same person has served as army minister and chief of the Army General Staff at the same time. But although he was portrayed in wartime propaganda as the Japanese equivalent of Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini, he lacked the absolute powers of those dictators. That his position was not unassailable became obvious in 1944 when, following a series of military setbacks, he was forced to resign by a group of the emperor’s advisors (jūshin). He was succeeded by General Koiso Kuniaki (1880–1950).When Koiso failed to improve the war situation, he was replaced by Admiral Suzuki Kantarō (1868–1948, who had been badly injured and barely survived an assassination attempt during the February 26 Incident). Suzuki, under pressure from both military and civilian advisers, delayed the decision to surrender, but was finally forced to succumb to the inevitable. Following a series of devastating defeats, the carpet-bombing raids that razed Tokyo and many other cities, and (in final days of the war) the dropping of the nuclear bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered in September 1945.

The military in postwar Japan Japan’s defeat in the Asia-Pacific War fundamentally changed the situation of the military and its place in Japanese society and politics. For almost a decade following the nation’s surrender, Japan had no military forces at all. The country was occupied by U.S. military forces (and small numbers of troops from other Allied powers) and completely disarmed, and both the IJA and the IJN were dissolved. Demilitarization was one of the main objectives of the allied occupation forces, together with democraticization and decentralization. Three million Japanese soldiers and sailors were repatriated from overseas and re-integrated into society, a formidable task for the devastated country (Watt 2009; Wilson 2008). After some of the military’s leading figures, including Army Minister Anami Korechika (1887–1945) and Chief of the Army General Staff Sugiyama Hajime (Gen, 1880–1945), committed suicide or were sentenced to death or imprisonment by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), Japanese politics was returned to the hands of civilians, including some who had withdrawn from politics during the era of militarism, such as Shidehara Kijūrō (1872–1951), a former diplomat and Japan’s first postsurrender prime minister (on Shidehara, see Schlichtmann 2009). War responsibility – in particular responsibility for war crimes – was assigned to the military, which alone was blamed for ‘hijacking’ the country and taking it to war (gunbu dokusō).Tellingly, almost two-thirds of the defendants who appeared before the IMTFE were military officers and all but one of those sentenced to death were IJA officers (Lingen 2016;Totani 2008).6 The question of war responsibility, however, was not resolved and is unsettled to this day. This situation is partly due to the fact that the occupation forces failed to put Emperor Hirohito on trial – notwithstanding his role as supreme commander of the military and ultimate sovereign under the Constitution – and also to changing perceptions of the role of the Japanese people, who overwhelmingly supported the war effort until the nation’s surrender. According to the study Who Was Responsible? published by a leading newspaper a decade ago, the general public still regards the military as mainly responsible for taking Japan into the war (Yomiuri Shinbun 2006). Historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki (b. 1946), on the other hand, argues convincingly that the militarist 191

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(he uses the term fascist) system had strong popular, or grassroots, support (Yoshimi 2015; cf. also Sheftall 2011 and Chapter 17 in this volume). Article 9 of Japan’s new Constitution, drafted with the guidance of the occupation authorities and enacted in 1947, stipulates that Japan ‘forever renounces war’ and to that end, ‘land, sea, and air forces . . . will never be maintained’.7 Although the precise origins of this clause are unclear, the strongly anti-militarist Prime Minister Shidehara Kijūrō has been credited as its author (Schlichtmann 2009). His successors as prime ministers, including Yoshida Shigeru (1878–1967), also welcomed Article 9, believing that it prevented the resurgence of the military as a political force (Yoshida 2002). Article 9 is today considered a unique characteristic of Japan’s Constitution, alternatively known as the ‘peace constitution’ (heiwa kenpō). Activist groups have even nominated it for the Nobel Peace Prize (see Dudden 2015). As a result of the introduction of Article 9, the rebuilding of the economy and making Japan a ‘rich country’ – but without a ‘strong army’ – became the major goal of postwar politics. It was believed that military security would be achieved through a close alliance with the United States, but that Japanese military expenditures and forces should be kept to a minimum. More importantly, however, Article 9 has provided the rationale for pacifism in postwar Japanese society (Berger 2003). Defeat in the AsiaPacific War led to a postwar Japan that eschewed violence. ‘The absence of state violence’, Peter Katzenstein argues, ‘is in striking contrast to Japan’s history’ before 1945 (Katzenstein 1996: 47). Under U.S. pressure, however, Japan initiated a policy of rearmament in the 1950s. As a result of the intensifying Cold War and the outbreak of the – not so cold – Korean War, a 75,000 strong ‘National Police Reserve’ was established in 1950. This force was the predecessor of the Self-Defense Forces (SDF), founded in 1954 in accordance with the Self-Defense Forces Act passed in the Diet in that year. The SDF was placed under strict civilian control in order to avoid the problems that had resulted from the painful failure to establish such control in the prewar period. Today, Japan’s Supreme Command – in the prewar period under the control of the military, under the cloak of imperial authority – is vested in the hands of the prime minister (Katzenstein 1996: ch. 5). The SDF is a professional army that enlists personnel between 18 and 25 years of age; officers are selected from the graduates of the National Defence Academy (Bōei Daigakkō) in Yokosuka. According to the 2013–17 National Defence Programme Outline (bōei keikaku taikō), the number of SDF personnel stands at 159,000 in the Ground SDF (GSDF), 45,000 in the Maritime SDF (MSDF), and 47,000 in the Air SDF (ASDF) (Ministry of Defense of Japan 2015: 37; see also Patalano 2015 on the MSDF). Although the MSDF has been much strengthened in recent decades and has seen the introduction of highly sophisticated AEGIS destroyers (apart from Japan, they are maintained only by the United States, Norway, Spain, and South Korea) and helicopter carriers, the GSDF has suffered budget cuts and a reduction in the number of its costly tanks and artillery units.This trend has been reversed over the last few years. State-of-theart weaponry such as Patriot anti-missile defence systems (PAC3) and stealth fighter jets have become major procurement items for the GSDF and the ASDF. While military forces on this scale could easily be seen as in violation of Article 9 of the Constitution, today the SDF is generally acknowledged as constitutional, and its image in Japanese society has massively improved over the last few decades. A turning point in the debate over the constitutional status of the SDF was the 1994 recognition by the Socialist Party of Japan (SPJ) that military forces configured for the exclusive purpose of self-defence could be considered constitutional. That same year, the SPJ, which had joined a coalition government led by Socialist Murayama Tomiichi (b. 1924), was forced to take a more ‘realistic’ stance on the issue. This change of course led to the ‘normalization’ of the SDF – but was also a major factor in the subsequent decline of the SPJ, whose supporters did not forgive this sudden volte face. Today, 192

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the general interpretation of Article 9 is that it forbids war as a means of resolving international disputes (and of course rules out aggressive wars), but that any nation has the inherent right to self-defence (based on the UN Charter) and may thus maintain self-defence forces. Hand in hand with this ‘normalization’ of the SDF has gone an improvement of the force’s image in society. Although the SDF was not a popular employment choice for young Japanese before the 1990s, since the turn of the century young people have been increasingly attracted to the SDF as a career option. In 1991, the ratio of applicants for officer candidate positions in the SDF was only 4.4 applicants to 1 position, but by 2003 it had risen to 45 to 1. Whereas mostly high-school graduates had traditionally filled the ranks of the SDF, recruits now include many college graduates. Opinion polls also demonstrate the improved image of the SDF. According to the regular polls taken by the Cabinet Office, whereas in 2009 an impressive 80.9 per cent of respondents had a ‘positive’ or ‘somewhat positive’ attitude to the SDF, in 2012 that figure had risen to 91.7 per cent. The surveys also show that Japanese consider disaster relief to be an important task of the SDF – ranking even above ‘maintaining national security’ (Cabinet Office 2012). The SDF was mobilized for this purpose after the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, after the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system in the same year, and during the Tōhoku Earthquake of 2011. On the other hand, although Japanese appreciate the diverse roles played by the SDF, a large majority continues to reject its involvement in military operations (with some ambiguity in case of UN missions). Opinion polls show that the percentage of respondents affirming that they would fight if Japan was attacked remains below 10 per cent – one of the lowest figures recorded internationally (Saaler 2005: chapter 1; Cabinet Office 2012; see also Frühstück 2007: chapters 4 and 5).

Defence policy debates Japan’s postwar defence policy has been based on the 1960 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security with the United States, under which the United States agreed to support the defence of Japan in the event of an attack.8 The signing of this treaty triggered strong opposition and mass demonstrations outside the Diet which quickly spread to the whole country (anpo sōdō) and led to the fall of the Kishi Nobusuke (1896–1987) cabinet. Nevertheless, to this day, the treaty remains the cornerstone of Japan’s defence policy, which is further detailed in the socalled National Defence Programme Outline, originally formulated in 1976. These guidelines were revised in 1995, to adjust to changes in the post-Cold War order. Further revisions took place in 2004, 2009, and 2013 (Ministry of Defense of Japan 2015). The most recent revisions stress the need to adapt the SDF so it can better handle ‘new threats’, such as terrorism, guerilla warfare, ballistic missile strikes, and invasions of islands on Japan’s periphery. Although North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) has long been seen as a declared threat to Japanese security, the amendments to the Outline adopted on 10 December 2004 for the first time explicitly mentioned China as a key threat – a move received with much suspicion in that country.9 At the same time, the Midterm Defence Buildup Plan (Chūki bōeiryoku seibi keikaku), which had originally provided for reductions in personnel and budget cuts in the 2000s, has been revised, instead expanding the military budget. This move was accompanied by the relaxation of the three principles governing weapons exports, established in 1967, which in effect had operated as a self-imposed ban on arms exports. These actions have caused concern in neighbouring countries. However, Japan’s military expenditures, though still the eighth-largest in the world (see Table 13.1), remain relatively low in terms of its percentage of the country’s national budget. 193

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USA China Saudi Arabia Russia United Kingdom India France Japan Germany South Korea

597 145 82 65 56 48 47 41 37 34

Source: Compiled by the author, data from International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2016. Routledge, 2016.

One particularly hotly debated aspect of Japan’s defence policy has been the question of dispatching the SDF overseas. Until the 1990s, as mentioned above, this was considered unconstitutional, because the SDF were supposed to be maintained exclusively for the purpose of national defence. However, as Japan grew into a major economic power, international demands for Japan to assume a greater role in international peacekeeping became stronger. During the 1991 Gulf War, Japan was sharply criticized for not sending troops and making only a financial contribution to the war. This episode led to heated discussions about the dispatch of SDF forces overseas, which have continued to the present day. In reaction to this international pressure, in June 1992 the Japanese Diet passed the United Nations Peacekeeping Operations Cooperation Law,10 which permitted the SDF to participate in medical and humanitarian missions, refugee aid, transportation, infrastructure repair, and election-monitoring and policing operations under limited conditions (Katzenstein 1996: 126). The SDF has since participated in a number of UN Peacekeeping Operations (PKOs) and humanitarian missions – for example, in Cambodia, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, Indonesia, the Israeli-Syrian border region (the Golan Heights), on the coast of Somalia, and in South Sudan (Ishizuka 2013). The current government’s policy is characterized by an almost obsessive drive to provide the legal framework that would allow a more active role for the SDF overseas. In a telling contrast to these moves, however, Japan refuses to make an active contribution to the solution of various international refugee crises and accept refugees from civil war zones, limiting itself to providing financial assistance to countries with large refugee populations such as Turkey and Lebanon (Saaler 2015). The present government’s attempts to make it easier to dispatch the SDF overseas are partly the consequence of U.S. policy. Since the Korean War, the United States has demanded a larger military contribution from Japan as its alliance partner, and these demands intensified considerably in the 1990s. As a result, the 1996 Japan–U.S. Common Declaration on Security (Nichibei anpo kyōdō sengen), the 1997 Japan–U.S. New Guidelines (Nichibei shin-gaidorain), the 1999 Vicinity Emergency Law (Shūhen jitai-hō), the 2000 Anti-Terror Law (Tero tokubetsu sochi-hō),11 and the 2003 ‘Emergency Laws’ (Yūji hōsei)12 have gradually expanded the criteria by which Japan is able to deploy the SDF overseas. However, these various statements and laws have arguably undermined the spirit of Article 9. This ‘revision of the constitution by re-interpretation’, as Gavan McCormack has called it (McCormack 2001), has allowed the government to dispatch the SDF not only as part of UN missions, but also alongside United States-led forces, such as in 194

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Afghanistan in 2001 and during the Second Gulf War. Based on the 2003 Law for Humanitarian Aid and Special Measures in Iraq (see Hayashi 2004), around 1,000 members of the GSDF and the ASDF were sent to Iraq in 2004. However, opinion polls show that opposition to the use of the SDF in support of U.S. military actions, and for any other than purely defensive purposes, remains strong. In 2005, for example, 69 per cent of respondents in a poll conducted by Asahi Shinbun, a major daily, opposed renewing the mandate of SDF troops in Iraq. Indeed, this issue was a major reason for the swing against the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), a shift in the public mood which the opposition Democratic Party (DPJ) was able to exploit, leading to a change of government in 2009 and the formation of a DPJ cabinet.

Recent developments The LDP administrations headed by Abe Shinzō (2006–07 and since 2012) have been particularly active in moving toward a more assertive Japanese security policy and a more pro-active role for the SDF (Oros 2017; see Hughes 2005 for the policies of the previous Koizumi cabinet). This has had the double effect of challenging the pacifism that is still a strong feature of Japanese society and alienating Japan’s neighbours, who remain wary of the resurgence of Japanese militarism. (However, some U.S. commentators see Japan’s new military posture as a ‘positive’ development; cf. Auslin 2016: 126.) Abe has done much to incite such anxieties – both domestically and overseas. He has frequently posed in military uniform, as a fighter jet pilot, a tank pilot, or been pictured on board warships, including a U.S. aircraft carrier.13 But his pro-military stance has not been limited to posing for the camera. Paralleling the euphemistic way in which the armed forces are referred to as Self-Defense Forces (rather than the army, navy, or air force), for many years the government has maintained a low profile for the country’s military administration, the Defence Agency. In early 2007, Abe upgraded this agency to a cabinet-level ministry, the Ministry of Defence (MOD). Critics have pointed out that, as a result of this move, continued civilian control of the Japanese military is at risk. They detect an increase in the authority enjoyed by senior military officers and fear that civilian control over the country’s military leadership is being gradually eroded (Moriya 2016). Some Japanese commentators have even gone so far as to compare Abe’s policies to the gunbu dokusō – the high-handed conduct of the military in the prewar period.14 The revision of the National Defence Programme Outline in 2014 marked a further shift in policy toward a more proactive military role for Japan in the East Asian region, and also globally. The LDP has also been pressing strongly for a revision of Article 9, a move intended to show that Japan has a ‘National Defence Military’ (kokubōgun), rather than ‘mere’ Self-Defense Forces. A 2012 LDP draft of a revised Constitution included a ‘new’ Article 9 titled ‘National Defence’, which stipulated that ‘in order to secure peace and independence for our nation as well as the safety of the State and the people, a National Defence Military shall be retained with the prime minister as the supreme commander’. The 2012 draft also explicitly gave the Japanese military a wide range of new roles ‘in addition to the activities for performing the duties in the first paragraph [national security]’, namely ‘international cooperative activities in order to secure the peace and safety of the international society and [activities to] maintain public order’. Apart from the dispatch of military forces overseas, the LDP also envisions a role for the SDF in combating unrest at home.15 Clearly, the symbolism involved in these projected changes is very important for the conservative establishment. The demand to inscribe the existence of the SDF – not a matter for debate in Japanese society, as we have seen – in the Constitution is high on the agenda of Japan’s main political party, and is also a priority for a number of right-wing pressure groups, including the powerful Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference).16 195

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However, the road to constitutional revision is long and complicated. In 2015, the second Abe administration passed new security legislation with the intention of expanding the deployment of the SDF outside Japanese territory within the framework of ‘collective self-defence’ operations. This legislation, which is likely to increase the possibility of Japan’s getting further involved in the never-ending ‘war on terror’ (Dower 2010), was strongly opposed by the opposition in the Diet and by large-scale demonstrations on the streets (Mason 2016; Benesch 2016). Criticism from abroad, in particular from the victims of Japan’s pre-1945 militarism and expansionism, showed that an expanded – and global – military role for Japan is still regarded as untenable, given the perceived deficiencies in Japan’s handling of its militarist past (see Saaler 2014b and Chapter 30 in this volume). Overall, however, resistance to the government’s policy of increasing Japan’s involvement in military activities overseas seems to be on the decline. At the very least, Prime Minister Abe can rely on a stable LDP voter base, as shown by his party’s clear victories in general elections in 2014 and 2016. With a clear majority in both Houses of the Diet, a revision of the Constitution – and in particular the pacifist Article 9 – has now become a major and, for the first time, attainable goal for the government, the LDP, and the groups supporting it.

Conclusion As we have seen in this chapter, the armed forces played an extremely important role in Japan prior to 1945. As a result of the national conscription system, young men from almost every household served in the military at some point in their lives. Due to the frequent wars in which Japan was involved (against China 1894–95, against Russia 1904–05, against Germany 1914 and in the First World War 1914–18, in the Siberian Intervention 1918–22, and in what is called the Asia-Pacific War from 1931 to 1945), there were few families that were untouched by at least one of these conflicts. The IJA, in particular, maintained close links to local communities through youth and veterans’ organizations, and, as we have seen, was a powerful actor in politics. After 1945, Japan was demilitarized and political life once again passed into the hands of civilians. Following the formation of the SDF, civilian control of Japan’s new military forces was firmly established. Because of its character as a professional army of limited size, the SDF do not play a role in Japan that is even remotely comparable to the role of the IJA before 1945. As a result of its participation in disaster relief activities and UN-led peacekeeping operations, its reputation in society at large has gradually improved. At the same time, although traditionally concerned about its image in a largely pacifist society, the SDF has become more assertive in its recruitment methods, employing slogans expressing national pride and emphasizing the superiority of Japan’s military equipment in its PR materials (see Figure 13.3). This marks a notable shift away from its previous emphasis on service to the public and to the Japanese people. These developments can also be seen as part of the worldwide trend to utilize military force for power projection and a renewed emphasis on prioritizing national interests over international cooperation – characteristics of so-called neoconservative politics in the ‘Western’ world, which Japan considers itself to be a part of. Other critics see the expansion of the role of the military and the accompanying rise in Japan’s military budget as an attempt at resolving the crisis in the Japanese economy (Itō 2015). Be that as it may, the tendency toward a more active military role for Japan, leading to a closer relationship between Japan and the United States, threatens to deepen Japan’s diplomatic isolation in East Asia, where such policies are seen as a sign of the resurgence of a Japanese militarism and ultranationalism. The incontrovertible fact remains that a number of East Asian countries claim that Japan has yet to fully recognize the damage done by prewar militarism and thus see news of a Japan looking toward acquiring offensive military 196

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Figure 13.3 SDF recruitment poster (2016; photograph by Sven Saaler).

capabilities to hit enemy bases (as recently urged by the LDP)17 with a high degree of suspicion. Unless historical issues are fully resolved, it will be difficult for the military to play a larger role in Japanese society once again, and also more difficult for Japan to play a constructive part in regional (let alone international) security discussions.

Notes 1 For detailed studies of the organization and history of the Japanese armed forces, see Drea 2009; Evans and Peattie 1997;Tobe 1998; Fujiwara 1987. For a detailed analysis of civil–military relations in modern Japan, see Kōketsu 2005. See also Yoshida 1978.Yoshida 2002 offers a highly instructive social history of the soldier in modern Japan. 2 The military strategy for Japan’s national defence was set out in the so-called Imperial Defence Guidelines (Teikoku kokubō hōshin). See Kurokawa 2003; Drea 2009: ch. 7. 3 In addition, the rescript laid down the basic virtues demanded of soldiers and sailors, becoming the ideological basis for the military in modern Japan: loyalty (to the emperor as supreme commander), valour, faith, politeness, and purity. 4 The plot originally included the assassination of Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), who was visiting Japan as Prime Minister Inukai’s guest. But when the assassins struck, Chaplin was absent watching a sumo match with the prime minister’s son. See Byas 1942: 29; Silverberg 2006: 1–2. 5 For the case of the party politician Saitō Takao (1870–1949), who in 1940 criticized the military in a speech in the Diet, see Kinmonth 1999. 6 The only civilian politician to receive the death sentence was Hirota Kōki; other civilians received prison sentences. 197

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7 See Government Printing Bureau,‘The Constitution of Japan’, www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/etc/ c01.html. 8 See ‘Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between Japan and the United States of America’, www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/q&a/ref/1.html. This treaty succeeded the 1952 Security Treaty between the United States and Japan. 9 See Ministry of Defense, ‘National Defense Program Guidelines and the Mid-Term Defense Program’, www.mod.go.jp/e/d_act/d_policy/national.html and NIDS 2016. 10 See ‘Act on Cooperation for United Nations Peacekeeping Operations and Other Operations (Act No. 79 of June 19, 1992)’, www.pko.go.jp/pko_j/data/law/pdf/law_e.pdf. 11 The full name of this act reflects the insecurity felt by Japanese lawmakers entering completely new territory in Japanese defence policy: ‘Special Measures Law concerning Measures Taken by Japan in Support of the Activities of Foreign Countries Aiming to Achieve the Purposes of the Character of the United Nations in Response to the Terrorist Attacks Which Took Place on September 11, 2001, in the United States of America as Well as Concerning Humanitarian Measures Based on Relevant Resolutions of the United Nations’. 12 This legislation comprises seven acts, including the ‘Law for the Situation of an Armed Attack [on Japan]’ (Buryoku kōgeki jitai-hō), the ‘Revised Self Defence Forces Law’ (Kaisei jieitai-hō), the ‘Revised Law for the Establishment of a Security Council’ (Kaisei anzen hoshō kaigi setchi-hō) (all 2003), the ‘Law for the Protection of the People’ (Kokumin hogo-hō), and the ‘Law for the Support of the U.S. Military’ (Beigun shien-hō) (2004). 13 ‘Abe becomes first sitting Japanese leader to board U.S. aircraft carrier’, Japan Times, 18 October 2015, www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/10/18/national/politics-diplomacy/japan-flexes-naval-muscle-us-signals-wider-engagement-western-pacific. For a photo of Abe posing in a fighter jet, see www. japanprobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/abe-731-jet.jpg. 14 See ANN News, ‘ “Senzen no gunbu dokusō to onaji”. Kyōsan, naibu bunsho ryūshutsu de tsuikyū’, http://news.tv-asahi.co.jp/news_politics/articles/000057031.html. 15 See ‘Draft for the Amendment of the Constitution of Japan’, www.voyce-jpn.com/ldp-draft-constitution. 16 See the organization’s website at www.nipponkaigi.org/about/mokuteki. 17 See ‘Japan ruling party urges government to acquire capability to hit enemy bases’, Reuters World News, 30 March 2017.

Further reading Frühstück, Sabine (2007) Uneasy Warriors. Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fujiwara Akira (1987) Nihon gunji-shi, 2 vols, Nihon Hyōronsha. Kōketsu Atsushi (2005) Kindai Nihon seigun kankei no kenkyū, Iwanami Shoten. Morris, Ivan (ed.) (1963) Japan 1931–1945. Militarism, Fascism, Japanism? Lexington: D. C. Heath and Co. Samuels, Richard (1994) “Rich Nation, Strong Army”: National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Yoshida Yutaka (2002) Nihon no guntai: Heishitachi no kindaishi, Iwanami Shoten.

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In 1889, Japan became the first Asian nation to establish a constitutional parliamentary system. Today, however, few historians cite this moment to designate Japan as the vanguard of Asian democracy or more broadly as the paragon of liberal internationalist values. Most, instead, regard liberal thought, political democracy, and internationalism as marginal traditions in modern Japanese history. Although individual advocates may have had staunch personal convictions and gained considerable public attention for their views, these advocates have nonetheless been perceived as putting pressure on the dominant political authority in a system that was decidedly authoritarian, corporatist, and nationalistic in its operation. Tempering this unsympathetic view of Japanese democracy requires giving credit to the complex ways that ‘liberalism’ asserted itself and inserted itself into modern Japanese life. An older tradition of scholarship has viewed Japan’s modern liberalism as a case study in failure, a society whose early promise veered from a universal path of development.This scholarship has contended that many Japanese liberals failed to grasp core liberal principles. Even those who subscribed to liberal thought maintained those liberal values inconsistently. And, in either case, Japanese liberals operated in a social and intellectual milieu that was fundamentally inhospitable to liberal thought. The ineffectiveness of bourgeois liberal political parties in Japan has been the focus of Marxist critiques since the 1930s (see Kawashima et al. 2013). After 1945, such critiques were similarly dismissive of the efficacy of Japan’s prewar liberalism. Non-Marxist critics, such as the influential political philosopher Maruyama Masao (1914–96), also noted the weakness of liberal thought and democratic institutions in resisting fascism (Maruyama 1963a; 1963b). In particular, American modernization theorists studied the ‘failure of prewar democracy’, premised on the notion that prewar Japan diverged from the proper path of democratic development. Robert Scalapino (1953) was an early example of this approach. The views of the modernization school are summarized in Edwin O. Reischauer’s (1910–90) widely cited essay, ‘What Went Wrong?’ (Reischauer 1971). Tatsuo Arima (1969) is especially critical of Japanese intellectuals’ failure to grasp liberal principles. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, ‘Taishō democracy’ and Taishō intellectuals garnered positive appraisals in the works of Matsuo Takayoshi (1966), Mitani Taichirō (1974), and others that elevated the intellectual work of Yoshino Sakuzō (Mitani 1975; Matsuo 1976; Han 2012) and Ishibashi Tanzan (Matsuo 1984).

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Although many of these appraisals of Japanese liberalism will be disputed here, it is worth noting at the outset that such claims about the flaws of liberalism in Japan presume a success for liberalism in the West that it did not enjoy. Modern liberalism in the West was just as compromised by its associations with imperialism, scientific racism, militarism, the expansion of state authority, and the mass political process that emerged under industrial capitalism. Liberal thought in Japan, as elsewhere, emerged within and passed through specific historical contexts, reflecting the political problematic of each age. Although intense interest in liberal democratic thought preceded industrial capitalism in Japan, broad Japanese investment in liberalism depended on the stimulus of an industrial capitalist social order, which expanded interest in liberal ideas, served as its essential social basis, and provided the gravest challenges to its use to animate Japanese political life.

Language of liberalism At the core of any liberal project is the rational and autonomous individual, who is captain of his political and social existence and an architect of history. History, in this view, is the aggregate of countless autonomously generated individual actions. At the same time, liberals worry that the autonomous individual is restrained by the bands of rote custom, outmoded tradition, and jealously guarded sinecures and privileges of dominant social classes. In these terms, liberalism has antecedents in East Asian thought. The foundational conception of rational agency of individuals creating the good society extends as far back as Confucius (551–470 BC). Similarly, there are parallels between this vision of liberalism and Mencius’ (372–289 BC) view of popular will as the final arbiter of good governance. Following in these traditions, late Tokugawa era (1603–1868) debates about social order occasionally took on a liberal tone.The dominant school of Zhu Xi (1130–1200) neo-Confucianism regarded all thinkers, especially elite educated classes, as rational agents. Tokugawa era thinkers within the heterodox Wang Yang-ming (Jp. Ōyōmei, 1472–1529) neo-Confucian tradition pushed this thinking further, emphasizing the individual as an intuitively moral agent regardless of his social position or status. Their ruminations on the nature of society and status distinctions often analyzed received privilege through a laissez faire lens and celebrated individual virtue (Najita 1987). Due in part to these intellectual traditions, late-Tokugawa-era revolutionaries offered proposals to replace the autocratic Tokugawa regime with new representative deliberative bodies, mirroring those found in Europe and the United States. Full articulation of liberal principles emerged during the era of the so-called ‘Meiji enlightenment’, from the 1860s through the 1880s, as the shape and forms of the Japanese polity were openly contested. The eventually accepted Sino-Japanese combination of characters for the concept of ‘liberty’ (jiyū) was not a neologism coined in this era. It had been used earlier in the sense of (acting) ‘according to one’s own intentions’, without any political connotations. In ordinary usage, it connoted an air of selfishness or self-serving willfulness. Enlightenment thinker Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) and translator of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty Nakamura Keiu (Masanao, 1832–91) understood that endorsing ‘political liberty’ could not be seen as an endorsement of unrestrained autonomy. To propose that one’s civic behaviour ought to be libertine or licentious not only flew in the face of their ethical worldview as former samurai, it would have been flatly worthless in an age of political revolution and open civil unrest. The rashness of individual actions aided the cause of destroying the ancien regime but not the cause of building a new social order. Fukuzawa’s Conditions of the West (1866–70) and Nakamura’s The Principle of Liberty (1871), therefore, cast individual liberty in ways that would shape respectable liberalism throughout the modern period. Liberty of public action, in their view, meant the 200

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operation of publicly minded men in an arena uncluttered by the obstacles of hereditary status and lineage. Insofar as the ‘individual’ (kojin) – which was, in contrast to jiyū, a neologism of the Meiji era (1868–1912) – enjoyed civil liberties, he did so owing to the state’s obligation to ensure impartiality in the public sphere, liberty from the interference of others (Howland 2002: 94–107). Meiji enlightenment thinkers were equally quick to assert that a constitutional order was the only guarantor of liberty. In 1874, Itagaki Taisuke (1837–1919), Gotō Shōjirō (1838–97) and six other former samurai petitioned the throne urging the founding of constitutional rule and a national assembly. Itagaki and Gotō were disenchanted leaders of the Restoration who broke with their fellow oligarchic leaders of the early Meiji state in a dispute over policy issues. As was clear at the time, this dispute was primarily a contest over the nature of the new state. Their petition aimed to thwart the increasing concentration of power in the hands of an exclusive group of former samurai from Chōshū and Satsuma domains. Despite the internecine quality of the dispute and the petitioners’ superficial interest in civil rights as such, the petition prompted a broader national debate about political leadership, collectively labeled the Movement for Freedom and People’s Rights’ (jiyū minken undō) (see Figure 14.1). As important as this strain of publically spirited liberalism was, it was not exclusive. The Freedom and People’s Rights Movement proved the dynamic political currency of the contrasting view that individuals possessed inherent rights to liberty apart from the state. Itagaki and Gotō would eventually form a political party, adopting the name Liberal Party (Jiyūtō) and collecting around them theorists and activists on behalf of a liberal political order: Baba Tatsui (1850–88), Ōi Kentarō (1843–1922), Ueki Emori (1857–92), Nakae Chōmin (1847–1901), and others. These thinkers argued that liberal values were equally necessary to restrain a corrupt and despotic state, whose actions some of them had felt acutely, having been put in jail, fined, or banished from the capital by the Meiji government. When the government issued an Imperial Rescript in 1881 announcing that a constitution would be promulgated and a national assembly convened in 1890, they responded with proposals aiming to compel the state to adopt a liberal constitutional order immediately. In one example, Ueki Emori’s ‘East Asian Greater Japan

Figure 14.1 The government discusses the 1874 petition for a constitution. From left to right: –  Okubo Toshimichi, Kido Takayoshi, Iwakura Tomomi, Sanjo ¯ Sanetomi, Goto ¯ Sho ¯jiro ¯ (seen from behind), Prince Arisugawa Taruhito, Shimazu Hisamitsu (former daimyo of Satsuma), Itagaki Taisuke (1875 colour woodblock triptych by Ogata Gekko ¯). 201

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National Constitution Proposal’ of August 1881 made explicit calls for the ‘people’ (jinmin) to be given ‘freedoms’ and rights.1 These thinkers played an important stimulating role, but the true work of political mobilization on behalf of civil rights and democratic governance arose in the rural prefectures, mostly but not exclusively in areas surrounding Tokyo. The Meiji oligarchs’ promise to implement a constitutional system by 1890 did little to tamp down agitation on behalf of a liberal political order. Throughout these communities sprang up local affiliates identifying with the national Liberal Party, in addition to any number of ‘discussion societies’, ‘lecture and debate societies’, ‘youth societies’, and assorted study groups and social clubs. Kanagawa Prefecture, adjacent to Tokyo, had more than sixty such groups (Irokawa 1985: 49). Many of the organizers arose from the stratum of wealthy farmers who had access to education but also had clear interests in a liberal constitutional system. As the highest stratum of local society, they had gained a great deal from the end of feudal restrictions and the abolition of the samurai-dominated social order. The central government’s harsh deflationary policies of 1881–85 hit many segments of rural society hard. These local associations benefited from discontent among those who viewed government policies as capricious and arbitrary. Local merchants, schoolteachers, and lower strata of the agricultural community joined in response. Decrying autocratic governance, these associations set about writing their own constitutions, invoking liberal principles to constitute a new relationship between locales and central authority. Hounded by the police, these associations became increasingly radicalized and spawned violent protests. Part and parcel of these debates was the question of whether women are autonomous agents who should be in charge of their own history. Male Meiji enlightenment thinkers had been quick to identify practices of marriage and concubinage as contrary to their conception of a liberal society. Whether that conception concurrently demanded political rights for women was a stumbling block for them. Rather than leaving questions of political rights to the ruminations of men, women spoke out forcefully, denouncing restrictions on women’s rights to public participation and demanding protections for their civil rights including rights to head households and hold property (see also Chapter 25 in this volume). Kishida Toshiko (1863–1901), born into a successful Kyoto merchant family, gave voice to these frustrations in a series of fiery speeches during 1881–83, which were frequently stopped by the police (Sievers 1983). As if to confirm suspicions of the government’s despotic leanings, official repression of these movements was unrelenting. Laws restraining the press (1875) and public assembly (1880) were invoked to arrest and banish government critics from Tokyo, while provincial administrators harassed local activists and disrupted their meetings, frequently inspiring open protests against their policies. Such protests were ruthlessly suppressed and their leaders punished. National liberal figures disavowed the radicalism of these protests; the Liberal Party formally disbanded in 1884. State repression continued to hound national activists, however. Facing police harassment, Kishida Toshiko became more circumspect in her activities. She married Liberal Party activist Nakajima Nobuyuki (1846–99). Despite Kishida’s new circumspection, the couple were exiled from Tokyo in 1887. Nakae Chōmin, Liberal Party newspaper writer and translator of Rousseau, was similarly banished from Tokyo in the same year. Fukuda Hideko (1865–1927), an educator who had been inspired by Kishida’s oratory and supported the Liberal Party, joined forces with Ōi Kentarō, a lawyer and Liberal Party activist, in 1885 to plot an overthrow of the moribund Korean monarchy (Jansen 1954). They reasoned that their coup would result in a liberal Korean state that would serve as a beachhead of liberalism in East Asia and thwart the foreign policy of the increasingly despotic Meiji government. Their quixotic plot unraveled and they, along with 137 other activists, were imprisoned.

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Although none of the violent mass protests lasted more than a few days and other moves to restrain the despotism of the Meiji state fizzled, it must be noted that events of the 1880s proved that many Japanese found in liberal values a compelling language of political participation and risked their lives to imbue the new state with those values (Bowen 1984). At the same time, one must observe that their idealization of liberal individualism flourished right at the moment of its decline as a salient political force in the West. Japanese leaders surveying the political landscape of Europe observed that there were just as many authoritarian as liberal responses to cyclical economic depressions, heavy industrialism, the rise of state-sponsored nationalism, and territorial expansion and rivalry among well-armed empires. This context conditioned Japan’s leaders to oppose any movement toward a liberal conception of the state.

Liberal empire The 1889 Constitution,2 written by members of the ruling clique, settled any questions of rights and citizenship. Within the autocratic constitutional order of the Meiji Constitution, the emperor embodied the sovereign authority but transcended the political system that operated under his name. The Constitution enumerated civil liberties but subjected them to the constraints of law. Instead of introducing the concept of political citizenship, the Constitution identified all Japanese as imperial subjects (shinmin). A directly elected lower chamber with circumscribed powers was established as part of the bi-cameral Imperial Diet (the other chamber was the House of Peers, consisting of a mixture of hereditary and appointed members), but, at least initially, only a small percentage of Japanese subjects held the franchise (Gluck 1985). Women had no franchise under the new parliamentary system. The emperor-dominated system created under the Constitution – ‘a contrivance that contravened all other values’ – has been a subject of intense scholarly debate (Irokawa 1985: 13). Certainly, prominent liberal voices were coopted and participated in the new public sphere it established. As early as 1881, Ōkuma Shigenobu (1838–1922), admirer of British parliamentarianism, had opposed the ruling oligarchs’ arrogation of political power and was expelled from the government. In opposition, he founded a political party and a college that was the forerunner of Waseda University, which would become a hotbed of liberal thought throughout the modern period. In 1888, he returned as foreign minister but was forced to resign after losing a leg in an unsuccessful assassination attempt in 1889. He subsequently served twice as prime minister and held many other posts under the new constitutional system. Former Liberal Party activists Itagaki Taisuke and Nakae Chōmin were elected to the Lower House of the Imperial Diet in the first parliamentary elections, signaling the incorporation and cooperation of a certain liberal respectability in the Meiji constitutional order. Most of the imprisoned liberal activists were pardoned under the general amnesty celebrating the promulgation of the new constitution. At an ideological level, the central government fostered an inhospitable environment for a liberal conception of political participation, sanctioning an official nationalism in public life and demanding moral education for children (Fujitani 1996). Rather than promoting individualism, meritocracy, and entrepreneurship – all of which held social currency in the Meiji era – official nationalism and educational policy stressed deference to authority, urged self-denial and selfsacrifice as serving the community interest, and romanticized rural life as the repository of traditional values. In this way, urban life and the bourgeois values of the individual were cast as unpatriotic. The industrial development stimulated by Meiji-era reforms, however, meant that Japan took on the features of other modern capitalist societies. In an expanding public sphere, liberal voices competed with the statist, nationalist, and eventually socialist voices over issues of

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economic development. A modern intellectual elite, often drawn from wealthy farming families, gravitated toward liberal theories of state and public action as these ideas continued to serve as justifications for a meritocratic society free of the power of hereditary privilege. In that environment, public commentators could still inject liberal interpretations into public discourse. A case in point is the various programmes to resurrect bushido, the supposed ethical code of the samurai, as an inspiration for the modern mass conscription military. Liberals Ozaki Yukio (1858–1954) and Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933) tapped themes of public service to modernize the ethos and compete with the jingoistic interpretations applied to it by nationalist thinkers. For Ozaki and the U.S.-educated Nitobe, Japan’s development as a modern nation depended on the growth of a civic-minded, gentlemanly class of high character. Both men saw in bushido an emphasis on individual moral character that paralleled the ethos of British public school training or Protestant moral training in the United States (Benesch 2014: 45–55, 90–6). Their conception of the liberally educated but culturally rooted Japanese gentlemen envisioned a critical role for men of non-elite backgrounds, like themselves, to participate in national and civilizational development. The lives of women presented a starker mismatch between an officially sanctioned ideology and the reality of life under capitalism. Denied suffrage in the 1890 Election Law, women lost further ground in the 1898 Civil Code.The Police Security Regulations of 1900 forbade women’s public political activity, placing them in the same category as military servicemen, schoolteachers, and shrine and temple officials. Women’s roles were seen as too centrally productive to the life of the nation to allow them to be politicized (Nolte and Hastings 1991: 151–74). As rationale, Education Ministry bureaucrats pushed a contrived agenda of ryōsai kenbo (good wife, wise mother), an image of domesticity that diverged fundamentally from many women’s lives as factory workers, nurses, and schoolteachers. With unappreciated irony, the Imperial Diet passed regulations requiring girls’ education in every prefecture, a move that would assure a new class of women would emerge to dispute this moral guidance. A feminist movement with a primarily liberal political agenda emerged with a new publication Seitō (Bluestocking) in 1911. Its five founders were all graduates of Japan’s Women’s College established in 1901. Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971) chafed under the contempt that even the college’s benefactors, including the liberal icon Ōkuma Shigenobu, showed for their education. ‘According to him, [women] needed to be educated not for themselves, but because their continued ignorance would be a national disgrace’. Her rejection of formal authority and her political consciousness grew directly from this experience (Hiratsuka 2006: 71–7). In the realm of public policy but also as participants in a discourse on civilizational survival, liberal thinkers became bound up in Japan’s territorial expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Chapter 6 in this volume for details). Whereas hoary nationalistic sloganeering rationalized Japan’s colonial adventures, liberal commentators saw ample opportunities to represent Japan’s behaviour as following the global trend of the expansion of the liberal capitalist order. An emblematic spokesman for a conception of liberal imperialism was American-educated Waseda University professor Ukita Kazutami (1859–1946). Ukita advocated an ‘ethical imperialism’ that promoted international commerce and extended the reach of civilization while accepting the international environment of predatory territorial expansion (Tierney 2015: 42–7). Ukita was hardly alone among liberal thinkers in accommodating himself to Japan’s territorial expansion. In 1901, Nitobe Inazō, fresh from completing his English language best-seller Bushido: The Soul of Japan (Nitobe 1990), agreed to serve as special advisor to the new Japanese colony of Taiwan in order to plan the development of the Taiwanese sugar industry. Despite his Quaker-inspired pacifism, Nitobe was friendly with the island’s head of the civilian administration (minsei chōkan) and colonizer par excellence Gotō Shinpei (1857–1929). 204

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Nitobe’s subsequent proposal was rooted in a liberal conception of agricultural development and was mostly ignored. Nevertheless, with Gotō’s support Nitobe attained prominent positions as professor of colonial policy studies at Kyoto and Tokyo imperial universities where he offered lectures on liberal colonial policy to Japan’s future leaders. Liberal thought did little to disrupt the central political authority in this era mostly because of a broad unanimity of opinion on national goals of spurring industrial development and securing Japan’s place in the regional system of foreign relations in East Asia. In conflict with the Joseon Kingdom of Korea, Qing China, and Imperial Russia, Japan took on the mantle of the progressive force in East Asia. With the colonization of Korea completed in 1910 and the vestiges of the unequal treaty relationships expiring in 1911, the national issues of security, wealth, and power had been largely resolved. The death of the Meiji Emperor in 1912 closed that stage in political development symbolically. The Taishō Political Crisis of 1912 and 1913 exposed how issues of constitutional governance had been only subsumed under the supposed unity of empire building. The parliamentary system was by that time more than twenty years old. Although the electorate remained small (about 3 per cent of the population in the 1912 elections), a system of empire-building necessarily drew fuller percentages of the population into national discourse on politics. At issue was the dissolution of the cabinet in late 1912 owing to a dispute over military spending (see Chapter 13 in this volume). The army’s political bullying in refusing to provide a suitable candidate for the Army Minister’s post inflamed public opinion against oligarchic government. Ozaki Yukio, who had served continuously in the Diet since 1890, issued what is commonly regarded as the most famous denunciation of clique government in the history of the chamber: ‘They hide behind the throne and snipe at their political enemies . . . using the throne as a parapet and the imperial Rescripts as bullets’ (Najita 1967: 147). The resulting public protests that erupted in January and February 1913 in defence of constitutional democracy were short-lived, but large and widespread, leading to the resignation of the cabinet. Although the protests did not unseat the entrenched power of clique governments, they did advance the liberal proposition that parliamentary activity was itself politicized. Tokyo Imperial University professor Yoshino Sakuzō (1878–1933), the liberal theoretician of the age, gave the justification for this evolving conception of parliamentary democracy in his writings and lectures. Son of a silk merchant and himself the product of the new meritocratic elite,Yoshino proposed the concept of minponshugi, a democracy of the people’s welfare.Through this conception,Yoshino avoided the conventional translation of democracy, minshushugi, the Chinese characters of which implied that the people were lord over their own affairs.The Meiji Constitution was explicit that the emperor alone was sovereign; no others could claim a piece of that sovereign authority without insulting the imperial rule. Using his new terminology, Yoshino argued, ‘Democracy is not dependent on where legal theory locates sovereignty’, he argued. In democracy, ‘the exercise of political power must take the people’s welfare as its object . . . and how power is exercised must be decided according to the people’s opinion’ (Totten 1965: 40–1, minor modifications based on the Japanese original). In this way, he split popular expectations for parliamentary government from the narrow interests of the oligarchs without challenging the sovereign authority of the emperor.

Internationalism and the age of mass liberalism Conventional narratives of modern Japanese liberalism cite the rise of Hara Takashi (Kei, 1856– 1921) as Japan’s prime minister in 1918 as signaling a new liberal phase in the history of parliamentary democracy. Hara was an adept party politician, the first prime minister without an aristocratic title, who manoeuvred to erode the influence of oligarchs and the military in 205

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parliamentary affairs. He had risen to power in response to popular outrage against rampant post-World War I inflation, and his self-styled ‘commoner’ status coloured his premiership with a progressive hue. To be sure, party politics played an increasing role in parliamentary affairs in subsequent years. In other ways, Hara was no liberal. He moved cautiously on democratic reforms and, when he was felled by a right-wing assassin’s dagger in 1921, he left no liberal party agenda.To emphasize Hara’s role as a liberal is to overstate the relevance of particular ideologues and actors at the cost of obscuring wider relevance of liberal ideas in Japanese society. The wartime boom resulting from Japan’s position at the fringes of the conflict expanded the electorate through force of rising wages, new professional jobs, and inflation. These trends augured for a change in Japanese politics in any case. Hara is profoundly important to this story in a different respect. He recognized that the postwar international system would be heavily influenced by a liberal internationalist conception of world order. Hara reasoned that minimal expansion of suffrage accepted alongside a cooperative framework with the capitalist West would promote Japanese economic development and ensure control of parliamentary parties over Japanese politics. To the extent that Hara pursued a policy of accommodation with the emerging liberal internationalist order, he indirectly endorsed what came in its wake. In turn, the fate of liberalism became entirely bound up in the fate of liberal internationalism. As Ukita Kazutami put it, ‘it will be the fate of Occidental liberalism which is going to determine the future of Japanese liberalism’ (Ukita 1920: 678–9). Liberal internationalism meant at least four things in 1920s Japan. First, there was the political dimension of international diplomatic cooperation, what is termed ‘Wilsonianism’. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson had no monopoly on these programmes, but then, as now, such ideas were discussed under his name (Manela 2009). Related to these ideas was a view that international trade and commerce could sustain economic growth through the postwar, an international environment that inspired but also bedeviled Japanese businesses. Third, internationalism meant cultural exchange that could include anything from the growing application of science and technology to daily life to new consumer preferences to full-blown cosmopolitan identities. Last, and for nationalists and nativists the most ominous, was the broader sense that Japanese society was becoming more like other societies, converging into the flow of global history in which all societies had middle classes. As in Japan, many members of these middle classes were pro-Empire: they supported illiberal colonial policies while seeking to expand their influence over parliamentary politics at home. Japan’s support for a number of liberal international treaties – the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the Washington Conference of 1921–22, the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, and the London Naval Conference of 1930 – stemmed from that accommodation. Even in the case of the 1922 Nine Power Treaty of the Washington Conference, which rolled back Japanese imperialist gains in China, Japanese leadership adopted a conciliatory and cooperative posture on China. In recognition of this participatory role in the liberal capitalist order, Japan was accorded responsibility for League of Nations Class C Mandate over former German possessions in the South Pacific. Nitobe Inazō ascended to a position of Undersecretary of the League and became a director of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, the forerunner to UNESCO (see Burkman 2008). Significantly, these four different meanings of internationalism complemented and reinforced each other and were sometimes mistaken for each other in Japanese public commentary. Wilson’s vision of an international system of cooperative diplomacy gained credibility against a discredited system of power rivalries, spheres of influence, and imperial competition (Iriye 1965). Liberal movements of all stripes would be associated with the emerging Anglo-American world order. This in turn gave American cultural forms a social currency that did not depend on 206

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political internationalism, even if they existed alongside it. Expanding consumerism, especially in urban centres, often reflected American tastes and preferences in goods and cultural products. Undergirding political internationalism at an ideological level was a raft of liberal, cosmopolitan, and pacifist proposals about the nature of human society combined with a belief that political internationalism allowed for the expression of these liberal proposals throughout societies that participated in international institutions. In this intellectual milieu, what was ‘new’ and ‘cultural’ was linked to the liberal and international. Japan’s middle classes, especially the new urban middle class, were most often receptive to these ideas. The wartime economic boom, the expansion of the civil bureaucracy, and rising influence of private universities had expanded the ranks of salaried middle-class Tokyo to over 20 per cent of its population by the 1920s (Minami 1965: 183–95). The imperial capital, with its bustling business, media, and academic activity, linked surrounding residential areas for the middle class as assuredly as it linked the empire’s work. Whether individuals in this class were particularly active or mobilized on behalf of a liberal agenda was perhaps less important than the fact that the liberal values of rational management of life and society now had a structurally dependable home, at least in the view of liberal commentators. Readership of all manner of newspapers, general interest and specialized magazines, and middle- and low-brow fiction grew rapidly as part of an expanding consumer society. Genuine political reform went hand in hand with these social developments. Hiratsuka Raichō joined suffrage activist Ichikawa Fusae (1893–1981), journalist Oku Mumeo (1895– 1997), and other women activists to found a new pro-suffrage organization, the New Women’s Association, in 1920. Although they failed to have the franchise expanded to include women, they did gain repeal of the odious restrictions on women’s public political activity. Their push for women’s suffrage was part of a general drive for expanded democratic participation. Since voting rights were tied to income, male suffrage expanded gradually. By 1925, universal suffrage for males over twenty-five years of age was granted. As a quid pro quo, police received expanded controls over political activity and censorship. The Peace Preservation Law of 1925 banned political activity that was deemed subversive. It is one of the tragedies of liberal politics of the era that liberals did not see the law as posing a generalized threat to all forms of civil discourse on political affairs. Its more immediate victims were socialists and communists, who faced direct persecution in subsequent years. Eventually, the same law would be used to target liberal political thought. The spread of liberal ideas to forms of social organization and association, even if not clearly under any liberal political banner, encouraged individual participation in the public sphere. Lecture societies, peace groups, social clubs, consumer cooperatives (see Chapter 22 in this volume), and others aimed to promote new social initiatives based on a rational and voluntarist basis. Indeed, the image – and reality – of the urban landscape as open, undifferentiated space of interacting classes and social status groups was a potent symbol even away from the largest cities (Young 2013). The education of women and girls in the ‘science of the home’ (home economics) is a stark example of the convergence of these forces. Middle-class acquisitive values trumpeted in the media – the magazine Shufu no tomo (The Housewife’s Companion) being the most visible example – built on a liberal conception of work, home, and eventually citizenship (Sato 2003). New cadres of educated women were needed to fill the teachers’ positions throughout the national school system, necessitating ever larger numbers of college-educated women teachers and administrators. Quite apart from whether state bureaucrats fashioned this educational project as pursuing national goals or a moral agenda, women leaders saw a burning need to teach the skills to thrive in a complex consumer economy. President of Japan’s Women’s College Inoue 207

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Hide (1875–1963), a professor of home economics, promoted the view that women’s modern education and modern lifestyles were extensions of the global convergence of values, a harmony of interests in peaceful cooperation. She was invited to join an internationalist women meeting held alongside the Washington Conference in 1921, and in 1928, she led the Japanese delegation to the Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference in Honolulu, one of the largest global women’s conferences of the decade (Schneider 2007). In sum, the 1920s saw the widest expression of liberal notions of the individual and of individuals’ relationship to an expanding public sphere. For urban dwellers, these notions were realized in daily practices and routines of thinking, reading, speaking, choosing. They would prove difficult to dislodge from individuals’ lives even as political turmoil, international conflict, and wartime austerity would challenge them.

Decline and persistence of prewar liberalism This expansion of liberal ideas and practices built on many new assumptions about lifestyles; modes of expression; and habits of thought, behaviour, and association that would remain salient throughout even the darkest days of wartime Japan. However, liberals presupposed levels of economic security and material comfort that, contrary to liberal expectations, were not evenly distributed by the end of the 1920s. Moreover, they presumed a level of international cooperation and global mutual economic development that did not continue through the global economic depression. In that context, perhaps no single act did more damage to the idea of Japanese liberalism and its association with international cooperation than the reversion to the gold standard in 1929. Japan’s ill-timed return to currency convertibility imposed drastic austerity on agricultural producers and borrowers already facing many years of deflation. When other countries went off the gold standard, Japan’s adherence to it ignited a crisis of confidence in elite liberal politicians, whose multilateralism was borne on the backs of Japanese farmers (Metzler 2006: 199–239). Even among liberal economists, there was debate about the soundness of the course the government had taken. Liberal policies had been increasingly associated with expanding consumerism, not the scolding frugality of bureaucrats and Confucian moralists. Nevertheless, the disastrous consequences of these policies fit a radical right-wing narrative that liberally minded elites were selfish and insensitive to the needs of ordinary people. By extension, their fealty to international cooperation led to accusations that they placed the needs of craven international financiers and leading status quo nations ahead of the needs of ‘have-not’ Japan. Finally, the radical right resorted to political violence against liberals, causing instability and social turmoil that they accused liberal social policies of causing in the first place. For example, an assassin from the extreme right-wing association Ketsumeidan (Blood Pledge Corps) shot and killed former finance minister Inoue Junnosuke, the architect of the gold-standard policy, in February 1932, and another murdered the president of the industrial conglomerate Mitsui, Baron Dan Takuma (1858–1932). The invasion of Manchuria by the Japanese army, which started in September 1931, and which the Wakatsuki cabinet was helpless to stop, posed a different sort of challenge to liberals: an assault on Japan’s treaty obligations at an international level and an assault on their intellectual commitments at home. To be sure, many newspapers, magazines, and political observers were swept up in the war fever of the 1930s, an all-too-recognizable case of social imperialism. The list of liberals who supported Japan’s aggressive war in Asia is long, and the reasoning behind each accommodation is complex. Nitobe Inazō toured the United States defending the Japanese position in Manchuria as consonant with his 1920s ideals. It was not, and the 208

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American press mocked Nitobe’s apostasy and the threadbare internationalism that could defend renewed territorial expansion. Men with long-standing liberal credentials such as the political scientist Rōyama Masamichi (1895–1980) and the academic-turned-politician Nagai Ryūtarō (1881–1944) turned away from their earlier liberal views. Arguing that the global depression and regionalist foreign policies pursued by many nations including the U.S. reflected a new international reality, they rationalized every step of Japan’s expansion in China as the formation of an independent path for Japan (Barshay 1988; Duus 1971: 41–8). Many liberals were silenced, marginalized, or coopted. Legal theorist Minobe Tatsukichi (1873–1948) had offered a widely accepted interpretation of imperial authority that rationalized the expanded importance of the parliamentary body. Though a member of the House of Peers, in 1935, he was hounded from public life, saw his legal works banned due to a right-wing public smear campaign, and barely survived an assassination attempt.Tokyo Imperial University Professor and liberal colonial critic Yanaihara Tadao (1893–1961) remained one of the most staunchly independent liberal voices, but his criticism of Japan’s war in China in 1936 cost him his position and relegated him to private study of his Christian faith under the menacing censorship of the police. Journalists such as Kiyosawa Kiyoshi (1890–1945) and Ishibashi Tanzan (1884–1973) moderated their views and blunted their criticism. Leading liberal women such as Inoue Hide and Ichikawa Fusae rationalized their participation in wartime mobilization efforts as consistent with their larger aim of demonstrating civic competence of women as requisite for their claims on civil rights (Schneider 2011). Until the broad wartime mobilization after 1938 began to impose severe restrictions on consumption, however, many of the features of the urban international lifestyle persisted. Wartime Keynesianism, on which Japan embarked after going off the gold standard in 1932, meant that college graduates found professional employment. Eating patterns involving modern foodstuffs such as refined sugar and meat and refrigerated items such as ice cream continued to expand into daily habits (Francks 2009: 105–44). Women’s education continued to expand and the science of home life continued to propose new rational approaches to daily life. A modern mass tourism industry rose and civilian overseas travel opportunities increased, albeit within the yen bloc dominated by the Japanese military. Even in international affairs, where Japanese unilateralism had made official diplomacy difficult, informal diplomacy by official, scientists, scholars, and business leaders perpetuated earlier patterns of cooperation. Right-wing and conservative opponents of this persistence of liberal values were, without any doubt, vocal and increasingly powerful (see Chapter 12 in this volume). They were repulsed by two decades of advance by liberal values. After 1938, they were dominant. Japan’s expanded war in China and invasion of Southeast Asia justified, as far as military leadership was concerned, increasingly illiberal policies at home. Visionaries of a new anti-liberal order recognized that autonomy, a cardinal liberal value, had to be extirpated where it existed in society. In 1940, political parties were dissolved in favour of a single party, quasi-fascist body, the Imperial Rule Assistance Association. Similarly, many political and social organizations were subsumed under national and state-centred organizations and associations. Symbols of liberal internationalism also came under direct attack (Berger 1977). The Olympic Games scheduled for Tokyo in 1940 were cancelled in 1938, the putative reason being the need to direct much-needed resources for the war in China (Collins 2007: 143–68). The cancellation served as comment on the internationalism the Olympics represented. In a minor but vivid example of the antipathy toward liberal internationalism, Education Minister General Baron Araki Sadao (1877–1966) and Foreign Minister General Ugaki Kazushige (1868–1956) cancelled the International Institute of Refrigeration conference in Tokyo scheduled for 1940. The organization was a Versailles-era body created by international convention in 1920, with Japan as a co-signatory. Japan’s nascent 209

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industry had benefited from the global connections the association offered and had consistently promoted the idea of refrigeration as a model of international cooperation. Araki and Ugaki opposed such a blatantly liberal internationalist event, even when the required resources were trivial by comparison to the Olympics. Despite these efforts to suppress any form of liberal (i.e., Anglo-American related) internationalism, Japan’s wartime leadership attempted to articulate an alternative vision of an internationalist order based on cooperation with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and, additionally, a regional system based on Pan-Asian unity (see Chapter 3 in this volume). Following treaties and cultural agreements with Italy and Germany (see Chapter 2 in this volume), cultural, artistic, tourist, and business groups used internationalist rhetoric to frame conferences and exhibitions in cooperation with Germany and Italy. Japanese labour groups participated in the World Leisure Congress in Hamburg, 1936, and delegations of German labour representatives and the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) visited Japan (Saaler et al. 2017). Educational leaders and women’s groups toured occupied China under the banner of unified support from middle-class, professional associations for reform in China. In a fitting summation of Japan’s efforts to divest itself of the grip of the liberal internationalist era, the Foreign Ministry organized the Greater East Asia Conference in 1943 to present Japan’s alternative path to world peace.The conference’s aim was to unite occupied Asian countries in a new truncated international system, while at the same time deriding the earlier liberal internationalist projects as cover for Western imperialism. The conference’s final declaration recycled many internationalist themes of respect for sovereignty, independence, cultural autonomy, and economic development as the cornerstone of future peace (Narangoa 2011: 243–53). As the liberal journalist Kiyosawa Kiyoshi observed wryly in his diary, ‘It is Japan’s tragedy to have to draft a declaration which is similar to the Atlantic Charter, granting all people’s their independence and freedom’ (Iriye 1981: 119).

Postwar liberal democracy The defeat of Japan in the Asian-Pacific War signaled a defeat for militarism, authoritarianism, and autocracy. Japanese liberals certainly had reason to look upon the postwar political changes with optimism. Universal suffrage for all adults over twenty years of age was adopted early during the Allied occupation of Japan. With political parties restored in parliamentary elections, the Liberal and Progressive parties took a near majority of the seats in the lower house elections of 1946 and formed a new party government. Women representatives constituted almost 9 per cent of the newly elected body. This government ratified a new constitution that disowned many of the features of the undemocratic Meiji Constitution. Sovereignty was now vested in the people, not the emperor.3 The legislative power of the Lower House was expanded. Civil liberties were enumerated and declared ‘eternal and inviolate’. Most remarkably, the Constitution in the now-famous Article 9 ‘renounc[ed] war as a sovereign right’, thus placing Japan in a unique position in the international community as a pacifist nation. Shorn of historical context, such events marked one of the most stunning advances of democratic and internationalist trends in the modern era. Each of these steps, however, was overlaid with stunning complexity and withering irony that rendered Japan’s postwar liberal democracy and pacifist internationalism halting, compromised, and, in some cases, unfulfilled. Most problematic was the connection of the liberal democratic reforms to the experience of foreign occupation. Liberal economist Yanaihara Tadao, restored to his position at Tokyo University, commented ruefully on the way Japan’s forthcoming liberal reforms would parallel Japan’s own attempts at managing colonial possessions: ‘This time it is we ourselves who have been placed on the laboratory table’ (Barshay 2004: 61). The treatment of 210

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Japan by the victors of the war was, by many measures, merciful and progressive.Yanaihara and other liberals, however, just as assuredly understood that occupation policies reflected American global strategy and interests. The much-heralded 1947 Constitution tapped into democratic traditions in Japanese society described above, but the occupation authorities also retained the person of the emperor and the imperial system in ways that prevented radical movements from critically examining the social foundations of Japan’s militarism. The priorities and the behaviour of the United States in the Cold War consistently strengthened the hand of conservative politicians in this new system at the expense of liberal voices. A stark example of the fraught democratic politics in postwar Japan has been the enduring power of patriarchy in political affairs. The 1947 Constitution includes one of the strongest declarations of the equality of the sexes. Nonetheless, it took nearly six decades before female representation in the Lower House of the Diet matched the percentages attained in the first post-defeat elections of 1946. In the limited political power of women, but also in the massive protests against the U.S.-Japan security treaty in 1960, and in the gap between popular allegiance to the ‘peace constitution’ and its erosion in practice, we see consistent patterns of political machinery and national representative bodies operating independently and at odds with the strongest democratic impulses of its people. At the same time, the 1947 Constitution has now served Japan longer than the Meiji Constitution that preceded it. Liberals cite this fact as evidence of the depth and durability of this democratic tradition.

Notes 1 See Ueki Emori’s conception of a Constitution, accessible online at www.ndl.go.jp/modern/e/cha1/ description14.html. 2 See Ito Miyoji (trans.), ‘The Constitution of the Empire of Japan’, www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/etc/ c02.html. 3 See Government Printing Office, ‘The Constitution of Japan’, www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/etc/c01. html.

Further reading Bowen, Roger W. (1984) Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan: A Study of Commoners in the Popular Rights Movement, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Duus, Peter (1968) Party Rivalry and Political Change in Taishō Japan, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lewis, Michael (1990) Rioters and Citizens: Mass Protest in Imperial Japan, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Scalapino, Robert A. (1953) Democracy and the Party Movement in Prewar Japan:The Failure of the First Attempt, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ward, Robert, and Sakamoto, Yoshikazu (eds) (1987) Democratizing Japan: The Allied Occupation, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

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15 The bureaucracy and politics Roger H. Brown

The bureaucracy has played a central and enduring role in the governance of modern Japan. Although never developing pre-modern bureaucratic traditions and institutions to the same degree as its East Asian neighbours China and Korea, during the Tokugawa Period (Edo period, 1603–1868) the country witnessed a Confucian-influenced bureaucratization of the ruling samurai elite that helped pave the way for the creation of a modern nation-state and the adoption of European bureaucratic thought and institutions in the wake of the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Predicated on the ideal of non-partisan service to the emperor-centred state and becoming a bastion of meritocratic elitism, the professional bureaucracy developed a relationship at once symbiotic with and antipathetic to the mainstream parties as these organizations expanded their power during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The character of these ties changed dramatically in the 1930s as party power declined in the face of partisan challenges from within the civil bureaucracy and the military. Mobilization for total war provided the opportunity for civil and military officials to further enhance their authority, yet never to a degree displacing the broader intra-elite competition for power and influence that had come to characterize Japanese politics by the 1920s. Even the intense struggle between reformist and status quo interests that peaked on the cusp of the Pacific War failed to bring about any fundamental reordering of the political system. Following Japan’s surrender in 1945, the reliance of occupation authorities upon the civil bureaucracy to govern the defeated nation ensured a very limited purge of the emperor’s officials and perpetuated bureaucratic authority into the postwar era. Meanwhile, the power of party politicians, never entirely eclipsed even during the war years, resurged under the reforms of demilitarization and democratization. The former initiative removed the army and navy as political competitors for both the parties and the civil bureaucracy, whereas the latter institutionalized the principle of party rule. The emergence of former bureaucrats within the leadership of the parties facilitated a close relationship among politicians, bureaucrats, and business leaders that further extended bureaucratic influence and proved integral to postwar governance and the nation’s reemergence as a major economic power. While recent decades have seen the prestige of the bureaucracy suffer from corruption scandals and bureaucratic power serve as a favourite target for criticism by younger generations of party leaders, whether in the postwar

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guise of ‘civil servants’ or as prewar ‘officials of the emperor’, Japan’s bureaucrats have played a key role in the nation’s modern political history.

From late Tokugawa governance to Meiji constitutional politics Many of the ideals and institutional models informing the Chinese bureaucratic state arrived in Japan during the seventh and eighth centuries in the wake of China’s reunification under the Sui (581–618) and Tang (618–907) dynasties, thereby exerting strong influence on the construction of the archipelago’s first centralized state and on Japanese approaches to governance. Nevertheless, indigenous organizational patterns and historical conditions, such as a strong inclination toward hereditary preferences in government appointments and the gradual rise of warrior rule, served to preclude adaptation of a meritocratic bureaucracy. However, the ‘Great Peace’ (Taihei) of the Tokugawa Period witnessed a renewed interest in applying Confucian approaches to governing the people, resulting in the much-noted bureaucratization of the samurai class (Ikegami 1995; Howland 2001: 267–374). The final decades of Tokugawa rule in particular saw this trend intensify through the proliferation and application of Neo-Confucian texts on local governance and via efforts to develop more systematic, professionalized approaches to bureaucratic rule through a new state academy and examination system (Ogawa 2008; Paramore 2012: 25–53). In addition to providing an indigenous bureaucratic legacy, these efforts to create a more responsive albeit still authoritarian system of rule infused the context within which post-Meiji Restoration political and intellectual leaders understood and applied the lessons of European bureaucratic and constitutional rule to the creation of Japan as a modern nation-state (Najita 1974; Matsuda 2008). The first moves to erect a bureaucratic structure to replace the Tokugawa shogunate preceded the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution (1889) by close to twenty years. After first reviving Chinese models from the eighth century, the leaders of the new Meiji state began setting up bureaucratic institutions based on the precedents visible in contemporary Europe. Overseeing these initial steps were two generations of former lower-ranking samurai, largely from a few anti-Tokugawa domains, who charted the course toward constitutional government and cultivated a younger generation of officials who often had experience abroad studying Western practices. These men also established an educational system that opened the door to the first generations of administrative professionals, known as examination or ‘degree-bearing bureaucrats’ (gakushi kanryō), who had passed the new higher civil service examinations and possessed the latest expertise on administering a modern nation-state (Spaulding 1971; Shimizu 2013). However, by the time the new Constitution was implemented the surviving restoration officials had matured into oligarchic elder statesmen (genrō) who generally disdained the party politics that accompanied a modern parliamentary system. Presenting themselves as officials who transcended the partisanship exemplified by party politicians, they sought to prevent any greater policy-making power for representatives in the Lower House of the Diet and to restrict party representatives to a role conveying popular will to the government. As the 1890s progressed, however, governance based on this style of ‘transcendentalism’ (chōzenshugi) fared poorly and the initial confrontation between the elder statesmen and elected representatives shifted toward a more conciliatory style of politics. Although the Constitution limited the power of the Lower House to a right to deliberate on and approve legislation, this authority encompassed the annual budget. And, while the government had the option of running on the previous year’s budget, state ministers were unable to attain the spending increases needed to realize increasingly ambitious government objectives without the budgetary assent

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of the Lower House. Party leaders soon used this leverage to gain access to cabinet portfolios. Conciliation was aided further by the similarity in background of the elder statesmen and many opposition leaders and by recognition on the part of party leaders that the quickest path to cabinet-level authority lay in pragmatic engagement with the government. This trend toward mutual accommodation is exemplified by Itagaki Taisuke (1837–1919), a former government insider who served as Home Minister in the 1896 cabinet of Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909), and by Itō himself, an elder statesman who revised his transcendentalist thinking and came to believe in the need for a government-friendly party. Meanwhile, many of the first examination bureaucrats tended to accept a greater role for party politics as necessary to the functioning of the parliamentary system and thus to the successful development and governance of the nation. Moreover, by the turn of the century, they shared a pragmatic self-interest with the parties in their desire to supplant the older generation of restoration officials. These two facts helped set the stage for the successful penetration of the various institutions of state by the mainstream political parties, a development of fundamental importance in a political system wherein the parties, regardless of their electoral success, had no constitutional claim on cabinet formation. Indeed, the civil bureaucracy was the priority target of party efforts in this regard, and success in building and mediating links between the bureaucracy and the parties is illustrated by the fact that some of these examination men went on to future careers as powerbrokers in one of the two mainstream parties, the Seiyūkai (founded in 1900) or the Dōshikai (founded in 1912 and renamed Kenseikai in 1916 and Minseitō in 1927, after merging with the Seiyū Hontō; see Shimizu 2013: 220–67).

The age of party rule: symbiosis and antipathy In 1898, the first party cabinet took power under the former government insider Ōkuma Shigenobu (1838–1922). However, Ōkuma’s administration proved to be short lived, with one key reason for this failure being an overly ambitious attempt to directly appoint party men to important bureaucratic posts. This fact, and the subsequent tightening of rules governing such appointments, presaged a central and sometimes contentious issue in the relationship between the political parties and the professional bureaucracy in the early decades of the twentieth century. For although many of the first generations of professional bureaucrats viewed a role for the parties as a necessary component of Japan’s new constitutional order and even cooperated in the politicization of the bureaucracy that accompanied the rise of party rule, this did not mean that they perceived no need to limit party influence. Indeed, where to draw and maintain these boundaries became a major point of contention between these two key sectors of the nation’s increasingly pluralistic constellation of governing elites. The Home Ministry (Naimushō) was the institution wherein domestic administration and party politics interacted first and most closely and thereby provides the best lens through which to consider the developing relationship between the parties and the bureaucracy. Known as the ‘government within the government’ and home to those officials the prewar diplomat and postwar prime minister Yoshida Shigeru (1878–1967) once called ‘the most bureaucrat-like bureaucrats’, the ministry’s authority encompassed the prefectural governorships, the system of policing and election supervision, the oversight of Shintō shrines, the planning of public works projects, and the conceiving and implementation of general administrative policies. This extensive authority meant that the ministry served as the key mechanism for connecting centre and periphery. Given this breadth of power and oversight, it comes as no surprise that politicians seeking to promote the fortunes of their party prioritized making inroads into the ministry, a

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process pioneered by the Seiyūkai’s Hara Takashi (1856–1921) from his post as home minister in the first Saionji Kinmochi (1849–1940) cabinet (1906–08). The parties used three primary methods to influence the Home Ministry’s high-level personnel appointments. The most straightforward of these was a classic spoils system realized through the direct post-election appointment of party men to bureaucratic posts to replace those associated with the losing party. Initially allowed by the second cabinet of Itō Hirobumi in 1893 because of the dearth of exam-qualified officials (the examination system having only been introduced in 1887), this rule resulted in the rapid appointment of party men to high-ranking sub-ministerial posts, the very issue that led to the early demise of Ōkuma’s cabinet in 1898. Consequently, in 1899 the second government of Yamagata Aritomo (1838–1922), reflecting the premier’s strong and abiding dislike for the parties, restricted the positions open to party men to those of cabinet secretary, ministerial secretary, and the secretaries of the respective ministries. In 1913, after the Taishō Political Crisis, the first Yamamoto Gonnohyōe (1852–1933) cabinet extended such appointments to the vice-ministerial and bureau chief level. The second Ōkuma cabinet (1914–16) restricted free appointments to fewer posts the following year, only to have the cabinet of Hara Takashi (1918–21) – generally viewed as the first bona fide party cabinet in that it reflected the conservative parties’ emerging centrality to the mediation of elite interests – return to the policy of the Yamamoto cabinet. By the mid-1920s a line had been drawn between posts open to free appointment by elected representatives (seimukan) and those restricted to administrative officials (jimukan). Whereas those in the former positions were understood to represent the interests of their party and to change in response to electoral results, officials in the latter posts were expected to embody the ideal of non-partisanship and to demonstrate professional competence in the service of the state. In the case of the Home Ministry, for instance, the head of the police bureau fell into the seimukan category, with predictably beneficial results for the governing party’s electoral fortunes. The free appointment of bureaucratic posts remained a matter of contention for the remainder of the era of party rule, but the number of posts open to such appointment was never extended further. The second method for extending party power into the ministry operated via the informal ‘affiliation of bureaucrats’ (kanryō no keiretsu-ka) with a given party, whereby high-ranking members of the bureaucracy cooperated with the interests of a particular party and benefitted with appointments and promotions whenever that party held power. Arising as a consequence of the restrictions placed on administrative appointments, this practice prioritized control over the administrative post of prefectural governor and spread to such a degree that by the late 1920s high-ranking Home Ministry officials were often viewed as being informally affiliated with either the Seiyūkai or Minseitō. The third form of politicization emerged for the same reasons and came about when serving officials actually joined one of the political parties, a practice that increased dramatically with the rise of party power during the 1910s and early 1920s; however, passage of universal male suffrage in 1925 was accompanied by a regulation prohibiting active officials from being members of the Lower House, thereby removing this as a point of contention for the remainder of the prewar period. Together with the restrictions on the free appointment of key bureaucratic posts, this meant that for the rest of that decade and during the early 1930s, debate over the politicization of the bureaucracy centred on the informal affiliation of serving officials with one of the mainstream parties (Kurosawa 2013: 28–32). Of central importance to the process of affiliation was the mediating role played by highranking officials who sought both to adapt to the expansion of party power and to prevent partisan influence from disrupting internal personnel decisions and the exercise of administrative

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duties. For instance, Hara Takashi, benefiting from the comparative openness of the earliest examination bureaucrats to cooperating with party-led cabinets and a shared interest in supplanting the power of restoration officials’ cliques (hanbatsu), used his position as home minister to recruit sitting officials, such as Mizuno Rentarō (1868–1949), to serve as intermediaries who would recommend talented and reliable subordinates for appointment to administrative posts. In this way, the Seiyūkai gained indirect influence over personnel appointments and benefited from the administrative expertise former officials brought to the party, while high-ranking bureaucrats were able to preserve some measure of the ministry’s professional integrity and autonomy. Officials with post-retirement political ambitions also were in a position to prepare for a second career as a party politician. The Kenseikai likewise cultivated connections to bureaucratic power­ brokers, such as Isawa Takio (1869–1949), through which to decide administrative appointments. In short, the relationship represented an accommodation with party power whereby partylinked officials facilitated limited politicization of the ministry, on the one hand, and served as a barrier to an overly disruptive spoils system, on the other (Kurosawa 2013: 32–85). So long as this bargain held sway, the power of the parties expanded and the centrality of the Home Ministry to domestic administration remained secure. Nevertheless, in the midst of these developments, the transcendentalist inclinations and professional identity of many officials remained strong even among those comparatively open to the principle of party participation in governing the nation. Isawa, for example, despite being viewed as a party-affiliated bureaucrat, in fact continued to maintain his allegiance to the idea that officials should remain non-partisan and thus aloof from party factions (Shimizu 2013: 316).Younger associates of Isawa, such as Gotō Fumio (1884–1980), shared these views and were if anything more dubious about the merits of party-led government, particularly as it was unfolding in the 1920s. Their unhappiness with the realities of party rule grew exponentially when the advent of universal male suffrage in 1925 unleashed greatly intensified party competition for votes and undermined the system of mediated appointment worked out by their senior colleagues. Meanwhile, the 1920s also witnessed divisions emerge within the bureaucracy that would have important implications for political competition and the distribution of administrative power in the 1930s. Following the First World War, the nation’s bureaucrats confronted the increasingly complex social problems and administrative challenges of an industrializing Japan, and efforts to address these issues effectively brought about changes in the structure of the bureaucracy and the outlook of its officials. The early cohorts of professional bureaucrats usually held law degrees from Tokyo Imperial University and many sought admission into the prestigious Home Ministry. Studying the latest German historical and economic thinking on proactive, moralist intervention in the economy, these men had been active in promoting rural improvement and youth organizations since the early years of the twentieth century (Pyle 1973; 1974). Ministry officials also drew on the neo-Confucian legacy of the late Tokugawa period in developing a refurbished sense of being bokuminkan (‘shepherds of the people’) who governed on behalf of the emperor-centred state. This ethos likewise supported feelings of proprietorship over local governance and bolstered the transcendentalist inclinations of many elite officials. By the late 1920s, this outlook informed their case for liberating their supposedly non-partisan expertise from the oversight of ineffective party-led cabinets (Furukawa 2005: 176–225; Brown 2009). In the wake of the war, however, the number of civil service applicants graduating in such fields as science and engineering increased and these men sought to apply their expertise to the era’s complex challenges. As officials with specialized technical knowledge (gijutsu kanryō), they viewed the approach of the administrative generalists as antiquated and inadequate to the

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challenges of governing a modernizing nation (Ōyodo 1997; Mimura 2011). Within the Home Ministry, in particular, these younger graduates chafed at the pre-eminence of the ‘bokumin-ha’ (‘shepherd-the-people faction’), as their law degree–bearing seniors were known, and resented the hold these generalists possessed over important posts (Takahashi 2001: 216; Wakatsuki 2014: 15–48). The contemporary expansion and reorganization of the bureaucracy provided other opportunities and many new graduates in technical fields opted for admittance into the Ministries of Communications and of Agriculture and Commerce (the latter of which in 1925 split into the Ministries of Agriculture and Forestry, and of Commerce and Industry), choices that came at the expense of the traditional appeal of the Home and Finance Ministries. Officials in these institutions, as well as in the Railways Ministry, were more open to free appointment of posts based on specialized knowledge, rather than civil service qualifications, and they themselves had greater possibilities for applying their expertise through careers in the private sector. This perspective on personnel matters, together with their desire to apply technocratic solutions and to enhance bureaucratic efficiency, provided some common ground with the mainstream parties. However, the Seiyūkai’s efforts to exert stricter cabinet-level control elicited strong bureaucratic resistance. Alternatively, the Kenseikai–Minseitō’s belt-tightening policies increased the burden on those ministries seeking to expand their managerial role. Both approaches fueled growing frustration with party rule (Wakatsuki 2014: 51–155). By the 1930s, foreign affairs also affected these developments within the bureaucracy. The creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932 provided a new venue through which these technocrats could apply the latest administrative and planning techniques. In the second half of the decade, Japan’s gearing up for and waging of total war provided unprecedented opportunity for scientific and social engineering both within the empire and from positions of power back in Tokyo, where technocrats within the economically focused ministries increasingly vied for domestic administrative authority with the long-dominant Home Ministry (Mimura 2011; Kurosawa 2013). In sum, both changes in the outlook of elite officials themselves and the growing complexity of the bureaucracy in general contributed to intensified intra-ministry competition for power and influence that would characterize the bureaucratic politics of the interwar and wartime years. This ‘sectionalism’ grew first under party rule, but then expanded together with the growth of bureaucratic power and the gradual decline of the parties as a political force. Nevertheless, even with these developments and the differences in approach advocated by generalists and their more technocratic juniors, elite bureaucrats continued to share unease over social unrest in the wake of the First World War and to believe in the need for proactive social and labour policies to ameliorate the effects of industrialization in both urban and rural settings. Although radical ideologies were not a new concern, developments such as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Rice Riots of 1918 underscored the potential dangers of failing to address the seeds of unrest. Bureaucrats from the Home Ministry’s newly created Social Bureau (Shakaikyoku) took on a leading role in the new Harmonization Society (Kyōchōkai), created in 1919 to bring together representatives of business and labour in an effort to conciliate their differences in the larger interests of state and society. The society also sponsored detailed research into social conditions, information that officials drew on in their efforts to get party support for legislation to efficiently address the social and labour problems identified. However, the apex of party rule coincided with policies of financial austerity and conservative resistance to legislation that would accommodate labour unions, and both factors left many officials increasingly unhappy with the political and economic status quo (Garon 1987; Umeda et al. 2004; Wakatsuki 2014).

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Bureaucratic backlash and the decline of party power By the late 1920s, a backlash against party rule was building among bureaucrats both frustrated over the prospects for applying the policies they believed were necessary to address socio-economic problems and alarmed at the crumbling of the boundaries worked out with the parties over personnel appointments. The result was growing support for the idea that officials should be allowed to apply their administrative and technical expertise unfettered by party oversight. This perspective on party leadership and its ills gained further impetus from a post–World War I nationalist movement informed by both radical and conservative political ideologies that questioned the suitability of liberalism and, in the former case, of capitalism in Japan, a country that, nationalist leaders insisted, was in need of thorough ‘renovation’ (kakushin) (Itō 1978). Whether they favoured radical or conservative critiques, many officials of both generalist and technocratic pedigree likewise came to view liberalism and capitalism as phenomena to be thoroughly reformed, strictly controlled, or even, in the case of the former, rejected.The effects of the Great Depression, the 1931 Manchurian Incident, and right-wing terrorism further convinced some elite officials of the need to take the lead in applying their expertise to the problems confronting Japan in the early 1930s. As with the initial politicization of the bureaucracy, the initiative to achieve greater administrative autonomy from party oversight began within the Home Ministry, where some of the most talented mid-career officials had long felt ambivalent about the accommodation between the bureaucracy and the parties worked out by their immediate predecessors and increasingly took umbrage at the influence of partisan party politics over their administrative endeavours. During the 1920s, men who would play central roles in the administrative reforms of the early 1930s, including the aforementioned Gotō Fumio, associated themselves with the efforts of Prince Konoe Fumimaro (1891–1945) and former Home Ministry official Tazawa Yoshiharu (1885–1944) to inculcate youth with values that would support their particular vision of proper parliamentary politics and lay the groundwork for a new party. Essentially, these men accepted a role for elected officials, but disdained party politics as practiced by the mainstream parties. Although their effort to create a new party failed, their outlook carried over into the 1930s and found expression in the ministry-led movement for election purification, which subsequently developed into a mechanism for supporting wartime mobilization (Berger 1974). The party role they perceived might best be viewed as a transcendentalist one in which members of the Lower House mediated the energy of the masses in support of the bureaucratic state. For example, even Tazawa, often remembered as the most progressive of this cohort, expressed a form of ‘enlightened transcendentalism’ that viewed the parties as inherently selfish factions placing the pursuit of power above good governance. He therefore disdained party ties and called for local administration that remained separate from and thereby transcended such partisanship (Furukawa 2005: 200–2). As if to confirm this perspective, the mainstream parties responded to the arrival of universal suffrage by engaging in greatly intensified competition for votes and in seeking to use control over the governorships to strengthen their ties to local political elites. Following the first election under universal suffrage in 1927, Suzuki Kisaburō (1867–1940), Home Minister in the Seiyūkai government of Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi (1864–1929), a retired army general, carried out an unprecedentedly extensive and direct appointment of administrative posts, thereby earning the antipathy of numerous furloughed officials. Subsequent Minseitō cabinets followed suit, and in the eyes of critics, the parties were perceived as sacrificing effective government in order to transform the ministry into a mere vote-gathering machine. Indeed, concern for the negative consequences of this intensified politicization of bureaucratic appointments for government 218

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effectiveness and political stability extended even to the Shōwa Emperor (Hirohito, reigned, 1926–89) and his court advisors, with the new monarch underscoring the need to maintain the distinction between parliamentary and administrative appointments. Meanwhile, the failure of the Diet to pass labour legislation further soured officials on the prospects for dealing effectively with pressing socio-economic problems under party rule (Furukawa 2005; Brown 2012). Ministry officials such as Gotō and Yoshida Shigeru (1885–1954; not to be confused with the postwar premier of the same name), dubbed ‘new bureaucrats’ (shin-kanryō) by journalists, took the initiative in aiming to weaken party oversight and thereby enhance the bureaucracy’s administrative autonomy. Honing their anti-party critique and reformist ideas through nationalist groups such as the Kinkei Gakuin (Golden Pheasant Academy) and Kokuikai (National Mainstay Society) and gaining high-level posts in the first non-party-led ‘national unity cabinets’ of the years 1932 to 1936, they helped change regulations governing the furloughing and appointing of elite bureaucrats and led campaigns for rural economic relief and election reform. The latter reform in particular, although justified in terms of purifying and thus improving party politics, ultimately weakened the ability of the parties to respond to local interests and thereby helped undermine party power. With regard to labour and social problems, these early reform bureaucrats played a key role in expanding support for ‘Japanist’ labour organizers. Yoshida, for instance, took charge of the Harmonization Society and shifted the organization’s primary objective from one of conciliating between management and labour to that of unifying them in the interest of the state. He likewise helped plan, create, and initially oversee the cabinet-level policy organ that later evolved into the Cabinet Planning Board (Kikakuin) from which civil and military officials endeavoured to mobilize the nation’s material and human resources in support of war. Finally, some of these officials pursued close ties to army staff officers, such as Major-General Nagata Tetsuzan (1884–1935), who were opposed to party rule yet committed to eliciting intra-elite support for their project of preparing Japan to wage total war (Spaulding 1970; Brown 2009; 2012). Although assassination by a fellow officer removed Nagata from the scene in August 1935, the failed coup attempt of 26 February 1936 left army leadership in the hands of his close associates and those officers linked with Lieutenant-General Ishiwara Kanji (1889–1949). Whatever their factional allegiances, these officers all remained committed to transforming Japan into a garrison state. The incident also facilitated a relative shift of power among reformists in the civil bureaucracy as Home Ministry officials were increasingly supplanted by mostly younger technocrats who were intent on implementing strict government controls over economic and social activity. Inspired by socialist and fascist precedents and coming primarily from the ministries of Commerce and Industry, Communications, and Finance, bureaucrats such as Mōri Hideoto (1902–47) and Kishi Nobusuke (1896–1987) joined with similarly motivated counterparts within the army to promote statist economic and political renovation of the Meiji state. Eliciting support from military officers determined to create a ‘high-grade national defence state’ and linking up with enthusiastic intellectuals and activists through such policy groups as the Kokusaku kenkyūkai (National Policy Research Society) and Shōwa kenkyūkai (Shōwa Research Association), these ‘reform bureaucrats’ (kakushin kanryō) promoted statist plans for managing Japan’s material and human resources in accord with their technocrat visions (Furukawa 1992; Mimura 2011). Like their predecessors, reform bureaucrats supported breaking with the cooperative diplomacy of the 1920s, an inclination most clearly visible in their enthusiastic backing for the armyled creation of a puppet state in Manchuria. Many economically minded officials welcomed the new Manchurian state as an arena in which to test their technocratic plans for mobilizing and controlling material and human resources. As this new departure in Japan’s approach to 219

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foreign relations gained influence in Tokyo and propelled the nation down the path toward international isolation, reformist officials came to support closer ties to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, new regimes that also sought to break with the Anglo-American principles of the interwar international structure in favour of creating a ‘new order’. Perhaps the best and most important example of this diplomatic dimension is the emergence within the Foreign Ministry of a reformist faction whose enthusiasm for an alliance with the fascist states was at least as fervid as that of pro-German officers in the army (Tobe 2010). The ambitious objectives of these officials, however, drew stiff opposition from various status quo forces at home, including other portions of the bureaucracy. Reflecting both ideological concerns and institutional interests, these internal divisions set the stage for the intense political struggles that accompanied the New Order Movement (shin-taisei undō) initiated by the second Konoe cabinet (1940–41) in the late summer of 1940. Moreover, the creation of extra-ministerial planning organs and the competition among ministries for influence over governing the people and mobilizing their energies and the country’s material resources further complicated the politics of the war years. Within the bureaucracy, for instance, the most extreme reformists often found themselves at odds with mainstream colleagues more intent on maintaining the authority of their particular ministry than in promoting structural reform of the polity. In short, even with dramatic shifts in the balance of power and consequent changes in national policy, the competition for control and influence within Japan’s pluralist establishment continued much as it had since the 1920s.

National mobilization and the wartime state In the wake of the February 26 Incident, reformists within the bureaucracy, military, and parties pushed the Diet to pass legislation that would enable the realization of their plans for national mobilization and possibly prepare the way for the creation of a one-party state. The outbreak of fighting with Chinese forces in July 1937 provided new impetus to the call for greater state power in order to wage war on the continent. The government initiated the National Spiritual Mobilization Movement (kokumin seishin sōdōin undō) in October of that year to convince the Japanese people to sacrifice in support of not only the war in China but also for the larger goal of reordering international relations in Greater East Asia. Passage of the National Mobilization Law (Kokka sōdōin-hō) in March 1938 was facilitated by expectations for a short fight, heightened patriotic sentiment, and the Konoe cabinet’s promise not to enable the legislation during the current conflict.The same period also witnessed the creation of the Cabinet Planning Board out of the merger of earlier planning organs and the government’s resources bureau, with the expanded board serving as the policy headquarters for reform bureaucrats and various civil and military technocrats. In late 1938 the cabinet officially defined the continuing conflict in China as a ‘holy war’ (seisen) to create a ‘new order for East Asia’ (Tōa shin-chitsujo) and, although reformist forces initially failed to convince Konoe to take the lead in forming a new political party similar to the totalitarian examples afforded by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the initial successes of those regimes influenced Japanese politics and sharpened the lines of division within the political and economic elite. Finally, German success in occupying Western Europe in the spring of 1940 left European colonial holdings in Southeast Asia vulnerable to a Japanese advance and, by energizing reformist forces, helped bring about conclusion of the Tripartite Alliance in September and the creation of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (IRAA, Taisei Yokusankai) in October. Nevertheless, intense opposition from conservative and status quo forces and the last-minute withdrawal of support by Konoe prevented the IRAA from serving as the core of the one-party state desired by reformists. By early 1941, conservatives had 220

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assumed leadership over the association and its offices were attached to the existing bureaucratic structure (Berger 1977). Those same years also saw confrontation and competition for power intensify within the bureaucracy. The Home Ministry’s divorce from the mainstream parties and the growing power vacuum created by the decline of party power had the ironic effect of making the ministry’s dominance over domestic governance vulnerable to competing claims from other ministries. In response to the economic depression, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (Nōrinshō) had already been expanding its activities in the prefectures during the early 1930s, initially under the leadership of Gotō Fumio, who held that ministry’s portfolio from 1932–34 and used his connections within the Home Ministry to facilitate cooperation in rural relief efforts. The failure of the police bureau under Home Minister Gotō (1934–36) to prevent the 1936 coup attempt elicited criticism of reformist officials from within the ministry, and leadership of the cabinet bureau that soon became the Cabinet Planning Board shifted to reform bureaucrats from other ministries. These economic-minded officials found a natural ally in an army now led by officers committed to Nagata’s vision of national mobilization, and officials in the Home Ministry came to view both civil and military reformist factions as potential threats to the ministry’s authority. Meanwhile, newly won autonomy from party oversight in the making of personnel assignments led to stagnation and frustration as senior officials, protected by new regulations that limited the discretionary powers of the home minister and with no path to a future in the weakening parties, tended to remain longer in their posts (Furukawa 2005: 226–97; Kurosawa 2013: 86–164). The pursuit of national mobilization further bolstered the hand of those ministries that sought, with the backing of civil and military reformists, to expand their role in governing the nation, an objective that inevitably constituted a challenge to the power of the Home Ministry. For instance, the Ministry of Transportation and Communication (Teishinshō) benefited from the reformist drive for electrification and improved transport needed to mobilize the nation’s resources. In 1936, immediately after the failed coup attempt, the army promoted a reform plan that would have deprived the Home Ministry of its control over local administrative appointments and stripped it of all or part of the bureaus for land development, Shintō shrines, public health, and social policy, with new offices to be attached to the prime minister’s office.This particular plan disappeared with the resignation of the cabinet of Hirota Kōki (1878–1948) in January 1937. However, the outbreak of war later that year provided new momentum to reformist forces. The new Health and Welfare Ministry (Kōseishō), created in 1938 with the support of the military, took over an important function of the Home Ministry’s Social Bureau to confront rapidly expanding manpower needs and a less than healthy pool of draftees. The idea of breaking up the Home Ministry returned in the late summer of 1941. At that point, Konoe was still hopeful of achieving far-reaching reforms of the bureaucracy, particularly if war with the United States could be averted through his proposal to meet with the American president. At the same time, he knew that jingoistic reaction to any detente would require reliable police responsiveness. Covertly, therefore, he engaged members of the Cabinet Planning Board to draft an administrative reform proposal that would include dissolving the Home Ministry and bringing its policing apparatus directly under the control of the prime minister’s office. Overseen by reform bureaucrat Kan Tarō (1904–80), the plan would thus remove the ministry as an impediment to the reformist agenda and transfer its administrative functions to newly created bureaucratic offices attached to the prime minister’s office. However, Konoe’s resignation in October 1941 prevented further consideration of the proposal, and the incoming premier, General Tōjō Hideki (1884–1948), showed no interest in pursuing the plan, being instead content to take on the portfolio of home minister (Furukawa 1992: 238–56; Kurosawa 2013: 168–75, 194–228). 221

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Having learned of the plan, officials in the Home Ministry had prepared themselves to wage another of the bureaucratic battles endemic to the era’s intra-elite politics. Indeed, bureaucratic ‘sectionalism’, one target of Konoe and the reformists, remained strongly entrenched. For although the late 1930s witnessed reformist forces benefit from the decline of party power and utilize both the expansion of the bureaucracy and the pursuit of national mobilization to weaken the ‘government within the government’, the ministry retained significant authority. The plan’s targeting of the ministry for dissolution clearly indicates this fact, but further evidence is visible in the ministry’s role in eviscerating the IRAA. Having identified the IRAA as a threat to their administrative position, ministry officials ensured that both the central and local offices of the new public organization – which had been prevented by opponents from being registered as a private, and thus political, organization – paralleled and linked up with, rather than supplanted, those already in place within the existing administrative structure. Consequently, local IRAA branches remained under the authority of prefectural governors appointed by the Home Ministry. Following Konoe’s withdrawal of support and his appointment of conservatives to senior IRAA offices, the momentum of the organization’s primary supporters suffered a further blow with the arrest of several leading reformist technocrats as suspected communists in the Cabinet Planning Board Incident of April 1941. With the shelving of the reform plan and the expansion of the war into the Pacific in December 1941, many remaining reform bureaucrats returned to their original ministries and, in 1943, the board was absorbed into the new Munitions Ministry. Meanwhile, concern over the political power of the army spurred Home Ministry officials to cooperate with members of the Lower House and to share intelligence information with the navy, which lacked its own military police and was entangled in perpetual rivalry with its sister service. Also in 1943, party politicians once again held cabinet posts and in the final months of war representatives in the Lower House even began jockeying for positions in a possible revival of formal parties. As the war approached a climax in mid-1945, the IRAA was abolished and replaced with the Giyūtai (Volunteer Corps), a national militia created in preparation for the final battle for the homeland and placed under the control of the Home Ministry (Berger 1977; Furukawa 2005).

Postwar bureaucratic power Following Japan’s surrender in September 1945, the Allied occupation’s promotion of demilitarization and democratization had a profound impact on postwar competition for political power. The former initiative meant first and foremost the abolition of the army and navy, thereby removing the military as a competitor for power and influence, whereas the latter reform boosted the standing of party politicians. Since Japan’s government had surrendered intact and occupation authorities decided to govern the country indirectly, the civil bureaucracy weathered the watershed events of wartime defeat and occupation reform with greater continuity than any other major portion of the governing elite. Consequently, the bureaucracy remained a central force in the governing of the nation and in the daily lives of the Japanese people. Only the Home Ministry failed to survive the occupation reforms. The ministry’s centrality to prewar and wartime governance and, above all, its role as headquarters for the dreaded Special Higher Police, left it particularly vulnerable to sacrifice on the altar of democratization. Even before the ministry’s fate was decided, officials linked to the police found themselves the largest non-military group of officials purged from public life by the Americans. Moreover, the wartime targeting of the ministry for reform and even abolition by bureaucratic competitors meant there existed a domestic constituency within the bureaucracy eager to profit from the disappearance of the ‘government within the government’. And indeed, when occupation authorities abolished 222

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the Home Ministry at the end of 1947, most of its vital administrative functions were apportioned to other ministries or used to create new bureaucratic offices (Kurosawa 2013: 233–45). Meanwhile, those ministries and officials overseeing Japan’s economy continued to exercise powerful authority over planning the strategy for reconstruction and, eventually, on the nation’s reemergence as a great economic power.These men determined early on that economic reconstruction should be based on heavy industry and not on agricultural and light industry, the approach they expected to be pushed for by occupation authorities. As it turned out, some occupation reforms actually strengthened the authority of these technocrats. For instance, the late 1946 creation of the Economic Stabilization Board stripped zaibatsu-dominated wartime control panels of the responsibility for rationing and allocating resources and placed that power into the hands of the bureaucrats. Although not initiated by American authorities, the transformation of the Munitions Ministry, which had originated out of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, into the Ministry of Trade and Industry set the stage for making ‘administrative guidance’ a key feature of postwar industrial development (Johnson 1982). If technocratic efforts to supervise economic growth were a notable instance of wartime methods being applied to postwar recovery, similar continuity in bureaucratic governance was visible in an extent to which the bureaucratic penchant to provide guidance to the general population carried over into the postwar era. For instance, there were postwar campaigns promoting thrift and saving in support of reconstruction and to improve daily life in such areas as diet, hygiene, housing, and child-rearing. Government officials drew on the advice of such non-governmental specialists as women’s leaders and educators to elicit support for government campaigns, while these non-officials utilized government support to pursue their own objectives in modernizing the daily – and increasingly middle-class – life of the Japanese people (Garon 1997). Another area of continuity emerged in the world of party politics as former bureaucrats found new homes within the postwar political parties. Marxist-influenced technocrats involved in the prewar proletarian movement and the reformist wartime drive to erect economic controls embarked on careers in the left-wing parties from which they promoted a postwar version of renovation. Wada Hiroo (1903–67), for instance, a former Ministry of Agriculture bureaucrat arrested as a suspected communist in the Cabinet Planning Board Incident of 1941, became a major figure in the Japan Socialist Party. On the other side of the political spectrum, former bureaucrats soon achieved prominence within the Liberal Party, the most immediate descendant of the prewar Seiyūkai. Following the political purge of former Seiyūkai leader Hatoyama Ichirō (1883–1959) in 1946, the party was taken over by Yoshida Shigeru. A former official of the Foreign Ministry who went on to serve five times as premier,Yoshida brought former bureaucrats under his wing in what became known as the Yoshida School, graduates of which included future prime ministers Ikeda Hayato (1899–1965) and Satō Eisaku (1901–75). Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, descending from the old Minseitō and also numbering former bureaucrats among its members, became the major conservative competitor to Yoshida’s Liberal Party. Confronted in 1955 with the prospect of a unified socialist party, the two major conservative parties put aside their differences to form the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which then ruled without interruption until 1993. Following the premierships of party men Hatoyama and Ishibashi Tanzan (1884–1973), another prewar bureaucrat, Kishi Nobusuke, became prime minister in 1957. Indeed, until the early 1990s and the rise to power of a postwar generation of politicians, around half of Japan’s prime ministers and numerous other high-level cabinet officials were former bureaucrats trained in the prewar era. Even when those with party backgrounds held ministerial portfolios, the information informing policymaking decisions and the drafting of legislation for the lower house continued to be dominated by professional bureaucrats serving 223

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in vice-ministerial roles and their subordinates in the various ministries. The links between these men facilitated establishment of the so-called iron triangle resting on the cooperation of the bureaucracy, the conservative parties, and big business that characterized the years of LDP dominance and high economic growth. In sum, the continuing presence and power of the bureaucracy in the governing of the nation and, consequently, in the lives of the people constitutes a fundamental characteristic of modern Japanese history. Japan’s modernization along Western lines strengthened the bureaucratic legacy imparted by developments under the old Tokugawa regime. By the 1920s the bureaucracy was a central component of the elitist political system and one that bore expertise indispensible to both the conservative parties and the military as the distribution of political power and initiative in governance shifted in the years that culminated in the Second World War. Even after postwar reforms enshrined the principle of party rule as normal constitutional government, the largely unchanged bureaucracy continued to exert tremendous influence over the reconstruction and governance of the ‘new Japan’. Both the bureaucracy and the political parties today are almost entirely in the hands of people born after the nation’s defeat and occupation; however, the bureaucracy remains a central factor in the practice of politics and in the lives of the Japanese people.

Further reading Berger, Gordon M. (1977) Parties Out of Power in Japan, 1931–1941. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brown, Roger H. (2009) ‘Shepherds of the people: Yasuoka Masahiro and the new bureaucrats in early Showa Japan’, Journal of Japanese Studies, 35(2): 285–319. _____ (2012) ‘(The other) Yoshida Shigeru and the expansion of bureaucratic power in prewar Japan’, Monumenta Nipponica, 67(2): 283–327. Furukawa Takahisa (2005) Shōwa senchūki no gikai to gyōsei. Tokyo:Yoshikawa Kōbunkan. Garon, Sheldon (1987) The State and Labor in Modern Japan, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kurosawa Ryō (2013) Naimushō no seiji-shi: shūken kokka no hen’yō. Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten. Mimura, Janis (2011) Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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16 The debate on fascism in Japanese historiography1 Kato ¯ Yo ¯ko

This chapter focuses on the historical debate concerning the question whether or not Japan was a fascist state prior to 1945. The chapter does not attempt to provide an answer to this question, but recounts the highlights of the historiographical debate from its origins in the early 1930s down to the present day. After noting that the prewar views shaped to a significant degree the early postwar perspectives and determined the initial course of the debate, I discuss the contribution of the political scientist Maruyama Masao and describe critical responses to Maruyama’s interpretation made by empirical historians in the 1960s and the 1970s. The chapter also recounts briefly the influence of prewar Marxist-dominated Japanese discourse on fascism on postwar views of Japan as a fascist state. The domination of modern Japanese history and thus theories of fascism by Marxist scholars broke down in the 1970s. This breakdown began with the critiques launched in the 1960s by Itō Takashi and other historians who dispensed altogether with the concept of fascism as applicable to Japan. Next, having briefly discussed the reaction to Itō’s work among Japanese historians, I survey the recent developments in Japanese historical research and its relevance to the fascism debate and round off the chapter with a short comment on the debate on Japanese fascism in Anglophone scholarship.

Aspects of continuity from prewar to postwar The defeat in the war with the United States was a bewildering trauma for the Japanese people. The novelist Sakaguchi Ango (1906–55) in his essay ‘On Decadence’ published in April 1946 observed that ‘within half a year the world has changed’ (Sakaguchi 2010). Heroic members of the kamikaze corps had turned into black-marketeers, and war widows were no longer pristine angels. They had lost their godlike qualities and ‘reverted to their status as human beings’. This reference was an allusion to Emperor Hirohito (1901–89), who after the war had renounced his divine status and declared that he was a human being in the so-called Humanity Declaration (ningen sengen) of January 1946. While transforming morality and depriving the emperor of his divinity, the defeat also revolutionized the social sciences. Political science and history had been among the fields under the most pressure to change. But with regard to research on fascism, little change took place between prewar and postwar. If one compares the 1932 essay ‘Fascism and Contemporary Times’ 225

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by the political scientist Sassa Hiroo (1897–1948) with Maruyama Masao’s postwar writings on fascism (Sassa 1932; Maruyama 1963a; 1963b), one can detect clear similarities both in their approach to, and their perception of, this issue. First, I will discuss these similarities as facets of prewar and postwar continuity. In an attempt to ‘make the [fascist] movement more easily understandable’, Sassa outlined five ‘aspects’ of fascism: orientation and objective; stages; social context; and conceptual form. Moreover, he asserted that the definition of fascism did not depend upon the aspects that manifested themselves at each stage, but upon the ‘true essence’ at the base of those aspects. For Sassa, the essence of fascism was as follows: first, fascism was the domestic and international political trend of monopoly capitalism arising out of the general crisis of capitalism after the Great War; second, fascism served to defend or revise capitalism by preventively suppressing the proletarian movement; and, third, fascism was a centralizing, authoritarian politics of power directed toward establishing state capitalism. In short, fascism, Sassa held, was counterrevolutionary. In the postwar period Maruyama (1914–94), professor of political science at Tokyo University, took essentially the same position. In his 1952 essay ‘Various Problems of Fascism’, Maru­ yama contended that ‘fascism is the twentieth century’s most radical and most aggressive form of counterrevolution’. From the postscript to this paper one can see that Maruyama’s goal was to provide a contemporary ‘guideline for judging conditions’, rather than to offer a substantial understanding of monopoly capital or mechanisms of control and that he sought to codify as much as possible the process by which fascism solidified out of chaotic conditions. In the entry for a dictionary of political science published two years later, Maruyama broke fascism down into the five categories of general context, developmental form, function, ideology, and antifascist struggle, and he placed special emphasis on the category of function. Because fascism assumed different forms in different regions and periods, Maruyama asserted, it was impossible to analyze it by looking at actual social conditions or systems themselves, such as monopoly capital, bureaucracy, and fascist parties. Rather it was necessary to ‘pay attention to fascism’s political function and the process by which that function was universalized’. In those circumstances, it was clear that the most vital political function of fascism was forced homogeneity. In other words, as he made it clear in ‘Various Problems of Fascism’, Maruyama’s position was to focus on the political function of fascism, rather than on economic conditions or political systems (Maruyama 1964).With this approach, Maruyama bolstered scholarly efforts to perceive the essence of ‘fascization’ (fassho-ka). Sassa wrote to provide facility for understanding a movement and Maruyama wrote to provide guidelines for judging conditions. Sassa argued for looking at essence, not at aspects; Maru­ yama argued for looking at function, not at form. In an effort to explain why it was necessary to look at essence and not aspects, Sassa observed in 1932 that the failure to explain the essence of fascism would ‘lead to ignoring the fascist tendencies of the political current of American imperialism’. In 1952, Maruyama, echoing Sassa, argued that it was necessary to look at function, not at form, because to overlook function would lead one to ignore the problem of the fascization of America and the ‘free world’ (Maruyama 1964; see also Maruyama 1963a; 1963b). There were clearly some parallels here between prewar and postwar.This is not to say that no progress had been made. But continuity was ensured by the fact that postwar scholars were able to draw on the store of research on fascism done by social scientists before the war.

Marxism and the postwar debate on fascism From the perspective of continuity, the 1933–37 debate between two groups of Marxist scholars, the Kōzaha (Lecture Group) and the Rōnōha (Workers and Peasants Group), is of crucial 226

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importance. The debate ostensibly probed the nature of the Meiji Restoration. Specifically it asked whether or not it was a bourgeois revolution and whether or not the Meiji state was still partly feudal or had become fully capitalist. But the debate was really about the nature of Japan in the 1930s, namely, was Japan a fascist state or not? Fascism, the Marxist argument ran, was a crisis of capitalism at its highest stage, that of monopoly capitalism. According to this argument, the capitalists turned to fascism in a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to prevent a communist revolution, whose advent was guaranteed by historical dialectics. Historians associated with the Kōzaha argued that it was impossible for Japan to be fascist because the Meiji Restoration was an incomplete revolution and feudal elements continued to predominate within the Japanese state. In contrast, the Rōnōha scholars asserted that the Meiji Restoration was a complete bourgeois revolution, after which Japan entered the monopoly capitalism stage and thus fascism could (and did) occur there. The Marxist debate on fascism resumed in the postwar period as, in the 1950s and the early 1960s, Marxist scholars, unrestrained by censorship or lèse majesté laws, more or less monopolized historical research in Japan (Abe 1973) and extended the prewar focus on capitalism to such topics as the political history of the Meiji Restoration (e.g.,Tōyama 1951). Moreover, the enormous influence of Marxist historians on the shaping the historical consciousness of the Japanese public is indicated by the extraordinary popularity of Shōwashi (Shōwa history), a run-away bestseller, which sold more than 10 million copies in multiple editions since its initial publication in 1955 (Tōyama et al. 1955; revised edition 1959). However, the Marxist hold on historical research weakened in the 1960s after the appearance of a number of empirically based studies that revolutionized the field of modern Japanese history (Itō 1969; see also Nihon Kokusai Seiji Gakkai 1963; Hata 1962). By the middle of the 1970s this new research had led to a major reappraisal of fascism as a concept of relevance to Japan and called into question the validity of Maruyama’s views on fascism.

Debating the structure of fascism The year 1976 was especially noteworthy in the debate on fascism, due to the publication of Tsutsui Kiyotada’s ‘A reconsideration of “Japanese fascism” ’ (Tsutsui 1976) and Itō Takashi’s ‘A perspective on researching Shōwa political history’ (Itō 1976; 1983). Tsutsui (b. 1948) criticized Maruyama by concentrating on the following six elements, which Maruyama listed as defining the structure (taisei) of fascism: first, the emergence of a dictator and the subsequent glorification of his person amounting to the cult of the individual; second, rejection of conventional multi-party politics in favour of one-party dictatorship; third, the formation of non-constitutional government; fourth, a ban on free communication and freedom of expression, assembly, association, and organization; fifth, the use of technology and mass media to regiment the masses; and, sixth, a ‘rule of terror’ through terrorism and violence.Tsutsui then pointed out that these elements were in fact indistinguishable from the structural characteristics of totalitarianism. In addition to these definitions relating to the structure of fascism, Tsutsui noted that Maruyama held a more fundamental view of what constituted the core of fascism, which he located in Maruyama’s characterization of ‘fascism as the twentieth century’s most radical and most aggressive form of counterrevolution’. At the same time, Tsutsui also raised the question whether Maruyama’s approach implied that labels such as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ could be used in a completely arbitrary fashion. Tsutsui’s critique of the matter of structure (I will not make a strict distinction between broad and narrow senses at this stage; I will return to this point later) struck at a weakness in the analyses of both Sassa and Maruyama. Because both focused on the function of fascism and not on its structure and because they wrote to provide guidelines that would enable contemporaries 227

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to evaluate fascism, their analyses failed to take into consideration actual social conditions or systemic aspects. System normally means the continuing or recognized frame or instrument of social life or, alternatively, the legitimate and acknowledged fixed behavioural forms of a society for the purpose of achieving particular objectives of value. However, it is not surprising that Maruyama, who did not touch on issues of system or political mechanism, also failed to discuss the higher-level concept of structure (taisei). As a matter of fact, at the beginning of Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics Maruyama made a distinction between fascism as a state structure and fascism as a movement, but then declined to discuss the former (Maruyama 1963b). Yet he was clearly aware of the problem. Indeed, in a postscript to ‘Nationalism, Militarism, and Fascism’ Maruyama discussed the impossibility of understanding fascism without addressing its unequivocal corresponding connection to structure, and noted that ‘looking at fascism as one historical structure, there were those who viewed the transition from bourgeois democracy to fascism historically as a transition to a higher stage, and therefore argued that it could only be followed by proletarian revolution’. However, he dismissed this view as erroneous. As this clearly shows, Maruyama was aware of the problem presented by the structure of fascism but deliberately declined to discuss it. Tsutsui’s critique made this omission plain. In contrast to Tsutsui, Itō (b. 1932) eschewed direct criticisms of Maruyama, probably because Maruyama was not involved in the debate over structure, and instead focused his critique on historical works that ‘used the term “fascism” as a matter of course to explain the political structure that arose after the collapse of party cabinets in the early 1930s’. But such differences apart, it should be noted that both Tsutsui and Itō made their criticisms from the perspective of political structure. Tsutsui’s and Itō’s critique had earlier roots. As early as 1963, Itō, together with Satō Seizaburō (1932–99), Takamura Naosuke (b. 1936), and Toriumi Yasushi (b. 1934), had complained that historical research was making no progress and suggested that ‘difficult questions’ were not being addressed because most historians were deeply in the thrall of Marxist theory (Itō et al. 1963). Too many historians, they protested, relied on the Marxist developmental stage theory to explain historical change through successive shifts in economic and social structure; moreover, if one accepted that the ‘state authority’ established at the time of the Meiji Restoration was a form of feudal absolutism, then one needed to deal with the undeniable fact of Japanese capitalism’s rapid development and address the question of just when and how ‘state authority’ underwent this ‘qualitative’ change from feudal absolutism to capitalism. That was most likely why Maruyama did not address the question of actual economic conditions, political mechanism, system, and structure: he was fully aware of the pitfall of discussing fascism by assigning it one unequivocal corresponding connection to the substructure. So how did historians working within the Marxist view of history react to these criticisms? Eguchi Keiichi (1932–2003) summarized the Marxist position by arguing that the definition of fascism as a violent dictatorship of finance capital was widely recognized and that absolutism, whether or not in essence a variety of feudal authority, was at minimum widely recognized as possessing feudal characteristics. If that was the case, then the problem caused by ‘the view which emphasizes the imposition of fascism under the wartime form of government’ was ‘how to explain the transition from the qualitatively feudal emperor system absolutism (that was especially pronounced in the military component of the system) to the violent dictatorship of finance capital with its different historical and class character’ (Eguchi 1977: 313). Marxist historians tried to resolve this problem by distinguishing between state type and state form. For instance, Nakamura Masanori (1935–2015) argued that, ‘even if a state was capitalist at the level of “state type”, which is where the true historical and class quality of the state was revealed, it was fully possible for the same state to maintain an absolutist essence at the level of “state form”, 228

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and the authority of prewar Japan’s emperor system truly existed in this difficult-to-bridge gap between “state type” and “state form”’. (Nakamura 1975) However, although making theoretical distinctions between state type and state form may be valid in the fields of economic history and comparative social history, it is doubtful whether the introduction of such distinctions brought any progress to the field of political history (Eguchi 1976; 1978; 1984).

The international situation and perceptions of fascism In his controversial essay, published in Shisō (Thought), Itō proclaimed that ‘the word “fascism” was meaningless as an analytical term’ (Itō 1983: 5). What stands out in this truncated and undocumented utterance is his assertion that ‘a major reason for axiomatically using the term “fascism” to describe the prewar Japanese political system was the judgment of the International Tribunal for the Far East’ (Itō 1983: 7). Here I wish to consider the intrinsic reason why Itō rather forcedly brought up the subject of the Tokyo Trials. First, he questioned the Tokyo Trials’ ideological schema that lumped the victorious powers of the United States, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China together in the democratic camp and the defeated Japan, Germany, and Italy in the fascist camp. Second, he asked what was the decisive difference between the political structure of Stalin’s Russia and that of fascism and totalitarianism. And, third, he queried whether there were any decisive similarities common to Stalin’s Russia, Chiang Kai-shek’s China, and the Anglo-American democracies. In this way, Itō, who had in his earlier co-authored article criticized the lack of concrete discussion of political structure in the discourse on fascism, approached fascism not as an issue of domestic politics but from the perspective of international affairs. This perspective resembled the approach of Gordon M. Berger (b. 1943) who, in the same issue of the journal, pointed out that in 1941 Japan, which the Soviet Union had assigned to the fascist camp, embarked on war not with the Soviets, but with the European colonial powers and the United States, a fact that ‘clearly contradicted the Comintern’s concept of the way the fascist states behaved’.What linked Japan, Germany, and Italy together, Berger agued, was not a war against the Soviet Union or communism, but a war against ‘the Anglo-American countries and the world system those powers were attempting to preserve’ (Berger 1976). That Itō raised the issue of fascist structure from the perspective of foreign affairs is of great interest and warrants further consideration. Before I discuss it, I would like to note that the issue of fascist structure was not completely ignored in Japan at that time. In fact, political scientist Ishida Takeshi (b. 1924) made a remarkable attempt to represent fascism as a total political structure, but he did so from the perspective of political science, not history (Ishida 1956). It would be instructive to take a look at political scientist Ōtake Hideo’s criticism of Ishida, which has some similarity to Itō’s argument in that it also placed emphasis on the international situation. Ōtake (b. 1943) viewed Ishida’s work as flawed because it ignored the international situation and analyzed emperor-system fascism only from a domestic perspective, focusing on domestic integration and the structure of oppression. Ōtake argued that the Meiji state was above all born out of an effort to deal with an external crisis, so it is futile to try to understand the significance of domestic integration without appreciating the foreign dimension. That is because the necessity of internal integration was brought about by external crisis (or perhaps a subjective crisis consciousness) and this sense of crisis was used to legitimize domestic integration. (Ōtake 1994) 229

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If one applies Ōtake’s argument to early Shōwa Japan, it connects to the point raised by Berger in the sense that both America and Russia aimed to preserve and expand their own national interests within the realm of international politics by means of universalizing their own ‘revolutionary’ values (Berger 1976). Japan, too, which perceived the threat of an inclusion within a U.S.-Soviet world order as an external crisis, universalized values sanctified by its own particular national experience and traditions. Thus, it is also possible to regard Japan as having envisaged a world order that was different from those offered by the United States and the Soviet Union. In short, this suggests that it is possible to look at internal integration from the perspective of the international situation. At first glance, Itō’s studies may appear to have nothing to do with the international situation. However, his first book-length monograph on early Shōwa politics examined the ways in which different political groups perceived and reacted to the naval limitations treaty worked out at the London Naval Conference in 1930 (Itō 1969). And in his aforementioned essay on researching Shōwa political history (Itō 1976), he argued that a detailed examination and analysis of historical sources were necessary to grasp how various states confronted the difficult problems that arose after the First World War. Only such an examination, Itō stressed, could clarify just how these states, and various groups within them, understood the challenging international environment. The problem was that Itō, while making this point, made no attempt to clarify the political dynamics between the international situation and internal reorganization. The introduction to his monograph (Itō 1969) was based on a sophisticated methodology drawn from the American political scientist Seymour Lipsett (see Katō 2005). Itō set up two axes along which he arranged various political groups such as the political parties, the army, the navy, the right wing, and considered the conflicts and connections among these groups through the prism of shared or conflicting interests. Nevertheless, having read the book, one cannot but conclude that the connection between the analytical framework set out in the introduction and the ten chapters in which ten political groups are analyzed one by one is unexpectedly weak.

Foreign crisis and domestic reorganization Whereas Itō critiqued the existing discourse on fascism in terms of the international situation, when discussing the domestic situation, he merely provided his own ‘kakushin’-ha (renovationist faction) analytical axis and failed to investigate the relationship between foreign crisis and domestic reorganization. Itō’s failure to address this important aspect is hinted at in the poor reviews his work received in Symposium Japanese History 3, Fascism and War (Fujiwara 1973; 23–5, 30–31, 88). Yet if one reads this book with a fresh mind, it is not really difficult to see that it examines what Maruyama called an ideology ‘linking domestic reorganization and international claims’. Or to put it differently, the book focuses on Maruyama’s third characteristic of the ideology of Japanese fascism, Pan-Asianism, that is, a call to liberate the peoples of Asia from the yoke of Western imperialism. In my view, the most interesting statement in Fascism and War was made by Hashikawa Bunzō: The particular character of Japanese fascism was pretty much determined by the experience of the Sino-Japanese War. If Japan had started the Pacific War without being embroiled in the Sino-Japanese War, then most probably the character of so-called fascism during the Pacific War would have been quite different. . . . For that reason, the various so-called special characteristics of fascism we have just been discussing also influenced domestic rule and the control of the Japanese people. (Fujiwara 1973: 244) 230

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These words by Hashikawa refer to the change brought about in domestic Japanese politics by the moves toward outlawing war as exemplified in the articles of the League of Nations, the 1922 Nine-Power Treaty, the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the Neutrality Acts (Shinohara 2003; Ikō 2002; Kobayashi 2002). This perspective overlaps with the work of Sakai Tetsuya, who has analyzed in great detail the historiography on Japanese politics in the 1930s, concluding, like Hashikawa, that there is a need for more analysis of the relationship between international and domestic politics and for closer study of the social impact of the Sino-Japanese War (Sakai 1988; 1992). Likewise, from early on Arima Manabu (b. 1945) has been consistently aware of the political dynamism of the relationship between foreign crisis and domestic reorganization. In his ‘The World View of the “Movement for National Reorganization” ’, Arima focused on the political organizations that were formed in Japan after the First World War (Arima 1977). He described their ideology as ‘state socialism’ (kokka shakaishugi) and examined the reasons why they wielded such powerful influence in Japanese politics at that particular moment. Having also analyzed the organizational details of these groups, he located the source of their influence in their offering prescriptions how to resolve both agricultural problems and the perceived external crisis. Through this approach Arima succeeded in shedding light on the linkages between external crisis and internal reorganization prior to the outbreak of Sino-Japanese War (Arima 1973; 1992). I, too, have written on the linkages between the foreign crisis and domestic politics during the period from the outbreak of that war in July 1937 to Japan’s attack on the AngloAmerican powers in December 1941. For instance, it was in this period that Hiranuma Kiichirō (1867–1952), who had since the mid-1920s headed one wing of the domestic reorganization movement and been generally regarded as a member of the ‘renovationist Right’ (kakushin uyoku), changed his views and formed a moderate pro-Anglo-American faction together with the upper ranks of the navy and members of the business world who wished to avoid war with Great Britain and the United States (see Katō 1993: ch. 4) At the same time, Konoe Fumimaro (1891–1945), who became prime minister for the second time in July 1940, with the help of the Shōwa Kenkyūkai (Shōwa Research Association) and other members of the renovationist faction, proceeded with peace overtures toward the Chinese Nationalist government, while pushing ahead with his plans to create a new nationwide totalitarian political party that consciously imitated Western fascist parties; however, the failure of the peace initiative weakened Konoe’s domestic position. As a result, the new party movement, which had encountered much opposition from various conservatives, failed to take power and turn Japan into a fascist state, and morphed into a largely ineffectual Imperial Rule Assistance Association. In sum, the ebb and flow of the war with China was determining the tempo of domestic political reform (Berger 1977; Katō 2015).

Research on the military and comparative fascism I will now describe the remarkable strides in research on the military, made particularly by Marxist historians, that resulted from the debate initiated by Itō. As Ōtake’s review of Ishida’s work showed, research on Japanese political history from the perspective of political science focused mainly on the Home Ministry’s mechanisms of domestic integration and coercion. This resulted in interpretations of emperor-system fascism (tennōsei fuashizumu) that completely ignored the role of the military, even though the military was considered to constitute the core of fascism. This oversight was a serious problem if only because it was the military who subjectively inflated the sense of external threat. At the same time, Marxist historians alleged but failed to demonstrate a connection between a military supposedly possessed of feudalistic, absolutist 231

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characteristics and finance capital. By exposing these oversights, Itō’s critique stimulated historians to address both the role of the military and its links to finance capital. This resulted in new important research published by Yui Masaomi, Yoshida Yutaka, and others (Yui 1976; Yoshida 1978; Kindai Nihonshi Kenkyūkai 1979; Kitaoka 1978; Kobayashi 1996; Kurosawa 2000; Saitō 2003; Kōketsu 1987; Yamada 1990). Itō’s criticism also provided an opportunity to refine discussions of comparative fascism. One of the best examples of this refinement is the work of political scientist Yamaguchi Yasushi (1934–2013). Rather than address the general question of what constitutes fascism, Yamaguchi broke the question down into three components: movement, thought, and structure. Let’s take a close look at Yamaguchi’s analysis of structure. Thus far I have not distinguished between the meaning of structure in a general sense (i.e., historical unity given order via the fundamental principles that provide unambiguous rules to social phenomena) and structure in a narrow sense (i.e., the form of political rule). One reason for this is that prior to Yamaguchi participants in the debate on fascism had not made this distinction. However,Yamaguchi argued that the question whether or not a certain structure (in its general meaning) was established was tantamount to the question whether or not the form of the state had changed. He further argued that the form of the state changed when fundamental alterations occurred in the following three areas: the principles legitimizing state authority, the mechanisms of state policy-making, and the nature of the relationship between state and society. Drastic changes in these three areas signified the emergence of a new structure (Yamaguchi 1979). Furthermore,Yamaguchi listed the following four points as benchmarks of a fascist structure: 1) the reactionary transformation of certain elements within the established ruling class and the emergence of a general political alliance between them and the so-called false revolutionary forces (giji kakumei seiryoku); 2) a one-party dictatorship and the realization of the political and social ‘forced homogenization’ making that party possible; 3) the complete suppression of various liberal rights and the complete, systematic institutionalization of terror centred on the secret police; 4) mass mobilization directed toward the formation of a ‘new order’ and a ‘new man’. The setting up of these groundbreaking benchmarks provided multiple directions for historians embarking on empirical research (Yamaguchi 1979: 180–2).

Further research In the 1980s the debate over fascism moved toward resolution. In the wake of Itō Takashi’s ‘renovationist’ faction thesis and Yamaguchi Yasushi’s refined explanation of fascist structure, a number of outstanding works were published based on empirical research. One of these was Amemiya Shōichi’s fascinating portrayal of a Japan that, in contrast to Germany with its ‘falserevolutionary’ transformation by outside political forces, became fascist as a consequence of ‘selfrenovation’ (jiko-kakushin) on the part of established and increasingly reactionary political elites. Amemiya (b. 1944) introduced the concept of the authoritarian-democratic faction (ken’ishugiteki minshushugi-ha) to describe those who gathered around Konoe Fumimaro during the period of the New Order Movement to promote national reorganization and their backers in the farm villages and provincial towns and cities (e.g., small-to-medium merchants and industrialists, landowners, and farmers). Amemiya also brought to light demands for the political and social liberation of the masses (Amemiya 1983; 1999). Eguchi Keiichi’s research made clear the existence of an ‘imperial’ consciousness that manifested itself in the idea of a ‘unity of sovereign and people’ and in a liberation consciousness that led to the Asian Monroe doctrine (Eguchi 1978). In a similar vein,Yoshimi Yoshiaki identified what he called grassroots emperor-system democracy (Yoshimi 1987). Combined, these three scholars succeeded in pioneering a completely 232

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new field that examined the war responsibility of the Japanese people (on war responsibility, see Chapters 29 and 30 in this volume). Meanwhile, other scholarly responses to Yamaguchi also resulted in the publication of studies illuminating the links between politics and society on the local level. Especially notable are the following works: Ikeda Jun’s study of farm villages as regions where lifestyles and production remained undifferentiated and that served as sites of rivalry between the Home Ministry and Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry that focused on the fundamentals of fascist organization (e.g., whether to prioritize organizing for regional purposes or to enhance wartime capabilities) (Ikeda 1997); Suzaki Shin’ichi’s study, which clarified state efforts at integration and the response of the people as revealed through his analysis of the Shinshū Gunkyō Dōshikai in Shimoina (Nagano Prefecture Military and Countryside Fraternal Association) (Suzaki 1998); and Hirai Kazuomi’s study of the relationship between local politics and society and the nationalist (kokkashugi) movement, which had been left largely untouched by previous studies of nationalism (Hirai 2000). Likewise noteworthy is the work of Furukawa Takahisa who, determining that the pre-1945 political system was authoritarian, analyzed the operations of the Diet and concluded that in wartime Japan the Diet was much more influential than had been generally assumed. This, of course, cast doubt on the view that regarded wartime Japan as a monolithic totalitarian state (Furukawa 2001; 2005). The strength of the established parties and the tenacity of the wartime Diet as a political force have been explored further by Yano Nobuyuki (1993) and Kanda Akifumi (2004a; 2004b; 2016). Their work seeks to revise the view of the Fifteen Years’ War as a single chain of interrelated events, each causing the next, beginning with the Manchurian Incident in 1931 and ending in Japan’s defeat in 1945, the view which was given its most perfect expression by Banno Junji (Banno 1996). Nagai Kazu, Itō Yukio, and Furukawa Takahisa have meanwhile written authoritative biographies of the Shōwa Emperor (Hirohito) (Nagai 2003; Itō 2011; Furukawa 2011). All of these in different ways, by showing Hirohito as a complex and far-from-dictatorial figure, undermine the somewhat one-dimensional image of the emperor as a fascist ‘war criminal’ presented by Marxist or Marxist-influenced historians as exemplified by the extremely influential works of Inoue Kiyoshi, Nakamura Masanori, and Herbert Bix (Inoue 1989; Nakamura 1992; Bix 2002). The difficulty of explaining the transition from liberal ‘Taishō democracy’ to ‘Shōwa fascism’ is what had led Itō Takashi to conceive of his ‘renovationist faction’ thesis in the first place. But Itō’s schema was not without its problems, and this has led some historians to question its validity. Recently, for example, Christopher Szpilman, in his analysis of the ideology of the Kokuhonsha (National Foundation Society) and the Yūzonsha (Society of Those Who Yet Remain) – the latter viewed by Maruyama Masao as Japan’s first fascist organization – pointed out a number of ambiguities in Itō’s distinction between the ‘renovationist Right’ and the ‘idealist (kannen) Right’ and argued for a reconsideration of Itō’s thesis (Szpilman 2015). Suetake Yoshiya, on the other hand, attempted to overcome the problems posed by Itō’s framework by focusing on the various calls for ‘national unity’ put forth to deal with the crisis of the Great War. By offering this as a new way to bridge the eras of Taishō and prewar Shōwa, Suetake has shed new light on the linkages between external crisis and domestic reform (Suetake 1998). Arguments for continuity between the prewar control economy and the postwar priority production system have of course been made before (e.g., Johnson 1982). However, recent research on the Imperial Diet, the emperor, right-wing ideology, and on discourses on national unity, is based on original frameworks and maintains a distance both from the ‘renovationist’ faction thesis and from the ‘fascism’ thesis. Therefore, I cannot help but feel that in the near future we can expect fresh solutions to the ‘perennial problem’ of continuity and discontinuity 233

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between prewar and postwar, solutions made from a completely new perspective. Indeed, one can say that younger researchers trained in the vortex of the fascism debates have created a new field of research into modern history.

The work of Anglophone historians This chapter would not be complete without a cursory survey of the fascism debate among Anglophone historians, which was to some extent influenced by, and in turn influenced, if perhaps to a lesser degree, the twists and turns of the Japanese debate. Although Anglo-Saxon wartime propaganda sometimes described Japan as a fascist state and this view found some expression in postwar works on Japan, it is fair to say that most Western historians of Japan eschewed the concept of fascism in their analyses of Japan. Even before the war with the United States erupted, the prominent historian-diplomat E. Herbert Norman concluded in 1940 that Japan ‘lacks the distinctive features of a fascist dictatorship’ (Norman 1940). The occupation authorities also took the view that Japan had not been a fascist state, but a state controlled by ‘militaristic cliques’.This view more or less continued to dominate Western scholarship on Japan over the next two decades (a concise summary of this debate in McCormack 1982). This view was accepted by the contributors to the influential modernization series published in the 1960s, who on the whole did not see it necessary to use fascism as a concept to explain the situation in prewar Japan (e.g., Ward 1968; Morley 1971). If the modernization series paid little heed to the concept of fascism, Peter Duus and Daniel Okimoto launched a frontal attack on it in a 1979 article (Duus and Okimoto 1979). Pointing out all kinds of ambiguities and contradictions in the existing definitions of fascism, they concluded that fascism as a concept was a failure, for, far from offering any insights, it only added confusion to the understanding of prewar Japan. The article exerted such a strong influence on Western historians that for the next two decades few Western historians considered it necessary to look at prewar Japan in terms of fascism. Indeed,Western studies of the issue published in the 1980s rejected the concept’s applicability (Kasza 1984; 2001; Fletcher 1982). Among the exceptions who kept the concept alive was Herbert Bix, who continued to insist that Japan experienced emperor-system fascism (Bix 1982). A decade later, Andrew Gordon coined the concept of ‘imperial fascism’ to explain the transition from the period of peaceful Taishō democracy, or as Gordon described it, ‘imperial democracy’, to the fascist era of militarization, mobilization, and repression at home and aggression abroad (Gordon 1991).Yet even after Gordon, references to Japan as a fascist state remained relatively infrequent. And although in 2004 a book was published which explicitly categorized Japan as a fascist state, it based this judgment not on any fresh empirical evidence, but on the basis of a new look at the existing published English-language sources (Reynolds 2004). Fascism began to receive renewed attention at the end of the decade with the publication of two volumes, one authored and one edited, by Alan Tansman. Tansman approached the fascism debate as a specialist in Japanese literature, not as a historian. This allowed him to circumvent the documentary obstacles that had apparently shackled the efforts of Western historians to detect fascism in Japan. In contrast to such historians,Tansman was interested in ‘the diffusion of fascism as ideology and representation’, not in ‘its origins and consequences as a political movement or regime’. Based on this approach, he and his co-authors analyzed fascism as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon, by and large setting aside timeworn questions of political structure and generic definition. Instead, they focused on identifying a ‘culture of fascism’ and ‘fascist moments’ in the literary and cultural discourses of the 1930s. In spite of this culturalist approach,

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Tansman and other like-minded practitioners recognized the importance of such mainstays of historical research as the reformist bureaucrats whom they described as representatives of state power and promoters of fascism (Tansman 2008; 2009; Hijiya 2011).These reformist bureaucrats received much closer attention in Janis Mimura’s remarkable study, which maintains that their integrated notions of technological innovation, centralized economic planning, and expansionist ethnic nationalism is best understood as ‘techno-fascism’, even if it still remains to be shown how this techno-fascism affected Japan’s political process (Mimura 2011; Moore 2013). On the other hand, Roger H. Brown’s research on reformist bureaucrats in the Home Ministry tends to contradict the fascism argument. Drawing upon an impressive range of primary sources including police records, the ministry’s newsletter, pamphlets, and reform plans, he provides new evidence on the administrative thought and activities of officials operating within the civil bureaucracy’s most powerful institution. Brown has detailed the decisive influence of the nationalist ideologue Yasuoka Masahiro on the ministry’s Yoshida Shigeru (not to be confused with the diplomat and prime minister of the same name) and other representative ‘new bureaucrats’ (shin-kanryō). Providing the first close analysis in English or Japanese of the connection between Yasuoka’s ‘Oriental thought’ (Tōyō shisō) and the ministry’s elitist ‘bokuminkan ishiki’ (sense of being shepherds of the people), Brown demonstrates the historical significance of Confucian-influenced ideas of governance for understanding bureaucratic thought in modern Japan and makes a compelling argument that these particular bureaucrats, rather than embracing fascism, were political and social conservatives who viewed themselves first and foremost as the emperor’s officials (Brown 2009; 2012). Brown’s argument has clear implications for the fascism debate, for the idea that in prewar Japan reformist bureaucrats represented fascist influence and facilitated the establishment of Japanese fascism was long accepted by Japan’s Marxist historians and recently argued for by Anglophone scholars, such as Mimura (2011). Finally, despite the fact that fascism as an ideology arose first in Italy, comparative studies of developments in Japan have generally focused on Germany; however, Reto Hofmann’s recent study of interwar Japanese interest in Italian fascism remedies this defect and at the same time argues that the Japanese variant of fascism exemplifies the ideology’s concurrent origins in national and global settings (Hofmann 2015). Similarly, though from a completely different perspective, Christopher Szpilman’s close study of the long-neglected philosopher Kanokogi Kazunobu contends that fascist thought in Japan predated and thus did not owe its origins to European variants (Szpilman 2013). Drawing partly upon this approach, in a recent publication a historian spurned the issue of definition and concentrated instead on a ‘fascist worldview’, which he asserted, ‘was coalescing in the Japanese state in the late 1930s’ (Ward 2014). In sum, this recent scholarship shows that Anglophone scholars, like their Japanese colleagues, are bringing new perspectives to bear in considering the question of fascism in prewar Japan. (Translated by Roger H. Brown)

Note 1 This chapter is a translation of Katō 2006; it has been adapted and updated for this Handbook in cooperation with the author.

Further reading Duus, Peter, and Okimoto, Daniel I. (1979) ‘Comment: fascism and the history of Pre-War Japan: the failure of a concept’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 39(1): 65–75.

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Fletcher, William Miles (1982) The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Morris, Ivan (ed.) (1963) Japan 1931–1945: Militarism, Fascism, Japanism? Lexington: D. C. Heath and Co. Reynolds, E. Bruce (ed.) (2004) Japan in the Fascist Era, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tansman, Alan (ed.) (2009) The Culture of Japanese Fascism, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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17 Japan’s 1930s Crisis, fascism, and social imperialism Ethan Mark

Bounded on the one side by the liberal and idealistic but profoundly unstable 1920s and on the other by the great military, social, and ideological conflagrations of the 1940s, the 1930s represents modernity’s greatest question mark. In Japan and elsewhere, the experience of the 1930s comprised the greatest crisis of modern times – and provoked its most radical responses. From the beginning, the study of Japanese society in the 1930s has therefore inevitably been implicated within larger conceptual debates and political fault lines regarding fundamental questions of twentieth-century history and the forces of modern social change that came to a head in that decade: questions of modernity and modernization, democracy, capitalism, imperialism, culture, war, and their inter-relationship. By the same token, as with other periods of its modern history but with an intensity distinctive to the extremes of the period itself, the study of Japan’s 1930s has been marked by a scholarly struggle over the nature and implications of Japan’s distinctive identity and experience as a non-Western society and a non-Western power. Changing understandings of Japanese society in the 1930s have thus been a measure not only of changing understandings of modern Japan more generally, but also of modernity itself as a global phenomenon. A quick glance at Japan’s domestic situation circa 1929 would seem to hold little portent of the radical developments and disasters just around the corner. Politically, by the end of the 1920s Japan had adopted universal male suffrage, and the elected party politicians in the parliament seemed firmly ensconced at the centre of power, even if still sharing much of that power with the emperor, his advisors, the Privy Council, and the unelected Upper House as originally intended by the conservative authors of the Meiji Constitution. Socio-economically, roughly half of Japan’s working population remained in the agricultural sector, and there were ongoing, troubling gaps in the pace of development between country and city as well as between Japan’s many small businesses and its few very large ones known as zaibatsu. At the same time, Japan could boast of near universal literacy, and its urbanization, mass production, and mass media were expanding briskly, with growing numbers of people (roughly 20 per cent of the urban population) having entered the middle class. Perhaps as inevitable byproducts of this mix of developments, labour movements both in country and city were also growing in popularity and assertiveness, and Marxist-Leninist social analyses were attracting serious intellectual attention – but neither on a scale that seemed to threaten the established social order to the degree seen contemporaneously in a restless Europe. Japan was a member of the League of Nations in 237

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good standing, having maintained a longstanding and profitable alliance with Britain until 1922 (see Chapter 2 in this volume). Anticolonial resistance in Japan’s most restive colony of Korea appeared to have quieted since the adoption of a comparatively mild ‘cultural policy’ (bunka seisaku) that mixed a degree of tolerance for local cultural autonomy with political repression. Ongoing frictions with rising nationalism in China worried Japan’s heavily invested business community along with its military.Yet objectively there seemed little to fear from Chiang Kaishek who presided over a fragmented republic and seemed much more eager to suppress a shared communist enemy than to confront the overwhelming military might of the Japanese. Indeed, an attempt by the unruly Kwantung Army1 to take matters into their own hands in Manchuria by assassinating insufficiently pliable local warlord Chang Tso-lin in 1928 met with little enthusiasm among Japan’s public or its political elites. Yet by the end of the 1930s, Japan’s brutal, stalemated war of attrition in China was entering its third year, making ever deeper demands on Japan’s social, economic, and psychological resources. The Kwantung Army’s successful second attempt to mobilize the nation for an invasion of Manchuria in 1931–32 had evidently not been enough to satisfy the thirst for military conquest. Military budgets totalling nearly three-quarters of all government expenditures for the previous four years and the dispatch of hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the continent only seemed to be sinking Japan ever deeper into the Chinese mud. Japan’s consumer economy had meanwhile come into tight straits, with shortages of staple goods and rising prices fuelling mass frustration. The elected politicians of the Lower House of the Diet had all but given way to the rule of military leaders and bureaucrats whose powers over the Japanese economy, its cultural sphere, and its daily life had expanded profoundly. Under their increasingly tightening grip, the holiness of Japan’s ‘holy war’ for a ‘New Order in East Asia’ was no longer open to debate, and voices of dissent, first on the left and then in the political centre, had been suppressed or fallen silent. In the empire, Koreans and Taiwanese were also now under more pressure than ever to serve Japan and demonstrate their loyalty, with their economies being retooled for Japan’s war and their populations compelled to speak only Japanese and adopt Japanese family names. Internationally, Japan had now abandoned its former association with the liberal democracies of the U.K. and the United States for an alliance with the staunchly anti-liberal and anti-communist Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Although surprised and frustrated with the nation’s failure to achieve a breakthrough in the war with China and the ongoing costs of the conflict, ordinary Japanese nevertheless appeared more firmly committed than ever to Japan’s new and radical military course – a course that was soon to lead to Pearl Harbor. How had it come to this? At least a part of the answer must lie in the Great Depression, which hit Japan, as it did the rest of the world, just as the new decade was dawning. Yet societies around the world responded in a variety of ways to the global economic crisis, only a few choosing extreme state repression and aggressive military expansion. As it happens the other two societies that most emphatically chose such a course were also Japan’s ‘fascist’ allies in the Second World War. How much could their histories help us to explain that of Japan’s 1930s? Conversely, how much of Japan’s apparent ‘new turn’ in the 1930s was really new – and how much of it was distinctively ‘Japanese’? Both in and outside of Japan, such questions have occupied the focus of scholarly attention ever since, with a changing focus – and sometimes a changing answer – that in turn reflected changes in broader postwar social, political, and intellectual contexts. The early postwar decades bore witness to intensive scholarly debates whose contending storylines, consciously or not, often reflected the political fracture lines of the Cold War era. Japanese scholars, many of them of a critical Marxist orientation, generally viewed the rise of what they called ‘Japanese fascism’ in the 1930s as an inevitable consequence of social deficiencies and contradictions dating back at least as far as the 1868 Meiji Restoration. The Restoration, they 238

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argued, had represented a less-than-revolutionary compromise between ‘semi-feudal’ landed and military elites and an expanding but immature Japanese capitalism. Together these interests had sought to enrich themselves and catch up to the Western powers through a forced-draft programme of industrial modernization and imperial expansion built upon the hyper-exploitation and oppression of Japan’s working masses. This had been facilitated by a systematic campaign of mass ideological indoctrination centred on loyalty to the imperial institution which drew upon, manipulated, and amplified pre-existing ‘feudal’ tendencies. The intensified militarization of society and the military showdown with China that began with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 had represented a reactionary attempt to shore up this ‘emperor system’ (tennōsei) in crisis, in the context of a global crisis of capitalism. In contrast, leading Western scholars of the early postwar decades such as Edwin O. Reischauer, ideologically at odds with Marxist critiques of capitalism and imperialism and more positive about Japan’s modernization, tended to view the 1930s as an aberration. They argued that under enlightened civilian leadership, Japan’s longer term trajectory of prewar development had shown signs of promise in a healthy, democratic, liberal capitalist direction – a direction indeed happily resumed, with American encouragement, after World War II. In this characterization, Japan’s 1930s appeared as a dramatic misstep on the way to modernity, in which Japan’s normally pragmatic and reasonable civilian leaders had been temporarily overwhelmed by an aggressive, irrational ‘militarist’ clique. The leadership of this troublesome group was roughly represented by those whom the United States and their allies singled out for high-profile war crimes trials held in Tokyo in the late 1940s. They were seen to have taken advantage of the sense of crisis generated by the Great Depression, a subservient public, and insufficiently autonomous public institutions to engineer repression at home and a disastrous expansionary adventure abroad. A third line of analysis, unique in enjoying wide influence both in Japan and outside of it, was formulated very soon after the war by the brilliant political theorist Maruyama Masao. Maruyama hewed close to the mainstream Japanese scholarly interpretation in seeing the disaster as an inevitable consequence of ‘feudal’ social and political structures wilfully exploited and manipulated by the prewar regime and in highlighting prewar Japan’s economic ‘backwardness’. But he emphasized fundamental shortcomings in Japan’s modern cultural development, arguing that the location and identity of the emperor within the prewar regime, combining both religious and political supremacy in one and the same person, had thwarted the development of a mature, Western-style civil society, with its clear and rational divisions between the spheres of church and state, the public and the private, the moral and the political. The result was a prewar society whose values were determined not within the independent, rational mind and conscience of each individual, as Maruyama contended was the case in the modern West, but externally and ‘situationally’, in reference to the national body and to the ‘absolute value’ at its centre – the emperor. Amid their great differences, all three of these lines of interpretation reflected a basic assumption: whereas Japan’s 1930s might have borne some resemblance to Europe’s 1930s, at its heart lay a tension between Japan’s ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ sectors and the ‘semi-feudal’ nature of the relationship between Japan’s prewar state and its underdeveloped civil society. Crucial evidence was seen in the distinctive staying power of the interwar Japanese regime, anchored by the unwavering, ‘irrational’ devotion of the Japanese people to their emperor. In German and Italian fascism, mass fascist movements ‘from below’ had battled rival mass socialist movements and seized control over the state, toppling the old regime; in Japan, civil unrest appeared to have played out only at the top, amid competing factions of its military elite.Violent acts of political extremism against the existing order had come from a handful of young officers from within the ranks of the military itself. Among them and in the wider society, the emperor’s authority was never questioned, and his representatives had remained firmly in the saddle. 239

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From the beginning, questions of comparability to European experience also led naturally to the question of fascism. Whether the term was appropriate at all in Japan’s case was something on which scholars were sharply divided, with those more sympathetic to Marxist perspectives tending to use it, and those who were not tending to reject it. In part such inclinations were reflective of a global postwar pattern, for while Mussolini and his ilk might have first coined the term, it were interwar Marxist theorists from Gramsci to Stalin to Trotsky who first sought to take intellectual ownership of it by conceptualizing it sociologically, and their global influence in doing so was immense. Sharing a stage-theory view of history and capitalist development, they developed an understanding of fascism as a defensive counter-attack mounted by an advanced industrial capitalism dominated by ‘monopoly capital’ that found itself under siege from mass revolutionary movements amid the profound socio-economic and political crises of the interwar era. It responded by establishing a dictatorship based upon a mass mobilization of the enemies of the working class, in particular the petty-bourgeoisie and the ‘lumpen proletariat’, in the name of the survival of the nation-state under threat from within and without. But in Japan’s case, such debates were additionally charged and shaped by a near-universal assumption of essential differences between Japan and the West. From the 1930s through the early postwar decades, even scholars who favoured the applicability of the term ‘fascism’ almost unanimously distanced Japan’s experience from the European one by defining its fascism as an exceptional case – a primitive, unilateral version of the European original foisted by an ‘absolutist’ state upon a society conditioned by tradition and indoctrination not to think or to act autonomously.2 In what is still perhaps the single most influential scholarly essay on 1930s Japan, Maruyama Masao drew upon Marxist scholarship to paint a picture of a prewar Japanese economy and society that he believed resembled contemporaneous Europe only in its upper echelons, and coined the term ‘fascism from above’ to describe it. The progress of Japanese ‘fascist’ transformation was very gradual. There was no March on Rome and no 30 January 1933; this suggests the weakness of resistance from below. There were no organized labour or proletarian parties to be smashed. Here we should note the form of Japanese monopoly capital itself. When we consider the population structure in 1930, directly before the Manchurian Incident when the Japanese ‘fascist’ movement suddenly became vigorous . . . how small in numbers the true proletariat was compared with the medium and small businessmen and the salaried class. . . [and] how inferior the industrialization of Imperial Japan was compared to that of the European capitalist nations. At the peak of the Japanese social structure stood monopoly capital, rationalized to the highest degree. But at its base were crammed together minute-scale agriculture with production methods that had scarcely changed since feudal times and household industries almost entirely dependent on the labour of members of the family. The most advanced and the most primitive techniques exist[ed] side by side in a stratified industrial structure. Production forms of different historical stages overl[ay] and supplement[ed] each other. This was a decisive obstacle to the growth of an organized democratic movement in Japanese politics. On the one hand there [was] the stubborn rule of absolutism, on the other the development of monopoly capital, both in agreement and reinforcing each other. . . . Here is revealed the internal weakness of the ‘fascism’ from below in Japan. (Maruyama 1963a: 40–1) As in Europe, Maruyama argued, ‘ “fascism” . . . performed the role of serving monopolistic capital, despite its having displayed a certain anti-capitalist appearance at the outset’ (Maruyama 1963a). The standard-bearers of this ‘Japanese fascism’, Maruyama argued, were the radical right, 240

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the nation’s leaders who co-opted their rhetoric, and the petty bourgeoisie, such as shopkeepers and small businessmen, artisans, and local civil servants whom he characterized as ‘petty emperors’ and sometimes as ‘pseudo-intellectuals’. But seemingly reaffirming the ‘primitive’ nature of Japan’s version of fascism, the young officers who were the most visible and active representatives of Japan’s radical right had pursued their infamous assassinations and coup attempts against Japan’s established political and economic elites in the early and mid-1930s in virtual isolation from the wider society, showing ‘no particular zeal for organizing the masses’ and lacking a coherent revolutionary ideology beyond a destruction of the status quo. As outlined in Kita Ikki’s famous 1919 Outline Plan for the Reorganization of Japan that had served as the young officers’ inspiration, the ruling elite of betrayers of the nation were to be eliminated, but only in the name of a vague ‘return’ to direct imperial control – a backward-looking ‘Shōwa Restoration’ that aimed to restore nation to the status quo ante of the Meiji Restoration some seventy years before. When the young officers’ schemes culminated in the major coup attempt of 26 February 1936, Japan’s senior military and bureaucratic leadership had taken advantage of the acute sense of crisis they engendered to initiate radical internal social reorganization and external aggression while decisively crushing the young officer hotheads themselves and subduing their senior military supporters. In a further reflection of Japan’s relatively weak and passive civil society, argued Maruyama, the intelligentsia and white-collar workers, along with the mass of the Japanese population, had largely stood idly by, a handful at the most engaging in ‘passive resistance’ (Maruyama 1963a: 25–83). Although their emphases differed, conventional Marxist characterizations of Japanese society in the early postwar decades were in rough agreement with those of Maruyama. Introducing a benchmark historical reference work in the mid-1970s, Ōishi Kaichirō emphasized a fundamental prewar continuity in Japan’s ‘absolutist’ ruling regime and socio-economic ‘backwardness’ that distinguished it from the mass-based regimes that implemented fascism in Europe. At the same time he asserted the regime’s unique ‘success’ in ‘playing the role of fascism’ by ‘mobilizing the mass of the people’ for war on an unprecedented scale (Ōishi 1975: 6). Like scholars elsewhere, mainstream Western and non-Marxist Japanese scholars questioned such Marxist understandings of fascism itself, arguing that their single-minded focus on the crisis of capitalism and the necessarily decisive role of ‘monopoly capital’ in response was reductive and mechanistic.Where Japan was concerned, they also opened up a second front by calling into question the degree to which Depression-era Japan had in fact experienced class tensions or socio-economic crisis at all: Although hit hard by the Great Depression (from 1929 on) and by the endemic domestic agricultural crisis, Japan’s economy, they argued in the revealingly titled edited volume Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan (1971) and elsewhere, never really entered the dire straits experienced even by the United States, let alone Germany. Japan, they noted, was one of the fastest of the industrialized nations to recover from the Depression through such moves as the devaluing of the yen – a boon to exports – and expanded public spending on infrastructural along with military-related projects, amounting to a sort of successful Keynesian intervention avant la lettre. Between 1930 and 1936, the Japanese economy had grown by approximately 50 per cent, even prompting one leading economist of the day to speak of an ‘economic miracle’.3 Although in Japan social tensions had arisen between workers and management and between landlords and tenants, they could not be compared, in either scale or severity, with the mass confrontations between socialist, labour and tenant movements, and capitalists and large landholders in Italy and Germany, where capitalists and large landholders had supported the fascists as preferable to impending social chaos. ‘Japan in this period is better labelled militarist than fascist’, wrote leading American historians Edwin O. Reischauer and Albert Craig in a widely used textbook. ‘The basic state apparatus was not new or revolutionary, but merely the old 241

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“establishment”, now dominated by the military elite, overlaid by controls, and swept up in a spiritual nationalism’ (Fairbank et al. 1989: 724–5). As such debates became increasingly deadlocked by the mid-1970s, the innovative Marxist scholar Furuya Tetsuo made a creative attempt to move the discussion forward. Although acknowledging that domestic Japan had indeed lacked the extreme social unrest or obvious ‘regime change’ witnessed in fascist Italy of Nazi Germany, he attempted to draw on Japan’s experience to propose a globally applicable definition of fascism centred upon two fundamental characteristics: suppression and mobilization. As a form of dictatorship, he argued, fascism was distinguished by its ‘uniform organization of the masses at the level of daily life’, combined with ‘the complete elimination of the roots of resistance and the mobilizing of the people in accordance with the wishes of authority’ (Furuya 1976: 84–6). For Furuya, what was revolutionary about Japan’s new domestic order in the 1930s was the degree to which the activist state had sought to reorganize society and intervene in daily life – and had succeeded in doing so. In retrospect, perhaps the more important innovation in Furuya’s approach was his particular attention to Japan’s situation as an empire in determining the specific shape of ‘Japanese fascism’, a perspective lacking in conventional analyses on right and left alike, with their near-exclusive focus on fascism as a domestic phenomenon (be it indeed Japanese, German, or Italian). Like those of Italy and Germany, Furuya argued, Japan’s elites also faced hostile revolutionary movements requiring a distinctly ‘fascist’ mass mobilization and suppression in response. But unlike in Italy or Germany, these threats came simultaneously from both within the metropole (relatively weak labour and tenant’s movements, fear of which was heightened by a perceived threat of communist ideology from abroad) and from the colonial periphery (in the form of popular anti-colonial liberation movements in China and Korea). This uneven challenge was met with a correspondingly uneven response: brutal and violent suppression of a nature and degree comparable to that seen in European fascism in the empire, combined with bureaucratically managed social mobilization and regimentation at home. The relative weakness of domestic left-wing movements, argued Furuya, meant that Japanese fascism did not require terror ‘at home’ on a scale comparable to that of Nazi Germany (Furuya 1976). In a prominent 1979 essay, American scholars Peter Duus and Daniel I. Okimoto also sought to move beyond the left-right deadlock. Rather than seeking another fine-tuning of fascism, however, they proclaimed fascism to be a ‘failed concept’ in the study of interwar Japan and suggested a need for attention to new angles and new social actors.4 Among other possibilities, they proposed the looser political science concept of ‘social corporatism’ – essentially the advocacy of an interventionist state to reorganize society according to social function, thereby suppressing the social chaos and conflict generated by laissez-faire liberalism – as a better fit with Japan’s 1930s. Both the title and the tone of their essay reflected a more general, growing scholarly impatience with conventional approaches associated with both Marxist and anti-Marxist camps in this period. Such a trend was indeed pronounced not only with regard to the study of Japan’s history, but among a new generation of scholars and scholarship around the globe in this period as the heated ideological battles and social movements of what might be called the high Cold War, which peaked in many places during the Vietnam War, began to recede into the distance. In retrospect, for Japan’s 1930s, as for so many other fields of historical specialization, the decade of the 1980s appears a turning point in terms of a search for new paradigms and new actors. Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s classic study Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People (1987), which recently appeared in English translation (Yoshimi 2015), can be seen as one of the great early fruits of such shifts in focus. In the early 1970s, as a young historian researching prewar popular political movements, Yoshimi (b. 1946) grew increasingly frustrated with conventional accounts of the war period, whether from left or right, which always seemed to tell the 242

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story from the ‘top-down’, according to an active historical role only to Japan’s political, military, and economic elites, to the impersonal structures and forces of socio-economics, and/or to ‘the Japanese’ conceived as a single ethno-cultural whole. As an active participant in the widespread mass political protests against the Vietnam War in his student days at Tokyo University, Yoshimi was troubled by the hypocrisy of an older generation that claimed to have learned from the mistakes of the past but appeared all too ready to repeat them – and a Japanese public that, in the wake of Japan’s ‘successful’ high growth, seemed increasingly inclined to follow their lead. Looking to Europe in the same period, he observed ‘the 1968 generation’ of Germans of his own age confronted with similar issues, who saw it as their moral obligation to conduct their own social reckoning of the past as a prerequisite to achieving real social change in the present. ‘They asked their own parents, why did you cooperate with Nazism?’ observed Yoshimi in a later interview, ‘while in Japan we didn’t have that. We didn’t pursue our parents’ responsibility’ (Personal interview with Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Tokyo, 19 January 2007). In search of a new story of the war during the course of the 1970s and early 1980s,Yoshimi and a number of young colleagues set about systematically collecting new primary source material, in the process gaining access to hitherto undiscovered government intelligence and other documents, including systematic wartime attempts to monitor popular morale. Such material reflected the revolutionary new reach of the wartime state in its attempts to penetrate and organize people’s daily lives – what might be called a hallmark of fascism – but they also yielded a valuable new perspective on evolving popular experiences and attitudes. In the same period, Yoshimi also happily observed the appearance of a slew of ‘unofficial’ new source material such as diaries, letters, and memoirs emerging from the attics, drawers, and word processors of a wide variety of elderly Japanese who had lived through the war and the postwar reconstruction, and now finally had both the time, and the need, to recall and reflect on their own experiences along with those of their fallen comrades and family members. New were not only the contents and variety of the stories told, but also the social variety of the authors: many were from the lower military ranks, former privates or non-commissioned officers, many from the rural farming families that had been called upon to supply a high proportion of Japan’s soldiers and to bear a high proportion of Japan’s wartime burden. In Japan’s highly stratified prewar society, many of them had enjoyed no more than an elementary school education, but they were relatively highly literate nevertheless due the generally high quality of Japan’s prewar education system. Drawing upon this rich and diverse base of source material,Yoshimi’s study painted a sweeping and persuasive portrait of wartime Japan from the ‘bottom-up’ that broke decisively with the conventions of the genre. Beginning with the war’s troubled early 1930s beginnings and culminating in the disaster of defeat and the promise of a new beginning in 1945, moving adeptly and systematically between the home front and the diverse variety of ‘fronts’ that distinguished Japan’s far-flung Asian imperium, Grassroots Fascism presented a carefully nuanced and historicized portrait of everyday, non-elite Japanese in all their real-life complexity and ambiguity not only as victims of, but also as active participants in, the wartime struggle for hegemony in Asia and social renovation at home. Yoshimi was also at special pains to include equally penetrating accounts of the experience of Japanese ethnic minorities and imperial subjects, including Okinawans, Koreans, and Taiwanese engaged in their own complex personal and group negotiations of the wartime enterprise. Rather than passively standing by as the dramatic developments of the 1930s happened to them, Yoshimi’s ordinary Japanese were shown to have taken an active interest, and to have played an active part, in their making. Rather than blindly and naively following orders issued by those of higher rank, ordinary Japanese were shown to have responded in diverse and divergent, informed and critical patterns that reflected a Japanese interwar society not so much mired in 243

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‘feudal tradition’ as energized and mobilized by the contradictory tensions, frustrations, dreams, and desires characteristic of interwar modernity. Rather than a society whose behaviour was overwhelmingly determined and driven by an internal, national dynamic, Yoshimi revealed a portrait of ordinary Japanese confronted and consumed by the fate of the empire. And perhaps most remarkably, by following Japanese troops to the battlefields of China and back again, he revealed a fundamentally interactive, transnational dynamic in Japan’s wartime radicalization. From 1939 to 1940, Japan not only expended more than ten billion yen and suffered more than one hundred thousand deaths in battle. It also absorbed several hundred thousand repatriated soldiers who had accumulated raw experiences of China and its battlefields; who had developed a deep fear of China’s resistance that involved the country’s entire people; and who had hardened in their determination to fight on. The Japan of this period was thus a Japan different from before. One by one, people returning from the battlefield – along with people at home who had been supporting the war – were becoming earnest, and beginning to give it their all. (Yoshimi 2015) Here, argued Yoshimi, was a radical development that challenged and complicated the conventional paradigm of ‘fascism from above’ in terms of both dynamic and timing.Viewed from below, he argued, the period through the early stages of the China War that began in mid-1937 had been characterized not by a passive popular acceptance of creeping authoritarianism and militarism but rather by an ongoing and broad social commitment to parliamentary democracy, accompanied by widespread antipathy to military attempts to undermine it. Although their thinking always bore ‘an authoritarian aspect . . . in so far as it took the emperor system as a given’, ordinary Japanese of the mid-1930s continued to ‘demand political and social liberation and improvement in their lives, to be actuated by the people themselves’ (Yoshimi 2015). Such sentiments were widely revealed, for example, in popular responses to both the young officers’ coup attempt in February 1936 itself and to military attempts to engineer greater social domination in its wake. The large number of personal messages of encouragement, support, and sympathy received by Diet Representative Saitō Takao following his ‘purge the army speech’ of 7 May 1936 – in which he hammered upon the responsibility of the military authorities for the incident – revealed the people’s genuine sentiments in opposing the trend towards military-directed fascism, yearning for the restoration of constitutional politics, and the realization of imperial democracy.5 . . . That these sorts of expressions continued to represent a strand of public opinion again became clear . . . when an attempt to form a new cabinet miscarried [due to military interference] in January 1937. (Yoshimi 2015) Crucially, however, it was not only in terms of a popular commitment to parliamentary democracy or devotion to the emperor that Yoshimi sought to portray the period through the mid1930s in terms of a continuity extending back through the decades since the turn of the twentieth century. For ever since the Japanese people had begun taking to the streets in large numbers to demand their democratic rights – a period referred to as the era of ‘Taishō Democracy’ that began with the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–05 – another interest had occupied an equal, integral part of popular activism: a commitment to empire. ‘Fuelled by extensive media

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coverage’ and aggressively manipulated by the military amid the crisis of the Great Depression (Yoshimi 2015: 40), Yoshimi noted, such popular imperialism had exploded into ‘war fever’ in the wake of the Manchurian invasion in 1931. Still, he insisted, by mid-decade these passions had largely cooled, and the popular turn to fascism was yet to come. More so than any indoctrination from above, argued Yoshimi, it was the brute reality of total war and the unexpected tenacity of Chinese resistance that brought about a radical and decisive popular shift away from democracy and toward an aggressive defence of empire. Only now did ordinary Japanese decisively come to share with military and bureaucratic elites a desire for a transcendent resolution of the national crisis, producing indispensable mass support for a radical transformation of the relations of state and society along fascist lines. Viewed from above, corroboration of Yoshimi’s characterization of this dynamic can be found in the 1939 analysis of eyewitness John Gunther. A movement to abolish the parliamentary facade and to inaugurate a single Fascisttotalitarian party replacing the old parties began several years ago . . . its leadership was to go to Prince Konoye [Konoe], who later became prime minister. . . . But the plan collapsed. Konoye became shy of the idea, and other leaders were coy. Apparently they feared that Japan was not ready for such a formally totalitarian step.Then came national preoccupation with the China war, which made it in a way unnecessary. (Gunther 1939: 65. Italics added for emphasis) As the war in China expanded, in intimate, detailed, and often shockingly graphic accounts authored by (fallen) soldiers,Yoshimi documents how Japanese responded to Chinese resistance with the inhuman ruthlessness and brutality characteristic of modern colonial war against an ‘obstinate’ opponent perceived as racially and culturally inferior. He presents overwhelming evidence of a general and evolving, systemic pattern of radicalization and brutalization, with looting, terror, enslavement, and the murder of civilians as well as soldiers, including mass numbers of POWs, as a daily event – evidence that makes it impossible to see such phenomena as the ‘Rape of Nanjing’,6 for example, as an isolated ‘incident’. Back in the Japanese countryside, observes Yoshimi, at first it were ‘landlords and powerful landed farmers who were the core figures at the centre of the system’, reflecting social and political continuity since the Meiji period. But as the war escalated into total war, he argues, ‘many people were needed as supporters, and the central supporters [of fascism] become those of a slightly lower level – landed farmers and landed/tenant farmers’ (interview with Yoshimi, Tokyo, 19 January 2007). For many, participation in the war effort was more than simply the product of patriotism or pressure from above, but a revolutionary opportunity for social and political participation and advancement in a time of crisis. From peasant recruits to small farmers to elementary schoolteachers to colonial settlers, Yoshimi presents grassroots fascism as an ambiguous, ambivalent product of oppression and ambition, hope and desperation, brutalization and brutality. For the most part, these were the results of attempts to find a way to live in the war’s midst after the war had shattered these men’s life prospects. It must be said, therefore, that soldiers were cornered into this situation. At the same time, we cannot overlook this aspect: that the attitude of trying to get as good a profit as possible out of the war transcended the bounds of unhappiness at being mustered up for war, and that soldiers were supporting the war in earnest. (Yoshimi 2015: 13)

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Such ambiguities were perhaps at their most striking in the case of rural women, for some of whom state-sponsored movements of mass mobilization represented an opportunity for social participation that was nothing short of revolutionary. In addition, as far as women, while their voting rights were not acknowledged before the war, the formation of the Ladies’ Patriotic Associations advanced rapidly, allowing ladies in farming villages and cities to join the organization known as the Great Japan Ladies Association, something hitherto impossible. And women who were only in the home up to then went out into society, entering society to support the war – this phenomenon occurs for the first time, and on this point it may be possible to speak of a social revolution. (interview with Yoshimi,Tokyo, 19 January 2007) As noted earlier, prewar Japanese educational levels were comparatively high in relation to the level of economic development – a gap all the more dramatic in the relatively less developed countryside – and this carried profound implications for the social mapping of fascism. In Yoshimi’s social portrait, the deepest support for the war effort came from those whose skills equipped them with the social potential and ambition to enter the middle class even as – or perhaps precisely because – their achieved social and material positions did not (‘as yet’) match this potential. ‘Persons with the educational background to be in the Japanese middle class of the future’, writes Yoshimi, ‘represented the core support of Japan’s war. In contrast, among the lesser-educated graduates of elementary schools and higher elementary schools the relative level of sympathy was slightly lower, with that among elementary school dropouts and those who had never attended school a further level down’ (Yoshimi 2015: 23–4). Viewed in nearly thirty years of retrospect,Yoshimi’s seminal Grassroots Fascism remains centrally relevant today not only for its bottom-up perspective and the unique array of sources upon which it drew, but because it can also be seen to have been moving more broadly in a number of distinctive directions that have come to define the study of Japan’s 1930s in the period since: an increasing attention to a variety of non-official social actors and non-central locations previously regarded as peripheral to the ‘main story’; to cultural history, ideology and lived experience; and, along with an increasing influence of postcolonial theory and critique (pioneered in Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 but impacting Japan studies mainly in the period after Grassroots Fascism first appeared), an increasing interest in imperial and transnational history, along with a critical awareness, and rejection, of the confidently Eurocentric modernism against which Japan’s prewar history was so often earlier held up to scrutiny – and inevitably found lacking. Although its focus lay in the earlier Taishō Democracy period (1905–31; see the introduction to this volume), Andrew Gordon’s Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (1991) was exemplary of several of these trends, with important implications for the study of Japan’s 1930s.These can be read from its title, both in its purposeful deployment of the provocative term ‘Imperial Democracy’ and in its focus on the evolution of political consciousness among Japan’s labouring classes. Attempting to move beyond conventional characterizations of Japanese prewar civil society as ‘shallow’, passive, or lacking in modernity, Gordon followed Yoshimi in stressing a contradictory but profound and sophisticated popular investment in both democracy and empire, along with bottom-up social activism and agency on behalf of both interests. In his conclusion, Gordon characterized the popular turn toward support for a more aggressive form of imperialism externally and social renovation internally in the 1930s as driven by growing disillusionment with a post–World War I liberal, social, and political status quo seen as failing to deliver upon its democratic promise, radically augmented by the multiple crises of the Great Depression. As a result, not only the military and right-wing activists but also civil society voices in the mass 246

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media and elsewhere increasingly called for state action to intervene in struggles between labour and big capital and other tensions seen as threatening to national harmony and stability. The Japanese state responded with social intervention schemes that drew heavily on fascist examples. The resultant regime, Gordon argued here and subsequently elsewhere, can be called fascist even if it lacked some of fascism’s European ingredients (see also Gordon 2003: 202). Where Gordon and Yoshimi both focused on the experience and agency of those lower down the social ladder, other landmark works dealing with 1930s Japanese civil society from the 1980s onward set in motion a fundamental revision of the social role of the intelligentsia, journalists, and other representatives of what could be called Japan’s interwar middle classes – those hitherto conventionally characterized as merely apathetic or passive followers of the army and bureaucratic lead. Miles Fletcher’s 1982 Intellectuals and Fascism in Early Shōwa Japan not only revealed a lively interest in European fascist models among three leading progressive intellectuals, but also an active ambition to deploy this ‘expertise’ in newly founded state-sponsored think tanks that offered revolutionary access to and influence among officialdom. Gregory Kasza’s The State and Mass Media in Imperial Japan, 1918–1945 (1988) also offered a portrait of the Japanese mass media in the 1930s and 1940s as actively supporting and working in tandem with the increasingly interventionist state and the military, riding the imperialist/militarist wave for commercial as well as ideological reasons. In a provocative comparison with mass media counterparts in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Kasza on the one hand described Japan’s wartime regime as less totalitarian than its fascist counterparts in Italy and Germany in that Japan’s large mass media firms, like other large Japanese corporations, avoided full absorption and nationalization by the wartime state in exchange for cooperating with it, and as a result retained a greater autonomy and manoeuvring room even as censorship and profit controls tightened.7 On the other, he argued, the Japanese wartime mass media may well have been more effective in swaying the hearts and minds of the general public precisely for this reason, as its producers’ greater appearance of autonomy also made them better able to maintain popular trust. In the ongoing project of revisiting the social dynamics of the 1930s, Louise Young’s Japan’s Total Empire (1998) built upon these and other innovative studies in the relationship between domestic wartime civil society and the state,8 but also represented a particularly ambitious and pioneering exercise of its own, both in terms of the broad range of state and civil society actors considered and – as the title reflects – in its incorporation of empire into the mix. In a landmark study that can be said to have inspired a generation of scholarship since,Young revealed Japan’s colonization project of the puppet state of Manchukuo that began in 1931 not as peripheral but as central to Japan’s domestic experience of the 1930s – as much a civil society project as a state one, which indeed prompted dramatic new interlinkages between the two. From the very beginning, Young demonstrates that not only for the Kwantung Army but for state officials, intellectuals, businessmen, the mass media, and indeed for a broad cross-section of Japanese society as a whole, the colonization of Manchuria was not only a bid to secure resources, ‘living space’, and militarily strategic territory in dangerous global times, but also something more revolutionary: Japan was to build in Manchukuo – the puppet state established in 1932 – a veritable social ‘paradise’ in which domestic tensions of class versus class; regional tensions of ethnicity and rising anti-colonial resistance; global tensions of great power rivalry and protectionism; and modern afflictions of materialism, individualism, and associated moral decay and corruption ‘imported’ from the West would be transcended through a combined ‘return’ to the lost Asian values of the past and a leap into a state-of-the-art, socially engineered future. Manchukuo promised not only a ‘living space’ but a dream landscape in which the very contradictions of Japan’s modernity and its multiple crises – economic, social, political, cultural, and imperial – would be resolved at a stroke. 247

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Central to Young’s argument was the essential modernity of this ‘total empire’ project – the interweaving and interdependence of empire and mass imperialism with the evolution of the political and economic institutions of the modern Japanese nation-state – and as such, its bearing of an inherent comparability with, and implications for, modern metropolitan European experience. In a similar vein but with an emphasis on 1930s intellectual history, Harry Harootunian’s Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan (2000) sought to show that although inflected locally, such dreams and discourses as those of Manchukuo were symptomatic of an interwar ideological condition prompted by a multi-layered crisis of liberal industrial capitalist modernity whose global nature, effects, and dynamics have been conventionally out of focus. In an opening chapter that problematized the conventional, static juxtaposing of Japan’s ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ sectors of economy, society, and culture, Harootunian rather emphasized the period’s immense and dizzying pace of change in country and city alike.9 Simultaneously and interactively in Europe and Japan, he argued, the perception of the moment as demanding and potentially promising a radical means of ‘overcoming modernity’ was an expression of being ‘overcome by modernity’.The social dislocations and stark imbalances (what Harootunian called the characteristic ‘unevenness’) of industrial capitalist economic development and their quickening pace, the emergence of the increasingly assertive masses into political and social life, the rise of radical challenges to the social status quo from the left and the right, the declining authority of established institutions and mores and an associated sense of moral decline, and the virtual collapse of the global liberal capitalist economy triggered by the Wall Street crash of 1929 were all components of the deepest global crisis witnessed in modern times. Arguing against a generation of scholars who had increasingly turned away from it, Harootunian reasserted the relevance of fascism as a means of characterizing and understanding the inter­ relationship between culture, society, and economy in this period both in Japan and elsewhere. In recent years he has been joined by a host of scholars focusing on cultural history in particular, including students of wartime writers and literati such as Leslie Pincus (1996) and Alan Tansman (2009), along with scholars such as Miriam Silverberg (2006) and Kim Brandt (2009) who have in different ways emphasized the centrality of changing gender roles and gender anxieties as central obsessions of fascism. Wherever one sits on the ‘fascism question’,10 most scholars would now agree that the accumulated scholarship of the last several decades has made it increasingly difficult to see or analyze 1930s Japan as early postwar scholars once did, as a singular, static, or isolated entity – whether temporally, socially, culturally, or geopolitically. True, the impact of both the Great Depression and the occupation of Manchuria that began the decade continued to reverberate throughout, indelibly shaping its parameters. And although acknowledging that Japan was not at war throughout the 1930s, one can still cite good reasons for referring to the entire period from 1931–45 as the ‘Fifteen Years’ War’, as progressive Japanese scholars have long been inclined to do. So long as 1930s Japanese viewed expanding empire as the solution to their ongoing domestic woes, it can be argued that a showdown between Japanese military and commercial interests and Chinese nationalism and communism was in the cards. Viewed regionally and globally, once the Chinese determined to fight back and fight on, the subsequent clash with the Western powers was equally inevitable. But as recent scholarship has so effectively illustrated, if there was something inevitable about where Japanese ended up by the end of the 1930s, this had less to do with the distinctive, ‘longue durée’ nature of Japanese society so heavily emphasized in early postwar accounts than with global trends: Japan’s 1930s is better understood as a local inflection and negotiation of the double crises of liberal capitalism and empire that defined the global 1930s. After all, 1930s Japanese were hardly alone in seizing upon an expanded empire as a solution to unprecedentedly unsettled domestic and global times – not only were Japan’s Axis allies equally 248

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determined in this regard, but the Allied powers too were equally committed to preserving their longstanding imperial advantages in the face of the era’s multiple and unprecedented challenges. Within this wider frame, an understanding of popular experiences of Japan’s 1930s requires an equally nuanced alertness to its shifting contours in time and space. As Yoshimi and others note, for example, popular ‘war fever’ stimulated by the Manchurian invasion had faded by the middle of the decade, with resistance to increasing military adventurism and interventionism widespread.11 Even as military and bureaucratic spokesmen along with right-wing activists ratcheted up their calls for a ‘return to tradition’ in the face of what they characterized as a crisis of national spiritual morale, even as crackdowns against leftists, liberals, ‘modern women’, and other so-called betrayers of the national essence intensified, the period through the mid1930s witnessed an ongoing cosmopolitan popular interaction with, and consumption of, the fashions and fruits of global capitalist modernity. This was true not only in the expanding cities, but also in an increasingly connected and up-to-date countryside (see, for example, Silverberg 2006). Indeed the increasing intensification of both the rhetoric and the attempted practice of top-down intervention in the mid-1930s may at least in part be understood as a sign of military and bureaucratic frustration with the irrepressible assertiveness of Japan’s by now irreparably modern civil society. By the same token, the intensification of popular commitment to aggressive war and domestic renovation that characterized the late 1930s cannot be divested from the specific situation of the China War itself, in particular to the unexpected – and from a Japanese standpoint virtually incomprehensible – tenacity of Chinese resistance. As expressed by writer Tomizawa Uio in an early 1939 essay, ‘As long as [the Chinese] do not make one shared border and one shared peace the goal’, Japan will sacrifice its last drop of blood. Whether this is good or bad is not an issue. Now there is no other choice.Yet even just one year ago, we had not awakened to this irresistible fate. At first there was not one among us who was not struck by a strange feeling of, why this? At first we did not imagine that China would mount such intense resistance . . . If Japan does not achieve its aim, in sum, it will mean the complete downfall of the East. (Tomizawa 1939: 186–7) Unable to overcome this challenge but also unable to imagine an alternative to empire, Japanese responded with unprecedented ferocity and brutality. For many, the resultant pent-up frustrations would eventually find release with the declaration of war against the Western powers, the bold attack on Pearl Harbor, and the ‘liberation’ of Southeast Asia that followed. Even as Japanese thus began the decade of the 1940s grasping ever more tightly and aggressively to the idea of a ‘return to Asia’, we may conclude that it was not a lack of modernity that had brought them here.

Notes 1 Japanese army units stationed in Manchuria (Northeastern China) from 1906 on. 2 An interesting and very early exception was the Comintern leader Karl Radek (1885–1939) in his guest introduction to Militarism and Fascism in Japan (Tanin and Yohan 1934), a book-length study authored by two fellow Soviet scholars under the pseudonyms O. Tanin and E.Yohan. Relying heavily upon Japanese Marxist scholarship of the day, Tanin and Yohan argued against the applicability of the term due to the ‘backwardness’ of Japan’s socio-economy in comparison to those of Italy and Germany. Radek disagreed, arguing that ‘the domination of monopoly capitalism’ and ‘a striving to create, as a bulwark for capitalism, a mass petty-bourgeois movement . . . undoubtedly . . . do exist’ (Morris 1963: 30). 249

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3 Arisawa Hiromi used this term in 1937. Cited in Gordon 2003: 192. 4 See Duus and Okimoto 1979: 65–76. Other leading Japan scholars classifying wartime Japan as other than fascist have included Itō Takashi, George Wilson, James Crowley, Mark Peattie, Richard Smethurst, Gordon Berger, and Richard Mitchell. In a more recent comparative study, Robert Paxton, a leading historian of the fascist period in Europe, agrees: ‘The Japanese empire of the period 1932–45 is better understood as an expansionist military dictatorship with a high degree of state-sponsored mobilization than as a fascist regime’ (Paxton 2004: 200). 5 Saitō Takao (1870–1949) was a member of the Minseitō known for his outspoken parliamentary criticism of the military in the late 1930s, criticism that eventually saw him purged from the Diet in 1940. Although he attacked the military for arrogance and flawed policies, Saitō was himself a proponent of Japanese imperialist expansion in China, and his anti-military criticisms were largely those of means rather than ends. For more on Saitō in English, see Kinmonth 1999. 6 After the fall of Nanjing, the capital of the Nationalist government of China, a large number of civilians were massacred by Japanese troops.The massacre remains a sensitive historical issue down to the present. 7 As E. H. Norman observed at the time, ‘it seems as if Japanese business circles have profited from the experience of Germany, where complete Nazi control over state and foreign policy has eventually become a Juggernaut menacing some of the very interests and men who helped it to power’ (Norman 1975: 114). 8 See, for example, Garon 1997. Garon argues that prewar civil society groups made tactical allegiances with the state that resulted in further regimentation and bureaucratic control over daily life. His examples include social welfare programmes, religious organizations, prostitution, and women’s rights movements (see also Smith 2000). Like Young and Garon, Kerry Smith also stresses the active role of local interests and civil society in a dialectical negotiation with the state as characteristic to the new social interventionism of the 1930s. The author argues that through debt arrangement, rural relief funding, and self-revitalization, the countryside’s attempts at recovery during the Great Depression drew it nearer to modernity, established a new relationship with the state and the economy, and prepared it for drastic land reform under the U.S. occupation. 9 Noteworthy here, for example, is the remarkable shift in Japan’s industrial composition that took place in the first six years of the decade, with heavy industry’s share of total industry rising from just 10 per cent in 1931 to 45 per cent in 1936. Tellingly, the data on the state of Japan’s industrialization cited in Maruyama Masao’s classic study noted earlier, which characterized Japan’s economy as profoundly developmentally ‘backward’ in comparison with those of Western Europe, is from the year 1926. For further important recent studies questioning images of the static or backward nature of Japan’s economy and society in this period from different angles, see, for example, Silverberg 2006 and Barshay 1998. 10 For a critical perspective on such recent trends, see, for example, Brown 2009. 11 Sandra Wilson (2002) goes a step further, arguing that the ‘war fever’ of these years was itself less socially widespread than conventionally assumed and that the Manchurian crisis should therefore not be seen in a direct line with the expanded war to come.

Further reading Gordon, Andrew (1991) Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Paxton, Robert (2004) The Anatomy of Fascism, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Yoshimi,Yoshiaki (2015) Grassroots Fascism:The War Experience of the Japanese People, trans. Ethan Mark, New York: Columbia University Press. Young, Louise (1998) Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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18 Japan’s war of words World War II propaganda Barak Kushner

Japanese modern propaganda efforts, which date back to the nineteenth century, peaked at the time of the Asia-Pacific War (1931–45). Japanese propaganda was pervasive, making it possible for Japan both to delay the American victory and endure the humiliation of defeat. Its effects continue down to this day more than seventy years since the end of World War II. No ministry of propaganda ever existed in Japan. However, several government agencies, branches of the military, and media companies constantly competed in propaganda efforts. This had an accumulative effect, meaning that themes and images accreted over time creating an imperial cultural ideology that supported Japanese military and colonial objectives. Paradoxically, the lack of central control resulted in an all-encompassing propaganda which pervaded all levels of society. This reach enabled military and civilian agencies to market imperial ideas in a way that gave them maximum benefit, while at the same time touting the empire at large. Initially Japan’s propaganda concentrated on imperial triumphs: victory in war against the Qing Empire in 1895, against Russia in 1905, and against Germany in 1914 (in what was called the Japanese-German War, or Nichidoku sensō), highlighting Japan’s role in World War I. These victories and the propaganda they occasioned spawned myths of Japanese righteousness and invincibility that influenced the development Japanese propaganda during World War II. In the early 1930s, propaganda focused on state sponsorship of Japan’s puppet state of Manchukuo, which was described as Japan’s ‘lifeline’ (seimeisen) and a ‘paradise on earth’ (ōdō rakudo). The escalation of war in China in 1937 and the 1938 National Mobilization Law brought changes to propaganda, which now called more clearly on the population of the home islands (naichi) and the colonies (gaichi) to support the war effort and make sacrifices for the empire. Propaganda shifted its aims to keep up with the succession of imperial crises, exigencies, and expansions. Following the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese declarations began to more vocally emphasize competition with the West and trumpet the ‘liberation of Asia from Western colonial bondage’. It should be pointed out that in Japan, China, and other East Asian countries, the notion of propaganda never acquired the same derogatory nuance as in the West. Arguably, moral suasion, or guiding the population toward what the civilian and military authorities viewed as a correct position, had already been practiced during the Tokugawa era (1603–1868), and more systematically in the Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō (1912–26) eras in the form of a variety of kaizen undō, 251

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or campaigns to renovate aspects of daily life. Such government-led propaganda movements proliferated from the early twentieth century onward and in some measure paved the way for the management of Japanese society in the 1930s (Garon 1997: 5–13). Propaganda should also be distinguished from education, which is much more directly controlled by the state, unidirectional, and aimed only toward some segments of the population, namely those in school. Although not completely unconnected, propaganda is also distinct from advertising, which is more clearly associated with commercialism and profit. Japanese propaganda, civilian and military alike, might come closest to what some scholars describe as a system that inculcated a mindset which ‘created enthusiasm for empire’. First, the Japanese crafted these beliefs and then convinced themselves that they were shouldering the burden of leading East Asia. This propaganda did not start suddenly on a certain date, but it gradually emerged and developed over time. Scholars have examined in detail the visual or ideological symbols of Nazi Germany, as orchestrated by Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) in the infamous mass rallies complete with their ‘intoxication with flags, the pylons of smoking torches, and the echo of martial music’ (Hoffmann 1996: vii). In some ways, this analysis of Nazi propaganda is also pertinent to the Japanese case because in Japan, propaganda aimed to instill a comprehensive set of images of modernity around which the nation could rally, and at the same time eliminate any traces of what was regarded as corrupting Western influences. Japanese propaganda that resembled Nazi efforts reached its peak in the early 1940s. The Nazi and Japanese use of propaganda contrast with the World War II, British use of propaganda as social guidance, a more benign stance which assumes that, when presented with the facts, people will choose correctly (Chapman 1998: 46). There are numerous definitions of propaganda, but one of the most succinct is ‘the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behaviour to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist’ (Jowett and O’Donnell 2006: 7). In this chapter I first lay out the thematic structures of wartime propaganda and define its components. I then introduce a number of basic categories that will help readers to grasp how propaganda worked.These categories are 1) the visuality of empire broadcast through media and entertainment, including radio, newspapers, and film; 2) an emphasis on gender representations in propaganda, which had not received much scholarly attention but has recently emerged as a key concept to examine the modern woman as a consumer; and 3) youth and propaganda, particularly the role of children as future soldiers. The Japanese and other imperial subjects moved constantly throughout the empire, sharing ideas, hearing new information, and experiencing the war in very different ways in a range of places that were under Japanese imperial control.

Layers of propaganda The Japanese government and the imperial armed forces considered the wars that raged almost continuously between 1931 and 1945 as part of a larger ‘thought war’ (shisōsen), in which Japan offered an alternative to the ideological and hierarchical world order imposed by the West. In its propaganda efforts, the Japanese government projected the image of Japan as an attractive, modern, hygienic, competent, and progressive state.This propaganda was conducted on a variety of levels and targeted all spheres of society – men and women; old and young; wealthy and poor. This positive image was disseminated by means of advertising on the radio and in the newspapers and magazines, projected in discussions of international relations, and emblazoned on clothing – and was even present during mealtimes. Japanese propaganda was, for anyone living in Japan and the colonies during the war, inescapable. This accounts at least partly for its success 252

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in mobilizing the population to fight war in China and then against America and its Western allies in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. It must be remembered that for Japan, World War II did not start in December 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor. What is called the Asia-Pacific War in Japanese historiography began with the 1931 Manchurian Incident (see also the introduction to this volume). Thus, Japanese propaganda must be seen holistically as focusing first on modernizing Asia, and then on ‘Asian liberation’. But even these propaganda goals were only clearly enunciated in the course of the war, with the publication of the Greater East Asian Declaration in November 1943 (Asahi Shinbun Company 2015: 84–5). It may seem astonishing that a relatively small country on the periphery of the Asian continent embarked on a protracted war against the combined might of the United States, the world’s largest industrial power; China, the most populous state; and Britain, the greatest colonial power. Why did Japan go to war in the first place against such overwhelming odds? It is surely possible to argue that was because the Japanese maintained a strong belief in their own invincibility. Japan’s spiritual power, they were confident, would help them vanquish their materially more powerful foes. This belief, which had been induced through extensive networks of education, media and entertainment with a broad appeal to the Japanese consumer, helps explain at least partly why Japan defied common sense and waged what essentially turned out to be a suicidal war. Japan’s linguistic, political, and geographical isolation was another significant factor as it accounts for the Japanese people’s inability to grasp the strength of the enemy and the resultant enthusiastic psychological support for war and empire. This gap helps explain why within Japan there was very little opposition to the policy of aggressive expansion. In short, owing to propaganda, the Japanese had persuaded themselves of the validity of their own utopian visions. Although Japanese propaganda went through many transformations between 1931 and 1945, for the reasons of space I will concentrate on a number of key issues such as how propaganda was conceived, where it emanated from, and how it affected different strata of society. My survey will not include food, an often-forgotten element of social mobilization, which is being covered elsewhere (Rath 2016; Cwiertka 2002).This semi-truncated approach will allow me to trace the broad spectrum of fields, ideas, and people that this wartime propaganda involved. Over the last twenty years, Japanese and Western historians have shed much light on the methods and techniques the Japanese civilian and military authorities (sometimes in competition for the same audiences) used to mobilize society into supporting an essentially unwinnable war (Nornes and Fukushima 1994; O’Connor 2004; Kushner 2006; Earhart 2008; Orbaugh 2015).These historians have shown beyond any doubt that propaganda played an essential role in rousing the population and persuading it that it would benefit from mobilization and war. Significantly, in thinking about mass mobilization, scholars have moved beyond explaining Japanese behaviour through cultural norms, by describing them all as slavish devotees of the emperor, bent on realizing the supposed ideals of a bushido or militaristic mindset. It is clear that Japan’s expansion was planned and executed and, although the path of this expansion was never inevitable, propaganda played a vital role at every step. Cultural values that supported this expansion were instilled and developed over time, not genetically predetermined. Japanese wartime propaganda was characterized by the fact that it operated in a closed system which kept society under constant surveillance and isolated from alternative sources of information. As a result of nearly constant emphasis on imperial symbols, and, within Japan, as a result of tolerance toward former ideological opponents, a set of structures and policies emerged which allowed the integration of such opponents into mainstream society after they admitted the error of their ways. It is important to remember that these practices had started long before the war began and endured long after the war ended. Moreover, they affected virtually every element 253

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of Japanese society, even though the system was neither controlled nor managed by a single agency. It is difficult to pinpoint a single moment when Japanese propaganda, whether as senden (propaganda), kyōka (moral suasion), or ken’etsu (censorship), began to control public opinion. Propaganda arose through a slow and steady process that justified imperial expansion and the advancement of Asian civilization, to be led by Japan, the vanguard nation. When the Kwantung Army (Kantōgun), a Japanese army unit stationed in Manchuria, reacted to the rise of nationalism and anti-Japanese sentiments in China in the 1910s and 1920s by assassinating the warlord Chang Tso-lin (Zhang Zuolin, 1875–1928) in June 1928, Japanese propaganda was used to cover up the Kwantung Army’s involvement and show its positive role to the Japanese public. The 1931 occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese and the subsequent establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo in Northeastern China led to an increase in censorship of Japanese media. This helped form layers of propaganda and stifled competing interpretations. The governments of the day, unable or unwilling to stand up to the military, showed an increasing tendency to allow the military a free hand in China. For the Japanese military, it was imperative to control the flow of information about what was happening and so it established the practice of what, after 1937, came to be known as the ‘Imperial General Headquarters Announcements’ (Daihon’ei happyō).These were news bulletins about the military situation but were only released by the military services themselves because the military believed it should be the sole purveyor of broadcasting news about itself. The Daihon’ei was set up in wartime and times of crisis as a temporary agency with the goal of coordinating the war effort and facilitating cooperation between the army and navy. It was beyond the reach of the civilian government and served in an advisory role to the emperor. In modern Japan, the Imperial General Headquarters was formed three times: 1) in the Sino-Japanese War, 1894–95; 2) the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05; and 3) on 17 November 1937 after the so-called China Incident of July 1937 had escalated into a full-scale yet undeclared war between the Japanese forces and the Chinese Nationalist government under the Nationalist Party, the Guomindang (Morimatsu 2013: 4–5). The Japanese people had mostly accepted as valid the strictly controlled content they read in the press or heard over the radio, which was that Japan was helping usher in a new racially harmonious paradise in Manchukuo and northern China where Japan would lead by example.The result was that by the time of the 1937 China incident, the Japanese public was both enthralled by the prospect of a not-too-distant victory and anticipating further war spoils. In this way, thanks to what was presented by propaganda as a continuous stream of triumphs in China that were achieved with little sacrifice, the Japanese public succumbed to a wave of euphoria that lasted throughout the 1930s and which helped it endure the difficulties brought about by an increasingly arduous, costly, and seemingly endless war and occupation of large areas of China. In part, the Japanese military debacle on the road to Nanjing in December 1937 was a harbinger of the difficulties that awaited the Japanese army on the continent. However, to the Japanese at the time the war in China was linked with Japan’s subsequent war with the West because propaganda represented it as a struggle to win for Japan its fair share of the world. We need to remember that Japanese propaganda was simultaneously operating on three major psychological levels with different purposes at different times to gain the support of the people: 1) to promote imperial efforts in China; 2) to convince the Japanese people that a war with the West was inevitable, and therefore necessary; and 3) that Japan was advancing the cause of the ‘liberation’ of Asia from Western colonialism. Demonstrating how successful these models were in helping to shape imperial Japan, Shimomura Hiroshi (1875–1957), who had served as minister of state on the eve of Japan’s surrender, reflected in his postwar reminiscences that the Japanese never liberated themselves from 254

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a state of war; it had to be done by foreigners (Hosaka 2006: 95–6). Defeat was never part of Japan’s propaganda lexicon. Propaganda helped drive the empire forward during the war, but, at the same time, it impeded finding internal solutions to accepting surrender.

Propaganda and Japanese imperialism What precisely was Japan fighting the war for? The goal invariably shifted with the nature of the aggression. Louise Young describes the slow development of a shared historical consciousness behind the Japanese concept of Manchukuo in 1932, during the first stage of Japanese wartime propaganda. Japanese men and women believed Manchukuo to be a ‘lifeline’ that would provide living space and raw materials for resource-short and overpopulated Japan (Young 1998). The installation of the last Qing emperor, Pu Yi (1906–67), as monarch to head the ‘puppet state’, was intended to provide a proper ceremonial air of political propriety. Holistically, propaganda was necessary to legitimize Japanese expansion: it explained what the empire was, it persuaded the Japanese and foreign collaborators that there was a strong reason to make sacrifices in its name, and finally offered the masses benefits. Propaganda operated not only within Japan, but also throughout the Japanese empire (formal colonies like Taiwan, Korea, and Karafuto) and then the occupied areas – which extended from Manchukuo, to Mongolia, parts of northern China, and Southeast Asia. The Western perspective often presumes the centrality of the emperor in Japan’s propaganda, but while he was ideologically present, Hirohito (1901–89) was never a central icon of the wartime symbols that mobilized the Japanese or other imperial subjects. This is indicated by the fact that the Japanese only heard the emperor’s voice for the first time in his recorded surrender speech broadcast on 15 August 1945.1 David Earhart’s analysis of Japanese visual propaganda demonstrates how the idea of ‘Certain Victory’ was portrayed in a government magazine, the ‘Photographic Weekly Report’ (Shashin shūhō), from July 1937 on, that is, from the moment when Japan launched an all-out attack on China (Earhart 2008).2 Initially, advocates of Pan-Asian solidarity represented Japan as Asia’s leader and liberator of downtrodden Asians from colonial oppression, but, as Earhart shows, the situation changed in the 1930s (Saaler and Szpilman 2011). Earhart ‘imaged’ the war, explaining in striking detail how Japanese saw their imperialism almost in philanthropic terms, believing that Japan was assisting the modernization of backward Asian countries, whose expanding populations – now healthy due to Japan’s help, were, in turn, applauding Japan. For example, the cover of the 30 August 1939 issue of the magazine depicts a young Korean girl in traditional dress, holding a Japanese imperial flag. The caption reads: ‘Attractive women and robust children’.This refers to those in need of protection, while alluding to the potential of youth. Such images were often used in propaganda when representing the more recent members of the Japanese Empire (Earhart 2008: 49). The Japanese did not just support the empire and the war because they were fed positive images from the authorities, support for the empire and the war effort emerged from below as well. Y   oshimi Yoshiaki has demonstrated that there was ample social backing for government and military policies to expand the empire through aggressive means, which he labels ‘grassroots “fascism”’. (Yoshimi 2015; see also Chapter 17 in this volume) Yoshimi shows the give-and-take form of Japanese propaganda and explains how belief remained on one side of the coin and how both state policy and private initiative fed popular desires that enabled Japan’s aggression. Based on Yoshimi’s research, it is fair to say that Japan’s imperial belligerence developed slowly under the banner of popular backing. Yet that must not obscure the fact that Japan, which Yoshimi describes as ‘fascist’, was not a police state like Hitler’s Germany, or Stalin’s Soviet Union, though fear did indeed exist as did police terror. Assassinations, successful and attempted, of prominent 255

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figures who voiced dissent no doubt added to enforced conformity but Japan’s domestic population was not treated anywhere near as brutally as the populations of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. The Japanese were also cut off from external (i.e., non-Japanese), independent sources of information, and this helped make Japan’s propaganda believable.The production of propaganda rose in tandem with the intensification of pre-publication censorship. The consequence of this was that the public had little idea of what was going on outside Japan proper, even within the rest of the empire. Jonathan Abel calculates that the period between 1928 and 1936 was ‘the high-point for the explicit and visible work of state censors in Japan’, and that ‘[a]fter that peak, the officers did not have to work as diligently, because the mechanism had been internalized’ (Abel 2012: 13). The number of banned books in Japan had three peaks in the first half of the twentieth century: during the Manchurian Incident (1931), during the failed army coup d’état in Tokyo on 26 February 1936, and after the revision of the National Mobilization Law in 1941 (Abel 2012: 33). But a will to war, even by curtailing access to other avenues of information is not enough. A culture of belief that the nation was under a threat and that the military was the only saviour impeded the growth of ideas that could posit alternative visions to war. In this context, we should recall that the kenpeitai, the military police, originally created to keep order within the military, was employed with increased frequency by military leaders as a tool to enforce ideologically ‘correct thinking’ within the military and the population.This reflected the conviction that after the First World War Japan’s wars were no longer confined to the battlefield but also took place on the psychological front. Japan was in competition with foreign powers for the hearts and minds of its people. The kenpeitai was used to corral, coerce, and threaten with increasing ferocity through the latter half of the 1920s and into the 1930s (Kōketsu 2008: 26–7).The Tokubetsu kōtō keisatsu (tokkōtai), the special higher police, were another tool of state repression and focused on maintaining control over proper ‘thought’, thus their unofficial name ‘the thought police’ (shisō keisatsu). They were not a new force, having been formed in 1911 to protect what the government felt was a threat from Koreans and socialists after the High Treason Incident of 1910. These special police units were to keep surveillance on minorities, watch out for threating foreign ideas, and implement censorship policies.Their remit was further strengthened in 1925 with the enactment of the Peace Preservation Law, and after 1937, when police were given powers to detain essentially anyone who contravened the vague notion of Japan’s national security or opposed imperial expansion. Any discussion of censorship must also address the issue of tenkō (best translated as conversion or apostasy).This Japanese term describes the behaviour that allowed individuals to convert, that is, shift their ideological orientation 180 degrees. Converts came from all corners of Japanese society. They included famous former communists Sano Manabu (1892–1953) and Nabeyama Sadachika (1901–79), who after their tenkō supported government policies and the empire. Other young men who were not involved in political activities, followed suit. For example, Akita Minoru (1905–77), a graduate of Tokyo Imperial University, had initially been interested in proletarian literature and communism, which was not unusual for a student in an elite university. However, facing increasing political and social pressure in the 1930s, he completely changed his political orientation and became a popular humorist writer whose skits served to amuse the masses and whom private companies who were profiting from the imperial expansion wanted to employ. Entertainment stars, including comedians, preferred on the whole not to mock the government, behaviour that had been more common during the Taishō era. Even rakugo (verbal entertainment) performers, traditionally the most severe critics of society, whose routines consistently irked the authorities in the earlier periods, took it upon themselves to unilaterally excise routines that might contravene imperial acceptability. In a ceremony in northern Tokyo on 13 256

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October 1941, performers, who got together on their own initiative at a local temple, buried offensive comedic sketches in a hanashizuka, a ‘tomb of stories’. Entertainment continued to be available until the very end of the war, although whether any was actually humorous is open to interpretation (Kushner 2004). Japanese propaganda, amusing and otherwise, succeeded in penetrating all strata of society and all walks of life to an extent which neither the Nazis nor other ‘fascists’ ever managed to attain with their propaganda or by direct coercion. The effects of the thoroughness of Japan’s social mobilization by means of the winnowed availability of information, constant social pressure, and a rampant use of nationalist symbols, can be seen in the phenomenon of kamikaze pilots. At the end of 1944 and 1945 when Japan’s military situation was desperate, young Japanese men faced such intense social pressure, both within the armed forces and without, that the military was able to recruit large numbers of ‘volunteers’ for the kamikaze corps, with virtually no opposition from their families or loved ones. Seemingly, this devotion was sincere as those who embarked on their one-way mission knew that they would almost certainly die. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney points out that the Japanese were not duped by wartime propaganda, but the social pressure to conform, framed by the propaganda, ensured that only ‘few students noticed or suspected the wicked hand of manipulation’ (Ohnuki-Tierney 2006: 32). Postwar interviews with men who served in kamikaze units (or with their relatives) describe the anxiety these young men felt when bullied into joining kamikaze units (Cook and Cook 1992: 305–36). Japanese propaganda, though it may appear both at times sinister and benign from today’s perspective, was effective in that it mobilized soldiers and the population to continually make extreme sacrifices, often in the most unfavourable circumstances.

Media entertainment and consumer products: the visuality of empire Many Japanese media companies, privately owned but forced to work increasingly under more constraints imposed by government and military imposed limitations, did not necessarily endorse the militaristic adventures in China. Rather, they passively accepted the situation, in part due to coercion, in part out of fear for their own safety, but also because the public was seemingly moving toward war support and media organizations did not wish to risk going against the pulse of public opinion. The Asahi and the Yomiuri newspapers’ own research has shown how propaganda events sponsored by these newspapers, drummed up backing for the war effort to a nationwide readership, which was by the later 1930s inextricably tied into imperial expansion (Asahi Shimbun Company 2015;Yomiuri Shinbun Sensō Sekinin Kenshō Iinkai 2006). The Japanese publishing industry had grown exponentially during the 1910s and 1920s, so the amount of printed matter available to both urban and rural readers was immense by the start of Japan’s territorial expansion in the early 1930s. From the second half of the 1930s, public opinion acquired enough clout to influence politicians as well as stifle views that did not fit the imperial propaganda models (Satō 2002; 2004).3 At the same time, as the war escalated in the 1930s, the actual number of newspapers available to the public was curtailed. Although political restrictions imposed on the Japanese press, concerning what could and could not be published, were not a new phenomenon but could be traced back to the beginnings of the Meiji State, these sorts of curbs imposed by the government during the 1930s further increased, as did efforts to greatly limit the number of newspapers and news agencies that offered news and analysis to readers. A drastic reduction in the number of newspapers and journals could be observed in the late 1930s and even more in the 1940s, due to a policy to allow only one newspaper per prefecture, which was caused by material shortages as much as a desire to maintain more rigid control 257

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over sources of information, a key propaganda concern (Kasza 1988; Satō and Hara 2015). But it was not just the presentation of ideas that corralled the population into accepting the empire’s aims, it was also the prevalence and the excitement surrounding sponsored events, including the spectacle of it all. The Japanese read about empire in print but could vicariously experience it also on the stage and screen.Venues like kabuki theatres were employed as a tool of war propaganda.This fulfilled two goals – it allowed audiences to enjoy the war as a performance and it assisted in the ‘modernization’ of kabuki, an issue struggling actors and theatre owners used in their bid to renovate the art and save it from turning into an ossified cultural icon (Brandon 2008).The movie industry also played an important role in managing how the public perceived the expanding empire. Companies produced engrossing films which rendered Japan into an ‘attractive empire’ that provided an alternative to the Western, or to the Hollywood, model (Baskett 2008). Propaganda research has placed much emphasis on the film industry in general and highlighted the fact that in Japan film propaganda did not occur all of a sudden but had evolved slowly through the series of political crises (High 2003). To be sure, Japanese propaganda films from the late 1930s are quite unlike the goose-stepping fascist celluloid caricatures one associates with the Nazis. The renowned American director Frank Capra (1897–1991) apparently expressed his admiration for one of the more famous Japanese wartime films, Soldiers and Chocolate (1938), noting that it was so tragic that it almost appeared as an anti-war film to him, rather than a pro-imperial propaganda film (see Kushner 2011: 145). Film is an important propaganda vehicle because it is, simultaneously, an artistic production created for profit but captured and transmitted through a thoroughly technological and modern medium. It requires reserves of monetary capital and technical expertise, meaning that it crosses boundaries between so-called pure arts and entertainment produced for mass consumption. As Daqing Yang notes, discussion of Japan’s new vision of its imperium in Asia had become inseparable from technologies that ‘overcame distance’ – physical as well as psychological. Not only did these technologies strengthen the ‘bonds’ between the regions and peoples in the co-prosperity sphere but they also strengthened Japan’s position as its leader as well. (Yang 2011: 205) There existed a cozy relationship between media and government through Japan’s vaunted advanced technology. These connections were formed because many editors and organizers of media companies held key positions in organs of the state that managed information and the media themselves. One prime example is Ogata Taketora (1888–1956), who was at one time the editor-in-chief of the Asahi Shinbun and during the last year of the war director of the Cabinet Information Bureau (Naikaku jōhōkyoku). This bureau, initially conceived of in 1935, went through a series of structural and name changes to arrive at becoming a bureau (kyoku) by 1940. It served as a research group within the cabinet that was supposed to coordinate propaganda efforts. Under the direct authority of the prime minister, it was given six main duties, including managing and analyzing all propaganda efforts in international and domestic propaganda and conducting research on the thought war. The goal was to coordinate the competing propaganda efforts of the Foreign Ministry, the Army Ministry, Army General Staff, the Navy Ministry, the Navy High Command, the Home Ministry, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Communications. The problem, reflecting Japan’s hub-and-spoke approach to propaganda, was that the bureau had no real regulatory status or authority. Previously, propaganda aimed at foreign countries had been under the aegis of the 258

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Intelligence Office within the Foreign Ministry, a territory the ministry fiercely protected and never fully relinquished (see Shillony 1981).

A gendered space for propaganda While the Cabinet Information Bureau tried to organize the films that those throughout the empire flocked to see, the Japanese government provided funds to colonial companies in the empire to produce hits, and from these movies emerged wartime film stars such as Ri Kōran (1920–2014, Ch. Li Xianglan). Ri, born as Yamaguchi Yoshiko, was a bilingual Japanese actress who passed as an ‘exotic’ Chinese woman and drove audiences wild. Produced by the Manchurian Motion Picture Corporation (aka Man’ei), the films she starred in, laced with erotic tropes and compelling music, delivered images of beauty and subservience at the same time (she was also popular among Chinese audiences in certain locales and it was not widely known that she was actually Japanese). Film propaganda intertwined the act of consumption with promoting a Japanese vision of empire and war, inextricably linking the two. Female film stars may have been idolized by male cinema-goers, but women were not absent from the market. They also consumed pieces of colonial modernity, that is, movies that fed into how they perceived of themselves as members of the empire (see Nickerson 2011).Wartime media pundits, the government, the military, and other groups in Japan were well aware that society could not be mobilized by half-measures.Women were key to sending off their sons to war and supporting the home front. Girlfriends cheered their boyfriends off and went to work in the factories in their stead. But the empire, both as an idea and as a product, also sold well. There was ‘a rising East Asian consumer culture generated by women in the early twentieth century and one paralleling the extension of Japanese imperialism’ (Culver 2013a: 7). Numerous examples also aimed specifically at women can be found in the flood of magazines aimed at female readers, such as Nippon Fujin, and a larger imperial audience was targeted in the journal Nippon and a non-Japanese audience in the journal FRONT (see Germer 2011; Weisenfeld 2000; Shibaoka 2007). Far from being passive subjects, women in 1930s imperial Japan played also a central role both in the consumption of propaganda and in its production. Ready-made clothing could be purchased in department stores in the larger urban cities but more commonly women stitched family apparel. By the 1930s ownership of sewing machines skyrocketed. This paralleled the rise in the number of magazines that offered articles on sewing or patterns for women’s clothing. Sewing clothing at home instead of purchasing the items helped families rationally economize, a frequent appeal of imperial propaganda to save and be frugal. Sewing was also championed as a way for women to gain supplementary income (Gordon 2012: 123–31). One advertisement expressed the spirit of the era adroitly by highlighting different products for men and for women: ‘For you a bayonet; for me a sewing machine’ (Gordon 2012: 128). Clothing was often yet another means to propagate the imperial message in an ingenious manner. Clothing is not generally considered part of social mobilization, so we still have little idea of how such material culture literally wove concrete visual representations of Japan’s imperial ideology and the belief in an East Asian ‘modernity’ into the fabric of daily life. However, it is now clear that a lot of clothing at that time was emblazoned with the symbols of empire. Kimonos for adults sported woven silken images of newspaper headlines touting the army’s triumphs and children’s outfits sported tanks, airplanes, and other technological achievements of the Japanese Empire (Kushner 2011). It is important to note that airplanes and other modern devices fascinated the Japanese, who recognized them specifically as outgrowths of Japan’s successful empire and modernity (Culver 2013b: 214; Kimura 1974). We tend to forget how intoxicating such images of imperial Japan’s technical wizardry must have been to inhabitants of rural regions in prewar Japan and at the edges of its empire. 259

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Items of clothing with such exciting technological messages helped to forge a strong national concept of union and linked the deeper idea of empire through to Taiwan, Korea, China, Manchuria, and even Southeast Asia as imperial Japanese culture strengthened. Images on clothing reflected similar symbols produced in the printed media industries. Gennifer Weisenfeld notes that [i]n the 1930s, when daily life rationalization trends melded into increasingly broad-based social mobilization, these same modernist pictorial strategies began to be deployed concurrently in the dynamic realms of national publicity and propaganda (kokka senden or kokusaku senden) production, in both the graphic arts and exhibition display design. (Weisenfeld 2009: 13) Though she refers specifically to images in magazines, many of these were also stitched onto clothing and worn by members of the public during shrine festivals or on the street for one of the many daily events held to mobilize support for the war. This means that the message was even more widely spread and more influential than previously thought. The visualized modernity of Japan’s empire was not only read about in books, seen in the newspapers, and heard about through stories of victory on the radio, but it was also reproduced on clothes! Although after the 1931 Manchurian Incident and its withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, Japan was increasingly isolated but it remained an influential world power nonetheless. In 1936 Japan was nominated to host the 1940 Olympics, further promoting a domestic belief that Japan was being recognized on the world stage. The image of the empire as shown in the pages of the ‘Photographic Weekly Report’ was seemingly accurate. Wartime Japan was strong and sporty. In the end, the 1940 Olympics were not held, but in the same year Japan still launched massive ceremonies to celebrate the 2600th anniversary of the founding of the empire, and this was where ‘patriotism spurred mass consumption and consumerism spurred patriotism’ (Ruoff 2010). During the war, sport events continued to be held: the legendary baseball game of 24 May 1942 at the Kōrakuen Stadium was the longest in Japan’s baseball history, running for twenty-eight innings. Fans cheered while the scoreboard screamed the war slogan ‘Let’s advance! One hundred million balls of fire!’ (NHK 1982) This is a good example of war propaganda in the sphere of leisure activities. ‘One hundred million balls of fire’ referred to the approximate population of the Japanese Empire (including colonial territories);‘balls of fire’ referenced imperial subjects’ supposed role as warriors. Sport melded with Japan’s martial spirit and in the colonies as well. In Taiwan sports such as baseball were a link to the creation of a colonial psychology that attached the imperial periphery to the mother country (Morris 2010).To play sports and to serve as soldiers required a healthy population and the government put a lot of time and effort into establishing a new Ministry of Health and Welfare in 1937, just as the undeclared war on the Chinese continent was escalating. The war with China brought rationing to Japan in 1938 and this greatly increased once the war with the Western powers began. But the key to managing the Japanese wartime psychology was that deprivation also brought new benefits from the state in a sort of quid-pro-quo form.

Propaganda and youth Japanese propaganda also targeted the young, or at least those not recognized by society as either married or of conscription age. Teenagers would be drafted when they turned of age and even children were touted as ‘little national patriots’. Fathers, mothers, and children as future soldiers were all depicted as protectors of the empire. Cinemas usually offered double features, along 260

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with newsreels, and often animation for the younger audience members. The animation that youths and children (and here it is hard to define where the age of one ended and adulthood began) saw in theatres also tied in with the visuality of empire which they were exposed to on the streets. Propaganda aimed at those defined as youths was important because it helped to instill a sense of sacrifice and a sense of awe about the soldiers in whose footsteps those younger would follow. Boyhood fantasies of the exotic South Seas (nanyō) that were frequently read about in youth magazines or seen in films were transformed into actual experiences as soldiers or civilians abroad (Kawamura 1993). One important art form that served the cause of wartime propaganda directed at the young was kamishibai – street theatre with placards, or, literally, ‘paper plays’. This art form was not limited to Japan but was also utilized in China, Korea, and Taiwan, where it was performed in vernacular languages as well. Kamishibai were private enterprises, and though affected by wartime censorship, they also had to turn a profit by attracting full audiences, which mainly consisted of schoolchildren. Kamishibai remained the main form of entertainment for children (what ages precisely is not clear) from the 1920s to 1950s. The performed stories tended to be full of excitement, for otherwise the young audiences would lose interest. In a sort of ‘education through sentiment’, the spectacles focused on a variety of themes, such as national duty, sacrifice for country and nation, being on the lookout for suspicious foreigners, news featuring key battles against the enemy, and promotion of savings campaigns (Kushner 2009; Orbaugh 2015). Kamishibai products were highly effective as a mobilizing force for the war effort, just as effective as Japanese war films. That was because instead of relying on the cognitive structure of good vulnerable self vs. evil and threatening other, wartime kamishibai narratives and visuals emphasize relationships of connection and community, usually starting at the familial level but then radiating out to incorporate all citizens on the home front, the soldiers on the warfront, and even the colonial other. (Orbaugh 2015: 297) Propaganda also addressed the health of the nation’s youth, which was naturally a matter of serious concern. For example, Japanese national newspapers financed campaigns to promote fit children, including contests for the healthiest babies, whose winners were publicized in the newspapers and on the radio (Ariyama 1998).

Japanese propaganda as seen from outside While the Japanese were imagining their empire from both within the naichi and gaichi, so were the Chinese and others, and Japanese officialdom did not ignore their opinions or impact. This field of research has grown as has our understanding of the fact that Japan did much more than simply imitate Western propaganda (see Dower 1986). Japan needed continually to spur on its own population but also had to offer succour to non-Japanese who supported imperial aims. In particular, Japan and China interacted vigorously on the level of the visual, oral, and printed word and in competition for the hearts and minds of both the Chinese on the continent and the Japanese (not to mention the Koreans and Taiwanese) in the colonies and Manchukuo. Chiang Kai-shek (1887– 1975), the leader of the Nationalist Government, and pro-Japanese defector from the Nationalists, Wang Jing-wei (1883–1944), who set up a rival government in Nanjing in 1940 in a bid to end war with Japan, both resorted to propaganda in Chinese against their respective enemies, and this also required consistent Japanese vigilance in order to respond with adequate imperial propaganda. Wang sponsored magazines and leaflets to be distributed that touted him as the solution to all of 261

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China’s problems that could only be found by supporting Japan’s imperial way. In this manner,‘the narrative that emerged in the pro-Wang press in these early months embraced the very controversy of Wang’s decision to even speak with the Japanese. It deployed this act as evidence of Wang’s spirit of self-sacrifice, while always projecting the image of a pacifist, patriotic, and anti-communist Wang as the antithesis of Chiang’.4 Japan might have dominated Asia militarily during the war but it always had to consider other propaganda voices it faced throughout the region.

Conclusion: managing defeat through propaganda Ian Buruma has suggested that ‘propaganda sticks’ (Buruma 2014), and certainly in the Japanese case the effects of wartime propaganda did not disappear with the defeat or even with the ‘embrace’ of the defeat (Buruma 2014). After Japan’s surrender, the United States, in order to maintain social order, was forced to retain many Japanese wartime bureaucrats to draw upon their expertise and experience in imperial management and propaganda. This was one reason why the imperial mindset did not disappear but merely changed tune (Morris-Suzuki 2000). The fact that Japan surrendered to the Americans but never ‘really’ militarily lost on the Asian continent also meant that a split occurred in Japanese political rhetoric.This logic suggested that the real cause of Japan’s imperial lost was due to the fact that it failed to overcome its scientific and technological deficits, not because the pursuit of an aggressive empire in Asia had actually been a mistake. The fact that Japanese wartime propaganda continued to operate after the surrender is also in evidence in that it was used as a postwar tool to help shape the Japanese view of the defeat, although ironically the word ‘defeat’ never appeared in the imperial rescript accepting the Potsdam Declaration.Yasuoka Masahiro (1898–1983), a scholar of the Chinese classics, who was advisor to the emperor, drew upon his erudite literary skills to render the decision to surrender palatable to the Japanese military, thus allowing a measure of the imperial propaganda to retain its lustre (Roger Brown 2015). The goal at the end of war was to preserve the chimera of the empire, which the Japanese believed they had created. Even though Japan lost the war, the ideology engendered by the wartime propaganda persisted (Kushner 2006). It is telling that the Japanese were able fairly quickly to regain a prominent position in international society.That is because many of the companies, individuals, and officials involved in the development and diffusion of propaganda had been active before Japan’s annexation of Manchuria in September 1931, and retained power and influence long after surrender in 1945. For example, Kishi Nobusuke (1896–1987), prime minister between 1957 and 1960, and Kaya Okinori (1889–1977), minister of justice in 1963–64, were two of the many prominent postwar officials who had played important roles as bureaucrats during the war. Obviously, this success was built on Japan’s military alliance with the United States, and access to cheap credit and oil within the new emerging world order based on Bretton Woods financial agreements, and the influence of the United Nations. But Japan’s economic revival and stable democratic evolution was also the result of its postwar campaigns to avoid war crimes trials – former Naval Captain Toyoda Kumao5 (1901–95), along with his team of researchers, for example, did his best to push Japan away from any longer-term examination of the insalubrious aspects of its history (Todaka 2009). The rather brisk re-emergence into public life of former war criminals after the ‘reverse course’ and after the occupation also helped to reshape popular discourse, which as early as the mid-1950s, once again parroted popular wartime propaganda slogans to the effect that the Japanese had ‘liberated’ East Asia and that Japanese colonial policies had modernized the region. The impact of such beliefs delayed diplomatic reconciliation with South Korea until 1965 and arguably has continued to thwart improvement of Japan’s diplomatic relations with East Asian countries (see Hasegawa and Togo 2008). 262

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Many years ago, a senior Japanese colleague told me that the field of Japanese media studies arose during the war and that Japanese scholars needed to resolve the issues caused by this interaction. I am pleased to note that in the recent years, scholars in Japan and abroad are beginning to do just that, but even though the field of propaganda studies has opened and expanded, much more remains to be investigated. In fact, the recent publication of the emperor’s chronicles and the unravelling of Hirohito’s thoughts about the war and empire are likely to offer new insights from the man placed at the centre of the entire imperial enterprise (Handō et al. 2015).

Notes 1 If that broadcast shocked the Japanese, a picture of the emperor published in the Asahi Shinbun on 29 September 1945, standing tense in formal attire next to a much taller and casual General Douglas MacArthur, stunned both Japanese censors and the population alike. 2 Accessible in full text in the online archive Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, at www.digital. archives.go.jp/das/image/F1000000000000069299 (inaugural number). 3 A magazine that reflects these changes is Ie no hikari (Homelight). See Ie no Hikari Kyōkai 2006. 4 See Taylor 2015: 676; Taylor 2014 and Taylor’s website detailing images of Chiang within Japanese and anti-Guomindang propaganda: www.hrionline.ac.uk/chiangkaishek/. 5 The name often appears as Toyota in print, but, according to Toyoda’s family, the correct pronunciation of it is Toyoda.

Further reading Asahi Shinbun Company (ed.) (2015) Media, Propaganda, and Politics in 20th Century Japan, trans. Barak Kushner, London: Bloomsbury Press. Culver, Annika (2013b) Glorify the Empire: Japanese Avant-Garde Propaganda in Manchukuo, Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press. Earhart, David (2008) Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Kushner, Barak (2006) The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. O’Connor, Peter (ed.) (2004) Japanese Propaganda: Selected Readings, 10 vols, Folkstone: Global Oriental.

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Part III

Economy and society

19 The path of economic development from the late nineteenth century to the economic miracle Penelope Francks

Between the late decades of the nineteenth century and the 1970s, despite a history of domestic and international conflict that culminated in devastating defeat in a global war, Japan was to become the first non-Western nation to achieve economic development in its modern industrial form. As a result, the Japanese case holds particular significance for those seeking to explain the origins of industrialization and the pattern of its diffusion, or lack of it, throughout the world. For much of the period since the Second World War, on the assumption that it was the industrial revolution, born and bred in eighteenth-century Britain, that provided the key to sustained economic growth, Japan’s development has been analyzed as the most successful example of ‘catching up’ and presented as a model to other nations that lacked the ‘preconditions’ lying behind the European initiation of industrialization. More recently, however, taking their cue from Kenneth Pomeranz’s seminal work (Pomeranz 2000), global historians have come to question the extent and timing of economic ‘divergence’ across Eurasia and its meaning in relation to understandings of why the industrial revolution took place when, where and in the particular form that it did. In this context, Japanese industrialization is coming to be re-interpreted not so much as a copying and catching-up process, but rather as demonstrating a long-term and distinctive path of development in its own right. Hence, global history is now shedding a new light on Japan’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic development in terms of both its comparative framework and its wider connections and implications. I will look first at the background to the ‘take-off ’ of urban industrial growth that began in the 1890s and continued through the boom conditions created in Japan by the First World War. The second section will consider the subsequent impact of the instabilities and global challenges of the inter-war years, focusing in particular on policy toward the international trading and financial system and the role of the imperial economy and its administration in conditioning the pattern of growth. The third section will analyze the ways in which continuities between prewar, wartime and postwar economic structures facilitated rapid acceleration in growth, under the conditions of the global economy up to the 1970s. Throughout, the chapter will reflect the major themes emerging from more recent literature on Japan’s economic history, including, on the one hand, the growing emphasis on the significance of the small-scale, labour-intensive and 267

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‘traditional’ sectors of the economy and, on the other, the new focus on the regional and global context within which Japanese producers – large-scale and small-scale, agricultural and industrial, ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ – came to operate.

Japan, the ‘great divergence’ and the path of industrialization During the 1960s and 1970s, the large-scale project led by Ohkawa Kazushi at Hitotsubashi University’s Institute of Economic Research established the long-term macro-statistical foundations of the ‘Japanese model’ of the process of economic development. The data produced and published as the series known as LTES (Ohkawa, Shinohara and Umemura 1965–88) provided the evidence that Japanese industrialization had ‘taken off ’ in the 1890s, on the basis of a spurt in capital investment, and that thereafter industrial growth, centring on a modern urban sector employing imported technology, had driven Japan’s ‘catch-up’.1 Much later, the global statistical series compiled by Angus Maddison were to confirm this picture of Japan leading the industrialization of the world’s ‘late developers’, a process that, in most other cases, did not really begin until after the Second World War (Maddison 2001). In this way, Japan’s precocious prewar economic rise could be seen as conforming to the wider understanding of development that continued to prevail through the postwar decades and into the 1970s and 1980s. Growth hinged on a dramatic rise in the rate of investment, which facilitated the expansion of modern industry employing the technology that had emerged out of the European industrial revolution. Late developers like Japan could take advantage of the prior accumulation of technical knowledge in the already-developed world, but where they lacked the prior conditions and institutions necessary to mobilize resources for industrial investment, steps might have to be taken to make up for what Gerschenkron (1962) famously termed ‘missing prerequisites’.These steps were typically assumed to involve an enhanced role for the state in directing resources to new forms of investment, but they might also include technological and institutional adaptations that made it possible to exploit, as a resource for growth, the ‘unlimited supplies of labour’ held in the still underdeveloped ‘traditional’ (mainly agricultural) sectors of such countries.2 As applied to Japan, this approach set the Meiji Restoration (1868) centre stage as the key to subsequent industrialization. The reforms initiated by the new government – most notably the Land Tax Reform of 1873 – placed the resources previously used to support the feudal elite in the hands of those committed to modernization and industrialization, and the state led the way in accelerating economic growth, both through direct investment in infrastructure, such as railways, and through the establishment of the institutional framework for modern industry. Although there was heated controversy over the extent and timing of output increase in the still-dominant agricultural sector, the underlying parameters of the model continued to hinge on the transfer of resources, facilitated by a modernising state, out of a backward traditional sector and into a modern industrial sector incorporating, if in possibly adapted forms, the technology and institutions of the already-industrialized West (for an outline of the debate over agricultural growth, Francks 2015: ch. 7; for the most thorough analysis of ‘surplus transfer’, see Karshenas 1995: ch. 8). The necessary backdrop to this ‘modernization’ model of Japan’s industrialization lay in a picture of the pre-industrial economy as a feudal world in which subsistence peasants, divorced from commerce and the market, suffered the depredations of a samurai elite incapable of utilising the ‘surplus’ for growth purposes. However, as early as the 1960s, evidence was beginning to emerge which undermined this picture. In English, the pioneering work of Thomas C. Smith showed how, in response to urban growth and expanding commercialization, 268

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Tokugawa/Edo period (1603–1868) rural households adapted to the growth in demand for both food and manufactured goods by devising and adopting intensive, high-yielding agricultural techniques that could be combined, where opportunities existed, with employment in non-agricultural activities, on or off the farm (Smith 1959; 1988; also Francks 2006: chapters 2 and 3). This ‘package’ put a premium on the kind of intensive and skilled labour that a family-based, household labour force was best suited to supply, and its diffusion was associated with the break-down of larger-scale holdings and the emergence of a village economy dominated by relatively small-scale household units, employing the traditional ie form. Such households and villages, while continuing to pay taxes – nominally at least in rice – to their local feudal lord, increasingly engaged with markets for both their output and their labour, with the result that the range of goods available commercially, in the countryside as well as the towns and cities, steadily grew. As a range of studies has come to show, this early-modern economic growth, which has now been demonstrated in both quantitative and qualitative work on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was in many cases far from opposed by the feudal ruling class (Miyamoto 2004).The administrations of feudal domains were often active in promoting, as well as taxing, the production of the distinctive local goods that could be ‘exported’ outside their boundaries (Roberts 1998; Ravina 1999). The role of the sankin kōtai (alternate attendance) system in the development of communications and the transmission of goods and knowledge throughout the country is clearly demonstrated in the work of Constantine Vaporis (2008), and Mary Elizabeth Berry (2006) describes the emergence of a network of knowledge accessible to the expanding numbers of literate samurai and commoners alike. Meanwhile, growing evidence reveals how a widening range of consumer goods – from the high-fashion silk kimono of the urban merchant elite to the soy sauce and confectionery that represented mass-market treats – was becoming available from shops and travelling salespeople throughout the country (Francks 2009: chapters 2 and 3). It was against the background of this reassessment of the Tokugawa-era economy that Japan began to take its place within the debate over the timing and nature of the ‘great divergence’ across Eurasia. Pomeranz included Japan as one of the parts of Asia within which pre-industrial ‘Smithian’ growth, based on the spread of the market and consequent division of labour, had created, by the eighteenth century, preconditions for industrialization comparable to those of much of Europe. Subsequent efforts at quantitative testing have not entirely confirmed this hypothesis and suggest that northern European levels of labour productivity and living standards had begun to diverge from their Asian counterparts well before this (Broadberry and Gupta 2006). Nonetheless, such tests make clear that, within the overall Eurasian ‘great divergence’, just as early growth in Britain and Holland resulted in a ‘little divergence’ within Europe, so Japan’s pre-industrial development formed the basis for a ‘little divergence’ within Asia, as China and India fell behind in the nineteenth century (Bassino et al. 2015). In this light, the great divergence debate has reframed the questions to be asked about Japan’s long-term development path. How can we account for the fact that Japan began to industrialize so much earlier than China and in fact not that long after much of Europe? Was it that, in crucial respects, Japan’s pre-industrial economic development resembled Europe’s in ways that China’s did not, enabling it to acquire and adopt the trappings of modern industrialization much more speedily? Or was it that Japan’s preconditions opened up the possibility of new ways of overcoming the resource barriers to sustained growth that paralleled, rather than copied, the technological developments whereby the industrial revolution solved these problems in Europe? The answers to these questions clearly lie in the relationship between the ‘Smithian’ growth of the later Tokugawa period and the forms which subsequent industrialization took in the 269

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Japanese case. It is now widely accepted that the institution of the rural household was central to the process through which economic growth came to be achieved within a labour-abundant but land-scarce economy constrained in different ways from its European counterparts (Sugihara 2013; Saitō 2008). Such households provided the framework for Japan’s version of the ‘industrious revolution’, whereby household members came to work longer, but also more productively, to improve their mutual livelihoods.3 Through the nineteenth century and beyond, this process involved not just intensive, high-yielding rice cultivation, but also growing amounts of manufacturing activity in fields such as textiles, making use of increasingly sophisticated, though not capital-intensive, forms of technology, derived from indigenous methods. These developments depended on the wider commercial and institutional environment that Tokugawa-period growth had fostered. In villages throughout the country, there emerged households with the business or land-owning assets and the wider connections that enabled them to act as bankers, sources of technical and market information and political leaders (Toby 1991; Pratt 1999; Platt 2000). Through the commercial networks established by such ‘cultivating landlords’ and ‘local notables’, local savings were mobilized and the output and labour of rural households organized and marketed. Although individual units of production remained small, putting-out systems or other forms of local coordination gave access to technical and design improvements and to widening market opportunities, so that, in due course, as skills and organizational capacities increased, small-scale producers would come together to form ‘industrial districts’, specialising in particular products and making use of local resources and ‘brands’ (Tanimoto 2006). It was therefore against this background that, following the Restoration and the opening of wider contact with the industrial economies of the West, Japanese businesses, undoubtedly at times aided by the state, began to develop the technological and organizational capacities needed to produce the products of modern industry. In fields such as shipbuilding and iron and steel, Japanese companies, benefiting from government subsidy, protection and military procurement, gradually came to master imported techniques so as to produce the heavy industrial output that the growing economy required (Morris-Suzuki 1994; Fukasaku 1992; Gordon 1985). However, in other areas, such as textiles, new technology was selected and adapted to suit Japan’s endowments of resources and skills.4 In cotton spinning and silk reeling, this involved the establishment of relatively large-scale mills equipped with machinery that could be intensively operated by female workers recruited in significant numbers from rural households (Hunter 2003). However, in weaving, especially for the growing domestic market, small-scale producers, working at home or in local workshops, continued to dominate, even as they began to take advantage of both indigenous and imported technological improvements. In general, therefore, as production for both export and the domestic market continued to expand through the later decades of the nineteenth century, small-scale producers continued to predominate in the manufacturing and services sectors, raising the capital they needed from local sources and drawing their labour, in one form or another, from households still also engaged in the intensive, rice-based agriculture that largely met Japan’s food requirements.5 In the light of the clear continuities that this produced in the nature of economic growth across the Meiji divide, the crucial role of the Meiji state is now seen as lying in the areas of monetary and financial policy that stimulated local manufacturing and agriculture along lines originally devised by previous feudal administrations, rather than in any radical reallocation of resources into investment in imported modern industries (Hashino and Saitō 2004: 243–6). Thus, overall, the first stages of Japan’s industrialization have to be treated as the products of human resources, skills and organizational capacities that were beginning to accumulate through the ‘Smithian’ growth of the later Tokugawa period. In the key work of Kaoru Sugihara (2013), 270

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Japan’s early-modern growth laid down a distinctive path of industrialization involving the intensive use of the relatively skilled and diligent labour resources fostered by the prevailing agricultural technology and household organization. For Sugihara, this path not only enabled Japan to subvert the ‘great divergence’ by overcoming the resource constraints on sustained growth in a different way – labour-rather than capital-and resource-intensive – from that developed in Europe, but also, in due course, formed the basis for the diffusion of industrialization to other parts of Asia where resource conditions were similar. Nonetheless, as we can now go on to see, the small-scale, labour-intensive, resource-saving path of industrialization that Japan pioneered was not immune to the upheavals of the global political economy after the First World War, and the strategies adopted in the face of this instability themselves continued to condition the structure of Japanese economic growth throughout the twentieth century.

Japan and inter-war globalization The acceleration in economic growth from the 1890s, confirmed by the LTES data, was undoubtedly associated, as was its European counterpart, with rising levels of urban industrialization. This process was intensified during the period of the First World War, as Western competitors were removed from the scene and new opportunities arose for Japanese producers, both in exporting to markets elsewhere in Asia and in substituting for imports at home. By the time of the culmination of this boom in 1919, the industrial sector’s share of the total output of the economy had reached almost 40 per cent, for the first time exceeding that of agriculture (Ohkawa et al. 1979: Table 2.1). Migration into both the emerging conurbations and the towns and cities of the provinces, in response to growing non-agricultural employment opportunities, meant that the proportion of the population living in cities of over 50,000 people had risen from around 10 per cent at the turn of the century to 16 per cent by 1920 and continued to rise to over 30 per cent by the late 1930s (Bank of Japan Statistics Department 1966: Table 2). A decisive shift had clearly occurred in both the structure of the economy and the ways of life of Japanese people. Nonetheless, the underlying forces determining the pattern of Japan’s urban-industrial growth demonstrated distinctive differences from their counterparts in the industrial West, which can now be interpreted as reflecting the labour-intensive development path. In the primary sector, the growth in agricultural output, which had been meeting Japan’s growing and changing demand for food and many raw materials from the eighteenth century onwards, continued to depend not, as in northern Europe, on the shift to larger-scale and more capital- and land-using forms of farming, producing the meat and dairy products that played a growing role in the Western diet, but rather on small-scale, family-based cultivation units focused on labour-intensively produced rice. This direction of change in Japan strengthened the hand of smaller-scale cultivators, who typically owned at least some of the land they farmed and possessed relatively strong cultivation rights backed up by co-operative village institutions (Francks 2006: ch. 6). On this basis, agricultural households not only continued to adopt new techniques and inputs – high-yielding, fertilizer-responsive rice varieties, for example – that enabled them to grow more, but also offered up whatever spare labour time they could make available from farming to other forms of employment, the income from which was incorporated into their overall budgets. Although younger sons and daughters might go out, on what was initially assumed to be a temporary basis, to find wage work away from home, employers also devised ways of tapping the supply of labour time available amongst those who remained resident in rural households. The villagers who had once combined rice cultivation with production of the distinctive local food products and handicrafts that found their way into the expanding 271

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commercial market of the Tokugawa era were, by the turn of the nineteenth century, morphing into the part-time or ‘pluriactive’ rural households, combining sophisticated and skilled, if labour-intensive, agriculture with participation in modern industrial or service work, that have persisted, in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia, to this day (Tanimoto 2006; for more data, Francks 2006: 143–5). As a result, the emerging industrial sector – built on the basis of the output and labour supplied by the rural economy – was undoubtedly conditioned by its rural roots, in terms of its technology, organization and institutions. In the heavy industries that state policy and military need, as well as the opportunities opened up by the absence of developed-country competition during World War I, were beginning to sustain, it was undoubtedly essential to master capitalintensive technologies acquired from Western suppliers. Even here, however, adaptations could be made – for example by sub-contracting to smaller-scale producers processes that could be carried out in more labour-intensive ways – so as to economize on scarce capital and skill. In cotton spinning, technical choices were made that enabled the employment of the relatively cheap labour of rural girls, as opposed to the male labour required by the technology employed in, for example, the cotton industry in India (Saxonhouse 1985). However, the share of output and employment that can be attributed to larger-scale businesses employing significant numbers of wage-workers and ‘modern’ forms of management and business organization, though growing, remained small throughout the pre–World War II period. Hence, the vast majority of those who came to work in the non-agricultural sector of industrializing Japan continued to be employed in smaller-scale and more ‘traditional’ forms of enterprise, even where new techniques and inputs, such as the electric motor, were beginning to transform production methods.6 Nonetheless, small-scale and labour-intensive as they were, such enterprises still required capital, financial and technical services, and marketing outlets, if they were to expand production. Although the reforms introduced by the Meiji government created the legal framework for modern industrial and financial institutions, they also offered the means whereby the ‘local notables’ who had financed and organized the expansion of the Tokugawa economy could mobilize funds for new forms of investment, access new technical ideas and influence policy. Banking legislation provided for the establishment of local banks to supply funds and services to local businesses; transport and communications developments, often state-funded, opened up new and wider market networks; local schools and technical colleges began to raise the skill levels of workers in local industries (Hashino and Saitō 2004).Through devices such as putting-out systems, industrial districts and sub-contracting networks, small-scale, ‘traditional’ enterprises, with new skills and resources at their disposal, continued to supply a significant share of the growing total of industrial output through the first half of the twentieth century (and indeed beyond), even as the big names of Japanese business were becoming established in the still-small modern sector.7 However, the boom conditions for businesses, large and small, that prevailed through the 1900s and 1910s, intensified by the effects of the war, were not to last, and in the much more unstable and testing times of the inter-war years, policymakers and business leaders groped toward the institutional structures and forms of intervention that might enable the economy, with its distinctive, historically conditioned characteristics, to sustain both improving and modernising living standards and the increasingly imperialist and militarist goals mapped out for the nation. The most immediate adjustment problem that faced the party-political governments in power as the wartime boom reached its climax in fact concerned the ability of the agricultural sector to meet the growth in demand for food that labour-intensive industrialization and urbanization necessarily generated. Pressure on supplies and prices of food – in particular, the Japanese-style rice that urban workers increasingly insisted on as the basis of a ‘civilized’ 272

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diet – culminated in 1918 in the so-called Rice Riots, during which consumers throughout the country protested against the rising market price of their central foodstuff (Lewis 1990). However, unlike its counterpart in England following the repeal of the Corn Laws, the adjustment problem that the riots embodied proved impossible to solve through imports of internationally traded grain – an inferior substitute for home-grown rice in the domestic market – whereas the interests representing landowners and cultivators alike continued to demand protection for the small farmer. The only feasible long-term solution seemed to lie in the expansion of Japanese-style rice cultivation in Japan’s newly acquired colonies of Korea and Taiwan. Colonial imports, although easing the pressure in the market, would not pose such a low-cost threat to Japanese producers, who were at the same time increasingly supported and subsidised by agricultural policymakers strongly influenced by a form of rural fundamentalism (nōhonshugi) that saw the small-scale, rice-cultivating farm as the backbone of the nation. The immediate problem that had triggered the riots was solved, however, by the collapse of the boom, following the resumption of international competition at the end of the war, which led to falling prices across the board. For the Japanese economy, this produced the first of a series of crises for industrial producers and the fledgling financial system that supported and depended on them, which was also to include the aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. Bank runs led to the collapse of many of the local small-scale banks that had mobilized the funds of regional investors in support of industrial expansion, and the banking system began to consolidate around the larger-scale financial institutions that were central to the emerging zaibatsu industrial groups (for the history of the banking sector in this period, Hoshi and Kashyap 2001: ch. 2). Meanwhile, smaller-scale enterprises that had over-expanded during the wartime boom had no option but to pull in their horns and seek the protection of longer-term relationships with larger-scale businesses if they were to survive. Nonetheless, although big businesses certainly exploited their privileged access to capital, technological knowledge and state support, the small-scale, labour-intensive sector by no means disappeared. Instead, through the institutional mechanisms of zaibatsu groups, industrial districts and local networks, it succeeded in carving out a role for itself within the modernising economy, even if this meant the mastery of new techniques and long hours of work on the part of household labour forces. What the state could and should do at the macro-economic level to support the economy in this situation became a highly contentious issue within the political context of ‘Taishō democracy’. The internationalization of the post-Versailles world was supported by an economic orthodoxy that argued for free trade, on the basis of the gold-standard system which fixed and guaranteed international currency values, as leading to the best economic outcome. For those within Japan, most notably Inoue Junnosuke (1869–1932), finance minister in the Hamaguchi cabinet (1929–31), who believed that Japan’s long-term economic development depended on trade and international investment and co-operation, adherence to the gold standard came to represent a badge of international respectability guaranteeing Japan’s access to the global product and financial markets that the still-industrialising country needed. However, free trade was by no means necessarily the policy pursued by the now-developed Western economies in the early stages of their own industrialization, and the argument that the industrial sectors of developing countries can only survive and grow if protected from international competition by trade barriers and domestic currency control also has a long history. In Japan, this argument was taken up most visibly by the larger-than-life figure of Takahashi Korekiyo (1854–1936), who served as finance minister (1913–14, 1918–22, 1927, 1931–36) and prime minister (1921–22) through the depths of the inter-war depression (on Takahashi, Smethurst 2007). It was also fundamental to the ‘industrial policy’ emerging within key ministries, especially the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI), which saw micro-level planning and 273

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targeted state protection as essential if industry was to fulfil national, and increasingly military, goals. As Mark Metzler (2006) has vividly demonstrated, the debate between Inoue and Takahashi prefigured that over neo-liberalism and the Washington consensus in the context of today’s developing countries, and just as in the late twentieth century, it was a global economic crisis – in this case the Wall Street crash triggering the great depression of the 1930s – that brought it to a head. Inoue continued to see Japan’s economy as ultimately best served by free trade, but his eventual attempt to return Japan to the gold standard at the prewar parity was made in the depths of the depression when the system itself was collapsing.The resulting crisis led to Inoue’s resignation (and subsequent assassination at the hands of an ultra-right group) and Takahashi took over as finance minister, abandoning the return to the gold standard and launching policies of increased government expenditure that brought Japan out of the depression sooner than most other countries and led to his being labelled the Japanese Keynes. Even he, however, baulked at the level of government expenditure and state control of the economy seen by many in the military and their civilian supporters as necessary for the creation of a Japanese-dominated Asian economic bloc capable of guaranteeing Japan’s security, and he also was before long to fall victim to assassins. As a number of recent works (e.g., Mimura 2011) have shown, influential officials within the MCI, alongside army factions and the entrepreneurs behind ‘new zaibatsu’, used the empire, and especially Manchuria, as a proving ground for a system of ‘non-communist planning’ that would guide investment into the heavy industry and resource extraction on which an autarkic empire, superseding the decadent capitalism of the West, would be based. As it turned out, the achievement of this goal proved very difficult without the co-operation of the old zaibatsu that controlled the accumulations of capital and knowledge on which modern heavy industry rested, while the exploitation of colonial resources was never sufficient to release Japan from dependence on the Western powers and their empires for many of the inputs that a modern industrial economy required. A scheme to solve Japan’s ‘rural problem’ at a stroke through mass emigration to the supposedly wide open spaces of Manchuria failed to make any great impression on either food supplies or the ‘over-population’ that was blamed for farmers’ difficulties in the depths of the depression (Young 1998, Wilson 2002). Although Korea and Taiwan did become important sources of rice, sugar and other agricultural products, industrial development in the empire remained limited, even as large resources of labour and capital were ploughed into securing and expanding imperial territory. Hence, the recent studies suggest that the empire’s most significant long-term economic role was as the birthplace of the techniques of bureaucratic economic planning and guidance, which a number of colonial officials were to perfect, on their return to the mainland, as the basis of the ‘developmental state’. As Japan’s economy became increasingly mobilized for war through the 1930s, state planning of industrial production and investment on the mainland also intensified, building on schemes of ‘industrial rationalization’ that had brought officials and private-sector businesses together to restrict ‘wasteful’ competition and advance Japanese technological capacity. Resources were more and more directed away from consumer-goods industries, and saving and frugality were heavily promoted (Garon 2000). Nonetheless, the instability and increasing mobilization of the economy should not disguise the fact that it was through the inter-war period that the direction of ‘modernization’, not only in production, but also in consumption and lifestyle was set. Japan’s cities were furnished with the infrastructure of ‘modern life’ – electrification, commuter railways, department stores, cinemas and baseball stadiums – and even in the countryside electric lighting, the post office, the bicycle and the newspaper were connecting rural families beyond the elite to the modernising nation. Although the vast majority of consumption 274

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remained ‘traditional’ in form, developments in production technology and marketing methods were creating a distinctively Japanese form of modernity: most women continued to wear kimonos in silk or cotton, but the fabric was produced in new ways (even though still by smallscale weavers) that made possible exciting new designs; white rice, eaten on its own, was firmly established as the central element in the diet, but new forms of food could be eaten alongside it and all manner of snacks and accompaniments, not to mention growing quantities of beer and tobacco, added variety; commuters took trains back to homes furnished with tatami matting and futons, having shopped at department stores at their station complexes (Francks and Hunter 2012; Sand 2003). While the great and the good campaigned for savings schemes and the ‘rationalization’ of daily life, inter-war consumers themselves were busy creating the modern Japanese lifestyle that the postwar economic miracle was to enhance and make available to so many more.

War, postwar and the economic miracle Nonetheless, as the economy moved on to a war footing through the 1930s, consumer-goods production became ever more restricted and by the end of the decade, as the war in Asia extended and Japan finally came into military conflict with the United States and its allies, the Japanese people began to have to navigate rationing, shortages and a pervasive black market in order to survive. Japan’s war economy was managed by means of a materials planning system, based on the allocation of key inputs, but its functioning continued to depend on cooperation between state and military officials and the private-sector businesses that had come to own and control most of the means of production. The resulting structure, whereby state and private sector accommodated one another in the pursuit of national ends, has come to be labelled the ‘1940s system’ and although much of it was, in theory at least, dismantled after the war under the occupation reforms, the literature now recognizes key continuities between the policies and institutions sustaining the prewar and wartime economy and the postwar recovery which turned into the economic miracle (Okazaki and Okuno-Fujiwara 1999). This continuity is perhaps most clearly visible in the rural sector, where the 1942 Food Management Law, which required all output of key food crops to be sold by its cultivator to a state body at government-controlled prices, was not repealed until 1994. Although the American designers of the postwar Land Reform saw it as expropriating a parasitic landlord class who had supported Japanese fascism, in practice its effect was to cement in place the structure of small-scale owner-cultivators laid down by the path of prewar economic and technical development. In combination, these measures ensured the domestic supply of Japanese-style rice (though not of many other agricultural products) that consumers demanded, as their incomes rose through the miracle years, and per capita rice consumption did not begin to decline, in the face of the diversification and Westernization of the diet, until the mid-1960s (Francks 2009: 164–8). However, this came at the cost of almost complete restriction of imports of rice (and those other agricultural products that Japanese farmers could grow) and mounting government expenditure on agricultural support, as the procurement price required to sustain farm incomes at levels equivalent to those earned elsewhere in the economy increasingly diverged from the consumer price at which the government’s agency could sell what it had procured. By the close of the twentieth century, ‘trade friction’ over agricultural products, combined with unsustainable budget deficits, had forced reform of the system in a more free-market direction, but the political power of farmers’ organizations, along with the investment of generations in an infrastructure of intensive small-scale rice cultivation, have continued to put brakes on the development of a sustainable agricultural sector within the modern economy. 275

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Meanwhile, in the industrial sector, postwar reforms were designed to break the stranglehold of the big-business zaibatsu that had collaborated with the imperialist state through the prewar and wartime periods. However, although the holding companies by means of which ‘zaibatsu families’ had controlled their share-ownership in the major companies in their groups were made illegal, and prewar business leaders were purged and jailed, the underlying networks of relationships between large and small businesses, supported by zaibatsu financial institutions, could not be destroyed. Before long, new forms of ‘industrial group’ (keiretsu) began to emerge. Some of these had roots in prewar zaibatsu, but their postwar incarnations depended more significantly on the key financial role of banks in supplying investment funds, combined with the sub-contracting networks which were to provide the basis for the flexible, ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing systems developed by leading companies in fields such as vehicle production and electrical goods (Gerlach 1992; Fruin 1992).Through such mechanisms the small-scale sector survived to play a key role in the economic miracle, as prewar skills and attitudes to work were turned to the sophisticated production of differentiated inputs and parts for mass-market assembly. Like their private-sector counterparts, the government officials who had planned and supported the prewar and wartime economy were purged and the economic role of the military was of course ended. Nonetheless, key figures in the construction of the prewar ‘developmental state’ returned to influential positions in administration and politics after the ‘reverse course’. At the macro level, as Scott O’Bryan (2009) has shown, the proto-Keynesian approach of Takahashi was revived in the form of the ‘GDP-ism’ which set economic growth as the over-riding goal of economic policy. Growth came to be seen as the panacea for the ills inherited from the interwar economy, creating the jobs and the output – of consumer products, as well as capital goods and exports – that would enable Japanese people to overcome ‘overpopulation’ and enjoy the vision of modern life that their new American allies presented to them. Given the background in national-income accounting and prewar economic policy of those responsible for the postwar economy, it was through an alliance of technocratic economic planners and hands-on policyimplementing bureaucrats that the goal of GDP growth was to be achieved. Following Chalmers Johnson’s seminal work (Johnson 1982), the precise contribution of the developmental state to economic growth – in Japan and subsequently elsewhere in Asia – has been the subject of much debate. There were undoubtedly forces at work – such as revival and expansion in the world economy – that might well have led to rapid growth in Japan, with its prewar accumulation of technological knowledge and skills, whatever bureaucrats had done, and, for some, to the extent that bureaucratic intervention distorted market incentives, it created inefficiencies and tendencies toward ‘crony capitalism’ that in fact reduced growth below its potential (Okimoto 1989). In strictly ‘growth accounting’ terms, the key to output growth lay in the very high rate of investment achieved by Japanese firms, which was promoted by both the institutional structures of Japanese business (e.g., keiretsu) and the relatively low cost of capital made possible by the high household savings rate, and which enabled the rapid absorption and improvement of industrial technology (Patrick and Rosovsky 1976). In this context, policy-makers’ main contribution was to ensure the stable and favourable macro-economic climate within which employment grew and domestic consumption and investment expenditure consistently expanded. Nonetheless, the bureaucrats of the new Ministry of International Trade and Industry, reborn out of the prewar MCI, set about re-inventing their methods of protecting and supporting businesses in the industries they saw as the keys to achievement of the goal of growth, and they undoubtedly succeeded in promoting investment and technology acquisition, while making the

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Japanese market a difficult place for foreign competitors. Combined with favourable macroeconomic conditions, this provided the framework for the unprecedentedly rapid economic growth, together with the urbanization and modernization, of the miracle years from the mid1950s to the late 1960s. The large and growing domestic consumer market remained the main engine of this growth, as Japanese families moved into new industrial jobs in the conurbations, enjoyed the ‘modern’ food, clothes and leisure activities (if still of an adapted Japanese kind) that had previously been available only to the elite, and filled their new apartments with electrical goods. The production techniques and product designs honed initially in the domestic market eventually enabled Japanese manufacturers to achieve their famed export successes and the country its balance-of-trade surplus, although the share of exports in GDP remained lower than in many more trade-oriented economies (e.g., the U.K.) and it is difficult to argue that miracle growth was, straightforwardly at least, export led (for case-studies of key growth industries and their links to the consumer market, Cusumano 1985, Partner 1999, Gordon 2012). The ‘oil shock’ of 1973 brought the era of annual 10 per cent growth rates to an abrupt halt and although growth resumed (at lower rates) through the 1970s and 1980s, cracks were beginning to appear in the miracle system.The macro-economic imbalances that it generated became increasingly problematic, with the trade surplus creating growing ‘trade friction’, especially in relation to Japan’s chief ally and protector, the United States, and the ‘savings surplus’ seeking more profitable outlets overseas, as domestic investment opportunities dried up (Katz 1998; Lincoln 1988). The Japanese banks that had channelled savings into industrial and infrastructure investment, under the guidance and protection of government officials, found themselves increasingly at sea, as demand for corporate loans faded, and resorted to the lending into the real-estate market that fuelled the rising property and asset prices of the ‘bubble economy’. Japan’s version of the ‘big bang’ financial reforms, designed to introduce a more ‘normal’, stockexchange-based structure of company finance and government monetary policy, were slow to take effect, given the close relations between the central bank, the commercial banks and the business world, in combination with the substantial cross-shareholdings that underpinned keiretsu groups (Carlile and Tilton 1998). Against this background, the collapse of the bubble in 1990 ushered in the ‘lost decades’ of relative stagnation that are still with us. While Japan thus struggled to adapt the model that had converted prewar resources, institutional structures and government policies into an engine for unprecedented economic growth to the conditions of a mature global economy with an aging population, the baton of miracle growth was being picked up elsewhere in Asia. This was in part at least the result of the ‘flying geese’ mechanism whereby Japanese firms, faced with rising labour costs at home, shifted their technically advanced but still labour-intensive activities to lower-cost, less developed parts of Asia, so setting in train the ‘East Asian miracle’. In this way, the distinctive path of labour-intensive industrialization, conditioned by Japanese resource availability and institutional structures that date back, in some ways, to before the great divergence, represents the key to the diffusion of economic growth beyond Europe and North America that has so profoundly changed the world we live in today.

Notes 1 For a convenient summary of the data, see Ohkawa et al. 1979. For historical accounts of Japanese development based on it, see Ohkawa and Rosovsky 1973; Minami 1986; Sugiyama 1988. 2 For the classic application of this ‘dual economy’ model to Japan, see Fei and Ranis 1964. Although now largely obsolete in development thinking, it can still be found in work on Japan, for example, Hayashi and Prescott 2008.

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3 For a summary of Japan’s industrious revolution by the inventor of the concept, see Hayami 2009: 64–72. Hayami’s model is, however, interestingly different from that of the same name devised by Jan de Vries, on the basis of European experience. For a comparison, see de Vries 2013. 4 The classic analysis of this is Saxonhouse 1974. See also the papers on various areas of the textile industry in Tanimoto 2006. 5 See Matsumoto 2006 for a detailed statistical analysis of the relative roles of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ producers in Japan’s industrialization. 6 At the time of the national census of 1920, at least 60 per cent of those working in the manufacturing sector were employed in establishments with fewer than five workers (Tanimoto 2006: 5). For the key role of the electric motor, see Minami 1987. 7 Enterprises with fewer than five workers still supplied just over 50 per cent of the output of manufacturing industry in 1909. Their share had declined to around 25 per cent by 1930, but their output continued to increase throughout the prewar period (Nakamura 1983: 80–1).

Further reading Francks, Penelope (2009) The Japanese Consumer: An Alternative Economic History of Modern Japan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ____ (2015) Japanese Economic Development, London: Routledge. Metzler, Mark (2006) Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan, Berkeley, CA: University of California. Nakamura, Takafusa (1983) Economic Growth in Prewar Japan, New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Tanimoto, Masayuki (ed.) (2006) The Role of Tradition in Japan’s Industrialisation: Another Path to Industrialisation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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20 The yen: Japan’s national currency Mark Ravina

Japan’s national currency, the yen, was created by the Meiji government in 1871. The relative stability of the yen, both as a medium of exchange and a store of value, parallels the remarkable durability of the modern Japanese state. Despite prewar financial panics such as the 1927 Shōwa Financial Crisis, the 1929 Great Depression, and defeat in World War II, the Japanese continued to treat the yen as ‘real money’. They did not abandon the state’s official currency for foreign currencies or specie. Nonetheless, the appearance of Japan’s national currency changed substantially. The iconography of the yen reflected changing understandings of Japanese history and culture and how those should be celebrated. This chapter is a study in numismatics and financial institutions, but more broadly a survey of changing notions of ‘Japanese-ness’ as evident in the changing shapes of the Japanese currency.

General conditions As with all national currencies, acceptance of the yen hinged on several conditions. First, widespread acceptance of any currency requires assumptions about the stability and legitimacy of the issuing state. Because, at any moment, a state can simply print more money, paper currency is valuable only when that prospect seems remote. That relationship between trust in a state and the value of money is clearest in the case of floating-rate fiat money, where the value currency is determined solely by what the market will bear. But similar bonds of trust also hold for convertible currencies as well. For example, gold-backed paper money holds its value only when most economic actors assume that the state will keep its promise to exchange paper for gold. Accordingly, when a state is widely seen as stable and responsible, its paper money functions smoothly as a store of value. A shared belief in the state can turn scraps of paper into financial instruments.1 The stability of any national currency also hinges the state’s monopoly on creating money: paper money cannot function if notes can easily be forged. To contain counterfeiting, states rely on a combination of legal sanctions and technological constraints. National mints commonly employ state-of-the-art printing techniques, and technological exclusivity helps to maintain the state’s control. But containing counterfeiting also requires regimes of surveillance and enforcement. The state has to remove unsanctioned notes from circulation and punish forgers. 279

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National currencies are uniquely tied to the rise of the nation-state. First, national currencies reflect modern territoriality: modern states assert exclusive power to create money within their borders. But that claim to power is most potent when it is invisible. In the ideal case, a nation’s subjects or citizens treat their national currency as obviously and inherently valuable, and look upon other forms of money with suspicion. The hegemony of the Japanese state is evident in the acceptance of the yen within Japanese territory: the modern Japanese state has not needed to compel the use of its money or to suppress underground currency markets. By contrast, state power becomes starkly visible during periods of economic crisis with attendant weakening of trust in the state. If a state needs to compel acceptance of its currency or enforce a ban on foreign currencies, it has already lost a crucial measure of trust and legitimacy.

National iconographies and currencies The iconography of national currencies reflects these determinants of value and stability. First, because national currencies require acceptance by their national populations, their design invokes national history and national culture. The images on currencies and on postage stamps commonly produce and reproduce national iconographies of heroes, leaders, legends, and emblems. As such, both currency and stamps can be tools of national propaganda, but the iconography of postage stamps is commonly more fluid and flexible than that of currencies.The value of stamps is ephemeral, because, for most purchasers, stamps lose their value after one use. Furthermore, national postal systems have a direct interest in promoting philately through special issues. Stamps are, in essence, demand notes on a government service: postal delivery.When philatelists collect ‘mint’ stamps, they purchase the notes but never demand the service for which they have already paid. Post offices thus have an economic interest in issuing ‘collectable’ stamps that are never used, and postal issues are therefore more varied and novel than currency issues. It is difficult to imagine Godzilla on a ¥1000 note or Elvis on the $20 bill, but both have appeared on commemorative stamps. In the case of currency, these incentives are reversed: paper money needs to remain in circulation, lest the mint incur the costs of printing new notes. And paper money is more expensive to produce, because the paper must be more durable and the anti-counterfeiting measures more severe. As a result, postage stamps reflect the whimsical face of national iconographies, whereas currency is a sober and stolid counterpart. The Japanese state, from the Meiji Restoration of 1868 on, sought to create a national currency that served, both domestically and internationally, as a stable store of value and as a medium of exchange. The currency needed to be difficult to reproduce, lest it be widely counterfeited. It needed to correspond to international standards of value in order to felicitate international trade. Accordingly, the development of the modern Japanese currency system has followed broader international trends. From the Meiji Restoration until 1897, the yen was a silver-backed currency until Japan adopted the gold standard after the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894–95. During World War I, Japan followed the lead of the United States and Britain and prohibited the export of gold, effectively ending the gold standard. The 1920s were characterized by boom and bust turbulence, although the weakness of the yen against Western currencies helped exports. In order to restore financial stability, Japan returned to the gold standard in 1930. Tragically, the return to a strong yen exacerbated the effects of the Great Depression, and in 1931 Japan once more dropped the gold standard, again as part of global trends. In the postwar era, the yen was incorporated in the international agreements known as the Bretton Woods System. That was nominally a new gold standard, although it was, in practice, a U.S. dollar standard, with secondary backing in gold. Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods System in the 1970s, the yen has been a fully floating fiat currency (Metzler 2002). 280

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Money in the Edo period (1603–1868) The Edo period monetary system was strikingly complex, a mix of multiple forms of coinage and paper currencies. The Tokugawa regime (the shogunate, or bakufu) itself avoided paper money until its final days. Instead the shogunate maintained a monopoly on striking coins, which were a combination of gold, silver, and copper. After the 1770s, however, Tokugawa coins circulated as token money: the value of the coins was not directly tied to the metal content. For example, shogunal ryō coins were denominated in gold, but minted from gold-silver alloy, so the face value of a ryō was often double its metallic value. Although traditionalists lamented that debasement of Japanese currency, the increase in coinage helped to monetize a growing economy. At the same time, the coinage system was a revenue stream for the shogunate through seignorage: the coins cost less to make than their face value. That system collapsed in the 1850s because of increased exposure to world markets. The unequal treaties required Japan to allow the export of gold. Because of the relative isolation of the Japanese economy, local gold-to-silver prices did not correspond to world markets: gold was underpriced by world standards. Traders exploited that price difference; and realized enormous profits by selling silver in Japan for shogunal coins, and then purchasing gold, leading to a massive export of specie: roughly 70 tons of gold in 1860 (Metzler 2006: 15–22; Metzler 2002: 47–51). In order to stop the outflow of gold, the shogunate debased its coinage, reducing the amount of gold to conform to world values. That rapid debasement caused a surge in prices, further undermining the weakened regime. Unable to rely on seignorage from coins, the shogunate turned to paper money, issuing three different currencies in 1867.The notes reeked of a regime in decline, and circulated only at extreme discounts. The Tokugawa-era financial system also featured a range of local monies. Feudal domains, hatamoto (bannerman) territories, temples, and shrines all issued their own currencies.The value of such issues varied, not surprisingly, depending on faith in the issuer. Many feudal domains issued paper money as a means of covering budget deficits, and such notes quickly lost their value. Other notes circulated at near face value, even at a distance from their place of issue. Currencies that were accepted by domains for tax purposes were generally more stable, since that guaranteed a minimum value. The iconography of these pre-national currencies featured symbols of wealth, such as the folk deities Hotei and Ebisu. The text of the notes generally indicated the issuing authority and detailed methods of exchange. Rather than highlight Japanese history or culture, the notes combined Pan-Asian symbols of wealth with local details on convertibility (Maruyama 1999).

Paper money in the Meiji period (1868–1912) The Meiji state’s first attempts at paper money were continuations of Tokugawa traditions. In 1869, the government released a hasty and shabby looking currency known as dajōkan satsu. The notes were printed on woodblocks and lacked any distinctive Japanese markings save chrysanthemum emblems in the corners (symbols of the imperial house). The Finance Ministry (Ōkurashō), the Ministry of Public Affairs (Kōbushō), and the Hokkaido Development Agency (Kaitakushi) also issued their own notes. Because those notes could easily be forged, in 1871 the government commissioned a series of yen notes from Dondorf and Naumann, a Frankfurt printing company specializing in financial instruments. These so-called ‘German notes’ were produced in fine detail, with advanced relief printing techniques, but the iconography was not especially Japanese. Instead, the notes employed conventional symbols of wealth and prosperity: phoenixes and dragons. Thus, like the dajōkan satsu, these were notes issued by the central government, but without a national iconography (Uemura 2015, 38–54; Nihon Ginkō Chōsakyoku 1975a, esp. 2–4, 133–40). 281

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At the same time, the Meiji government attempted a national convertible currency, based on American models. The notes were called ‘National Banknotes’ (kokuritsu ginkō shihei), although that term is misleading: they were issued in 1873, nine years before the creation of the Bank of Japan (Nihon Ginkō) in 1882. The notes were issued by private banks, rather than a single national bank, although the total volume of currency was regulated by the state.That system was based on the U.S. post–Civil War model of a national currency without a central national bank (Nihon Ginkō Chōsakyoku 1975a, esp. 4–5, 145–9). The adoption of the U.S. model reflected striking parallels between the history of paper money in the United States and Japan. In 1836, after U.S. President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) refused to renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, the nation entered a period of ‘free banking’ in which hundreds of local banks issued their own currencies. In that environment of minimal regulation and oversight, many banks failed and their notes became worthless. The need for banking reform was compounded during the Civil War by the federal government’s need for revenue. Beginning with the National Banking Act of 1863, Congress established a new national banking system, although no single national bank was founded at the time. Instead, the federal government established a tier of national banks, supervised by a Comptroller of the Currency. National banks could issue their own money, but only in proportion to their federal securities reserves (Orrell and Chlupatý 2016, 103–12). Although the post–Civil War banking system lacked a central bank, the iconography of the currency issued by the national banks was strikingly nationalistic, and Japan’s National Bank adopted that practice for its banknotes as well. Intriguingly, such nationalist imagery on currency was new to both Japan and the United States. The iconography of notes from the U.S. ‘free banking’ era, like sub-national Tokugawa-era currencies, focused on depictions of wealth and prosperity, rather than national legends. In the American case, common images included bountiful harvests, busy factories, and steam locomotives. Confederate currencies featured political iconographies, but those defended secession and slavery, and were overtly antagonistic to national unity (Doty 2004).The new currency, by contrast, was part of a nation-building project, designed to instill patriotism and a sense of a common national heritage. Writing to the Secretary of Treasury in 1863, Spencer M. Clark (1811–90), the head of National Currency Bureau, outlined this project in detail: A series properly selected, with their subject titles imprinted on the notes, would tend to teach the masses the prominent periods in our country’s history. The laboring man who should receive every Saturday night, a copy of the ‘Surrender of Burgoyne’ for his weekly wages, would soon inquire who General Burgoyne was, and to whom he surrendered. His curiosity would be aroused and he would learn the facts from a fellow laborer or from his employer. The same would be true of other National pictures, and in time many would be taught leading incidents in our country’s history, so that they would soon be familiar to those who would never read them in books, teaching them history and imbuing them with a National feeling.2 Ironically, the Surrender of Burgoyne was placed on the $500 note, which was unlikely to be handled by a ‘laboring man’ receiving his ‘weekly wage’. Overall, however, the 1863 series reflected the sense that currency should serve as civic primer, fostering and celebrating a common national heritage (Lauer 2008, Rooks 1891: 55–64). The Meiji government adopted both the U.S. regulatory scheme and this new iconographic practice. Japanese ‘National Bank’ notes were issued by tightly regulated private banks, rather than a single national bank. The design and visual structure of the notes was strikingly similar 282

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to U.S. national bank notes, but with American national symbols swapped out for a Japanese iconography. Indeed, the notes were printed by the Continental Bank Note Company, which had printed money for both sides during the U.S. Civil War (Tōno 2011). Perhaps the clearest example of American influence is the parallelism between the 1873 Japanese ¥10 note and the $10 United States National Bank Note from 1864.The notes are similar both in style and theme, establishing a supernatural basis for the conquest of a neighbouring territory. The U.S. note depicts Hernando DeSoto’s (1495–1542) ‘discovery’ of the Mississippi, based on an oil painting by William Powell. Visually, the painting links DeSoto’s subjugation of the Chickasaw and Muskogee to the ideology of ‘Manifest Destiny’. The juxtaposition of the crucifix with naked ‘savages’ suggests that DeSoto conquest was divinely ordained (Baigell 1990). The Japanese note features Empress Jingū’s legendary conquest of Korea in the third century CE. Jingū’s victory, according to ancient chronicles, was divinely decreed and full of supernatural portents. She defeated enemy forces while pregnant with the future emperor Ōjin, who delayed his birth until his mother had finished her mission, although he offered her military guidance from inside the womb (Trede 2008). The two images were thus thematically parallel: imperial expansion was divinely ordained (Figures 20.1 and 20.2).

Figure 20.1 and 20.2 1873 Japanese ¥10 note (bottom) and 1864 United States National Bank $10 note (top). 283

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There was a similar parallelism between $1 and the early ¥1 notes. The ¥1 bill featured the wreckage of the Mongol fleet, tossed by a storm on the shores of Japan. The $1 bill showed the Puritans, arriving safely in Plymouth, shielded from a stormy sea by Providence. In these parallel images, ‘divine forces’ seemingly controlled the seas to advance national destiny, destroying the Mongols but sparing the Pilgrims. This emulation of U.S. practice meant that Japan’s ‘National Bank Notes’ were some of the most overtly pedagogic paper bills of their day. In Europe, currency iconography was comparatively less didactic. Nineteenth-century British bank notes featured an image of  ‘Britannia’, holding a staff and an olive branch, but no detailed tableaus from British history. Intriguingly, Britain began putting the image of its sovereign on coins in the tenth century, and Queen Victoria appeared on the first modern postage stamps in 1840, but British monarchs did not appear on paper money until 1960 (Hewitt 1999). On the continent, European nation-states were also slower to employ currency as either pedagogy or propaganda. The German Empire, for example, issued its first bank notes in 1874, but those notes featured cherubic children, rather than symbols of the Reich. Only gradually did German currency introduce nationalist symbols, such as the German eagle and Germania, the female personification of the nation (Pick 1994: 533). Nineteenth-century Italian notes often featured elaborate iconographies, but even after the Risorgimento, Italian notes retained a distinctly local flavor. Currency from Sardinia, for example, featured the acclaimed local ruler Eleanor of Arborea (1347–1401), whereas notes from the Banca Generale di Roma showed the legend of Romulus and Remus and the coat of arms of the House of Savoy (Cuhaj 2013: 727–30). The most ‘nationalist’ Italian currency of the 1800s was produced in the United States by the American Bank Note Company. The 1-lira notes of the Banca Nazionale nel Regno d’Italia featured portraits of the leaders of the Risorgimento (e.g., Cavour, Mazzini), as well as Christopher Columbus. As with Japan’s 1873 ‘National Bank Notes’, this American-style currency was designed to instill in the populace reverence for a common pantheon of national heroes. In this case, the spread of an American-style nationalist iconography was directly linked to American industrial capitalism and the commercial success of the American Bank Note Company and the Continental Bank Note Company. Although Japan’s 1873 bank notes were strongly influenced by American design ideals, notes from the late 1870s and 1880s were more European, with a less pedagogic, simpler iconography. Those newer notes were printed in Japan, rather than outsourced, but the design and production were heavily influenced by European advisors, most prominently the Italian artist and engraver Edoardo Chiossone (1833–98), who learned currency design while working for Dondorf and Naumann. In accordance with European models, the obverse of both the ¥1 and ¥5 notes from 1878 featured the folk deity Ebisu, a non-national symbol of prosperity analogous to the cherubs on German notes. The face of the notes also depicted generic scenes of military power and prosperity: ¥1 notes showed sailors in Western uniforms, and the ¥5 note featured industrious blacksmiths (Uemura 2015: 76–87). The legendary empress Jingū appeared on a new series of    ¥1, ¥5, and ¥10 notes in 1881, but translated into a European rather than an American visual vocabulary. Now Jingū appeared in a small oval portrait, similar to the depictions of Britannia and Germania on notes and Queen Victoria on British stamps. Intriguingly, Chiossone argued for a depiction of the Meiji Emperor himself, prompting a vigorous debate within the Japanese government. In the end, the government elected to depict an historical monarch rather than the reigning emperor. The reasoning behind this decision is obscure, but the government seems to have wanted depictions of the emperor to be treated with special reverence. Copies of Chiossone’s portrait of the emperor were distributed to schools across Japan, but those were the focus of public ceremonies, not mundane commerce (Uemura 2015: 88–97; Fujitani 1996). 284

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The 1881 Jingū notes were released amidst a general deterioration of the Japanese currency system. The yen began to lose value in the late 1870s because of both fiscal and monetary policies. The notes were originally intended as a gold-backed currency, but outflows of gold meant that, in practice, the notes were backed by silver, widely considered a lesser standard. Confidence in the notes was further eroded by the enormous volume of debt incurred by the Meiji government in order to convert samurai stipends into interest-bearing notes. A final blow was the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion, or the War of the Southwest. The government paid for the war by printing money, which predictably caused inflation. Between 1876 and 1881 the domestic prices of basic commodities, such as rice and miso (bean paste), doubled. Over the same period, the yen fell against specie from under 1000 yen per Mexican silver dollar in 1876 to over 1700 in 1881 (Matsukata 1899). The government confronted this financial crisis with a planned recession known as the ‘Matsukata deflation’, after Matsukata Masayoshi (1835–1924), the government official who pioneered the reforms. From 1881 until 1901, Matsukata was the single most influential figure in government finance, serving as finance minister for 15 years, in addition to two brief terms as prime minister. The goal of the ‘Matsukata deflation’ was to rein in inflation by reducing the money supply so that Japan could eventually return to the gold standard. That required a drastic reduction in government spending, which effectively caused a domestic recession. But the policy did bring down inflation and by 1885, the Bank of Japan was able to issue silver-backed yen notes (see Ericson 2016). Matsukata believed that Japan’s return to a stable currency warranted a new style of notes. Japan’s first silver-convertible note boldly declared in English that the Bank of Japan would ‘Pay the Bearer on Demand 10 Yen in Silver’. But the design of this first convertible note was an extension of older ‘lucky god’ currency, now featuring Daikoku instead of Hotei (Uemura 2015, 98–106). In 1887 Matsukata proposed that Japanese currency be used to increase the people’s respect for the state and therefore feature ‘the emperor, the prime minister, or remarkably influential people’. The government again rejected depicting the emperor, but began compiling a shortlist of national heroes, focusing on ancient imperial loyalists. That focus on the distant past raised the question of how to depict men for whom there was no reliable portrait. The government’s official instruction to designers was to rely on textual sources and to create engravings that were based on ‘our characteristic national style of drawing’ (Uemura 2015: 107–9). This new banknotes series began in 1888, first as silver-backed notes and then, after 1897, gold-backed notes. The iconography became the standard for Japanese currency until 1946. In a broader sense, the style of the notes continues to this day, with simple portraits of Japanese historical figures, rather than elaborate tableaus or ‘lucky gods’. The new notes portrayed five exemplars of imperial loyalty: Takenouchi no Sukune (before 400), Sugawara no Michizane (845–903), Wake no Kiyomaro (733–99), Fujiwara Kamatari (614–69), and Shōtoku Taishi (574–622). With the exception of Takenouchi, the legendary grandson of a legendary emperor, these men served the imperial court at or near the zenith of its power in the Nara (710–94) and early Heian (794–1185) eras. They were chronologically remote, but several were connected to lived experience through religious practices. Sugawara no Michizane, for example, was posthumously deified as Tenman Tenjin and became venerated as a patron saint of scholarship. To this day, Japanese students inscribe votive plaques at shrines to Michizane when taking school entrance exams. In celebrating imperial loyalism, these notes were overtly nationalistic. At the same time, however, the notes were part of Japan’s greater integration into global financial markets. The adoption of the gold standard was intended to establish Japan as a ‘developed’ nation and to link 285

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Japan to major capital markets. According to Matsukata’s official report, the gold standard would assure ‘capitalists of the gold standard countries’ that ‘they will no longer be in constant danger of suffering unexpected losses from investments made in this country’. Furthermore, the gold standard would ‘bring about a closer connection between this country and the central money markets of the world’ (Matsukata 1899: 348; Metzler 2006: 31–3). As part of that process of global integration, the new notes continued the practice of stating their convertibility in English. The new notes now avowed, in Roman letters, that the bearer would be paid in gold. Thus, the notes were part of an emerging international monetary regime of gold-backed currencies with nationalistic iconographies.

The influence of economic crisis, inflation, and war Japan’s adoption of the gold standard must be also seen in the context of Meiji imperialism. After its victory over China in 1895, Japan extracted an indemnity of 230 million silver taels, equivalent to three years of Japanese government revenue. That silver was converted into gold and became the reserves of the Bank of Japan (Metzler 2006: 3; Jiang 2015). Imperialism thus enabled Japan’s adoption of the gold standard, but it also led to the creation of new colonial currencies. Those overseas monies reflected tensions within Japanese notions of empire. Were the colonies extensions of a Tokyo-centred unitary state, or peripheries under the oversight of the metropole? Or was Japanese colonialism, like ‘white man’s burden’ or ‘la mission civilisatrice’, a noble question to uplift and advance Japan’s ‘backwards’ neighbours? The first Japanese colonial currency for Korea, issued in 1902, was a straightforward extension of metropolitan power. The Dai-Ichi Ginkō (First Bank) released yen-denominated notes featuring a portrait of Shibusawa Eiichi (1840–1931), the bank president. Later issues, however, reflected the complexities of Korea’s integration into the Japanese empire. Notes issued by the Bank of Korea (Chōsen Ginkō) featured famous Korean heritage sites, such as Hwahongmun Gate and Changdeokgung Palace. At the same time, the design of the currency reflected Korea’s colonial subjugation. The most prominent language on the notes was Japanese, followed by English. Hangul, the Korean script, appeared only minimally, and was neglected entirely on some higher denomination notes (Nihon Ginkō Chōsakyoku 1975b: 324–5). Colonial currency also reflected how many Koreans were caught between resistance and collaboration. Most Bank of Korea notes featured, in addition to heritage sites, either Daikokuten of Jurōjin of the ‘seven lucky gods’. But the image of Jurōjin looked to many like Kim Yunsik (1835–1922), the foreign minister of Korea who had formally requested Japanese assistance against China in the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War. Kim was widely seen as pro-Japanese, and his appearance on the Bank of Korea’s ¥1, ¥5, and ¥10 notes was therefore interpreted as a reward for collaboration. But Kim had supported Japanese intervention only as a counterweight to China and Russia and in 1919 he supported the March First Korean independence movement. As punishment, the Japanese government stripped Kim of his peerage and officially clarified that the image on the currency was of a ‘lucky god’ not an unlucky Korean intellectual (Nihon Ginkō Chōsakyoku 1975b: 328). The iconography of Japanese currency did not change in the 1930s, despite considerable financial turmoil. Japan went off the gold standard in December 1931 as part of a broader collapse of the international gold standard. Britain, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden all declared gold embargoes in late 1931, followed by the United States in 1933 (Metzler 2006: 237). In Japan, the end of the gold standard was accompanied by finance minister Takahashi Korekiyo’s ‘positive’ economic recovery programme. Takahashi (1854–1936)

286

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increased government spending and lowered interest rates, resulting in a remarkable recovery from the Great Depression (on Takahashi, see Smethurst 2007). By 1935 the Japanese economy was supporting near full employment with stable prices. After Takahashi’s assassination in 1936 and the start of the China War in 1937, however, surging military spending created fiscal and balance-of-payment deficits (Metzler 2006: 240–56). The so-called ‘Great East Asian War’, in particular, was financed almost entirely through debt, with borrowing accounting for roughly 80 per cent of war-related outlays between Pearl Harbor and surrender. That deficit spending resulted in severe inflation, despite official price controls. The general price index increased by over 220 per cent between July 1941 and December 1944, for an annualized rate of over 50 per cent. In the last ten months of the war, prices soared by over 400 per cent (Kurihara 1946). Inflation required more paper money, but by 1944 it was impossible to produce high quality currency. Many of the National Printing Bureau’s skilled personnel had been conscripted, and there were shortages of machine parts, paper, and ink. Since the 1870s, the National Printing Bureaus had used the intaglio process, in which images are etched into the printing plates. Ink is applied to the plates, but then wiped off.The application of high pressure during printing forces the paper into the recesses of the plates, where it absorbs the remaining ink.The intaglio process thus embosses the notes, raising different areas of the paper as they are printed. In light of wartime privation, however, the National Printing Bureau opted for the simpler process of outset printing, in which the inked areas are higher, rather than lower, than the rest of the plate. The new 1944 plates were largely copies of existing notes, and depicted the same historical figures: Takenouchi no Sukune, Sugawara no Michizane, Wake no Kiyomaro, and Shōtoku Taishi. But the notes were distinctive for the relatively poor quality of the ink, paper, and printing and for a small change to the text: the 1944 notes finally dropped the promise of convertibility (Uemura 2015: 168–77). At the same time, a shortage of industrial metals, especially aluminum, led the government to remove coins from circulation and replace them with small sen-denomination notes (¥1 = 100 sen). The 5 sen note featured the famous imperial loyalist Kusunoki Masashige (1294–1336), and the 10 sen notes featured a major ultra-nationalist monument, the Hakkō Ichiu Tower in Miyazaki Prefecture (Uemura 2015: 177–81). Erected in 1940, the monument commemorated the purported 2600th anniversary of the founding of the Japanese empire by Emperor Jinmu. The name of the tower derives from the four-character compound hakkō ichiu inscribed on the front (see Figure 3.3 in this volume).Translated variously as ‘the eight corners of the world under one roof ’ or as ‘all the world under one roof ’, the phrase is an adaptation of a passage from the early eighth-century annals Nihon shoki in which legendary Emperor Jinmu declared his desire to rule a unified Japanese kingdom. As a propaganda slogan in the 1940s, it suggested that Japan’s conquest of ‘Greater East Asia’ was a logical extension of the founding of the Japanese state by Jinmu, a great grandson of the sun goddess Amaterasu, and that Japan would one day span the whole world (Edwards 2003). The 1944 sen notes thus represent a zenith in the use of currency as overt propaganda, and, in particular, the invocation of the mythological past to legitimize contemporary policies.

The yen during the occupation The breakneck pace of political change under the Allied occupation of Japan (1945–52) was reflected in both postage stamps and currency. Between 1944 and 1950, the Japanese government issued six different types of currency. That unprecedented rate of change was the

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product of conflict between the Japanese government and the U.S.-led occupation administration, known as SCAP (the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in Japan). Based on its policy of ‘democratizing’ and ‘demilitarizing’ Japan, SCAP objected to many of the currency images proposed by the Japanese government, insisting instead on emblems of peace and cooperation. Further, the two sides disagreed over how to contain inflation and the underground economy. SCAP refused to authorize notes above ¥100 for fear both of promoting inflation and encouraging counterfeiting. SCAP finally authorized a ¥1000 note in 1949, but that was part of a broader plan to integrate Japan into the world economy (Bronfenbrenner 1975). SCAP declared its official policy on stamps and banknotes in May 1946. It prohibited the depiction of military and ultranationalist leaders, past and present; symbols of militarism and ultra-nationalism; representations of Shinto shrines or other symbols of Shinto; and scenes from territories no longer under Japanese sovereignty. Those extensive and explicit orders, known as SCAPIN 947, were prompted by the continued use of explicitly nationalist postage stamps, such as the 1945 series featuring the slogan ‘defeat the enemy’ and the image of Y   asukuni Shrine (Woodard 1972). The finance ministry anticipated such restrictions and began debating proposals for a new yen in late 1945, eventually deciding on a series of six notes: ¥1, ¥5, ¥10, ¥100, ¥500, and ¥1000. The government’s proposals reveal a limited awareness of U.S. attitudes. On the proposed ¥5 note, Sugawara no Michizane was replaced by a simple design, and the ¥1 and ¥100 notes retained, respectively, the images of Takenouchi no Sukune and Prince Shōtoku. For higher value notes, the printing office chose famous examples of Buddhist statuary. The new ¥500 note, for example, depicted an acclaimed image of Maitreiya Buddha from Hōryūji, the ‘crowned Maitreiya’ (Hōkan miroku). Although the Hōryūji Maitreiya is known for its peaceful demeanour, the office chose a more bellicose image for the ¥1000 note: the fierce visage   akushi nyorai, the ‘Medicine Buddha’. Like of Basara shinshō (Skt. Varja), a protector deity of Y the Hōryūji Maitreiya, the Basara shinshō from Shin’yakushiji in Nara was deemed a national treasury and lacked any links to militarism. Nonetheless, Basara, as one of the ‘Twelve Heavenly Generals’, looked powerful and potentially violent (Uemura 2015: 187–90; Nihon Ginkō Chōsakyoku 1975c: 195–201). Officials at SCAP were unimpressed and rejected most of the Japanese Mint’s proposed series. They refused to allow notes over ¥100 for fear of promoting inflation and encouraging counterfeiting and black market trading. In response, the Japanese government proposed turning the ¥500 Maitreya note into a ¥100 note, and the ¥1000 Basara shinshō note into ¥10, thereby reducing the series from six note types to four. But SCAP also objected to the iconographies. Takenouchi no Sukune and Basara shinshō were labeled symbols of militarism. Strangely, SCAP also rejected the Hōryūji Maitreiya, suggesting that the icon’s expression reflected despair over Japan’s defeat. Those rulings left Japanese officials scrambling for appropriate iconographies. Basara shinshō was replaced by an image of the National Diet, but the new image fit awkwardly into the original frame. To replace Takenouchi no Sukune on the ¥1 note, the designers chose Ninomiya Sontoku (1787–1856), the famous exemplar of diligence and thrift. On the surface, that choice seems odd, because the Japanese government had invoked Ninomiya in its wartime campaigns to conserve resources. Ironically, so had the U.S. government, air dropping a propaganda leaflet that celebrated Ninomiya’s spirit of local self-reliance as inherently ‘democratic’. The sole image carried over from prewar currency was Prince Shōtoku on the ¥100 notes: Japanese officials had convinced SCAP that Shōtoku was a pacifist humanitarian (Uemura 2015: 190–6; Nihon Ginkō Chōsakyoku 1975c: 201–8).

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The yen: Japan’s national currency

The series of four notes was released in February 1946.Aesthetically, these ‘A series’ notes reveal their origins as an awkward collaboration between SCAP and the Japanese government. Both the ¥1 and ¥10 notes looked ad hoc and the entire series lacked a coherent sense of style or design. Further, during the long process of negotiation, Japanese officials had become concerned that the new issue would be too late and too small. To increase the volume of currency, they pressed SCAP to authorize the ungainly expedient of ‘currency stamps’: stickers that could be affixed to older notes.The currency stamps, roughly the size of a postal stamp, were issued in denominations ¥10, ¥100, ¥200, ¥1000 and could be affixed to notes of any value.These S series currency stamps circulated as legal tender only from February to October 1946, but they were strikingly visible evidence of the complexities of creating a new currency regime (Uemura 2015: 197–8). By late 1946, however,  Japanese financial officials in the government had developed a coherent iconography that celebrated Japanese history and culture while respecting SCAP directives. When the occupation authorities banned ultranationalist images on currency in May 1946, it effectively banned sen-denominated notes, which featured images such as Ametsuchi no motohashira (Pillar of Heaven and Earth, i.e. the Hakkō Ichiu Tower), but the economy needed such low denomination notes amidst a shortage of coins. In response to SCAP’s visions of a ‘peaceful’ and ‘democratic’ Japan, the government proposed a new small denomination series featuring images such as a dove, plum blossoms, the Diet building, and Itagaki Taisuke (1837– 1919), a Meiji-era politician. As a leader of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement of the 1870s and 1880s (see Chapter 14 in this volume), Itagaki was considered a symbol of Japan’s longstanding democratic tradition. This new series meshed with SCAP’s expectations, and unlike the A series, proposed just nine months earlier, SCAP approved this low-denomination series without amendment or dissent. The appearance of Itagaki on the 1946 50 sen note marked the start of a new national iconography. From 1946 until 1984, Japanese bank notes have predominantly featured prominent Meiji-era figures. The heroes of Japanese currency became those nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century figures who could be considered forerunners of a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic Japan. Remarkably, the currency iconography of postwar Japan was set largely in 1946, when the Japanese government submitted a list of 20 possible historical figures to SCAP for a new series. Because the 1946 ‘A series’ was crudely printed, raising the risk of counterfeiting, the Mint was eager to issue a new ‘B series’ of high quality notes. The Japanese list of twenty proposed ‘B series’ images featured only two ancient figures (Empress Kōmyō, 701–60, and Prince Shōtoku) and one from the Heian period (Sugawara no Michizane). Five candidates were Tokugawa-era intellectuals: Kaibara Ekken (1630–1714), Ninomiya Sontoku (1787–1856), Aoki Kon’yō (1698–1769), Arai Hakuseki (1657–1725), and Inō Tadataka (1745–1818). The remaining twelve were all from the Meiji-era: one scientist (Noguchi Hideyo, 1876–1928), two author-intellectuals (Natsume Sōseki, 1867–1916 and Fukuzawa Yukichi, 1835–1901), and nine politicians and bureaucrats (Matsukata Masayoshi, Itagaki Taisuke, Kido Takayoshi, 1833–77, Ōkubo Toshimichi, 1830–78, Shibusawa Eiichi, Iwakura Tomomi, 1825–83,Yoshihara Shigetoshi, 1845–87, Katsu Kaishū, 1823–96, and Sanjō Sanetomi, 1827–91). Japan’s ‘usable past’, as depicted on its currency, shifted from the NaraHeian-era imperial state to the Meiji-era creation of modern Japan (Uemura 2015: 203–4). SCAP reviewed the list and rejected eight figures. The logic of SCAP’s decision remains inscrutable. For example, they rejected Matsukata Masayoshi, the Meiji-era finance minister, but approved Meiji-era Bank of Japan governor Yoshihara Shigetoshi. But the remaining 1946 SCAP-vetted list provided eight of the twelve figures on Japan’s postwar currency (see Table 20.1).

289

Table 20.1  Iconography of Japanese currency in the postwar period. Person shown

Dates of birth/death

Description

SCAP 1946 decision

Postwar appearance on currency

Series

Prince Sho¯toku

574−622

approved

1946

A series

¥100

      Fukuzawa Yukichi   Iwakura Tomomi

      1835–1901

      approved

1950 1957 1958 1984

B series C series C series D series

¥1000 ¥5000 ¥10000 ¥10000

  approved

2004 1951

E series B series

¥10000 ¥500

  Ninomiya Sontoku

  1787−1856

  approved

1969 1946

C series A series

¥500 ¥1

Itagaki Taisuke

1837−1919

approved

1953

B series

¥100

Noguchi Hideyo

1876−1928

approved

2004

E series

 

Natsume So ¯ seki Aoki Kon’yo ¯

1867−1916

Imperial regent and purported author of 17-article Constitution       Writer and educator   Statesman, court noble, and diplomat; active in Meiji Restoration   Farm technologist, moral and agricultural philosopher Statesman, leader of “Freedom and People’s Rights Movement”; active in Meiji Restoration Bacteriologist, isolated syphilis spirochete Novelist

approved

1984

D series

¥1000

approved

none

 

 

Yoshihara Shigetoshi

1845–87

approved

none

 

 

Kido Takayoshi

1833–77

Confucian and Western learning scholar, advocated cultivation of new crops Finance official, first governor of Bank of Japan Statesman, active in Meiji Restoration

approved

none

 

 

  1825−83

1698−1769

Value

Person shown

Dates of birth/death

Description

SCAP 1946 decision

Postwar appearance on currency

Series

Value

¯ kubo O Toshimichi

1830–78

approved

none

 

 

Kaibara Ekken

1630–1714

approved

none

 

 

Empress ¯ Ko ¯ myo

701–60

rejected

none

 

 

Arai Hakuseki

1657–1725

rejected

none

 

 

Ino ¯ Tadataka

1745−1818

rejected

none

 

 

Sugawara no Michizane

845–903

rejected

none

 

 

Matsukata Masayoshi

1835−1924

rejected

none

 

 

Shibusawa Eiichi

1840−1931

rejected

none

 

 

Katsu Kaishu¯

1823−99

rejected

none

 

 

Sanjo ¯ Sanetomi

1837–91

Statesman, active in Meiji Restoration Confucian scholar, focused on experience and practical knowledge Known for patronage of temples, charity, and concern for poor and sick Confucian scholar, historian, shogunal advisor Surveyor and explorer, known for precise maps Imperial court scholar and advisor Finance minister and prime minister, architect of Japan’s Meiji-era financial system Entrepreneur and business leader, pioneer in establishment of modern industry Statesman and naval officer, served both Tokugawa and Meiji governments; active in Meiji Restoration Court noble, active in Meiji Restoration

rejected

none

 

 

(Continued )

Mark Ravina Table 20.1 Continued Person shown

Dates of birth/death

Description

SCAP 1946 decision

Postwar appearance on currency

Series

Value

Ito ¯ Hirobumi

1841–1909

not proposed in 1946

1963

C series

¥1000

Higuchi Ichiyo

1872–96

Statesman, GovernorGeneral of Korea, active in Meiji Restoration Author and poet

2004

E series

¥5000

Nitobe Inazo ¯

1862−1933

1984

D series

¥5000

Takahashi Korekiyo Murasaki Shikibu

1854−1936

not proposed in 1946 not proposed in 1946 not proposed in 1946 not proposed in 1946

1951

B series

¥50

2000

D series

¥2000

973–1016

Educator, author, bureaucrat Statesman, financial expert Author

Sources: Compiled by the author from Nihon Ginko¯ Cho¯sakyoku 1975c; General Headquarters, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ/SCAP), History of the Non-Military Activities of the Occupation of Japan (1945 through June 1951), volume XI – Social, Part D: Religion. GHQ/SCAP, 1952.

Post-occupation developments The striking continuity noted in the last section reflects parallel continuities in the Japanese political economy. Since the late 1940s, Japanese politics has been dominated by a growthoriented centre-right coalition, formalized with the creation of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 1955. Since its creation, the LDP has enjoyed virtually uninterrupted electoral success, and all prime ministers have come from the LDP save for two periods: August 1993 to January 1996 and September 2009 to December 2012. Japanese foreign policy has been similarly stable. Japan continues to support U.S. military bases as part of a broader U.S.-Japanese defensive alliance formalized in the 1950s. Those national and international political structures have changed, but through inflection points rather than ruptures. The ‘Nixon shocks’ of the 1970s and the bursting of the ‘bubble’ economy in the early 1990s bent but did not break underlying political and economic structures. In that environment of continuity, currency design was shaped by gradual changes in technology and cultural attitudes. Each of the four post-1946 series involved new anti-counterfeiting methods. The B series (1950–53) used intaglio printing to replace the crude 1946 A series. The C series (1957–63) introduced a broader range of colours, which impeded duplication until the development of high-resolution colour scanners and copiers.The new D series (1984, 2000) combatted those new technologies with finer lines, tiny numbers, and luminescent inks. The E series (2004) introduced holograms and other latent images, which appear only when the currency is viewed at specific angles. The D and E series have also been designed for use in ATMs and vending machines. Another gradual shift was the replacement of politicians with cultural figures. Whereas the C series featured only political leaders, the D and E series shifted decisively to intellectuals, authors, and scientists. That shift from politics to culture paralleled international trends. French franc notes issued in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, dropped political leaders such as Napoleon Bonaparte 292

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and Cardinal Richelieu in favour of Paul Cézanne, Gustave Eiffel, and Pierre and Marie Curie. The British pound E series (issued from 1978 to 1999) similarly featured scientists, authors, philosophers, and composers. The inclusion of women has also been an international trend. The appearance of Higuchi Ichiyo (1872–96) on the E series ¥5000 bill followed figures such as Clara Schumann (1989 100 German mark), Florence Nightingale (1975 £10), and Elizabeth Fry (2002 £5), but preceded the appearance of women on U.S. banknotes announced in 2016. The Japanese National Printing Bureau does not make public statements about its selection process, but the mint has periodically leaked limited details of its selection process. According to the Asahi Shinbun, for example, the C series was designed after consultation with psychologists at Tokyo University, who conducted a survey.The top-ranking figures were political: Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909), the Meiji Emperor (1852–1912), Iwakura Tomomi, and Wake no Kiyomaro. Next were cultural figures, such as Noguchi Hideyo, Natsume Sōseki, Uchimura Kanzō (1861–1930), and Nishi Amane (1827–97). The cultural figures were more popular among young people, but the mint determined that they lacked the gravitas necessary for a national banknote. According to the Asahi, the plan for a note with the Meiji Emperor was vetoed by the Imperial Household Agency, so the mint then chose Itō Hirobumi. According to the National Printing Bureau’s own history, however, the two finalists for the ¥1000 note were Itō and Shibusawa Eiichi (Uemura 2015: 224–8). The D series was apparently also designed after a quiet survey. The Finance Ministry developed three proposals: a political series, and cultural series, and a hybrid series. The political figures included Shōtoku Taishi, Itō Hirobumi, Ōkuma Shigenobu (1838–1922), and Hara Takashi (1856–1921). The cultural figures included the novelist Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), poet Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), and cultural critic Okakura Tenshin (1863–1913), as well as the final three winners: Fukuzawa Yukichi, Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933), and Natsume Sōseki. The hybrid category was not a simple combination of politics and culture, but included figures such as Kanō Jigorō (1860–1938), the founder of judo, and Taki Rentarō (1879–1903), composer and pianist. The hybrid category was rejected after intra-agency debate, and the ministry then conducted a survey through the Bank of Japan to assess the cultural and political categories. The survey established the popularity of cultural figures over politicians, and there was also a consensus that the new series should include at least one woman. The government discussed Murasaki Shikibu (978–1016), Sei Shōnagon (966–1025),Yosano Akiko (1878–1942), and Higuchi Ichiyo as female candidates, but found reasons to reject all four. Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shōnagon were rejected for lack of photographs, although that had not blocked the earlier selection of Shōtoku Taishi. Yosano Akiko was removed from consideration because her famous anti-war poem ‘Kimi shinitamou koto nakare (Thou Shalt Not Die)’ might anger conservatives. Higuchi was deemed too tragic. Her fiction dealt with poverty and prostitution, and she died of tuberculosis at only 24. Higuchi Ichiyo was thus rejected in the 1980s before her eventual appearance in 2004. After investigating and rejecting all proposed women, the government finally settled on three male cultural figures. Sōseki was understood as an easy choice. As the preeminent novelist of the Meiji era, his works are widely read in middle school and therefore known to almost all Japanese. Nitobe is best known for his book Bushido:The Soul of Japan (1899), and for his role as the founding director of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, the prewar forerunner of UNESCO. In the odd logic of the finance ministry, however, Nitobe was chosen as a proxy for a woman because of his support for women’s education. As a prominent Meijiera intellectual, Fukuzawa was also considered obvious, but the Mint was concerned that Prime Minister Takeshita Noboru (1924–2000) might object. Fukuzawa founded Keiō University but Takeshita was a graduate of that school’s main rival, Waseda. In the end, however, Takeshita approved the list (Uemura 2015). 293

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The National Printing Bureau informally considers the 2004 E series to be a second ‘culture’ series and, indeed, the figures on the E series were all candidates for the D series. Despite these continuities, currency issued since the 1990s show subtle evidence of ‘post-bubble’ attitudes. The release of the E series, was, for example, accompanied by hopes that bills might spur the sale of new vending machines. Even the prospect of a minimal 0.1% increase in GDP was deemed newsworthy. The inclusion of Higuchi Ichiyo suggests a new interpretation of her biography. Whereas her life and fiction were considered too dark in the 1980s, her struggle against poverty and poor health can be recast as a triumph over adversity. Uemura Takashi, a former finance ministry official, has suggested Ichiyo can send a hopeful message to Japan’s youth that ‘hard work can gradually lead to great accomplishments’ (Uemura 2015: 264–5).

Conclusion Modern Japanese currency is thus the product of overlapping economic, political, ideological, and technological forces. Changes in Japanese currency also reflected the rise and fall of different international monetary regimes. Japan’s first banknotes after the 1897 adoption of the gold standard boldly declared in English that the ‘Nippon Ginko [Bank of Japan] promises to pay the bearer on demand’ the face value of the currency in gold. Roman letters and promises of convertibility disappeared in the 1940s, reflecting the collapse of the prewar gold standard and Japan’s attempt at wartime economic autarky. The iconography of the currency reflected both popular and official conceptions of national identity. Until 1945, Japanese currency focused primarily on ancient and medieval exemplars of imperial loyalty. In the postwar era, however, the iconography has shifted to reflect different visions of Japan’s ‘usable past’. From 1945 until 1984, currency iconography focused on leaders of the Meiji Restoration, such as Itō Hirobumi and Iwakura Tomomi. Japan’s most recent two currency series have followed an international trend away from high politics to culture and toward the inclusion of women.

Notes 1 For a useful survey of theories of money see von Glahn 1996: 15–23. A remarkable aspect of mainstream neo-classical economic theory is its neglect of general theories of money. As Orrell and Chlupatý observe of monetarism, it is ‘less a way of thinking about the behaviour of money than a way to stop thinking about money by assuming it can be made stable’. See Orrell and Chlupatý 2016: 145. See 97–117 for considerations of paper money. 2 Exec. Doc. no. 50: Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury in answer to a resolution of the House of 24 January, in regard to the Printing Bureau of the Treasury Department 1865.

Further reading Ericson, Steven J. (2016) ‘Orthodox Finance and “The Dictates of Practical Expediency”: Influences on Matsukata Masayoshi and the Financial Reform of 1881–1885’, Monumenta Nipponica, 71(1): 83–117. Metzler, Mark (2006) Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Smethurst, Richard (2007) From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister: Takahashi Korekiyo, Japan’s Keynes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.

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21 Urban life and the city idea in the twentieth century Louise Young

As Michel de Certeau (1925–86) famously wrote: ‘The city is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity’ (de Certeau 1984: 95). Why do we equate cities with modern life? In the Japanese case, national and regional development projects identified modernization with urbanization and the city with modern Japan, a process that intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century. Although this new age of the city accelerated growth of Tokyo and Osaka, much of the action took place outside of the metropolitan centres in Japan’s provincial cities. Drawing on the examples of the four regional centres of Sapporo, Niigata, Kanazawa, and Okayama, this chapter examines twentieth-century urbanism through the experience of the provincial city. As prefectural capitals, all four cities constituted the economic, political, and cultural centres of their respective regions. They were seats of municipal and prefectural government, centres of regional industry, and major transportation hubs. They held a concentration of institutions of higher learning and provided a platform for regional publishing. Yet with populations in 1920 ranging from 50,000 to 150,000, they were all dwarfed by Tokyo’s 3.3 million. Despite such commonalities, these four cities occupied vastly different positions in relation to the social structures and historical processes of the nation-state and the capitalist economy. Sapporo was a Hokkaido ‘frontier town’ that sprang up on land Japanese appropriated from the indigenous Ainu population in the late nineteenth century and became the headquarters for the colonization of the northern island. Seats of provincial commerce and government since the Tokugawa period, Kanazawa and Okayama developed modern urban institutions atop the infrastructures of the castle town. A major coastal port city during the Tokugawa era, Niigata was designated one of five open ports where foreign traders were permitted commercial access in 1858 and a seat of prefectural government in the modern administrative order. The increasing orientation of Japan’s economy toward the Pacific coast shaped the fates of cities, leaving a Niigata (facing Asia and removed from the economic centres of Tokyo and Osaka) on the wrong side of the geography of power and placing an Okayama (on the Pacific side, near Osaka) directly in the path of economic progress. The diverse histories of these local cities reflected, on the one hand, the uneven application of the centralizing and standardizing tendencies of the nation-state, and on the other, the social and economic disparities generated by capitalist modernization.

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Japan’s modern history has usually been told from the vantage point of Tokyo, newly designated capital of the empire after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Standard narratives assume that from 1868 on government and civic leaders in Tokyo invented modern institutions and dispatched them to the provinces. They suggest that the diffusion of Tokyo models created a dynamic of imitation, placing localities in a condition of perpetual catch-up with the capital. This is particularly true of interwar urban history, which portrays Tokyo as the centre and most active site of the modernist social and cultural movement.1 Such storylines conceive a process of modernization by diffusion that inexorably erased the particularities of local cultures, creating a homogeneous national culture of modernity represented in its fullest form by Tokyo. And yet, a closer look at local city stories calls into question such beliefs. One payoff to ‘provincializing Tokyo’ is the discovery of substantive differences in the local experience of national development and global capitalism.Viewed from off-centre, it becomes possible to imagine that modernity was co-constituted through the dynamic interactions of provincial cities with the capital as well as through the circulation and exchange of people and ideas throughout the country and the world. Telling these other urban stories helps us unpack our assumptions about the relationship between cities and modernity that underpin the master narratives of modern times. Instead of conceiving provincial cities or even Japan itself as an example of some kind of alternative modernity, we might begin to see that the so-called standard-bearers of the modern are themselves outliers and exceptions.

Tokyo-centrism One of the most striking effects of Japan’s modernization project of the late nineteenth century was the rising prominence and the increasing centrality of Tokyo within the new national space. By the 1920s the cumulative result of Meiji government policies of national developmentalism pursued since the 1870s built Tokyo up into a centre in myriad ways: the control room for nation-wide political parties, the seat of national government and apex of administrative hierarchies, the clearinghouse for the financial industry, the heart of the national transportation grid, a locus of industry and major concentration of population, and the main portal to the outside world. These policies increased Tokyo’s centrality in cultural ways as well, as a centre of higher education, of the high arts, of the publishing industry, and the mass media. The same forces that made Tokyo central – that concentrated power and prestige in the capital – provincialized other urban centres, turning them into ‘local cities’ (chihō toshi) in relation to Tokyo by marginalizing their cultural and economic production and limiting their political clout. New educational institutions channeled ambitious and talented intellectuals to the capital; the ongoing brain drain held profound implications for local communities. The result was a new cultural geography that privileged Tokyo and marginalized its outside world – a geography that defined Japan in terms of Tokyo and its Others. In the circulation of people and ideas set in motion by the modernizing project of the Meiji state, Japan’s cities redefined themselves in relation to other urban centres. Just as Tokyo’s metropolitan identity was constructed against a rural imaginary – the chihō or provinces – Tokyo provided the Other against which local cities forged their own self conceptions. The educational system was a central vehicle for this dynamic. The architecture of Japan’s national education system was created through a series of late nineteenth-century laws that shunted children into different streams based on gender and wealth. There were several junctures in the educational track that served as the major points of social segregation. The first of these separated terminal graduates of primary school, which was compulsory and universal, from those

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that continued onto secondary school, which was selective and expensive. A small fraction of middle school graduates continued on to the elite track higher school and from there to university. The tiers in this educational tracking system were distributed according to a particular spatial logic that distinguished villages (with elementary schools only) from cities (with a range of secondary school choices); and both of these from the metropolis (where universities were concentrated). This geographic dispersal of educational institutions linked social mobility to geographic mobility, and it laid the channels through which such demographic movements would flow (Passin 1965). What did this mean for the relationship between local cities and the metropolis? Geographically dispersed tiers of educational tracks helped create a new cultural geography that was hierarchical and organized around an emerging logic of centres and peripheries. Tokyo, with its concentration of universities was one centre, but prefectural capitals, with their concentration of secondary schools made up another set of centres. For cities like Okayama, status as a centre of learning ensured cultural dominance of their respective regions, but at the same time cemented a position of cultural subordination to Tokyo. Okayama’s ability to develop educational resources drew on its rich inheritance as a centre of learning during the Tokugawa period; in the late nineteenth century the city moved quickly to build on this legacy. Okayama’s first public middle school opened in 1874; a second was built in 1921. Together with the private middle school that had opened in 1894, the city’s three middle schools enrolled about 2,600 students. By 1886 Okayama boasted two women’s colleges, and additional schools were established in 1900, 1908, and 1925. In terms of commercial and technical schools, by 1926 the city offered a range of options: a four-year public technical school, a four-year public commercial school, a private professional women’s college and a women’s arts school, and city-run industrial arts and commercial schools. In addition, Okayama was home to a prestigious medical school and a normal school (Okayama-ken 1987: 594–614). This impressive array of schools established Okayama’s reputation as centre of higher learning for the region, attracting a flow of students from the surrounding counties as well as neighbouring prefectures of the Chūgoku and Shikoku regions. Moreover, because employment at Oka­ yama’s secondary schools typically required a university degree, the school network generated in-migration from university centres in Tokyo and, to a lesser extent, Kyoto. In their capacity as teachers, metropolitan intellectuals made enormous impacts on local cultural movements, often acting as conduits for the introduction of Tokyo trends into the provinces, where they encountered thriving local cultures and became part of a cultural melting pot. Whether it was in-migration of Tokyo intellectuals or the influx of students from surrounding towns and villages, the new educational system provided a channel for the circulation of people and local knowledge. It created extended social networks and provided the context for productive engagements and mutual influences, a synergy between artists and writers from different local communities who came together in places like Okayama. At the same time, because of its subordinate position in the grid, the educational system turned Okayama into a way station to Tokyo, both for students continuing on to university, and for scholars who used local employment as a stepping-stone to a more prestigious post in the capital. Biographies of Japanese intellectuals who lived during these years reveal the power this tracking system had in structuring individual lives. The story of Shida Sokin (1876–1946), poet and professor of literature at Okayama’s prestigious Sixth Higher School for almost twenty years, offers a telling example of the operations of the new cultural geography. Shida graduated from Tokyo University’s Department of Literature, where he studied with Masaoka Shiki (1867– 1902), the great naturalist poet and founder of the modern haiku movement. Through disciples like Shida, the new haiku movement established strong provincial links and spread throughout

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Japan. Shida’s energetic promotion of haiku poetry clubs made this a cornerstone of Okayama’s literary scene (Okayama-ken 1986: 796–9). One might argue that modern haiku was incubated in provincial cities like Okayama, where dynamic interactions between imported metropolitan and regional literary practices allowed for the reinvention of haiku as a new poetic form. The new haiku movement flourished precisely because of its spread throughout the provinces and because of its accumulations of regional inflections, yet despite all of that, modern haiku is still known as Masaoka Shiki’s movement and associated with the Tokyo brand (on Masaoka, see Keene 1984: 92). Despite his celebrity as Okayama’s leading poet, Shida Sokin eventually quit his job at Okayama’s public higher school in 1925 to take a post at Seikei Higher School in Tokyo, forerunner of the private college in the suburb of Kichijōji. Since public schools enjoyed greater prestige and higher salaries than private schools, the only reason this made any sense as a career move was because it took Shida back to Tokyo. As the stories of intellectuals like Shida illustrate, the educational system promoted Tokyocentrism through career ladders leading to the capital and by the monopoly of Tokyo-trained scholars over provincial faculty posts. These features of higher education encouraged cultural deference to the metropolis and helped naturalize the idea that modern knowledge issued forth from Tokyo.Yet such forms of Tokyo-centrism masked a more complex reality about the movement of ideas and the intellectual formation of scholars. Although Tokyo was undoubtedly the single greatest source of academic pedigree, the ‘Tokyo intellectuals’ that staffed Japan’s provincial schools had themselves been provincial transplants to the capital. In this sense Tokyo represented only a single phase of an intellectual biography that circulated scholars through various locales; these diverse cultural experiences cumulatively constituted their intellectual formation. Before Shida Sokin moved to Tokyo to attend university, he grew up in Toyama, another prefectural capital on the Japan Sea coast, where he was educated through higher school. If we keep in mind that the prewar higher school is basically the equivalent of a four-year college today, this means that Toyama was where Shida came of age intellectually; he was a fully formed adult when he moved to Tokyo. In fact, virtually none of the so-called Tokyo intellectuals hired from metropolitan universities to work in a place like Okayama were actually raised in the capital.This suggests a more complex, heterogeneous intellectual formation than their Tokyo branding implied. Though their scholarship and artistic production were associated with the Tokyo pedigree from a metropolitan university, this was the capstone of a long period of education and socialization, all of which took place outside the metropolis. And yet, their identities, their writings, and the process of artistic canonization all tended to erase the provincial origins of metropolitan culture. What did it mean for the Tokyo literati that most were born and raised outside the capital city? What did it mean for a local city? Though these artists became identified (by themselves and by others) as belonging to Tokyo, their provincial origins left conspicuous traces in their literary production. Thus it is possible to track a shift in subjectivity – their embrace of a metropolitan identity – through their writings. This came through with particular clarity in the way the literati wrote about their old hometowns. As a focal point of their literary production, the ‘hometown’ – kokyō – became the lens through which the Tokyo literati and their readers visualized the local city.Viewing it from the perspective of Tokyo and situating it in a particular relationship with the capital, they provided in fictional and poetic space a powerful symbolic rendering of local cities that became integral to the ideology of the metropolis and the power of Tokyo-centrism. One example of this was the frequent emplotment of the provincial city within an ‘ascension to Tokyo’ (jōkyō) narrative. Most canonical writers of the early twentieth century wrote autobiographical fiction that depicted student life in their old hometowns as a rite of passage on the path to literary renown in the capital. ‘Changing Song’ by Nakano Shigeharu (1902–79), ‘The 298

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Snow in My Old Hometown’ by Tokuda Shūsei (1871–1943), and ‘Sexual Awakening’ by Murō Saisei (1889–1962) were all coming-of-age stories set in Kanazawa that described early romantic attachments, rivalries, and comradeship of classmates – stories of young dreams and character formation in the country towns of their youth.2 What critic Kobayashi Hideo (1902–83) called ‘the literature of a lost home’ stereotyped the provincial city as childish and unsophisticated, rustic and countrified, a world of an earlier age and a simpler time (Kobayashi 2000).3 Paired as Tokyo’s Other, the provincial city was lodged within a nest of binaries: the adult contrasted with the boy, civilization with nature, the present with the past. Such literature narrated the transformation of a Murō Saisei or Nakano Shigeharu from provincial intellectuals to Tokyo literati, tracing this shift in subjectivity. Their embrace of Tokyo required the distancing and marginalizing of the local city. As they assumed their new identity, they minimized the power and vitality of provincial culture and what it had meant to their own intellectual formation. From their perches in provincial cities and in the metropolis, writers and artists wielded enormous power to shape the epistemology of Japan’s modernity. Moving through the circuits of exchange laid down by the educational grid, intellectuals traversed a social and cultural geography organized in terms of centres and peripheries. Although they were products of this environment, their actions and their artistic production also helped create the inequalities that characterized it. In the visions of modern urban life that spun from the fancies of the literati, the distinction between the capital and the provinces became a defining feature of urban subjectivity and identity. In its figuration of the ‘hometown’ metaphor, highbrow literature elaborated the Japanese inflection of that most classic trope of modernity – city and country.

Colonizing the country The same government policies of national developmentalism that gave rise to Tokyo-centrism through the modern education system began to reshape regional political economies around the force field of the provincial city. The production of new regional space intensified with the economic boom of World War I, which ushered in what amounted to a second industrial revolution (see Chapter 19 in this volume).This shifted the focus from the first wave of strategic national industries established in the late nineteenth century to a broader array of products; the war boom also accelerated the expansion of consumer and service industries. A stream of public investments in infrastructure accompanied economic expansion: regional rail, roads, streetcars, waterways, and schools. Both of these developments – regional industrialization on the one hand, and public investments in education and transportation on the other – served to enhance the power of provincial cities over their nearby towns and villages. For cities of all sizes, the main infrastructural development that facilitated urban growth in the twentieth century was the railroad. Cities expanded their capacity to exert power within the national economy because of rail; and they increased their dominance over regions because of rail. Japanese railways developed in two phases, the first with the building of the national rail grid in the late nineteenth century, and the second with the development of light rail in the interwar period. During the first phase between 1870 and 1906, 5,000 miles of track were laid, mainly along the Pacific coast of the central island of Honshu (Ericson 1996). Along this privileged coastal corridor that faced Europe and America, railroads provided the new point of connection between domestic and international markets, and a critical catalyst for the explosive growth of Osaka and Tokyo around the turn of the century as centres of commerce, industry, and political power. Most second-tier cities were connected to rail during this early phase of building. But even here the time lag between the link-up of Sapporo in 1880, Okayama in 1891, and Niigata and Kanazawa in 1898 reflected the 299

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uneven development of the transportation grid and its dynamic interaction with an economic geography that privileged certain regions as targets of state development. Thus proximity to important coalfields ensured Sapporo’s precocious link-up, and Okayama was located along the path of the Pacific coastal railroad corridor, anointed for development. But extension of the system to Niigata and Kanazawa, on the opposite side of Honshū along the Asia-facing coastal regions, lagged behind. This delay became one more sign of economic ‘backwardness’ that gave rise to the stigmatizing designation for the region of ‘ura Nihon’ – the posterior, backside, or rear entrance to Japan.4 In the teens, twenties, and thirties, the transportation revolution entered a new phase. Cities built streetcars that connected downtown districts with industrial and residential developments springing up on the outskirts of the city lines. They laid light rail to nearby mountains and beaches. In surrounding villages and towns, new train stations appeared in rapid succession, and by the interwar period most provincial cities could boast several station stops instead of a single central station. If Meiji was the ‘railroad age’, Taishō was the era of light rail. On average, 320 kilometers of track were added every year, reaching 5,000 kilometers of track nation-wide in the mid-1920s (Hashimoto and Hayashi 1987: 124). A spate of road building that straightened and widened city streets and created thoroughfares to nearby towns and villages accompanied the diffusion of the iron track. Together these new transportation grids extended the economic reach of the city, expanding the boundaries of local labour, commodity, and retail markets. The impact registered most dramatically on the rural communities located in close proximity to cities, which were brought through transport into subordinate relationships to the city. What had formerly been autonomous, self-sustaining villages now became orbital communities and extensions of the urban economy – part of a larger field of economic specialization that reorganized social and productive space. New geographic divisions of labour and specialization of land use turned nearby villages into economic dependents, even as many were slated for annexation. Urban expansionism, with its characteristic geography of orbital villages, represented a phenomenon widely embraced by urban boosters in the interwar period. The institutions that supported urban expansionism included municipal governments and their expanded authority through city planning and social policy. Urban power drew on the interests of private enterprise – real estate developers, manufacturing firms, the leisure and tourist industry – and their increasingly powerful business organizations. Municipal powerbrokers deployed all the considerable tools at their disposal to promote urban growth, disseminating an urban-centric view of the countryside under the banner of the ‘big city’ (dai toshi) movements that flourished in the teens and twenties. Throughout the country, cities adopted the prefix ‘great’: Tokyo became Dai-Tokyo; Sapporo became Dai-Sapporo.When the language of ‘Greater Sapporo’ and ‘Greater Niigata’ infused the lexicon of urban administration and business plans, cities loomed larger: they were monumentalized. The new rhetoric of ‘big-ness’ signaled a kind of urban triumphalism, a widespread embrace of the legitimacy of urban expansion, of a manifest destiny of cities to colonize the countryside. The urban expansionism set in motion by the transportation revolution possessed a voracious appetite for land. Niigata’s experience was a common one, revealing how demographic growth generated intense outward pressure to alleviate the shortage of housing at factory sites. Niigata’s population rose from 65,475 in 1912 to 131,675 in 1930, an increase arising partly from the amalgamation of Nuttari village, but also from a significant in-migration to the city. Growth of industry and population influx created an acute housing shortage. In 1924, of the 20,850 urban households in Niigata, 5,422 owned their own home (Niigata-ken 1988: 393). Many of these were long-time Niigata residents, who lived in neighbourhoods like Furumachi and Honchō, 300

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the old city centre near the entry ramps to Bandai Bridge. Only limited rental housing was available in these areas, mostly along the backs of commercial property. New rental housing was erected in Gakkōchō and Tanakachō to accommodate the new arrivals, whether they came for white-collar employment or as factory hands. Much of this was shoddy construction for factory workers and day labourers, but even middle-class housing was sub-standard and subject to collapse. With new oil processing factories built along the Shinano River, working-class tenements sprang up in Sekiya, at Niigata’s ragged urban edge. Amalgamated with Niigata district prior to its incorporation as a city in 1889, the west side neighbourhood grew rapidly, even before the Echigo Railway opened Sekiya Station in 1913. In 1888 Sekiya’s population comprised 88 households (572 individuals); by 1911 it expanded to 306 households, with a total population of 1,573 (Niigata-shi 1996: 427–9). Niigata was not alone in experiencing this pace of growth. Here, as elsewhere, the development of factories and housing along the urban edge propelled cities to chew up agricultural land along their peripheries. The drive toward suburbanization had begun. Urban expansionism also brought nearby farming villages into the orbit of the city. Turned into agricultural suppliers for the urban economy, such villages simultaneously became dependent for commercial supplies on the urban market, drawing them ever more tightly into the economic orbit of the city. And like suburbanization, economic integration proceeded rapidly in the wake of the railroad. In Niigata’s case, for example, commercial life was decentralized and dispersed among the nearby farm villages prior to the advent of rail. Both the city of Niigata as well as its proximate agricultural villages possessed retail economies; the latter were largely independent of the Niigata market. Nearby villages like Nuttari, Ryōkawa, Matsugasakihama, and Uchinō that relied on river transport all ran thriving markets and supported a small number of merchants along their main streets. Markets were held three times a month and typically drew between thirty and fifty stalls that sold foodstuffs, secondhand clothing, sundries, and other goods for daily life. In spite of its size and more extensive range of goods, nearby residents travelled to Niigata infrequently, perhaps once or twice a year. This situation began to change dramatically around the turn of the century. With the establishment of railway stations in Nuttari and Niigata, both sites became commercial centres for the local region. The number and frequency of their markets rose and merchant establishments proliferated. In nearby villages, markets did not disappear, but the mix of goods available for sale changed (Niigata-shi 1996: 361–4). Villages like Toriyano and Ishiyama focused on vegetables, with particular hamlets concentrating on single crops like radish or eggplant. Other villages brought out new crops such as tomato and cabbage (Niigata-shi 1997: 98–100). In this way, regional transportation grids extended the reach of Niigata’s urban economy, turning farmers in nearby villages into producers for and consumers of an expanded, urban-centred market. Whether it was houses or vegetables that took their place, the rice paddies were gone and the countryside would never the look the same. Urban expansionism and the passion for ‘bigness’ were reflected in the ongoing waves of annexations in the teens, twenties, and thirties – an urban juggernaut with no end in sight. In Sapporo, sections of four of its seven satellite villages were annexed in 1910, adding over 10,000 people to the city population. Another major annexation occurred in 1934. Niigata amalgamated the neighbouring village of Nuttari in pieces in 1915 and 1918, almost doubling the footprint of the city (Niigata-shi 1997: 12–16). Extended negotiations with three nearby villages in the 1930s yielded a major amalgamation in 1943, multiplying its territory nearly fourfold and increasing the population to 191,000 (Niigata-shi 1997: 378–81). Kanazawa annexed parts of three nearby villages in 1910 and 1925, and Okayama amalgamated nearby villages in 1899, 1921, and 1931 (Okayama-shi 1989: 163–78;Tōkyō Shisei Chōsakai 1931: 1–7, 24–6).The 301

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consequences of these annexations varied widely for the communities involved, though disparities in both costs and benefits tended to get lost in the consuming fever for growth. The concatenation of multiple forces – the transportation revolution, the urban planning movement, as well as the physical, demographic, and economic growth of cities – triggered a rethinking of the meaning of the countryside in interwar Japan. Suburban development offered a variety of templates for re-imagining modern rural space. The passion for urban ‘bigness’ altered the metrics of land use value, privileging urban demands on the land. In a world where growth was seen as both good and inevitable, the city appeared destined to triumph over a countryside in retreat. The metaphors that dominated visions of the country in the new urban– rural system invoked consumption: the inexorable devouring of the countryside in the face of the urban juggernaut.

The past in the present Rapid urbanization of the interwar created new challenges for cities as they tried to deal with the dramatic changes in everyday life.The population churn generated by an increasingly mobile labour force destabilized urban communities, as newcomers to the city constituted an increasing share of the local demographic. The city became a melting pot, dissolving the social memory of community that rested on the geographic stability of successive generations of residents. As the communications revolution expanded the territorial jurisdiction of the city and the building boom of the teens and twenties remade its built environment, the predictability and familiarity of the cityscape seemed to disappear. Such changes created a crisis of socialization for municipal governments. As increasingly clamorous social groups competed for public space and political representation, for access to resources and city services, new questions arose:Whose city was it going to be? How could these antagonistic forces be reconfigured into a workable social unit? One response to these questions emerged in the context of regional culture movements, where visions of local community provided new grounds upon which to build a sense of belonging. As they cast about for material from which to fashion a cohesive identity, municipal leaders stretched the meaning of the city, installing the belief that the rising urban centres of the twentieth century represented natural communities drawing on a shared cultural heritage. One expression of this was the local history movement that spread across the country. In the north, Akita’s local historians published more than eighty works in the years before 1945, half of these in the 1930s (Taguchi 1983: 225). On the Japan Sea coast, every county in Ishikawa brought out its own history, as did many villages. The first wave of prefectural histories emerged at this time, such as the two-volume ‘General History of Okayama Prefecture’ (1930) or the four-volume ‘New History of Hokkaido’ (1936). This was also the founding moment for city histories, which ran into multiple volumes produced over years, sometimes even decades. Barely forty years after its founding, Sapporo brought out its first city history, a fat volume that topped a thousand pages. In 1934 Niigata published a two-volume study twice this length, and Kanazawa produced an astonishing fourteen-volume city history between 1916 and 1937.5 The local history movement produced new forms of knowledge that linked localities with a particular temporality. Through the construction of distinctive narratives of a place – its origins, its turning points, and its defining features – local identity became tied to local time. In the process, local scholars invented the quintessentially modern form of local history – the urban biography. As the ‘Niigata City History’ put it, ‘just as nations have national histories and families have genealogies, local communities (kyōdo) have their own histories’ (Niigata-shi 1934: 1). Both

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the clan and the nation were symbolic reference points for the new urban biographies. Drawing heavily on the models and inspiration of national historiography, the profusion of urban biographies brought out in the twenties and thirties told the story of the city as the birth and rise of an organic community that was rooted in a particular place. And yet, local historians did not make their community into a microcosm of the nation, nor did they draw their accounts simply in reaction or reference to the larger national story. Rather, these histories laid down a set of timelines specific to each community: historical time was heterogeneous, not uniform. Within the narrative frame of the urban biography, the single historical timeline of the nation was inhabited by the multiple temporalities of the local. The timelines of local history became a core component of the narrative form of urban biography. For example, the life history of Sapporo was organized around colonization and settlement, an account disseminated to local residents through elementary school textbooks like the ‘Sapporo Geography Primer’ (1927). Tracing the city’s origins back to the age of exploration in the late eighteenth century when Hokkaido was still called ‘Ezo Island’, the ‘Sapporo Geography Primer’ told how shogunate agent Kondō Jūzō (1771–1829) toured the Ishikari Plain and settled on the site of present-day Sapporo as a good location for the capital of Hokkaido.The Japanese took the name of the prefectural capital from the Ainu word Satoporo, a term used to describe their fishing grounds along the Toyohira River. With the establishment of the Colonization Bureau in the 1870s, magistrate Shima Yoshitake began the programme of urban construction that transformed Sapporo from wilderness to civilization, clearing the forests of elm and oak where deer and bear roamed freely to make way for paved streets and government buildings. Settlers arrived, ‘and they bravely endured life in the forest and helped to build the city . . . Roads were laid, bridges erected; the city grew and thrived’ (Sapporo-shi Shōgakkō Kyōiku Kenkyūkai Chirika Kenkyūbu 1927: 3). Statues in city parks and along the city’s main thoroughfare commemorated Sapporo’s founding fathers, agents of the Meiji government who devoted themselves to the building of the city and the colonization of Hokkaido (Sapporo-shi Shōgakkō Kyōiku Kenkyūkai Chirika Kenkyūbu 1927: 1–5). The history texts and the network of commemorative statuary worked together to shape public understandings of Sapporo as a showcase settlement. Colonization and the transformation from wilderness to civilization became central to the narrative of urban progress, a triumphalist storyline of expanding government, services, and urban-based collective life. Other cities had different story lines. For Niigata, the logic of the port drove the chronology. New histories of the city were written to commemorate the expansion of the port in the twenties, they told the story of city in terms of its development as a port town and centre of trade. Niigata’s epochal moments, its dramatic turns were determined by the rise and fall in the fortunes of the harbour. As the urban anthem, ‘Niigata Port Song’ proclaimed, ‘This village that served as harbour for river boats for many generations became one of the five ports that governed Japan’s routes to the sea’. Pointing to the moment when Niigata joined Kobe and Yokohama as an open port in the mid-nineteenth century, the song highlighted the role of Niigata’s port in ushering in the era of civilization and enlightenment for the country and urban growth for the city (unpaginated front matter of Junkan Niigatasha 1936). Whereas the Niigata story had been one of ‘humble beginnings; leap to greatness’, Kana­ zawa’s urban biography traced out a history of decline and recovery. During the 300 years of the great peace the samurai lived beneath the castle that commanded 1,000,000 koku [of rice revenue]. . . . Under successive administrations they avoided intercourse with other domains and like the still water at the bottom of a well grew accustomed to the safety and security of this untroubled time. Lacking the stimulation of the

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struggle for survival, there was little of the spirit of enterprise and action . . . people were complacent and self-satisfied with their place at the centre of Japan’s back coast (ura Nihon). (Kanazawa-shi 1928: 139) For Niigata the Edo period signified a sleepy time of river transport, for Kanazawa it stood for stagnancy and complacency. Warning its citizens against ‘remaining intoxicated with the rosy dreams of . . . the ancient metropolis’, the ‘Kanazawa Citizen’s Reader’ insisted that to ‘grow and expand’ required the ‘total elimination of the deeply conservative ideas that permeated the inner core of our townspeople over the Tokugawa years’ (Kanazawa-shi 1928: 139–41). Only eviscerating the past and embracing its opposite – movement, dynamism, and expansion – could guarantee Kanazawa’s future. Unlike Kanazawa, whose samurai community had been shattered by the social and economic transformations of early Meiji, Okayama experienced an easier transition to the new capitalist order. Perhaps because of this, the eulogies to urban progress that circulated in Okayama took a different approach to the city’s heritage as a castle town, viewing the past as a potential resource for future progress.Thus, the ‘Okayama City Song’ celebrated the city’s heritage as a castle town: The sites of old Bizen, redolent of a great past, Like the smart colours of the tower of Ujō Castle Or the striking cranes of Kōrakuen Gardens, These scenic places that still evoke the spirits of illustrious retainers and wise rulers. Ah! Our own great Okayama city (‘Okayama-shi ka’ in Kobayashi 1932: 42) The multiple timelines of local identity stamped these cities with their character – whether it was the pioneer spirit of Sapporo, the varied legacies of the castle town in Kanazawa and Okayama, or Niigata – the rise of a great trading entrepôt. In the place of the charismatic heroes and epochal events that children learned about through national history texts, the local history movement introduced a separate set of distinctive protagonists and telling episodes. These flattering urban biographies did not displace a national history erected on a wider stage, but they did not make the stories come together, either. Rather, local history asserted the primacy of the local urban frame: the city constituting an indivisible unit with its own story to tell. Urban biographies of Kanazawa were entirely self-referential, conveying the message of a self-made city, a force unto itself. Local storytellers turned the city into an organic community and a sovereign subject. Together with the local history movement, the rapidly developing tourist industry provided another powerful vehicle for the broadcast of a temporally inflected urban identity.6 Throughout the twenties and thirties, railway companies, municipalities, and chambers of commerce undertook a series of campaigns to promote domestic tourism, part of a larger project to stimulate economic development. An outpouring of local travel guides shaped a new image of the provincial city for both visitors and residents. Here, local boosters packaged their communities as tourist attractions, presenting their cities as a glittering necklace of meisho – or famous sites – each of which captured the character and distinctiveness of the city and which together accounted for its magnetic appeal. Like the reinvention of Mount Fuji as a famous site and icon of the nation, local famous sites were reinvented as symbols of the local community, places that linked past and present and bound the community through time. Guidebooks encouraged people to experience the famous site in this way by highlighting the juxtaposition of new and old, the connection of past and present that was crystallized in the famous place. For example, atop the list of Niigata’s tourist attractions sat Hakusan Park, a so-called ‘new famous place’ created in 1873 on the site of the 304

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old Hakusan Shrine. Descriptions of the shrine in the ‘Niigata City Guide’ (1918) pointed to the remains of an ancient pine forest in a corner of the park and described its former glory, ‘when people used to illuminate lanterns in the evening to light the way for boats travelling on the nearby river’ (Niigata Shisei Kisha Kurabu 1918). Readers were called on to mourn the lost pines and to cherish those that remained as a relic of times past. In much the same vein, an Okayama guidebook directed visitors to the scenic Takashima Park, with its breathtaking views of the inland sea and the iconic outlook onto the Takashima Island shrine. Modern attractions included a sunbathing beach and amenities for a family day out, but the haunting view of the famous shrine with its ancient links to Emperor Jimmu called attention to Okayama’s connections with the archaic (Okayama-shi Kangyōka 1927: 80–81). In such descriptions, viewers were instructed to visualize a site of scenic beauty as an inscription of a particular history, a juxtaposition of past and present that connected the modern city with its primordial roots. In these ways, guidebooks of the interwar gave the modern city a quality of pentimento, where the earlier image of the cityscape showed through the modern surface and conveyed the sense of the city as the accumulated experience of generations that had lived in the same spot. The conceptualization of ‘the city’ as an organic community that developed through time represented one product of the local history movements of the interwar. Here the technologies of nationalism – both imagined communities and invented traditions – were applied to the creation of urban identities and the city idea. Much like nations and nationalism, cities and urban centrism were newly constructed forms and ideologies that masked their modern origins under the veil of primordialism.Although local histories created origins myths that reached back through the mists of time and plotted urban development as the natural growth of an organic community, the expansion of modern Japanese cities was neither spontaneous nor natural. The modern urban form emerged through the 1889 administrative reforms that establish Meiji cities as administrative-political units with territorial jurisdictions; the modern city took shape over the succeeding decades with the growth of urban-based industry. Upon this foundation, the local history movement constructed the form of urban biography and the idea of the city as a cultural community that existed through time. Spread through the folklore movement and the tourist industry, such ideas became core elements in the ideology of the modern city. Like the presumed isomorphism of the nation that imagined an identity between people, economy, and territory, the city idea brought territory and culture into a single unit. Deploying this idea, guidebooks and local history texts interpellated urban residents, calling them to a sense of membership in their urban communities.

The cult of the new While local history texts equated their cities with a past life-world, at the same time provincial cities shared with the metropolis the identification of the city with modern life and the world of tomorrow. Complementing the regional history movement, chambers of commerce and municipal governments put local development plans in motion that harnessed the city idea to a forward-facing time horizon. Guidebooks trumpeted the modern face of the city, pointing with pride to the transformation of the built environment and its iconic symbols – new ‘famous places’ like department stores and station buildings. City fathers celebrated their locales as technotopias filled with engineering wonders – multistoried buildings, elevators and escalators, and magical instruments like telescopes and radios – holding out a tantalizing vision of an uncertain future controlled by technology. These discourses on local development and futurism interlinked the city idea with a cult of the new. Urban boosters saw cities in terms of their potential, projecting forward rosy scenarios of economic and social development. Embracing growth, bigness, speed, and acceleration, the cult of the new celebrated an aesthetic of dynamism and vitality. Although the metropolitan 305

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establishment promoted the idea that modern institutions were invented in Tokyo and exported to the provinces, the discourse on ‘the new’ in cities outside the capital suggested that progress was etched in local colours. Like the multiple temporalities of local history, individual cities offered particular timelines into the future. Running counter to the image of ‘hometown’ produced in the capital that figured localities as a world of yesterday, provincial cities imagined themselves in terms of chronotopes of a future-space. Although urban biography particularized the identity of ‘Niigata’ or ‘Kanazawa’, projections of the future could also make regional particularity converge on a singular set of images of the modern city. Here stereotypes of local cities as a marker of difference operated in tension with a more universal model of urban modernity. While paeans to progress showcased the regional brand and celebrated local colour, projections of the cities of tomorrow – with their neon towns and modern girls, their high-rise department stores and wide, paved boulevards – tended to make all moderns look the same. As urban futurism turned the association of the city with the future into an axiom of modern life, the cult of the new became a cult of the same. These competing images of an urban past as (mostly) different and an urban future as (mostly) the same created a tension within the city idea between universalism and particularism. As people came to understand the city as a time-space – a place with a past, present, and future – they also embraced the doubled identity of the modern urbanite. Kanazawa residents embodied local culture: they spoke the dialect and they took part in local festivals. They could list the best restaurants, where to go for a bird’s eye view of the cityscape, and perhaps even recite the city song. Familiarity with this system of local knowledge defined what it meant to be ‘from Kanazawa’. But Kana­ zawa residents also thought of themselves as urban, a self-perception that bound them with city dwellers throughout the country and that set them apart from rural people. Urban residents embodied modern culture. They lived in a place with baseball fields and movie palaces. They worked in offices and factories. They rode trains and dealt with traffic. In this sense city dwellers lived a double life: they embodied a collective past that set them apart from other regional communities and a collective future that bound them together with other urban communities. The new idea of ‘the city’ contained within it both the sense that particularized pasts shaped the present as well as a belief in an increasingly homogeneous future. The idea that urban = future emerged with particular force in the context of a fad for industrial fairs in the interwar period. Throughout the country, cities hosted industrial fairs as a tool for promoting economic development and countering slumping production. Kanazawa, Sapporo, Okayama, and Niigata all held industrial fairs and committed enormous resources to build fairgrounds, expand transport infrastructure, and spruce up their cities in advance of the fairs; they spent years planning and preparing for these events which brought millions of visitors to their communities. Sapporo sponsored one exhibition in 1918 and another in 1926. The first commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the colonization of Hokkaido. Planning for the exhibition began in 1914 with an initial budget of 330,000 yen, which rose to 459,349 yen by 1918. The city placed 34,000 articles on display at three separate fair grounds, two within Sapporo and a third in the nearby city of Otaru. During the fifty days of the fair, officials recorded 1,420,000 visitors to the main site at Sapporo’s Nakajima Park; 8,000 alone came on opening day. Both the city and the prefecture made significant investments in infrastructure to prepare for the exhibition. The horse-drawn city tram was electrified, and twenty new buses were put into circulation to carry people between the central station and the fairgrounds. The city experienced a construction boom as new hotels and shops went up, the display halls were built, and amenities at Nakajima Park were improved.The central rail station, as the gateway to the city, gained three magnificent renaissance-style arches, erected in front of Sapporo station to constitute a welcome gate at a cost of 4,700 yen (Sapporo-shi Kyōiku Iinkai 1994: 661–71). 306

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Industrial fairs became a forum for exhibiting local progress as well as for the creation of urban and regional ‘brands’. The idea of local branding guided the organization of Sapporo’s second exhibition, the National Products Exposition of 1926. Of the forty-five buildings on the main fair grounds, the majority was devoted to the exhibition and sale of regional products. Organizers encouraged participants to ‘display the distinctive characteristics of regional production’ and raise public awareness of the distribution of regional industry (Kokusan Shinkō Hakurankai Hensanbu 1927: 131–2). As the locus of advanced manufacture and home to the broadest array of products, cities held a special position within the mosaic of distinctive regional brands. At the Sapporo Special Products Fair, Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto mounted their own exhibits. Japan’s three major cities projected a kind of ‘superbrand’, capturing certain emblematic elements of the national culture. While the promotional material described Tokyo as ‘the fashion capital’, Kyoto was characterized as the ‘city of arts and crafts’ and Osaka as the ‘city of commerce and industry’ (Kokusan Shinkō Hakurankai Hensanbu 1927: 170). Though the three municipalities were presented as centres of a national economic culture, in this context they provided the backdrop to the city of Sapporo, which occupied centre stage. Just as the mosaic of prefectural displays in the main exhibition hall was set up to showcase the rich distinctiveness of Hokkaido’s regional economy, the metropolitan superbrands provided a frame for Sapporo to promote its own unique urban brand. Housed in a spacious hall of its own, the Sapporo exhibition text wove the identity of the city into its manufactures: The top class products seen on display here have developed out of the history of manufacturing in Hokkaido. Beginning with hemp spinning, and moving to beer, bricks, lumber, and leather manufacture, eventually all kinds of industries established a manufacturing base here. A national market for goods showed that Greater Sapporo has a bright future as a commercial and industrial city. (Kokusan Shinkō Hakurankai Hensanbu 1927: 283–4) Beyond the exhibition halls of the industrial fairs, streetscapes of cities transformed by the interwar building boom offered an open-air venue for the display of revolutionary technology. Electrification of streets, homes, and factories; widening and paving of roadways; railway and streetcar expansion; wharf, bridge, and tunnel construction; and the erection of more and bigger buildings turned cityscapes into objects of curiosity and wonderment. Magazine commentary and city guides trumpeted the eruption of an eclectic modernist architecture into their midst. Photograph collections and picture postcards captured the new multi-story buildings from angles that emphasized their height and bulk and highlighted their exotic facades. Artists were fascinated by the geometry of the new rows of electrical lines, the rail grids, and straight paved streets. The photographs that adorned the pages of guidebooks emphasized the newness of these buildings by juxtaposing recent constructions with pictures of Edo-period structures. A 1926 Niigata guidebook featured a photograph of the traditional wooden bridge that marked the entry to the city’s landmark Hakusan Shrine, opposite a photo of the recently rebuilt Bandai Bridge, sleek and modern. One marked the entry to a sacred space that preserved the spirit of an earlier incarnation of the city; the latter marked the gateway into ‘Greater Niigata’ (Jitsugyō no Annaisha 1926). Other photos showed the gleaming new facilities of the recently expanded wharf, with several large ocean liners in dock. A guidebook favourite was the panoramic view of the city taken from the roof of a downtown building (Satō 1936). Such devices emphasized those elements of the city that were newly developed and where engineering science created a modernist façade for the built environment. The keen admiration for grand height and scale, like the fixation on the panoramic viewpoint, reflected a desire to grasp the city in a single gaze. 307

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In contrast to the traditional ‘famous sites’ that captured the cultural essence of older urban space, these so-called ‘new famous sites’ illustrated the marvels of science and engineering. And whereas the ‘old meisho’ opened a window into previous life worlds that left traces of the past in the present, the ‘new meisho’ emphasized change and novelty. In a typical example, the Okayama Shinpō designated the prefecture’s first ‘sunken highway’ as a ‘new famous site’. Opened with great fanfare in 1936, National Highway 2 ran from Okayama to the neighbouring city of Kurashiki. At a point in the city where the road crossed the main rail tracks, instead of creating a level crossing the city engineered the road to run under the tracks. As the newspaper triumphantly announced on 1 May 1936, Okayama’s sunken highway was the ‘first of its kind’. The magnificent scale of the construction reflects a desire to appeal to pedestrians. Made entirely of concrete, the sunken roadway is flanked on both sides by elevated walkways that are separated from the road by a blue painted iron railing.The whole project cost 56,414 yen. (San’yō Shinbunsha 1990: 300) Monumental architecture – bridges, tunnels, and multi-story buildings – highlighted the ways that engineers were remaking the physical environment of the city. The power of the engineer to control the built environment offered an appealing metaphor for an urban citizenry whose social environment felt so volatile and unpredictable. The city idea that took hold in the 1920s and 1930s recast urban space as a chronotope. If the late nineteenth century provided the moment when the nation crystallized the nexus of timespace, in interwar Japan the time-space of the modern coalesced around the social imaginary of the city. The turn from nation to city shifted the iconography of the modern. The modern monarch, the steam railway, and the young men of Meiji setting forth to enlighten themselves and their nation, these were the symbols of the new age and the new Japan in the late nineteenth century. By World War I, the ‘modern girl’ emerged as the preeminent symbol of modern life, the automobile and the streetcar eclipsed the train as the emblems of the new age, and the city stood as the shining beacon into Japan’s future. The regionalist movements of Japan’s interwar cities bequeathed to later generations libraries, museums, folklore associations, and a host of other institutions.They also helped produce a new concept of ‘the city’ – one which imagined the city not simply as a point on a map, but a community that existed through time, bound by a shared set of cultural practices and a common history. Cities were defined by their economic base and local brand; they were stamped with the personalities of their founding fathers. They were also projects, the locus of planning efforts and development schemes. This meant the modern city was forward looking: it anticipated the future and created opportunities to grow and improve. In Japan, as elsewhere, the particular configurations of the city took their characteristic modern form in the early decades of the twentieth century. This is not to claim that all of Japanese urbanism traces its roots to this single origin point, but rather that the explosive urban growth, the urban-focused social and cultural movements, and the extensive institution building that took place in these years left their mark on the formative structures of the modern city. Just as proliferating networks of railroads and schools generated competing impulses toward standardization and differentiation, regionalist movements produced tensions between universalism and particularism within the urban form. In the tracks of regional identity, historians and folklorists contributed to the idea of the city as a cultural community that persisted through time. In pursuit of urban development, business organizations cultivated a distinctive local brand associated with a regional culture of production. Alongside such agents of urban particularism, the spread of a service economy, the communications revolution, and other institutions of urbanexpansionism shaped a shared experience of modern city life, where the seeming ubiquity of 308

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department stores, the rush hour, and other phenomenology of the modern portended a single timeline to the future. Much like nations, cities are composed of both institutions and ideas; they are grounded in material and ideological power. As I conceive it, ‘the city’ encompassed the underlying material structures, institutional scaffolding, and built environment of the city, as well as the social and cultural networks that together gave it shape. It also included the social imaginaries, thought experiments, and ideological currents that ran through the city idea. Thus, on the one hand Tokyo-centrism represented an ideology that naturalized the uneven distribution of resources and channeled wealth and talent to the centre. The ideology of metropolis concealed this flow toward the centre beneath a narrative of diffusion and advance, masking the provincial origins of metropolitan culture and encouraging the self-marginalization of regional culture. But on the other hand, Tokyo-centrism signified the structures that produced and reproduced Tokyo’s dominance – the system of higher education, publishing institutions, and the social formation of the literati. The same was true for urban expansionism and the railroad, which were at once a set of ideas – the imperative of growth, the mystique of the railway – and institutions – city planning regulations, the railroad grid. Cities became imagined communities and agents of the future through industrial expositions and the images they disseminated, local history texts and the urban biographies they invented, tourist guidebooks and the ideologically saturated concept of the meisho. Like two sides of the same coin, thought and institutions, ideology and structure, the city idea and the urban form came together to constitute ‘the city’.

Notes 1 Classic examples are Minami 1965; 1987/1990.Though the essays in these volumes on Taishō and Shōwa culture claim to speak for a ‘Japanese mass culture’, the data for analysis are drawn virtually exclusively from Tokyo. In English, Edward Seidensticker’s authoritative account of the metropolis likewise collapses the history of Tokyo culture with Japanese intellectual and cultural history (Seidensticker 1983; 1990). 2 Kanazawa was also home to critic Miyake Setsurei (1860–1945), philosopher Nishida Kitarō (1870– 1945), and religious thinker Suzuki Daisetsu (1870–1966). Studies of writers from Kanazawa include Torrance 1994 and Silverberg 1990. 3 The eponymous essay ‘Ushinawareta kokyō’ was first published in 1933. 4 Today this term retains a stigmatizing nuance and because of protest by regional politicians, the mass media refrains from using it (Furumaya 1997). 5 Okayama also published a city history in this period, though it was a comparatively modest single volume (Okayama-ken 1987: 649; Kanazawa-shi 1916–37; Sapporo-ku 1911; Niigata-shi 1934). 6 The central agency for organized tourism in prewar Japan, the Japan Tsūristo Byūrō (JTB) was founded in 1912, initially to promote foreign tourism in Japan and its colonies. Recognizing the possibilities of using tourism as tool for cultural policy and economic development, the government expanded JTB to focus on Japanese travellers in 1924 and merged the two organizations in 1934. JTB maintained an expanding network of service centres in cities throughout Japan and the empire; it produced travel literature and the magazine Tabi (Travel). JTB worked with the Bureau of Railways to promote passenger travel on the national rail network and with the Home and Education Ministries to develop group summer travel programmes for school children designed to encourage hiking, skiing, and mountain climbing. These and other sports-related tourism to the countryside as a form of public health. Tourism became a major element of fascist cultural policy in the 1930s. See Takaoka 1993: 9–52.

Further reading Seidensticker, Edward (1983) Low City, High City:Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake: How the Shogun’s Ancient Capital Became a Great Modern City, 1867–1923, New York: Knopf. _____ (1990) Tokyo Rising:The City Since the Great Earthquake, New York: Knopf. Young, Louise (2013) Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan, University of California Press. 309

22 Cooperatives and grassroots developments Tessa Morris-Suzuki

Japan as a ‘cooperative mecca’ Between late 1935 and the summer of 1936, as America and the world struggled with the aftermath of the Great Depression, an event described as ‘one of the greatest speaking tours ever carried out in this country’ took place in the United States. The star of this phenomenon was a soft-faced, elegantly dressed man in his late forties, who mesmerized the crowds with speeches delivered in the dramatic tones of an evangelical preacher and in heavily accented English. He travelled across the length and breadth of North America, visiting some 200 communities in the United States and Canada and receiving a rapturous welcome from supporters who likened him to Mahatma Gandhi and St. Francis of Assisi (see Figures 22.1 and 22.2). The speaking tour inspired the creation of the U.S. social movement whose disciples would ultimately range from to Mississippi sharecroppers to New York advertising executives.1 The speaker who evoked such excitement and devotion – but who also stirred alarm and criticism in some quarters – was Japanese Christian activist Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960), and the message he brought to the United States was the gospel of cooperativism (Figure 22.3). The thousands of Americans who flocked to hear Kagawa learnt that over 5 million Japanese were members of the country’s Cooperative Federation and were introduced to the Christian socialist’s political vision of a ‘cooperative commonwealth’ in which laws would be drawn up by industrial and social congresses directly elected by members of labour unions and cooperatives, respectively (Kagawa 1936: 14; Kagawa 1937: 119, 159). The vision of Japan as a cooperative mecca had obvious appeal to Americans who were looking for an alternative to the capitalist competition that had culminated in the Great Depression, but needed an alternative free from the taint of communism. Kagawa’s Christian and vehemently anti-communist cooperativism seemed to offer a perfect solution. Both the brief cooperative boom in the United States and the public adulation of Kagawa faded with the onset of the Pacific War, but a number of the American consumer co-ops launched at that time still survive and still acknowledge their historical debt to Kagawa Toyohiko (Cooperative Development Institute 2015). In Japan itself, meanwhile, the cooperative movement revived and expanded after the Asia-Pacific War, and by the first decade of the twenty-first century, as John Restakis points out, Japan’s consumer cooperatives

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Figure 22.1 Simulated stained-glass window installed in Grant Community Church, Michigan, to celebrate Kagawa Toyohiko’s 1936 tour of the United States (The Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University, New York).

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Figure 22.2 Illustration from a pamphlet promoting a lecture by Kagawa Toyohiko at Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 1936 (The Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University, New York).

had almost 17 million members ‘making them the largest organized consumer movement in the world’ (Restakis 2010: 118). In the decades following Japan’s high-growth era of the 1960s and early 1970s, Japan was often portrayed internationally as a model of state-encouraged capitalist development and of corporate management. But with the exception of the brief co-op boom in the 1930s United States, Japan has rarely seen as a model for cooperativism or other alternative visions of economic life. In very recent years, though, the search for post–Cold War alternatives to corporate capitalism has evoked a new interest in cooperativism, and a growing number of commentators worldwide have once again begun (sometimes in very rosy terms) to depict Japan as a model ‘cooperative commonwealth’ (for example, Thompson 2008). This seems a good moment to reassess the long, rich, and complex tradition of cooperativism in Japan, to consider both its positive and negative impacts on Japanese social and political life, and to examine its continuing influence on Japan today.

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Figure 22.3 Signed pamphlet promoting a lecture by Kagawa Toyohiko at Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 1936 (The Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University, New York).

The origins of Japanese cooperatives Japan’s modern cooperative movement was built on a long history of rural mutual aid. Historian Tetsuo Najita provides a vivid account of one mutual aid society in the small community of Munakata, near the city of Fukuoka, which in the early nineteenth century collected funds from some 150 local households and used them to provide medical treatment in times of need. Najita cites Japanese research suggesting that the origins of Japan’s modern health insurance system lie as much in these pre-Meiji mutual aid traditions as they do in Western ideas of social welfare (Tetsuo 2009: 62–3). Mutual aid societies, generally known as tanomoshi kō or mujin kō, existed widely throughout Japan in the Edo period (1603–1868). Some scholars trace their origins back

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as far as the thirteenth century. Kagawa Toyohiko argued that they had been introduced to Japan from China, where similar organizations, known as hehui (and also as wujin or shehui) had existed since ancient times (Ogata 1923; Kagawa 1937: 154;  Tetsuo 2009: 67). Japanese kō operated in various ways in different times and places, but most involved schemes where villagers pooled money to assist those in need of a sum larger than their personal savings, and many operated a form of lottery to distribute the proceeds of the savings scheme amongst members of the community (Embree 1939: 138–40; Tetsuo 2009: 66). Some Japanese historians of the cooperative movement have dismissed these early endeavours as ‘pre-modern remnants’, to be viewed as quite distinct from modern cooperativism (Okutani 1938: 7). But the mutual aid societies survived well into the twentieth century, and many pioneers of modern cooperativism in Japan drew inspiration from such groups. Kagawa notes, for example, that in the mid-1930s some 15,000 families in Waka­ yama (a city with a total population of around 150,000) belonged to tanomoshi kō (Kagawa 1937: 155). One important strand to emerge from this tradition of mutual aid and communal self-help was the hōtoku movement, inspired by the ideas of the renowned rural reformer Ninomiya Sontoku (1787–1856). A self-educated thinker from eastern Japan, Ninomiya developed a philosophy which embedded economic life in a moral system where humans were deeply immersed in the forces and cycles of the natural world. To survive natural disasters and enhance the riches derived from the natural world, Ninomiya proposed a system whereby farmers would pay about a quarter of their post-tax income into a shared fund to be used for communal welfare and development activities (Tetsuo 2009: 104–40; Ogata 1923: 25–41). Ninomiya’s ideas were later developed by his disciples and became particularly influential in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan. By 1918, there were over 500 hōtokusha (returning virtue societies) all over Japan, 348 of them operating under the umbrella of a nationwide Dai Nippon Hōtokusha (Ogata 1923: 49). Many of these operated not only as mutual aid systems but also as vehicles for moral instruction, offering lectures to farmers on the virtues of diligence and thrift. As Japanese society faced the challenges of incorporation into a global economy in the mid-nineteenth century, a number of rural communities, building on the tradition of mutual aid, created cooperative enterprises in response to rapid economic change. Most of these were marketing co-ops, in which small-scale producers of goods like silk and tea banded together to create outlets to sell their produce on national and international markets. In other cases, farmers pooled their funds to buy expensive inputs like the commercial fertilizers. A survey by the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce in 1898 found 348 cooperatives in Japan: 141 credit, 141 marketing, 39 purchasing, 9 common use, and 14 production cooperatives (Okutani 1948: 21).

Importing and adapting Western cooperative ideas These early initiatives were generally spontaneous local responses to the demands of survival in a changing economy, but by the 1870s, some Japanese writers were also starting to be influenced by ideas of cooperativism which they encountered in their travels to Europe. Among them was Baba Takeyoshi, who had studied in Britain for two years (1873–75) and visited the Lancashire town of Rochdale, often regarded as the birthplace of the international cooperative movement. The Rochdale Equitable Pioneers’ Society, founded in 1844 by a group of local artisans, drew much of its inspiration from the work of earlier British and Irish social reformers such as Robert Owen (1771–1858) and William Thompson (1775–1833), but was the first British organization to create a viable and long-lasting movement based on cooperative principles. The Rochdale Pioneers created a store which sold daily necessities at reasonable prices, circumventing exploitation by commercial middlemen. All customers were also members of the cooperative association, received a fair share of the profits, and had the right to elect its managers. This modest 314

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beginning was ultimately to grow into a huge chain of cooperative stores and other business ventures that still exists today (Williams 2007: 10–11, 18).The key concept which Baba brought back from his visit to Rochdale was the idea of the cooperative shop, which he put into practice in 1878 by creating the Kyōritsu shōsha (Cooperative Trading Company). This established branches in Osaka and Kobe, but was unable to take firm root and had disappeared by the early twentieth century, leaving little trace of its activities (Okutani 1938: 69). During the second half of the nineteenth century the cooperative ideal spread widely throughout Europe and North America, and in 1895 an International Cooperative Alliance was established to link cooperatives across frontiers; but this was far from being a simple or unified movement. At one end of the spectrum were workers’ or consumer cooperatives closely linked to anarchist movements, which saw the cooperative as a key to transforming society from below (for example, Esenwein 1989: 13–4; Burbank 1986: 100); at the other end were a growing number of state-endorsed cooperatives (often focusing on the provision of credit), designed to promote economic growth and modernization while containing the danger of revolutionary social upheaval (Fairbairn 1994). In between were many experimental co-ops designed to further diverse and evolving social goals. As Brett Fairbairn puts it, ‘the cooperative was like a vessel into which each group could pour its ideology – and groups did so regardless of the founders’ visions’ (Fairbairn 1994: 1217). By the 1890s, a new current was entering Japanese cooperative thought via the emerging labour movement.The Rōdō kumiai kiseikai (Labour Union Establishment Association) created in 1897 by social activists including the Christian socialist Katayama Sen (1859–1933) helped to inspire an initiative by workers at the Tokyo arsenal, who, in the following year, set up their own cooperative store on Rochdale lines (Tomita 1976: 18). But these worker-initiated schemes had much less influence than a top-down, state-centred model of cooperativism aimed at securing social stability and encouraging thrift and diligence. The chief source of inspiration for these state-centred schemes was Germany, a country which by 1913 had over 34,000 cooperatives with a total membership of more than 6 million people (Fairbairn 1994: 1215). The main streams of nineteenth-century German cooperativism are associated with the names of two middle-class and cautiously reformist social entrepreneurs, Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch (1808–83) and Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen (1818–88). SchulzeDelitzsch’s focus was mainly on urban artisans and small business people, whose livelihoods he saw as being imperilled by the collapse of the old guild system and the rise of big business. To address these problems, he embarked on creating a network of cooperative credit institutions which were to operate on commercial lines without reliance government support (Holborn 1982: 116–7; Fairbairn 1994, 1219–20). Raiffeisen, by contrast, was a Catholic conservative village mayor who was particularly interested in the fate of rural communities in industrial society and developed a system of credit cooperatives which incorporated a strong element of moral and spiritual education. The introduction of these ideas into Japan, and their adaptation to Japanese conditions, followed a pattern familiar in many areas of Meiji-era state development policy. The key figures in the process were Shinagawa Yajirō (1843–1900), a former Chōshū samurai who had studied in England and Germany in the 1870s, and Hirata Tōsuke (1849–1925), a doctor’s son who had absorbed the Westernizing ideas of Fukuzawa Yukichi before taking part in the 1871 Iwakura Mission to Europe, where he met Shinagawa while studying in Berlin. Both men developed a keen interest in the German model of cooperatives, which they sought to put into practice during their subsequent careers as senior government officials: Shinagawa went on to become Minister for Home Affairs in the Matsukata government (1891–92), and Hirata became Minister for Agriculture and Commerce in the first Katsura government (1901–6) (Okutani 1948: 56–61). 315

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After a failed attempt in the 1890s to pass a law promoting credit cooperatives, in 1900 an Industrial Cooperatives Law (Sangyō kumiai-hō) was passed, providing an official framework to encourage the nationwide creation of cooperatives by small-scale producers. ‘Industrial’, in this context, did not mean manufacturing industry. The main focus was on farmers and small scale craft producers, and the law, closely modelled on German legislation of 1889, provided tax concessions and gave cooperatives easy access to finance from a newly established national network of agricultural banks. The Japanese version borrowed ideas freely both from Schulze-Delitzsch and from Raiffeisen, modifying them as local circumstances dictated (Ogata 1923: 118–9; Aoki 1972: 69–70). The Industrial Cooperative Law defined four categories: credit, marketing, purchasing, and production cooperatives, but of these, it was the first group that expanded most rapidly. By 1903, the number of registered co-ops was 870, of which 549 were credit cooperatives (Okutani 1948: 69–76). By 1923, this had risen to a total of some 13,700 registered cooperatives with a membership of around 2.6 million people (Ogata 1923: 92).

Top down and bottom up The Japanese experience vividly illustrates the ambivalence of the cooperative movement. The movement has the capacity to operate both as a vehicle for grassroots empowerment and as a vehicle for state social control. In the early years of the twentieth century, the credit and marketing cooperatives which sprang up in villages and towns all over Japan were, for the most part, local initiatives. A typical cooperative might be created by a group of a few dozen neighbours who wanted to address pressing needs for finance to undertake farm improvements, small business ventures, etc. Each member would subscribe to the co-op by buying a share, for which he (the great majority of members were male) might pay in instalments. The accumulated funds would then be loaned for commercial activities, and the dividends divided amongst members, with some part of the co-op’s fund often being set aside for community welfare activities. But almost inescapably, such cooperatives mirrored the hierarchical nature of local society. Richer and more influential members of the community were most likely to be the founders, largest shareholders, and presidents of the cooperative; and, where village communities failed to initiate co-ops, the government would sometimes intervene, sending in officials to help remedy the deficiencies of local community spirit. Meanwhile, Japan’s Central Association of Industrial Cooperatives (Sangyō kumiai chūōkai), established with government support in 1905, provided overall coordination of the local movements and helped to ensure that their actions conformed to the aims of government policy (Okutani 1948: 93). The Central Association’s first president was Minister of Agriculture and Commerce Hirata Tōsuke, and each prefectural branch was headed by the governor of the prefecture (Aoki 1972: 71). In 1923, the government strengthened the power of the co-op system by supporting the creation of a cooperative agricultural   riting bank, the Nōrin chūkin, which remains one of Japan’s largest financial institutions today. W in the 1920s, economist Ogata Kiyoshi observed that the real impulse for the creation of cooperatives ‘nearly always comes from above’ (Ogata 1923: 120, 149). In many ways, Japan’s locally initiated but hierarchically organized system of cooperatives was an excellent illustration of the process that Nikolas Rose calls ‘the government of freedom’ (Rose 1999: 73–5). The Japanese state entrusted local communities with the freedom and responsibility to advance their own prosperity through cooperative action, but at the same time required them to demonstrate that responsibility by living up to the norms set down by the centralized nationwide cooperative system. But the centralization of Japan’s cooperatives into a mechanism of social control was only one phase in a continuing ebb and flow of the forces of governance and resistance. 316

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The rapid industrial growth which accompanied the First World War, followed by the prolonged postwar depression, encouraged the expansion of the labour movement and the rise of agrarian protest actions. The peasant farmers’ movements of the 1920s and 1930s not only demanded reductions in rent for landless farmers but also, in some cases, attempted to capture control of local cooperatives which had, until now, been dominated by landlords and village notables. The movements were often short lived and poorly recorded, but in some rural areas memories of these events survive. In the village of Shimokisaki, Nagano Prefecture, for example, wealthier villagers had created a credit cooperative in 1914, but with the rise of peasant activism a growing number of poor farmers joined the cooperative, and in 1926 they succeeded in ousting the existing management and control themselves. Their coup, though, was quickly suppressed by the local government authorities, who stepped in and disbanded the whole organization (Okutani 1948: 306–7). In the cities, meanwhile, a new wave of labour activism was closely linked to the expansion of consumer cooperatives, many of them based on Rochdale principles. Social reformers from a variety of backgrounds saw cooperatives as a means of relieving the poverty of the urban working and lower middle classes while also reducing the risk of revolutionary turmoil. The renowned Taishō democrat Yoshino Sakuzō (1878–1933, see chapter 14 in this volume) incorporated consumer cooperatives as key element into his ‘politics of the people’ – minponshugi – and in 1919 founded what was to become a network of ‘household purchasing cooperatives’ (katei kōbai kumiai) (Yamamoto 1984: 150–2). It was at this time, too, that Kagawa Toyohiko embarked on his mission of social reform through cooperative action. Kagawa came from a materially privileged but emotionally difficult background. His mother was the mistress of a wealthy businessman, and after both his parents’ early deaths, he was brought up by his father’s family, in an atmosphere largely devoid of affection. While a student in Kobe, he converted to Christianity, and he then went on to train as a Presbyterian minister, first in Japan and later (from 1914 to 1916) in the United States. In 1909 Kagawa began work with the poor in the slums of the rapidly expanding port city, and after the First World War he became increasingly involved in labour activism, for which he was twice imprisoned in the early 1920s. By this time, he had already embarked on the creation of consumer cooperatives for urban workers, artisans, and small business people, working with associates to establish the Common Benefit Purchasing Cooperative (Kōbai kumiai kyōekisha) in Osaka in 1919 and the Kobe Consumer Cooperative two years later. He also provided advice to Nasu Zenji, a philanthropist and enthusiast of cooperativism who established the Nada Consumer Cooperative in the western suburbs of Kobe in 1921 (Imada 2010: 29–30). During the 1920s and 1930s Kagawa visited Rochdale and other centres of the European cooperative movement. The way he applied these ideas in Japan, though, reflected his own idiosyncratic religious and political convictions. His deeply anti-materialistic worldview led him to see cooperatives not simply as a way of alleviating poverty, but also as a vehicle for promoting communal solidarity and moral education. This vision was presented as a third way which would transcend the intensifying conflict between capitalism and communism: ‘capitalism and communism are both inclined toward class struggle while the cooperative movement is based on the success of all’ (Kagawa 1936: 11). Kagawa’s vision of cooperatives as the building blocks of a virtuous society was reflected in his refusal to allow his co-ops to sell alcohol: to those who questioned this stance, he would reply that if they were to sell alcohol, they might as well sell drugs and prostitutes as well (Odagiri 1990: 96). Although Kagawa’s cooperatives were quite successful in attracting members – membership of the Nada cooperative reached a peak of around 10,000 in 1942 (Saito 2010: 16) – this distinctive moral and political position created a gradual separation between the Kagawa consumer 317

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cooperatives and the Japanese labour union movement: a separation which reflected the wider ideological dilemmas of cooperativism in Japan and worldwide (Kage 2010: 33; Yamamoto 1984: 155–60).

Left and right Following the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, the polarization of ideology between capitalism and communism created tensions which constantly threatened to tear the cooperative movement apart. In its early days, the socialist international had cautiously welcomed the idea of consumer cooperatives for the working class. The 1910 Second International issued a statement which recognized the value of cooperatives as long as they contributed to the greater cause of the revolutionary transformation of society and educated their members in socialist ideals. But after the Russian Revolution, the Soviet authorities subsumed existing Russian cooperatives into the state distribution system, and communists increasingly came to condemn cooperatives as representing ‘petit bourgeois’ reformism (Yamamoto 1984: 130–5). In 1920s Japan, the cooperative network created by Kagawa Toyohiko and his supporters was initially closely linked to the labour movement (see Chapter 23 in this volume), but, as labour activism was suppressed, it shifted ground to become a broadly based ‘citizens’ group with many urban middle-class members. Other cooperative groups moved in the opposite direction. The Kyōdōsha, a cooperative created in Tokyo by writer Hirasawa Keikichi (1889–1923) in 1919, reflected its founder’s gradualist approach to social reform through cooperation and cultural activism.This approach, ironically, did not save Hirasawa from the repressive instincts of the state: he was one of those arrested and killed by police in the moral panic which followed the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. In 1926 the Kyōdōsha merged with other cooperatives in eastern Japan to form the Kanto Consumer Cooperative Federation (Kantō shōhi kumiai renmei, or Kanshōren for short), an organization which flourished briefly in the late 1920s, but also became the site for fierce disputes over the political meaning of cooperatives (Tomita 1976: 19–22). Whereas Kagawa Toyohiko’s cooperatives had tended to part company with the organized labour movement, Kanshōren became increasingly closely linked to labour activism, seeing its cooperatives as part of a push for far-reaching political and economic transformation. But this in turn provoked a split within the group, leading to a mass exodus of those who felt alarmed by this more radical approach (Tomita 1976: 25–30). Underlying these political tensions within the cooperative movements were fundamental questions about the nature of cooperatives themselves. Are they organizations that nest within the existing order, making life just a little better for their members? Or are they part of the architecture of a radically new and different society in the making? And, if so, what sort of society is that to be? In the context of prewar Japan, the space for working out the answers to these questions was tightly restricted. The more radical cooperative movements were the first to succumb to state repression, but ultimately all of the ‘bottom-up’ cooperative initiatives were absorbed into the new ‘top-down’ system of state controls which spread through the economy in the 1930s. In 1933 the government drew up a five-year industrial cooperative plan, which aimed to extend the centralized hierarchy of credit and marketing cooperatives to every town in Japan (Aoki 1972: 70–3). The state-sponsored cooperative scheme now became a key vehicle for the material and spiritual mobilization schemes which characterized Japan’s war economy. Following the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941, even the independent consumer co-ops became absorbed into the state system, losing their autonomy and being transformed into local branches of a centralized nationwide distribution system (Odagiri 1990: 97). Meanwhile, the village credit and marketing co-ops created under the Industrial Cooperatives Law were merged with other 318

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rural institutions into Agricultural Associations (Nōgyōkai) which also became both nodal points in the state controlled distribution system and agents for the dissemination of wartime patriotic spirit. Indeed, the value of such cooperatives for social mobilization encouraged the Japanese state to encourage the creation of similar cooperative networks in its colonies and in the client state of Manchukuo (see, for example, Kurumada 1990; Satō 1980).

Revival and quiet resistance: consumer cooperatives in postwar Japan The years of the postwar Allied occupation of Japan saw the rapid revival and growth and restructuring of Japan’s cooperative movement. The notion of cooperatives appealed to U.S. occupation officials who sought (on the one hand) to democratize Japanese society and (on the other) to stave off what they saw as the rising menace of communism. In this environment Kagawa, with his anti-communist rhetoric and strong links to U.S. Christian communities, quickly reemerged as a central figure in the movement. In 1951 he helped to create the Japanese Consumers’ Cooperatives Union (JCCU), of which he became chairman until his death in 1960. The occupation authorities also supported the introduction of new laws to promote cooperatives in agriculture (1947), fisheries (1948), and small business sectors (1949), and a further law to support credit cooperatives was passed in 1952 (Aoki 1972: 81–2). These policies were to have an enormous impact on social life in Japan throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Consumer cooperatives rapidly revived in the new social and economic environment of postwar Japan, and grew to a scale unimagined in the prewar era. Membership of the Nada Consumer Cooperative, for example, grew to around 48,000 by 1948, before falling somewhat to around 33,000 in the 1950s (Kage 2010: 33). In 1962 the Nada and Kobe consumer cooperatives merged, and by the early 1990s, under the new name of ‘Consumer Cooperative Kobe’, had a total of over 1 million members. Such enormous growth in scale created a need for new organizational forms. Many consumer cooperatives adopted a pyramidal structure in which the smallest unit was the han,2 a group of around 7 to 10 neighbours who would purchase goods jointly and meet regularly to conduct local co-op business (Restakis 2010:122). In many of the larger co-ops, a group of around 10 han would elect a representative to a precinct committee, which in turn elected members of district and area committees (see, for example, Herath 1989: 20). During the 1950s, the consumer cooperative movement also spread rapidly through the education sector, with students working with the wider cooperative movement to create the co-op stores (seikyō) which are still a feature of Japanese university life today (Saito 2010: 51–2). A striking characteristic of postwar consumer co-ops was their overwhelmingly female membership, making them one of the most significant forces for women’s social and political action in Japan. For example, the Seikatsu Club Consumers’ Cooperative, a major consumer cooperative established in 1965, now has a membership of around 350,000, of whom around 95 per cent are women. The Seikatsu Club is particularly well known for its energetic efforts to change the wider political landscape by encouraging female members to run for public office and by promoting consumer and environmental protection policies (Restakis 2010: 127; Dubb 2012; LeBlanc 1999: ch. 5). Consumer co-ops like Seikatsu Club embody many of the ambivalences of cooperatives in postwar Japan. On the one hand, the self-identification of their members as housewife-consumers risks replicating the gender stereotypes that still restrict the social roles of women in Japan. The han structure also rather disconcertingly echoes the neighbourhood grouping structures used as an instrument of social and political control in wartime Japan. Indeed, anxieties about the 319

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power of the han to impose pressures of social conformity help to explain why groups like Seikatsu Club have more recently opened up membership so that individuals can join the co-op without having to join a specific han (Dubb 2012). On the other hand, Seikatsu Club and other consumer co-ops have created crucial opportunities for women to play active roles in local or national political life, and many co-ops have also provided a strong foundation for consumer protection, environmental, and peace activism (LeBlanc 1999). Commitment to peace and opposition to nuclear weapons are core principles of many Japanese consumer co-ops. Interweaving consumer and community interests with wider political activism, many co-ops (for example) run social activities such as choirs and flower arranging classes alongside protest actions which include exhibitions on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and participation in peace marches (for example, Herath 1989: 22–3).  At the national level, meanwhile, the JCCU developed trading links with the Soviet Union and China before the reestablishment of Japanese political relations with either country and provided vocal support for the 1960 protests against the renewal of Japan’s security treaty with the United States (Saito 2010: 32, 43). In this sense, the consumer cooperative movement has provided a strong, if not highly visible, basis for a range of political ideas at odds with those of the conservative parties that have dominated formal political life in Japan since the mid-twentieth century.

The No ¯kyo ¯ empire: producer cooperatives in postwar Japan Postwar political reforms had a particularly profound effect on the credit and producer cooperatives which had flourished in Japanese villages under the umbrella of the 1900 Industrial Cooperative Law. T   he allied occupation authorities abolished Japan’s wartime Agricultural Associations and encouraged their replacement by cooperatives run on democratic lines. In the process, though, the new agricultural co-ops inherited not only the financial resources but also some of the social legacies of the old Agricultural Association system (Kleindienst and Sato 1994: 511). Though land reform radically altered the distribution of wealth in the countryside, social relations were slower to change, and old powerful families often reemerged as a key presence in local agricultural cooperatives. The nationwide network of agricultural, forestry, and fishery co-ops which emerged from the occupation era onwards was to exert an enormous influence on rural life in Japan throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Prewar rural co-ops had generally been community centred, with local credit groups often supporting a range of agricultural, small business and trading activities. In the postwar era, by contrast, the co-op sector became specialized along occupational lines, and it was the nationwide network of agricultural cooperatives – commonly known as Nōkyō or JA (for Japan Agricultural Cooperatives) – which above all was to become a potent force in Japanese social and economic life (Aoki 1972: 76–83). As in the prewar era, so once again in the 1950s and 1960s, these rural cooperatives were quickly organized into a nationwide system over which the state exerted enormous influence. In 1952, the Ministry of Agriculture approved the creation of a central Nōkyō Council (Nōkyō chūōkai), and following a crisis in the agricultural cooperative sector in the early 1950s, the Japanese government made substantial loans to the Nōkyō system, while also mobilizing Nōkyō as the main intermediary in its policies to control the production and marketing of rice (Bullock 1997). The Allied occupation authorities, and later the Japanese government, saw agricultural coops as a vital mechanism for promoting their vision of farm modernization: encouraging farmers to mechanize, adopt the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and experiment with new crops. To promote these aims, the co-ops offered low-interest loans to members and conducted extensive community education programmes. Nōkyō became a ubiquitous presence in Japanese 320

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rural life, providing most of the inputs for farming, selling much of the output, loaning finance and providing insurance to farmers, and running social activities such as rural women’s groups. It also became a powerful political force, both as a lobby group for agricultural protectionism and as a mobilizer of votes for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (Bullock 1997; Mulgan 2013). In recent years, though, this comfortable relationship between agricultural cooperatives and the ruling party has gradually crumbled. The second Abe administration (2012– ) singled out reform of Nōkyō as one of the key elements of its structural reform policy, and international free trade agreements threaten to undermine the cooperatives’ power over Japanese agriculture. It remains to be seen whether the waning power of the cooperative empire will leave space for more decentralized, grassroots cooperative initiatives in rural Japan or whether it will simply allow the influence of cooperativism to be swept away by the force of global competitive capitalism.

Grassroots alternatives In postwar as in prewar Japan, the push and pull of top-down and bottom-up forces within the cooperative movement have continued. Even within the state-centred Nōkyō empire, there remained corners where alternative cooperative visions flourished. One small but vivid example can be found in the regional city of Saku, Nagano Prefecture. In 1944, at the height of the Asia-Pacific War, a hospital was established in Saku by the local Agricultural Association, and in the postwar period Saku Central Hospital continued its work under the umbrella of the newly created agricultural cooperative.This is just one small part of a long tradition of cooperative medical ventures in prewar and postwar Japan.  As John Restakis notes,  Japanese consumer cooperatives include some 120 health co-ops with nearly 3 million members. These play a particularly important part in preventive medicine, using the han system to involve memberpatients directly in the health care of themselves and their neighbours (Restakis 2010: 129–32). Regional agricultural cooperatives also fund the running of hospitals and clinics. For example, JA Nagano Prefecture Health and Welfare Association (JA Nagano ken kōseiren), the parent body of Saku Central Hospital, funds and oversees 11 hospitals and numerous other clinics and health centres.3 The close association between the agricultural cooperatives and the hospitals helps to ensure that medical care is tailored to the needs of the local farm community. Saku Central Hospital chose to maintain its connection to the agricultural cooperative network out of a commitment to the principles of cooperativism, but interpreted those principles in ways that led to frequent differences of opinion with more conservative figures in the local community, who commonly referred to it as ‘the Red Hospital’ (‘Saku Byōinshi’ Sakusei Iinkai 1999). The epithet reflected the radical experiments in rural social medicine developed by the hospital under the leadership of its postwar director, Wakatsuki Toshikazu (1910–2006). These included the creation of patients’ self-help groups, the formation of a hospital drama group which toured farm villages presenting plays to communicate ideas about health and social wellbeing, joint study groups where farmers and medical staff shared ideas on key social issues, and a collaborative programme with farmers to provide nutritious meals to recently discharged hospital patients (Wakatsuki 1976; ’Saku Byōinshi’ Sakusei Iinkai 1999: 36–8, 62–3). The model of rural medicine initiated at Saku Central Hospital continues to be refined and developed to the present day and has inspired a range of similar health initiatives in other parts of Asia (see, for example, Honda 2014). Outside the framework of the large agricultural and consumer cooperative networks, other Japanese groups, too, use the cooperative form to pursue alternative social visions. Bob Marshall describes how, following the end of Japan’s postwar high growth era, a number of individuals and 321

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groups responded to the challenges of the changing social and political environment by developing workers’ cooperatives (Marshall 2010). One strand of this movement emerged from the Seikatsu Club consumer cooperative. During the 1980s, some Seikatsu Club members began to establish their own small businesses run on cooperative lines, and in 1995 they created the Workers’ Cooperative Network Japan (WNJ), which now has a membership of over 500 workers’ co-ops, most of them run by women.4 The cooperatives are almost all small, and are concentrated in service areas like childcare, care of the elderly, catering and design.The network’s promotion of the cooperative as a business model is linked to a strong emphasis on environmental sustainability, which, since the triple disaster of March 2011, is also linked to calls for an abandonment of nuclear power. A similar philosophy also drives the EcoTech workers’ co-op, created in 1993–94 by a group of workers who had left the Toshiba Corporation after a court case against its management (Marshall 2010). EcoTech began working on renewable energy projects in the mid-1990s, and since 2011 has focused mainly on developing ‘Citizens’ Cooperative Power Stations’ (Shimin kyōdō hatsudensho): small-scale, cooperatively run projects to generate energy using solar power and other renewable energy sources. As of 2015, there were over 450 Citizens’ Cooperative Power Stations Japan-wide, of which 78 were created with direct involvement from EcoTech.5 The philosophy of EcoTech reflects a strand of cooperative thought which resonates strongly amongst many of this newer generation of cooperatives: Up until now, companies have been managed with profit as their first objective. The result has been the mass production, mass consumption, mass disposal society that we have today. What we value is not company profits. Instead, our aim is to consider the social usefulness and environmental impact of the things we produce. . . .We also aim to supply and distribute goods for mutual development through collaborative problem solving between producers and users, in cooperation with non-governmental organizations, non-profit organizations, local government, business and entrepreneurs.6

Conclusion Japan’s long tradition of cooperativism in the credit, purchasing, marketing, and other sectors has had a profound influence in shaping modern Japanese society. But, as elsewhere, the social aims and impact of the cooperative movement and been diverse and complex. Cooperatives have clearly helped to cement rural social solidarity and promote agricultural development, but have also been a channel for state control of rural society and have at times themselves developed into huge hierarchical organizations with the power to stifle change and individual initiative. Some consumer cooperatives also have grown into giant enterprises with ambivalent consequences for their members. But at the same time this extensive cooperative sector has provided a strong basis for promoting consumer rights and environmental protection, and in some cases for expanding the role of women in political life.The tug of war between the top-down forces of centralization and the bottom-up forces of grassroots initiative continues; and, in the face of the twenty-first century challenges of global warming, economic restructuring, and an ageing society, Japan’s cooperative tradition remains a source of creative innovation and experimentation.

Notes 1 Descriptions of Kagawa’s tour of North America are based on ‘Biographical Sketch of Toyohiko Kagawa’, 1950, in the Kagawa Toyohiko Papers (hereafter KTP), 1929–68, Burke Library Archives, Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University, New York, Box 4, Folio 13; ‘Kagawa Also “Misses the Boat” ’, 322

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2 3 4 5 6

Bartlesville Examiner, 25 April 1925, KTP, Box 3, Folio 3; Colorado Convocation of Pastors and Christian Workers, ‘An Oriental Ambassador of God Comes to the Rocky Mountain Region’, 1936, KTP, Box 3, Folio 3; ‘Sharecroppers Look Up: Cooperative Farm to Give 30 Families a “New Order” ’, New York Herald Tribune, 7 June 1936, KTP, Box 3, Folio 3; and letter from John Shields, Wertheim Advertising Associates, to Emerson O. Bradshaw, 16 August 1950, in KTP, Box 4, Folio 13. The han structure had been pioneered by a consumer cooperative in western Tokyo in 1929, but only became prevalent in the postwar era; see Saito 2010: 15. See JA Nagano Kōseiren, ‘Byōin, shisetsu annai’, www.nagano-kouseiren.jp/facilities/index.php. See the homepage of the Workers’ Cooperative Network Japan, www.wnj.gr.jp/. See the EcoTech homepage, www.ecotechnet.com/ohisama. See EcoTech, ‘Kaisha keitai to rinen’, www.ecotechnet.com/about/.

Further reading Cooperative Development Institute (2015) ‘History of Cooperatives’, www.cdi.org/resource-center/ about-co-ops/history/. Ogata, Kiyoshi (1923) The Cooperative Movement in Japan, London: P. S. King and Son. Saito,Yoshiaki (2010) A Brief Chronicle of the Modern Japanese Consumer Cooperative Movement, ed. and trans. Takeshi Suzuki, Tokyo: Japanese Consumers’ Co-operative Union, http://jccu.coop/eng/aboutus/ pdf/a_brief_chronicle.pdf. Williams, Richard C. (2007) The Cooperative Movement: Globalization from Below,  Aldershot:Ashgate Publishing.

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23 The emergence of trade unions Christopher Gerteis

This chapter surveys the development of trade unions in modern Japan beginning with their emergence in the 1890s up to their collapse during the post-bubble years of the 1990s. As significant civil society actors, trade unions in Japan served both a political and economic role in establishing the basic rights of all Japanese before and after World War II. Indeed, trade union activists were key participants in the fight for universal manhood suffrage in the 1920s, instrumental in re-establishing democratic rule after 1945, and collectively helped to push base wages that enabled unprecedented levels of worker affluence in the 1960s. Yet Japan’s trade union movement did not represent everyone equally; like most of the industrialized world, they failed to secure equal pay for wage-earning women by not actively resisting, and sometimes tacitly supporting, gender-based wage differentials. Although the trade union movement helped to create a family wage system that provided increasing levels of affluence until the end of the 1980s, it proved unable to resist neo-liberal policies that have since the 1990s fossilized a political economy defined by declining wages and increased job insecurity.

The origins of a movement During the early stages of Japan’s industrialization traditional iron craftsmen served as the intermediary between industrial employers and small groups of semi-skilled and unskilled labourers. Japan’s nascent heavy industrial sector experienced periodic shortages of skilled workers during the second half of the Meiji era (1868–1912). During the 1870s and 1880s, tradesmen skilled in iron work, some of them trained by foreign advisors, established themselves as bosses (oyakata) of small groups of semi-skilled and unskilled labourers. These oyakata were not simply labour contractors; they brought to their respective heavy industrial enterprise technical expertise gleaned from a combination of traditional craft technique and modern on the job training. Their skilled work was key to the success of Japanese industrialization, but the oyakata and their work gangs, iron workers in particular, found that their scarcity freed them to wander from job to job and place to place.This phenomenon of ‘worker footloosedness’ disappeared by the end of the 1880s; however, the oyakata system remained an important characteristic of labour–management relations until the early twentieth century (Gordon 1985; Kinzley 1991).

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By the 1890s a handful of university educated activists began to organize small groups of industrial workers into unions. This first wave of labour organizations was guided by a small cadre of university educated men, such as Katayama Sen (1859–1933) and Takano Fusatarō (1869–1904), who promoted an idealistic, but politically moderate social vision (Kublin 1959). Takano had received some instruction on union organizing while on a study sojourn to the United States where he came under the tutelage of American Federation of Labor founder Samuel Gompers (1850–1924). Despite auspicious connections such as this, Japan’s first wave of unionism never expanded far beyond a few urban neighbourhoods in Osaka and Tokyo and collapsed around 1900 in part because state authorities accused the movement of threatening public order, but also because there was still no solid social base of urban workers. Indeed, the oyakata bosses were until the twentieth century more likely to use their technical expertise and managerial strategies to better position themselves than they were to try to mobilize Japan’s industrial proletariat (see Garon 1987 and Marsland 1989). Brief moments of worker collective action around the time of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) again failed to coalesce; however, the founding of the Yūaikai (Friendly Society) by Christian convert and lawyer Suzuki Bunji (1885–1946, see Large 1970) precipitated a tentative resurgence of trade union formation in the 1910s. By the mid-Taishō era (1912–26) many lower-class neighbourhoods of Japan’s urban centres were beginning to take on the characteristics of an industrial working class.Yūaikai organizers benefited from the development of new patterns in traditional forms of lower-class collective action (non-union disputes) combined with company initiatives to replace the oyakata with systems of direct managerial control. The success of the Yūaikai between 1912 and 1918, albeit limited, was also due in part to the emergence of an ‘ideology of imperial democracy’, which enabled workers, both male and female, to conceive of themselves as possessing full political rights within a political system that still precluded them (Gordon 1991). A handful of Yūaikai activists were able to foster a brief period of trade union activism in the lower-class neighbourhoods of Osaka and Tokyo as social and political developments of the Taishō era ‘imperial democracy’ emboldened workers, male and female, to perceive themselves as possessing full political rights even though they lived within a political system that still did not allow them to vote. Whereas parliamentary leaders and ministry bureaucrats shared an aversion to ideas and movements that threatened to destabilized the status quo, legislative and civil service policymakers often came into conflict over exactly how to facilitate the social stability desired (Nimura and Gordon 1997; Large 1972; Kinzley 1991).

The interwar era The First World War opened significant new markets for Japanese corporations, and the booming economy of the late 1910s combined with the political moment to produce a brief period of political activism by labour unions, intellectuals, and social activists. The war’s end, however, brought on sharp decreases in overseas demand for Japanese manufactured goods. This resulted in the collapse of inflated domestic stock and commodity prices and was followed by wide scale unemployment and worker unrest. The Rice Riots in August 1918 brought considerable public attention to bear on the material concerns of the urban workers at the heart of the disturbances, and in part precipitated vigorous social reform movements aimed to quell what corporate managers and government officials increasingly feared to be an urban proletariat ripe to give birth to leftist political movements. The emergence of Bolshevik Russia did encourage an influential cohort of leftist intellectuals to flirt with Marxism-Leninism;

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however, leaders of the relatively conciliatory labour movement were far more influenced by the classic liberalism of labour movements in Britain and the United States, with an admixture of German ‘Sozialpolitik’ thrown in for good measure, than by Marxism (Scalapino 1983; Lewis 1990; Metzler 2006). The expansion of Japanese industry after the First World War combined with a relaxation of state proscriptions on union activities to foster a nascent labour movement engaged with political parties at the cutting edge of the Taishō-era flirtation with ‘imperial democracy’ (see Chapters 14 and 17 in this volume). Although conservative opposition to organized labour mounted all through the 1920s, trade unions were a significant force behind the successful campaign for universal manhood suffrage, which was eventually promulgated in 1925. The turbulent suffrage campaign – led by a coalition of intellectuals, social reformers, trade unions, tenant-farmer movements, and political parties – compelled the Imperial Diet to take notice of the widespread desire for an expanded franchise. Enactment of the suffrage law invested millions of men with the ability to affect social change through electoral politics, and revitalized the conservative Rikken Seiyūkai and the Kenseikai (after 1927 Rikken Minseitō), but also fostered the formation of a panoply of progressive and leftist parties (Gerteis 2013). The liberal air of the Taishō era also spurred some managers to reform their practices. To pre-empt strikes, and undercut union organizing, managers developed workplace practices that reinforced the notion that the company was a natural extension of the Meiji State’s legally codified family system (ie seido). Managers used work rules to instill social behaviour, styles of dress, and shop floor routines that reinforced the worker’s position as a child within the corporate family (Gordon 1991; Garon 1997). Managers seeking greater control over their workforces had the most success in the textile mills, in part because women textile workers were, by custom and by law, the wards of their employers. Women working in the textile mills did not, however, sit by idly as managers, government bureaucrats, and union leaders kept ignoring their many grievances.  And, explicitly without the assistance of trade union leaders, and sometimes specifically in the face of union opposition, women worker-activists were able to bargain for better wages and working conditions by organizing discrete work slowdowns, strikes, and protests. Their activism established important precedents of labour militancy and worker autonomy in an era that precluded women’s political rights outside the context of the patriarchal household (Mackie 1997; Hunter 2003; Faison 2007). Yūaikai organizers benefited from the development of new patterns of traditional forms of lower-class collective action (non-union disputes) as well as from company initiatives to replace labour bosses with systems of direct managerial control. During this period, government bureaucrats also began to push for limited protections for industrial workers. The 1911 Factory Law (Kōjō-hō), implemented in 1916, banned work for children under 12 years of age, night work for women and minors, and limited the working day to 12 hours. Although the law was primarily intended to preserve the reproductive capacity of working women, had few penalties for offenders, and was unevenly enforced, it nevertheless had significant impact on labour–management relations. Following employment patterns similar to many other industrialising nations, the majority of textile workers were women (Mackie 1997; Hunter 2003). The growth of unions in the heavy industrial sector, iron and shipbuilding in particular, features prominently in this history of the Japanese labour movement, but the majority of Japanese factory workers were employed in textile mills well into the early twentieth century, and the majority of textile workers were women. Indeed, women comprised more than half of all factory workers in Japan until 1930. Despite the law, harsh work rules and

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long hours, and dangerous working conditions, rampant disease, and cramped dormitories continued to define the lives of women working in the textile mills. Women dockworkers in August 1918 refused to load ships with rice too expensive for them to feed their children, sparking riots that brought down the government of the day. Women bus workers in the 1920s won toilet breaks and the right to unpaid menstruation leave, and women strikers at the Tōyō Muslin Factory in 1930 fought for and won the right to come and go from their dormitories at will, but failed to secure shorter work hours, the right to access to their saved wages, or even the right to receive visitors at their dormitories. Importantly, the strike at Tōyō Muslin was only one of 329 labour disputes led by women for working women’s issues. Despite their legal exclusion from political events, and the labour movement’s inability to mobilize more than a few thousand women, women’s non-union disputes were at the centre of political protest and strike events throughout the twentieth century (Kumazawa 1996; Hunter 2003). Despite the organization’s oversights, the Yūaikai nevertheless established the first women’s union organization, which sought to encourage more women to support the labour movement by creating an organization ostensibly dedicated to fight for their interests. Although the Factory Law had established minimum employment standards protecting women and children, the law had limited provisions for enforcement, and managers seeking greater control over their workforce continued to have the most success in asserting their authority over their female employees. Women’s activists affiliated with the Yūaikai sought to help wage-earning women by advising union leaders on policy decisions concerning female workers, developing organising literature, and participating in key strikes and walkouts throughout the 1920s. The Yūaikai Women’s Department established important precedents for women’s union activism, but succeeded in convincing no more than a few thousand women to join unions (Tanai 1969; Mackie 2003). During the 1920s the booming global economy combined with the domestic political moment to allow for a brief period of sustained union activism. The Yūaikai, renamed the General Federation of Labour (Nihon rōdō sōdōmei, or Sōdōmei for short) in 1921, represented nearly a half-million industrial workers in the Osaka and Tokyo metropolitan areas. Strike actions peaked when organizers coordinated a strike by 30,000 dockworkers at the Kawasaki and Mitsubishi shipyards in Kobe in 1921. Whereas the Yūaikai advocated cooperation between labour and management and promoted a moderate policy of mutual assistance and worker education, the Sōdōmei soon adopted a more radical and militant agenda emphasizing class struggle. This radicalization reflected the dramatic industrial expansion that took place in Japan in the early twentieth century, especially during and after the boom stimulated by World War I. The factory labour force of male workers in heavy industry grew rapidly. Militant workers challenged the Yūaikai’s policy of conciliation. And the influence of Marxism, Leninism, and Communism following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia contributed immeasurably to the enhanced attraction of left-wing ideologies (Large 1981). In the mid- and late 1920s, labour leaders, some affiliated with the Sōdōmei, also staged a number of strikes in the heavy industrial and transportation sectors that won national attention and led to a series of unprecedented coordinated campaigns for political change. In addition to organizing strikes and other protest activities, trade unions joined other leftists in promoting outreach activities such as youth organizations and cooperative schools. Partly in response to this agitation – and partly spurred by changing production technologies and new theories of labour–management practices – the state and private sector intensified their imposition of hierarchical systems of control. Combined with outright repression, especially after adoption of

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the Peace Preservation Law in 1925, this turned the late 1920s and early 1930s into a period of intense but increasingly futile labour protest (Large 1972; Garon 1997). Instances of worker militancy were attended by increasing government repression and paternalistic managerial practices in the late 1920s combined to undermine the efficacy of union organization, and the accommodating policies of those unions that the government tolerated did little to distinguish union leaders in the eyes of those they claimed to represent. Other developments in approaches to workplace management also shaped the development of trade unions. During the early 1920s, an emerging class of professional managers sought to rationalize their labour management practices by replacing the oyakata with a closed system of direct employment within which wages and worker training were directly controlled by company managers. Direct control of the industrial workforce enabled managers to increase corporate profitability by rationalising labour costs and technical processes. The system also held some attraction for workers who perceived that as regular employees their social status improved because they now ‘belonged’ to the company. Indeed, gaining membership of the enterprise was a seductive promise for the majority of workers who had, under the oyakata system, been easily distinguished from regular employees by uniforms and codes of behaviour not required of contract labourers. Market forces combined with prejudice during the mid- and late 1920s to create conditions in which Koreans and Ryukyuans (Okinawans) migrated to mainland Japan where they worked as disposable, temporary labourers first to be fired at the convenience of managers. The pauperization of Japan’s colonial subjects was underscored by institutionalized ethnic discrimination that channelled Korean and Okinawan women into the very worst textile jobs, and Korean and Okinawan men into the uncertainties of the urban day-labour market. Trade unions did little to reach out to these workers, and indeed at times tacitly collaborated with employers to maintain the employment status quo. Even mutual aid societies, formed by the in-migrant communities to help their own, were unable to alter the day-to-day struggle to find and re-find work that characterized life at the margins of Japan’s industrial economy (Kawashima 2009; Faison 2007).

The wartime labour movement The economic dominance of the four largest zaibatsu (corporate conglomerates that controlled the Japanese economy such as Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Furukawa, and Sumitomo) along with the rise of non-party governments in the 1930s closed Japan’s brief moment of ‘imperial democracy’, and pressed the trade union movement further to the periphery of the political landscape. This trend was further compounded by planning for economic self-sufficiency and a control economy from the late 1920s, which renewed the state’s emphasis on the development of heavy industry. Increasing worker militancy during the 1930s culminated with a state ban on trade unions in 1940, to be replaced with quasi-fascist labour commissions that paradoxically encouraged worker collective identity even as they asserted state supremacy through to the end of the Second World War in Asia (1931–45). By the late 1930s the government was well into the process of shutting down independent trade unions, farmer cooperatives, political parties and even business associations, and replacing them with state-controlled organizations created to mobilize the masses in support of the nation’s military expansion into China. The 1930s were nevertheless witness to trade union activism at odds with the interests of the emerging militarist state. Although the aggregate percentage of workers who belonged to unions did not grow significantly after 1931, the number of workers willing to launch and maintain workplace disputes exploded between 1930 and 1932 and remained steady until 1938. Although not a clear indicator of a strong labour movement per se, the numbers indicate a 328

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persistence of collective action at the social base even in the face of an increasingly repressive state. The number of long strike actions also indicates employer ability to resist worker activism, but it is also evidence that local unions were able to hold out against employers who, in law and material resources, held all the cards (Gordon 1985). The Sōdōmei carried on until 1940, making it the longest surviving of Japan’s prewar unions. Its durability, however, was facilitated by the increasing takeover of leadership by the political right wing. Beginning in the mid-1920s, the federation experienced splits and the shedding off of leftist and then moderate member unions. In the 1930s, the Sōdōmei was advocating collaboration with the state and the managerial class, which now presided over an economy that was increasingly directed to production for war. By the end of the 1930s political strife and worker unrest had reached the point that the government dominated by the military felt they could no longer tolerate (Gerteis 2013). In 1940 the militarist state abolished independent political parties while folding all remaining labour unions into the Industrial Patriotic Service Association (Sangyō hōkokukai, or Sanpō). Although the Sanpō was little more than an excuse for the state to legitimize the dissolution of the labour movement while ameliorating very little of the poor working conditions, low wages, and managerial abuse faced by Japan’s wartime industrial workforce, some worker representatives nevertheless were able to use traditional styles of non-union activism – negotiations and strikes – to temporarily buttress what otherwise were rapidly eroding (and soon non-existent) wages and working conditions. The war ended in 1945 with widespread carpet bombings that destroyed more than 80 per cent of Japan’s urban centres (Gordon 1985; Okazaki 2005).

The Allied occupation and trade unions The Allied occupation of Japan (1945–52) mandated new legislation that established the legal framework within which trade unions could organize, strike, and engage in collective bargaining. The Allies brought to Tokyo a handful of labour experts, who planned, advised, and regulated the rapid legislation of union rights loosely based on America’s Wagner Act of 1935. Shepherded by William Karpinsky and Golda Stander in late December 1945, the Trade Union Law guaranteed all Japanese the rights to organize (a right that later would be enshrined in the 1947 Constitution), bargain collectively, and strike (Moore 1983; and Takemae 2003). The prewar and wartime political experiences of Japanese workers well positioned them to take advantage of the legal protections granted to them by the Allied occupation. The first few years of the occupation saw tremendous growth in union activity and by the end of the 1940s trade unions could claim 5 million men, and 1.5 million women members. The primary directive from Washington was to build in Japan a ‘bread-and-butter’ trade union movement, and labour officials of the Allied occupation wrote policies and promoted programmes that actively encouraged Japanese workers to unionize around an agenda for improved wages and working conditions. To these ends, the occupation authorities also launched an extensive propaganda campaign designed to guide Japanese workers in developing what labour planners thought would grow into an American-style ‘business friendly’ union movement (Moore 1983; Takemae 2003). Despite a 50-year history of trade unions in prewar Japan, Allied officials had expected it would take decades to build a strong labour movement in Japan. Labor Division officers were pleased at first by the popularity of labour unions; however, Japan’s postwar unions did not follow the course planned for them by their predominantly American occupiers. This early postwar period of trade union formation was best known for its political volatility, and Japan’s most militant unions, affiliated with the national labour federation, the Sanbetsu kaigi (Zen Nihon 329

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sangyōbetsu rōdō kumiai kaigi, Congress of Industrial Unions). The Sanbetsu kaigi was led by veteran activists of the prewar labour movement. The Congress’s militancy and its close ties to the postwar Socialist and Communist parties quickly earned them the enmity of Allied officials. Between September 1945 and December 1946, Sanbetsu unions launched more than a thousand job actions, nearly half of which involved the seizure of the workplace by striking workers. In some cases, workers even opted to eject their managers and assume direct, worker control of production (Hōsei Daigaku 1996; Moore 1983). Allied labour officials reported to General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964), Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) and de facto ‘ruler’ of occupied Japan, that these ‘production control’ strikes heralded the first stage of Communist revolution, and consented to the Japanese government’s request to ban the practice. Fearing state suppression, Sanbetsu SecretaryGeneral Hosoya Matsuta (1900–1990) ordered the practice stopped, and directed member unions to abandon all tactics that directly challenged ownership or control of the enterprise.The Sanbetsu regrouped and in January 1947 announced plans for a general strike to demonstrate to the Japanese government that organized labour, not capital, was ready to assume legitimate leadership of the postwar democracy. A peculiar coalition of what were otherwise fratricidal trade unions mobilising for a general strike did not sit well with the deeply conservative members of MacArthur’s inner circle, who immediately ordered the strike called off. Union activists were stunned. Most felt betrayed by what they perceived as a fundamentally anti-democratic intervention on the part of the occupation authorities (Hōsei Daigaku 1996; Hyōdō 1997; Takemae 2003). As relations between the United States and the Soviet Union worsened, policymakers in Washington and Tokyo began to plan how to turn Japan into an American ally in the Cold War. Ranking American officers within MacArthur’s General Headquarters (GHQ) responded to the perceived change in mission in early 1947 when they began to characterize labour militancy in Japan as an extension of what American intelligence reports described as Soviet expansionism into East Asia. By late 1947, GHQ had ordered union militants ‘called to heel’ – one major general even suggested that Japanese unions needed to be ‘housebroken’ like a naughty pet dog. GHQ officials further ordered suspected Communists purged from their leadership positions in 1949 and 1950, which crippled many left-led unions and augured the formation of the officially non-political Nihon rōdō kumiai sōhyōgikai, or Sōhyō (General Council of Trade Unions).

The 1950s The Densan Wage System, named for the Electrical Utility Workers’ Union Nihon denki sangyō rōdō kumiai rengō kyōgikai (Densan), which created it in the late 1940s, quickly became the normative wage standard upon which Sōhyō leaders assessed target wages for the pattern bargaining campaigns in the 1950s. The Densan Wage System ignored corporate profit (not a particularly pressing issue for a publicly owned utility) and privileged need by emphasizing that the purpose of work was to enable a worker to live the minimum cultured life guaranteed by Article 25 of the 1947 Constitution of Japan. The Densan ‘market-basket’ wage system established base wages based on the actual cost of food staples, housing, transportation, and medical care. Created to suit the needs of a majority male workforce, it was built on the premise that a male wage earner headed each worker household. Whereas the 1950s saw significant public-sector union activism, unions that formed in the mid-1950s were characteristically enterprise-centred organizations within which management and labour were both represented. Enterprise union leaders were often at odds with those of the ‘old line’ national unions; however, the failure of a series of politically motivated strike campaigns 330

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in the early 1950s forced union leaders to set aside their political differences, and resulted in an unlikely alliance between public sector, industrial, and enterprise unions (Kume 1998). In 1956, the national leadership councils of the Sōhyō and a number of smaller industrial and unaffiliated regional federations formalized ties that resulted in the creation of the so-called Spring Wage Offensives (shuntō). Conceived by Chemical Workers’ Union president Ōta Kaoru, the shuntō were jointly coordinated campaigns in which public- and private-sector unions collaborated in a series of direct actions in support of large-scale pattern bargaining for minimum base-wage increases. The annual offensive consisted of contract negations between an industrywide union and one employer during which the union focused all its resources on winning a favourable contract from that employer and then used the conflict and resultant agreement as a precedent to demand similar contracts from additional employers not otherwise bound by the original agreement. By adopting the Densan market-basket ideal, the shuntō created the economic basis for a family-centred wage for all blue-collar workers. They provided a powerful, coordinated structure within which both private and public sector unions were able to ensure incremental wage increases during the high-speed, double-digit growth of the 1960s. Although the emergence of the blue-collar middle class family was a highly significant development, Japan’s postwar wage system also privileged the male-breadwinner as the economic goal central to union activism (Gerteis 2009). Wage-earning Japanese women militantly contested the Sōhyō’s espousal of normative gender roles at the core of its male-centred bread-winner model. Women wage-earners found their struggle for equal rights particularly difficult in both their workplace and society in part because contemporary ideals of citizenship in industrialized societies emerged alongside the assumption that a woman’s economic and political status are dependent on her role as a wife. The establishment of economic and institutional structures premised on the ideal working-class home envisaged by Japan’s labour leaders helped to exclude working-class women from equal access to waged work, and at the same time precluded them from the rights and responsibilities of full citizenship. Through their participation in the shuntō, Sōhyō-affiliated unions succeeded in raising male workers’ wages in part by relegating women’s wage-earning value to the periphery of the male-headed household economy (Gerteis 2009).

The 1960s The sometimes violent confrontations between labour and management that characterized labour relations during the late 1940s and 1950s contributed to the creation of a postwar wage system that privileged the blue-collar ‘family man’, and set the stage for the increased standards of living that accompanied double-digit economic growth in the 1960s. A blue-collar age- and seniority-based wage system can be seen as one cause of the alienation of young men during the late 1960s, because it left them lower paid, despite individual skill and ability, and hierarchically subordinate to the older generation of male workers, and resulted in significant rifts between young and middle-age blue-collar workers. The alienated younger workers dropped out of the day-to-day activities organized by their trade unions, even declining to participate in the annual wage offensives that had precipitated the age and family status based wage differentials (Gerteis 2011). During the 1960s, management initiatives to pre-empt independent trade union activism included social benefits such as special income allowances, seniority promotions and raises, employee sports and excursion programmes, company-subsidized housing, and supplemental health and welfare benefits. The 1960 Incomes Doubling Policy proposed and carried out by Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato (1899–1965, prime minister 1960–64) combined with the period 331

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of intense economic growth during the 1960s to radically increase the standard of living for most Japanese households. By the end of the 1960s, the three ‘Cs’ (‘car’, ‘cooler’, and ‘colour television’) were the icons of Japan’s new material wealth. Economic growth also enabled managers to refrain from mass layoffs while claiming this was proof that the company was loyal to their workers, and that the company should expect the same in return. Indeed, Japan’s unemployment rate remained well below 3 per cent until the late 1980s (Sōmushō Tōkeikyoku 2000).

Post-growth challenges Throughout the postwar period, union leaders and managers tacitly collaborated to promote gender-segregated employment patterns that institutionalized regular, full-time employment as an all-male domain. Managers adapted to rapid growth in the 1960s, and negative growth in the 1990s, by adjusting the numbers of women employed as part-time and temporary workers. Gender-based wage differentials narrowed slightly, but married women were still making far less than their male counterparts well into the 1990s (Sōmushō Tōkeikyoku 2005). Privatization of the Japan National Rail system in 1989 combined with the long-term trend of decreasing rates of union membership and forced the dissolution of Sōhyō. It was reorganized as the National Confederation of Trade Unions (Rengō), but national union leaders nevertheless continued to make the shuntō the focus of national organizing activities. The ‘Long Decade’ following the bursting of the Economic Bubble in 1991, however, saw negative economic ‘growth’, declining aggregate wages, and mass lay-offs. One result being that unions continued to see shorter membership rosters. By the end of the 1990s, the percentage of workers belonging to unions in Japan had declined to less than 20 per cent (Sōmushō Tōkeikyoku 2015). The ‘Long 1990s’ were an era characterized by cycles of workforce restructuring that included mass layoffs and an increasing ratio of part-time to full-time employees. By the start of the twenty-first century the national unemployment rate had exceeded 5 per cent for the first time since the early 1950s. When disaggregated, however, employment data revealed a much more troubling concern: the average unemployment rate for persons aged 15 to 24 was nearly double that for the overall population (Sōmushō Tōkeikyoku 2015). Despite chronic youth underemployment and persistent sex discrimination in the workplace, trade unions have focused on reviving the employment stability and regular wage increases, popularly understood as the ‘Japanese employment system’, that was never the norm for more than a third of regular, full-time workers, employed by large and medium-sized firms. Established trade unions have generally kept to platitudes, but a few local groups took during the 1990s a radical turn by organizing ‘women-only’ and ‘community based’ unions. Unlike the Women’s Departments that had existed within established, male-dominated trade unions since 1916, the womenonly unions were locally focused, autonomous organizations of women for women. Community unions grew from neighbourhood activist groups in areas that saw high levels of unemployment and underemployment. Unlike in conventional trade unions, membership was not determined by trade, company, or employment status. Both ‘women-only’ and ‘community’ unions focused their activities on the protection of individual worker rights through collective action on a caseby-case basis. Although representative of an extreme minority of Japanese workers, women-only unions and community unions are indicative of a growing dissatisfaction with the status quo that nevertheless failed to precipitate significant reforms within the conventional labour movement (Broadbent 2005; Weathers 2009). It seems clear at the writing of this chapter that the waves of trade unionism that helped to define the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Japan ended in the early 1990s. Although a few small groups of workers have since experimented with forms of non-union organizing 332

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reminiscent of prewar social forms (women-only unions and community unions), the form that the next wave of worker organizing will take is still not clear.

Acknowledgments I want to thank the IGK ‘Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History’ (re:work) at the Humboldt University of Berlin for their financial support, intellectual comradeship, and good cheer during the writing of this chapter.

Further reading Garon, Sheldon (1987) The State and Labor in Modern Japan, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gerteis, Christopher (2009) Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Gordon, Andrew (1985) The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry, 1853–1955, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. _____ (1991) Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hunter, Janet (2003) Women and the Labour Market in Japan’s Industrialising Economy:The Textile Industry before the Pacific War, London: Routledge Curzon.

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24 The postwar employment system Charles Weathers

Postwar Japan witnessed the development of the democratic world’s most cooperative labour– management relations system, alongside a distinctive ‘membership’-based employment model. During the 1950s and 1960s, as massive investment transformed the nation’s workplaces, managers and union leaders committed to cooperative industrial relations successfully reshaped labour management practices, creating a foundation for economic prosperity driven in part by manufacturing exports. This success helped to legitimize closely cooperative labour–management relations. However, a stiff price was paid in the neglect of work conditions and acceptance of inequalities, problems that continue to trouble the country. This chapter analyzes the development of the postwar employment and labour–management relations (rōshi kankei) systems. The first part describes the immediate postwar era (1945–55), emphasizing the rapid rise of the union movement and its subsequent rollback, especially of the labour left. The second part describes the steady advance of cooperative labour–management relations and productivity raising during the high-growth era (1955–73). As described in the third part, cooperation and high productivity helped to drive strong export performance and maintain enviable employment stability during the so-called steady growth era (1973–91), a period when many advanced democracies suffered serious unemployment problems. Since the early 1990s, however, as pointed out in the final part, Japan’s employment practices, widely admired in the 1980s, have increasingly appeared outmoded, especially because employers and unions have failed to act seriously to improve work conditions or to reduce inequality for female and non-regular employees. At present, there is widespread agreement that employment practices demand major reform, but the mainstream union movement finds itself relegated to a secondary role.

The early postwar era (1945–55) The rapid rise of labour unions Prewar and wartime employment policies exerted strong influence on the postwar employment system, especially the establishment of the so-called lifetime employment system, based on ‘lifetime’ (more accurately, long-term) employment, nenkō (age or tenure-based pay and 334

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promotion), and enterprise unionism (Gordon 1985). However, outside political pressure was crucial in democratizing the system. During the first two years of the Allied occupation of Japan (1945–52), when liberal New Deal influence was strong, many American officials regarded organized labour as an essential foundation for democracy, and actively encouraged workers to form unions. The union movement grew from no members at war’s end to 6 million, over 40 per cent of the salaried work force, by December 1946. Enterprise unions quickly emerged as the major form of union organization. This reflected historical legacies along with economic and social conditions. Japan’s prewar unions had usually formed among workplace comrades, a pattern that continued after the war. Furthermore, with the economy devastated and inflation severe, unions protected worker livelihoods by preventing dismissals, demanding regular wage raises, and supporting the rebuilding of companies. They also forced managers to revise wage systems to place greater emphasis on individual and family conditions (or livelihoods), such as number of children, while reducing the importance placed on productivity. Managers would later reduce the so-called ‘livelihood pay’ portion, but its influence has remained in the form of nenkō pay practices. Finally, unions played a key social role by enabling workers to demand an end to the pervasive status discrimination of pre-1945 Japan. Managers were forced to cease the worst discriminatory practices, such as body searches and discriminatory job titles and pay systems. Reflecting the social levelling and rapid democratization of the early postwar era, white-collar workers generally joined unions along with blue-collar workers rather than form separate unions, the usual practice in other countries. Despite being able to wring important concessions from managers, unions failed to cohere into a well-unified movement. Industrial unions formed, but invariably failed to exercise significant authority over their constituent enterprise unions. Furthermore, two rival federations formed in 1946, re-creating the prewar ideological division in organized labour.The Communistinfluenced Sanbetsu kaigi initially held the initiative over the moderate Sōdōmei, but the preference of many Sanbetsu kaigi leaders for political and ideological activism worried some American officials, and some Japanese workers as well.

Rolling back union influence Unions held the initiative against managers at the outset of the occupation because of the political and social economic environment, but conditions soon became unfavourable as conservatives strengthened their influence in Washington and in the General Headquarters (GHQ) of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in Japan (SCAP) in Tokyo and shifted their priorities in Japan from democratization to economic recovery. Sanbetsu kaigi planned a general strike for 1 February 1947, largely to take down the openly anti-union Yoshida Shigeru (1878–1967, prime minister between 1948 and 1954) government, but General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964), SCAP, ordered the cancellation of the strike.That was the first of a series of strong blows to the union movement, especially its left wing. In 1948, at MacArthur’s direction, the government restricted the strike and collective bargaining rights of public sector employees, intending to extinguish the militancy of the public-sector unions. In 1949, the new labour laws were revised to strengthen the hand of managers, and thousands of leftist and militant workers were dismissed in the 1950 ‘Red Purge’. The greatest blow of all to the union movement was probably the 1949 ‘Dodge Line’. A package of harsh anti-inflation and austerity fiscal policies implemented by Joseph Dodge (1890–1964), a banker sent by Washington to conduct a crash economic restructuring programme, the ‘Dodge Line’ stamped out inflation but also plunged the economy into recession, giving managers strong leverage to force rationalization measures on unions. As the economy 335

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faltered and the new labour laws were revised to favour business, the union organization rate plunged from a peak 55.8 per cent in 1949 to around 46 per cent a year later. Employers took full advantage of SCAP’s policy shift to re-assert strong management authority. 1948 saw the establishment of a national employer association, Nikkeiren, which played an important role in fighting militant unions. From 1949 through 1960, unions would lose every major labour dispute. Partly because postwar unionism was associated with democratization and worker well-being, managers usually found that it was not feasible to simply eliminate unions from workplaces (the default strategies of American managers); instead, the natural strategy, especially at large firms, was to encourage cooperative unionism. The basic pattern of dispute was established in 1949 at Toshiba. With the severe ‘Dodge Line’-induced recession making it difficult for unions to protect excess workers, managers targeted leading militants, and also quietly supported white-collar workers who wanted to form new cooperative unions. Because demand was low, strikes by militant workers proved ineffective. In the end, the two unions agreed to cooperate in restructuring the company (allowing the dismissal of the designated workers) in exchange for a commitment to protect the remaining jobs. (Later, the two unions merged to create a unified enterprise union.) Several other disputes followed similar patterns, as managers used the professed need to rationalize operations to eliminate unwanted workers, and quietly helped cooperation-oriented employees (especially white-collar workers) to form new unions. In many enterprises, union-shop agreements were formed, so that membership in the enterprise union became a virtual condition of employment. Competing unions thus became difficult to establish. Another major showdown occurred in 1953 at automaker Nissan, where the union maintained a powerful shopfloor presence and sought also to spearhead development of a robust industrial union. With business leaders providing strong financial backing to the company and white-collar workers forming a new cooperative union, the original union steadily wore down (and later dissolved). The Nissan dispute marked one of the most important setbacks to efforts to establish robust industrial unionism. However, it also demonstrated the potential pitfalls of overt union-busting, as the new union proceeded to cooperate on wages but, having established its own power base during the dispute, resisted efforts to redesign production practices. In the 1980s, with productivity lagging Toyota, Nissan managers finally managed to have the union leadership replaced. As Sanbetsu kaigi collapsed around 1949–50, most major unions (representing about twothirds of unionized workers) joined to form a new federation, Sōhyō, in July 1950. Although Sōhyō remained Japan’s largest labour federation throughout its existence (1950–89), it began losing influence practically from the moment of its inception. It was originally envisaged as a politically neutral federation but, in the tense Cold War environment, soon became embroiled in ideological disputes and turned leftward. Consequently, more conservative unions steadily disaffiliated to form competing federations, and Sōhyō came to be centred on its left-wing public sector unions.

The high growth era (1955–73) Toward cooperation Left-wing unions waged numerous politically tinged struggles in the early 1950s, especially to contest dismissals. Although they often enjoyed support from families and communities, the strategy proved unsuccessful. Consequently, Sōhyō shifted its core strategy from political

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to economic struggle, hoping to stimulate worker consciousness by putting more weight on wage demands. In 1955, eight industrial unions launched shuntō (spring wage struggle). Although 1955 marked the start of high growth, shuntō struggles in the late 1950s gained only modest wage increases as managers continued to take hard-line stances on wage raises. Leftist union leaders lamented that they failed to alter worker consciousness or to overcome the weakness of Japanese-style enterprise unionism, especially the tendency to try to protect particular jobs within firms by supporting management efforts to strengthen company competitiveness. Nevertheless, as economic growth gathered force, high wage increases became the norm, and the average shuntō wage settlement reached double figures in every year but one from 1961 through 1975. Strikes were common during the shuntō wage bargaining season but – with most private-sector unions controlled by cooperative leaders – few were hard pressed. Apart from some pressure exerted by militant National Railway unions, wages rose largely because of the combination of high growth, high inflation, and shortages of workers that resulted from the rapid expansion of manufacturing and service industries. Companies essentially bid up wages for young workers, steadily reducing the once large age-based wage differentials. Whereas most large private-sector unions were becoming cooperative, the public sector remained highly contentious (Koshiro 1983). Public-sector unions, especially in the National Railways, frequently participated in shuntō, launching campaigns (which were often barely disguised strikes) to demand restoration of strike rights along with wage increases. Conservative politicians and national bureaucrats frequently sanctioned striking workers, and sometimes refused to honour independent pay recommendations as well, helping to perpetuate a vicious cycle of strikes and sanctions. In the 1960s, the International Labour Organization (ILO) made an unusual intervention into Japan’s public-sector labour controversy, admonishing both sides, though to little effect. Japan’s last great political upheavals occurred in 1960, when the Miike mine strike, in Kyushu, coincided with the demonstrations against the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty (Anpo) demonstrations, generating a dangerous double political crisis. Mining firms began drastically reducing coal mining work forces in the late 1950s, but the militant coal miners’ union Tanrō refused to accept job reductions, or to slacken a strict safety regime that minimized accidents and injuries, but also reduced efficiency. When Tanrō launched an all-out strike, numerous left-wing activists rushed to Kyushu to support the miners, while the business community and government provided major financial and logistical assistance to the uncompromising mine owners. At some points of the ordeal, large-scale bloodshed was clearly possible. Finally, after 313 days, an exhausted Tanrō accepted a settlement that thinly masked a complete capitulation, marking another major defeat for the labour left. The ascendant second union abandoned the safety regime, but accidents surged, and 458 Miike mine workers died in an explosion in 1963. Following the disruptions of 1960, Japanese politics and labour relations became less politically charged. Conservatives continuously controlled the government, but moved away from the contentious policies of the 1950s toward the politically pragmatic stance of focusing on growth, notably by enacting the 1960 ‘Income Doubling Plan’ (which did little to stimulate growth, but became a symbol of the country’s economic success as incomes doubled in much less than the anticipated 10 years). Similarly, with living standards rising, Sōhyō steadily reduced (but did not abandon) its political activism. Despite worsening shopfloor weakness, unions were buoyed by a steady influx of members, as the fast-growing manufacturing and white-collar sectors recruited large numbers of young workers. As a result, the union organization rate stabilized at around 35 per cent from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s.

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Workplaces and productivity The decade from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s was possibly the most important stage in the formation of the Japanese employment system. To be sure, the basic patterns had already emerged: labour–management relations were increasingly cooperative, courts had begun protecting long-term employment, and tiered employment practices, especially extensive use of low-paid non-regular workers, were in place. Nevertheless, this decade saw a drastic reshaping of workplaces. Most importantly, managers developed new personnel practices that made effective use of quickly advancing new technologies to raise productivity, creating a foundation for increasingly powerful export performance. Economic success in turn helped to legitimate labour management practices that were closely cooperative but not always democratic (few union elections in large firms are seriously contested, to put it politely), and shuntō helped ensure that the fruits of economic success were reasonably well apportioned. During the high-growth era (1955–73), but especially in the decade from the mid-1950s, a massive infusion of technology and new labour management practices brought a comprehensive transformation of manufacturing workplaces (Gordon 1998; Kumazawa 1996: 125–58). Japanese managers took full advantage of the technological shifts not only to raise productivity, but to overhaul personnel practices to gain tighter control of workplaces and to hold down numbers of workers. The shipbuilding industry, for example, increased tonnage produced nearly four times from 1957 to 1968, but the number of workers barely changed at around 150,000. The transformation advanced most quickly in the steel industry (and perhaps shipbuilding), where large firms possessed great financial and technical resources (Gordon 1998). Manufacturing work steadily shifted from being based in long years of hands-on experience to being primarily knowledge or education based, and the new labour management practices proved attractive to younger workers with the higher levels of education needed to master rapidly evolving technologies. The decline of long-term, experience-based skill development undermined the traditional structure of union authority, in which the older, most experienced workers often served as de facto leaders of workplaces. Thanks to the introduction of new technology, dangerous and physically exhausting work was nearly eliminated. Unfortunately, work conditions worsened in other respects; automation made production work increasingly routinized and tedious, and managers reduced break time and increased shift work. A major step in the reorganization of employment practices was the overhaul of shopfloor supervision. Companies greatly improved training of foremen and other workplace supervisors, and clarified the criteria for advancement. They thereby encouraged talented and ambitious workers to channel their energies toward seeking promotions (and away from unions). The advent of well-trained supervisors put an end to the longstanding problems of favouritism and inept shopfloor supervision and also ended the dual role of many foremen as representatives of both management and unions – in fact, in many workplaces, foremen with training in personnel relations served to partially displace unions as worker representatives. Major firms also steadily revised personnel systems, and by the mid-1960s had unified blueand white-collar personnel systems. Consequently, education level no longer limited promotion chances, and blue-collar workers were ‘white-collarized’ – they enjoyed basically the same career opportunities and monthly pay systems as white-collar workers. The rationalization (and standardization) of promotion, pay, and other personnel practices helped strengthen the sense of fairness and facilitated the efficient deployment of workers – making it easier, for instance, to transfer people between jobs or factories as massive investment transformed workplaces. The Japan Productivity Centre (JPC) was established, with American assistance, in 1955 by Japanese managers.The cooperative union federations were persuaded to participate officially in 338

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the JPC after formal agreement was reached that the benefits of productivity raising would be equitably shared and jobs would be protected (observers still disagree about whether the agreement provided real protections or was just pro forma). Even many left-wing unions were agreeable to productivity raising, or were simply resigned to it, because workplace rationalization and technological upgrading could save jobs (by keeping firms competitive) as well as displace them. In fact, the JPC played only a secondary role in raising productivity, since many managers were already strongly dedicated to raising efficiency, but effectively encouraged labour–management cooperation by helping disseminate labour–management consultation practices. Many managers had enthusiastically embraced scientific management methods since the 1910s, but the real payoff from those efforts came after the war, thanks in large part to organizations, such as the Japan Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE), dedicated to productivityraising (Tsutsui 2001; Cole 1989). JUSE, for example, played a central role in developing quality control circles and other small-group activities, which quickly developed into a core feature of Japanese industrial relations. Small-group activities were initially devised so that all workers, not just engineers, would take responsibility for improving product quality, but they have also served to bolster morale against the worsening tedium of factory work, and to inculcate tighter adherence to corporate goals.While fulfilling for some workers, efficiency-raising activities also added to workloads (Kumazawa 1996: 87–124). Auto maker Toyota was probably the global pioneer in meshing and further refining the techniques of mass production and scientific management. Led by engineer/manager Ōno Taichi (1912–90), who sought to eliminate all waste of either motion or time, Toyota rigorously redesigned production lines and machines, and reorganized production work so that workers performed several tasks simultaneously.William Tsutsui (2001: 187) suggests that Japanese workers have been more willing than Western workers to accept the intensification of work resulting from Taylorist rationalization as a ‘fair price for rising wages and improving lifestyles’. The rapid and comprehensive implementation of new practices was possible because most unions were controlled by cooperative leaders by around 1960. Managers in major steel firms quietly helped cooperative leaders gain control of the unions without busting them (in contrast to Nissan), though they quietly employed some hardcore measures of their own, notably by assisting pro-management groups in violation of labour laws (Gordon 1998: 81–4). During hard-fought wage disputes in the late 1950s, managers consistently refused to confer significant raises even when the companies were making large profits, steadily undermining leftist authority in the steelworker unions (Gordon 1998: 104–30). During the 1960s, the once combative steelworker unions came to be known for their commitment to cooperation, and went on to play a leading role in encouraging cooperation and wage moderation in the union movement through the early 1980s.

The emerging labour market and inequality Long-term job security became progressively institutionalized from the early 1950s (Foote 1996). Japanese labour law provides little job protection, allowing dismissals on one month’s notice, but court decisions from the early 1950s restricted managers’ dismissal rights. Consequently, job security rights steadily became codified through practice and legal interpretation. Job security for regular workers became quite strong in larger firms, which have the resources and incentives to protect jobs. However, job protection was far from equal due to the re-emergence of the ‘two-tiered’ employment system, based on differentials between large and small firms, and between regular and non-regular workers. Firm size-based differentials in wages and work conditions have 339

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historically been (and continue to be) much greater than in other advanced economic democracies, and extensive use of non-regular workers has also been commonplace. Few small-firm or non-regular employees have been represented by unions, and most large-firm enterprise unions have tacitly accepted the use of non-regulars as ‘buffers’ or ‘cushions’ protecting the jobs of regular workers. Even court decisions have reinforced the practice of dismissing non-regular workers to protect regular worker jobs. The use of employment agencies was tightly restricted after the war to prevent recurrence of prewar labour abuses, but the government loosened the rules in 1950, and the steel and shipbuilding industries quickly began to make extensive of shagaikō, workers hired through private employment agencies. Large manufacturers also directly hired large numbers of rinjikō, non-regular workers, who often preferred non-regular status in large firms over the poor conditions common in small manufacturing firms. Toyota and Nissan, even with production and sales soaring from the late 1950s, continued holding down labour costs by automating and rationalizing production. Low-paid non-regular workers posed one of Japan’s most serious social policy concerns for years, but thanks to high growth, along with some efforts by unions, the numbers of non-regular male employees fell steadily, until by the late 1960s nearly all men had regular positions. On the other hand, the ranks of non-regular women workers (usually called paato, part-timer, even if they worked full-time hours) began to grow, especially to fill rapidly expanding service-sector positions. Furthermore, the large labour cost differentials between larger and smaller firms means that sub-contracting has continued to be an important means of reducing labour costs. The importance (or ‘uniqueness’) of lifetime (or long-term) employment security has often been overstated or misunderstood. The more standard interpretation today is that employment practices for core workers have emphasized ‘membership’ over particular jobs or occupations. Regular workers do not have clearly designated job responsibilities or work hours, but as full members of their enterprises, receive strong livelihood protection in the form of good compensation, support for career development, and strong job security; in contrast, non-regular workers perform specific tasks and have well-defined work hours, but are not recognized as enterprise ‘members’, so that their pay, job security, and status are low.This line of reasoning is longstanding and has recently been refined and popularized by Hamaguchi Keiichirō (2009), whose characterization is widely used at present. The process of creating a membership-based employment system developed in large part from the long prewar struggles of low-status workers against discrimination, efforts of early postwar unions to demand equal status within firms, and the historical reliance on long-term in-house training to develop skilled production workers as well as capable white-collar and managerial staff. In addition, postwar Japanese firms came to prioritize the hiring of schoolleavers. Hiring young people directly from school enabled managers to conduct intensive training from an early age and to inculcate strong company spirit in core employees; the nenkō wage system helped minimize the risks of hiring unskilled workers because starting wages are low. Consequently, and in contrast to common Western practice, large Japanese companies have usually hired young people according to perceived job potential rather than current skill level. One important economic benefit of this employment logic is that it strengthens incentives for firms to conduct long-term skill development – turnover has been relatively low, partly because most workers’ employment options become less favourable once they have graduated, so companies can expect to recover training costs. A further consequence was that companies came to emphasize ‘internal’ flexibility by regularly rotating employees among jobs and by emphasizing OJT (on-the-job training, generally conducted with close assistance from experienced workers) to develop a wide range of skills. The new supervisor practices explained earlier 340

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put strong importance on the ability of superiors to conduct training and skill development of younger workers. As technologies began to change rapidly and new manufacturing complexes were constructed to replace older facilities, firms often avoided dismissals by retraining and transferring workers. (By relocating workers, firms could adhere to promises to protect jobs even while downsizing work forces in particular factories, but the process could be disruptive for the families involved.) Another distinctive feature of the labour market, then, was that the particular tasks of most employees were not clearly designated, providing considerable flexibility to managers in assigning tasks. Since the 1990s, however, this indistinctness has increasingly come to be viewed as a problem, partly because managers often assign excess tasks, overburdening workers and generating long work hours. Although all advanced economic democracies had well-defined gendered divisions of labour in the early postwar era, the male breadwinner model became especially strongly entrenched in Japan. This occurred largely because men were expected to dedicate themselves to their jobs, working overtime and doing strenuous shift work as demanded. Women, once married, were accordingly expected to dedicate themselves to families. Nevertheless, apart from non-paid tasks such as childrearing, many women lent important support to economic competitiveness by performing semi-skilled production work, notably in the textile and electronics industries. Young female employees were, for example, instrumental to the export success of transistor radios because Western competitors facing more assertive unions could not hire productive workers at similarly low compensation. In short, the gendered division of labour proved economically efficient, and was accordingly encouraged by corporate and government policies (e.g., Gordon 1998: 75–9). Through the 1980s, women were generally hired as regular workers, like men, but they nearly always left by their late twenties (before their pay rose much under nenkō pay systems) to marry and raise children. If they returned to the work force, it was usually to non-regular (low-paid) work, or sometimes to work for non-profit organizations (NPOs) or community organizations. In short, apart from teaching and the civil service, women rarely had opportunities for well-paid or professional careers.

The steady-growth era (1975–91) Slower growth but stable employment Many scholars characterize the basic employment system as has having taken shape during the high-growth era, then ‘maturing’ during the 1970s, as corporations protected regular employees’ jobs despite less favourable economic conditions. The 1973 oil shock brought an abrupt end to high economic growth and generated a damaging inflationary surge. Japan experienced a short eruption of militancy and a soaring strike rate, and the 1974 shuntō wage settlement spiked to 32.9 per cent (although reduced overtime and other measures reduced actual costs to corporations). Business and political leaders, along with cooperative union officials, went into crisis mode.Vigorously arguing that high raises would bring high inflation and destroy jobs, business leaders helped reshape public opinion and cooperative union leaders (especially in steel) strove to convince fellow unionists of the importance of moderating wage demands. At the same time, the government instituted a harsh austerity policy to rein in inflation and force down wage settlements. The result was a speedy transformation of shuntō into an instrument of wage restraint, starting in 1975. The nation’s most prestigious manufacturing firms (notably Toyota, Nissan, Toshiba, Hitachi, Nippon Steel, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries) institutionalized their 341

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leadership role in wage setting, a pattern that still continues. Although Japan was hit harder than other developed economies by the oil embargo, close labour–management cooperation on wages and workplace rationalization helped the country to recover more quickly than Western competitors. With high wage settlements ended, cooperative union leaders adopted a strategy of attempting to gain improved employment conditions and living standards for workers by holding down wage demands while emphasizing active policymaking participation. The underlying logic was that unions would strengthen cooperation with managers in order to protect jobs while improving living standards and work conditions by demanding policies, such as tax reductions and expanded vocational training, that would benefit workers and ordinary citizens. The strategy harboured several obvious problems. Many critics regarded it as an attempt by cooperative unions to mask their inability (or unwillingness) to gain reasonable wage raises or improved work conditions in collective bargaining. In addition, it presupposed both the rationality of the unions’ policymaking agenda and their policymaking leverage. Labour-related policies are, in principle, formulated primarily in shingikai (policy deliberation councils), tripartite forums orchestrated by national bureaucrats that give organized labour a voice in policymaking (Foote 1997). However, the technocratic shingikai-driven policymaking process cannot be readily observed by the public or by union members, so the strategy has been ineffective in building public support for or interest in unions, even in cases where gains have been made. Not surprisingly, the union organization rate commenced a steady decline in 1975, from around 35 per cent, to 17.3 per cent, one of the lowest levels among major economic countries, in 2016. The labour side clearly fared poorly in the three major labour-related policy issues of the 1980s and early 1990s: equal job opportunity, part-time worker protections, and work hour reduction. Those policymaking initiatives were generally initiated, not by unions, but by Ministry of Labour bureaucrats, who were not necessarily friends of female or non-regular workers. Worse, most mainstream unions, committed to their enterprises and core (predominantly male) regular worker members, were ambivalent about all three issues, because women and nonregular workers were serving as job-protecting buffers for regular employees, and work hour flexibility enhances firm competitiveness. Equal opportunity for women is an area where Japan has taken a course different from other leading democracies. In the 1970s, as equality was becoming a global concern, Japanese conservative policymakers began reasserting conservative principles on gender, partly in order to hold down welfare costs by encouraging women to focus on homemaking and child raising. Meanwhile, employers, facing little pressure from unions or women’s groups, continued to pursue traditional policies favouring male-centred employment practices. Consequently, the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL), passed in 1985, neither outlawed discrimination nor enlarged women’s employment rights. The law’s main impact was probably in encouraging ongoing change in social consciousness and economic practice. Certainly, the number of women pursuing professional careers began to grow, though the early pioneers reportedly suffered high levels of stress and job separation. Overt gender discrimination has weakened steadily, but large differences in compensation and ease of dismissal create strong incentives to hire non-regular workers, who have been predominantly women since the late the late 1960s. The ratio of non-regular workers began a steady rise from around 15 per cent of the work force in the mid-1980s, reaching nearly 40 per cent in 2015. Over half of women employees are presently non-regular. One reason for the increase is automation, which has steadily made it easier to replace many regular positions – among them, financial-sector jobs commonly performed by female employees – with nonregular workers, because training and experience have become less essential. Some industries, 342

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notably supermarkets, began in the 1990s converting non-regular employees, largely mothers returning to the workforce, into ‘core’ workers (in a process called kikanka, literally core-ization) by raising skill levels. As a result, non-regular workers account for majorities of employees in some industries. With the number of female non-regular workers growing and their unequal treatment becoming a social concern, policymakers passed the Part-time Workers Law in 1993, especially to strengthen job protection. Employers mostly evaded it by making more systematic use of time-limited employment contracts. Excess work hours were first identified as a major socioeconomic problem in the 1970s, but subsequent policymaking efforts have brought only minor improvements (Foote 1997). Economic slumps have generally been more effective than policy in reducing work time because Japanese employers routinely cut costs by reducing overtime rather than dismissing workers. Long hours are believed to generate serious health problems, including karōshi, or death from overwork. In addition, excess work time impedes gender equality, because women raising children have difficulty pursuing careers, and undermines job creation, as employers prefer to press longer work hours on regular employees rather than to hire more staff. Despite the problems, the employment system has functioned well by many measures, especially in the 1980s. During that period, many Western countries struggled with severe unemployment, but Japan maintained steady growth, and the middle class appeared enviably stable. Following the oil shock, ‘voluntary early retirement’ became institutionalized as the primary means of reducing core work forces in large firms, keeping the process of downsizing orderly and reasonably fair, if not exactly painless. A major union function came to be mediation when firms reduced core regular work forces. The employment system passed a major test in 1986, when a sharp but short recession occurred in the wake of the 1985 Plaza Accord (when the Japanese government agreed to allow the yen to appreciate to alleviate trade friction). Japan’s strong competitiveness across a wide range of manufacturing industries (complemented by protectionist measures protecting low-productivity sectors like food processing) has helped to maintain relatively high levels of manufacturing employment, despite the end of the grossly under-valued currency.

The union movement Major unions since the 1960s had sought to unify the union movement, and the end of the high growth created further pressure to overcome divisions and attempt to consolidate organized labour influence. A major obstacle to unification, however, was the hostility, based on both ideology and economic interest, between the left-wing labour federation Sōhyō, centred on public sector unions, and the cooperative federation Dōmei, constituted primarily of private sector unions. The problem was resolved in large part by the steady weakening of the labour left. In autumn 1975, Sōhyō public sector unions launched the ‘strike for the right to strike’, reasoning that a determined strike could force the government to restore strike rights. In fact, they succeeded mainly in angering Japan’s long-suffering commuters (conservative policymakers better appraised conditions, and simply let the strike play out). In the 1980s, Sōhyō was again badly battered when the Nakasone Yasuhiro-led government privatized NTT (the national telecommunications monopoly) and the Japan National Railways.The latter was also divided into seven new railway companies, partly in order to bust Kokurō, Japan’s last large militant union. While the militant labour left was breaking down, most other major unions (including several in Sōhyō) steadily enhanced their inter-organizational networking and continued to emphasize participation in governmental policymaking forums. The process culminated in 1987 with the formation, by private-sector unions, of a new national labour federation, Rengō (Japanese 343

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Trade Union Confederation, JTUC). In 1989, Sōhyō and Dōmei dissolved themselves into ‘new’ Rengō, today’s leading national labour federation. Rengō initially represented nearly 8 million members, about 62 per cent of the organized work force.The threat to union influence, evident in problems such as the steadily declining organization rate, had led the unions to overcome their divisions sufficiently to unify organized labour for the first time since the early 1950s. It was nonetheless clear that the formation of Rengō constituted a culminating triumph for cooperative unionism. Furthermore, the old divisions were hardly resolved, and leftist-cooperative tensions have persisted within Rengō (though they are well screened from public view). Moreover, factions within Sōhyō public-sector unions opposed to Rengō’s cooperative stance formed a new left-wing federation, Zenrōren, presently representing fewer than 1 million workers. A third federation, the small Zenrōkyō, closer in spirit to moderate Western unions, also formed. Rengō has also pursued an ambitious, but ultimately frustrating, political agenda centred on backing moderate reformist challengers to the long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The federation played a key behind-the-scenes role in the establishment of the coalition government under Hosokawa Morihiro in 1993, only to see it collapse in eight months, and then see the coalition break up shortly after. By 2000, the Japan Socialist Party (JSP), long closely tied to Sōhyō, had nearly collapsed after losing its raison d’être with the close of the Cold War. In the 2000s, Rengō has been the main supporter of the new Democratic Party (DPJ), which routed the LDP in the 2009 elections. Unfortunately, the DPJ did little for workers when in office, despite placing several union officials in cabinet positions, and its electoral collapse in 2012 left the mainstream union movement’s political strategy in shreds.

The slow-growth era (1991–present) After the bubble The burst of the ‘bubble’ economy around 1991 was the most visible, but not necessarily most important, of the socioeconomic shifts that have stimulated change in the employment system. Slower growth prompted managers to make greater use of non-regular workers, but that shift was already underway. Other major socioeconomic changes include the falling birthrate and the shrinking of jobs in manufacturing, public works, and the public sector. The low birthrate led the government and business to readjust employment-related policies and practices once they belatedly comprehended that women’s lagging earnings were discouraging economically uneasy couples from having children. The number of employees in manufacturing peaked in 1994, largely a result of increased offshoring, continued rationalization of production, and rising challenges from Chinese and Korean competitors. In 2013, manufacture employment fell below 10 million for the first time in decades.Though less noticed, cutbacks in public works and public sector budgets brought further reductions in well-paid jobs. The government quickly shifted its stance on gender equal employment opportunity around 1990 because, as it became clear that the birthrate would soon lead to population decline and threaten economic performance (Weathers 2005). Instead of encouraging women to dedicate themselves to support families and to participate in the labour market only as ‘supplementary’ workers, the government began to promote equal job opportunity. However, conservatives continue to dominate policymaking, and they still respect the principle of respecting management authority and autonomy. As a result, policymaking has been somewhat progressive, but halfhearted. For example, policies to provide support for child care and elder care were introduced by 1991, and have been steadily strengthened, but only a minority of workers have actually benefited. Nearly all non-regular workers suffer de facto exclusion. The EEOL was revised in 344

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1997, at last making gender workplace discrimination illegal, but it remains a weak law. A second revision, in 2007, intended to deal with persistent indirect discrimination, was barely noticed. The large divide between regular and non-regular workers (and, to a lesser extent, between large and smaller-firm workers) has, as in the 1950s, again become a serious policy issue, partly because of growing concern about Japan’s surprisingly high poverty rate (though severe poverty remains rare). 8.5 million new jobs were created from 1988 to 2010, but 8.4 million of them were non-regular. 6.4 million of the new jobs went to women, including 400,000 regular jobs (indicating that women have begun displacing men, though to a small degree).To a large extent, the rising number of non-regular workers simply reflects new conditions, such as rising rates of labour force participation for mothers or older persons who want short hours. Unfortunately, the rate of involuntary non-regular work, especially among youth, is also growing. Furthermore, differentials remain large. Compensation for the non-regular workers is estimated to be about 56.6 per cent that of regular workers (40 per cent if pensions are factored in), and they are relatively easily released, generally through non-renewal of contract. It is widely believed that more and more non-regular workers do essentially the same jobs as regular workers (though employers naturally claim otherwise), and that some experienced non-regular workers regularly train recently hired regular workers. Finally, non-regular workers suffer very rates of injury and are especially vulnerable to serious harassment. In 1995, Nikkeiren issued A New Age of Japanese-style Management, a report advocating greater use of non-regular workers for routinized jobs. Many observers believe the report stimulated greater utilization of non-regular workers, though its real impact is hard to gage. In addition, LDP-led governments and the Ministry of Labour eased rules on the use of non-regular workers, arguably undermining their own equal opportunity agenda (since most non-regular workers are still women). At strong corporate insistence, the government backed revision of the Temporary Worker Law in 1997, deregulating the agency temporary worker industry.The combination of market-oriented policymaking and economic change (especially slow growth) brought an important, and unwelcome, change in the 2000s, when, for the first time since the 1950s, many young men found themselves in non-regular employment. During the 1990s and into the early 2000s, it was common to view young non-regular workers as irresponsible wasters unwilling to accept social responsibilities (as reflected in the derogatory term ‘parasite singles’). Since around 2005, public perception has shifted, due in part to more aggressive reporting of workplace practices by journalists and academics. They pointed out that non-regular workers were frequently mistreated and that young persons who did not attend good universities had few good job opportunities. Reflecting the change in public consciousness, the term waakingu pua (working poor) was introduced from English, and around 2011 burakku kigyō (black company) became the still-ubiquitous catchphrase for companies that abuse or exploit (especially young) workers. Despite increased concern about abusive workplaces and economic inequality, mainstream unions failed to take strong action to protect the most vulnerable workers or arrest their own organizational decline. Not only has organized labour’s policymaking participation been largely ineffective in helping disadvantaged workers, but the government has increasingly excluded unions altogether by bypassing the shingikai to advance labour-related reforms in committees staffed mainly by business leaders and conservative academics. The organization rate has fallen steadily since 1975, as noted above, and the absolute number of union members started to decline as well in 1994, as manufacturing employment began falling. Strikes have nearly disappeared. One veteran labour observer estimates that in 1974, the peak year for strikes, probably half of all union members participated in at least one labour dispute during the year, but that in 2013 only 1 in 1,000 did so. Average wages declined about 12 per cent from 1998 to 2013, with 345

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small-firm workers being hit especially hard. In 2002 and some later years, unions declined to make even symbolic demands for wage raises. It became a mantra that wage restraint since 1975 had been overdone, aggravating Japan’s deflationary spiral. The decline of mainstream unionism has been paralleled by a steady rise of non-mainstream labour organizations dedicated to representing disfavoured workers. Most of these are community unions and other ‘individual affiliate unions’ which, unlike enterprise unions, enroll primarily individual members rather than by workplace groups (Suzuki 2008). In the early 1980s, so-called community unions began to emerge, especially to represent the women, non-regular workers, and small-firm workers neglected by mainstream enterprise unions. Non-mainstream labour organizations have since proliferated and diversified, with some, such as Tokyo Union (which specializes in campaigning for temporary agency workers) becoming rather prominent. Japanese labour law does little to protect union autonomy from managerial interference, but does effectively protect the rights of workers to form unions and conduct meaningful collective bargaining. For this reason, Japan’s non-mainstream union sector can be expected to remain vigorous and significant, though it does not presently figure to become large and powerful. The major weaknesses of the alternative labour movement are lack of funding and the small number of people actively involved. Lacking resources, activists rely heavily on legal action to enact change, but the court system is slow and far from labour-friendly. Nevertheless, nonmainstream labour organizations have proven effective. Though small, they have over the years assisted tens of thousands of individual workers. Furthermore, they have played an important role in shaping national consciousness through public relations activities and by channeling information to journalists, stimulating the media’s strong concern with workplace problems.

Current conditions Today, contrasting trends in employment conditions can be observed. On the one hand, concerns about serious workplace problems combined with changing social consciousness (especially about gender and economic equality) have been pushing employers to improve treatment of non-regular workers. The pressures for positive reform are currently being strengthened by the falling youth population and consequent labour shortages. Prominent companies such as Uniqlo have recently garnered attention by improving employment conditions, such as elevating non-regular workers to regular status or improving support for working parents. However, these measures are primarily responses to labour market conditions rather than government policies or union pressures, and relatively few workers have so far benefited. Furthermore, the limitations of mainstream unions mean that major firms and conservative politicians continue to hold the initiative in reshaping employment practices. The present Abe Shinzō government (since 2012) is pressing a wide range of labour deregulatory policies long desired by business: total liberalization of agency temporary work, near-elimination of work hour protections, eased use of foreign workers, and steady dismantlement of long-term employment protections.The Abe government has also made unusually direct interventions into labour–management relations, especially by making limited use of affirmative action to advance gender equality, and by pressing major firm managers to raise wages in order to stimulate economic growth.

Conclusion Perhaps the most important characteristics of the postwar Japanese labour and employment systems have been the exceptionally high degree of cooperation between unions and managers, and 346

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the high level of employment stability. Close cooperation enabled managers to develop highly efficient production practices that supported a long-powerful export sector, and unemployment has been held to enviably low levels (even allowing for problems such as large numbers of nonregular workers). Millions of workers in larger firms have enjoyed strong protection, with high or stable economic growth usually enabling workers in smaller or more vulnerable firms to find re-employment as necessary.Wage restraint became highly disciplined in the mid-1970s, helping manufacturing firms to maintain strong international competitiveness. Not surprisingly, close cooperation has entailed serious costs. Labour–management practices are often less than democratic. Most major private-sector unions have long been closely tied to managers and have rarely exerted themselves to represent workers other than their own core members, primarily male regular employees in large enterprises. However, increased media attention, the rise of alternative unions, and increasingly serious labour shortages have put pressure on the government and corporations alike to improve employment conditions for women and non-regular workers. Mainstream unions affiliated with Rengō have continued to see their influence wane, but non-mainstream labour organizations continue to be active and quite effective, if only on a small scale. But the initiative for labour reform presently lies with cost-conscious managers and conservative politicians. There is a growing consensus that Japan should shift toward Western-style job-based employment system, away from the present membership- or firm-based employment system. A new transformation is underway, but there are concerns that the benefits will not be shared equitably.

Further reading Carlile, Lonny E. (2005) Divisions of Labor: Globality, Ideology, and War in the Shaping of the Japanese Labor Movement, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Gordon, Andrew (1998) The Wages of Affluence: Labor and Management in Postwar Japan, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kumazawa, Makoto (1996) Portraits of the Japanese Workplace: Labor Movements, Workers, and Managers, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Kume, Ikuo (1998) Disparaged Success: Labor Politics in Postwar Japan, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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25 Genders, sexualities and bodies in modern Japanese history Vera Mackie

The importance of gender to the writing of the history of modern Japan is now well established. We can trace a shift from ‘women’s history’, which was largely focused on making women visible in the historical narrative, to ‘gender history’.The field of gender history deploys ‘gender’ as a major conceptual tool of analysis, considers both men’s and women’s experiences and interrogates both masculinity and femininity (Scott 1988: 42; Molony and Uno 2005). There is a long tradition of the writing of women’s history in the Japanese language, and we now have a significant body of scholarship in the English language, too, starting in the 1970s, and increasing in recent years (for surveys of the field, see Mackie 2005a; 2013a; 2013b; 2013c; 2015; Hayakawa 1991; Fujimura-Fanselow and Kameda 1995; Tonomura et al. 1999; Wakita 2006; Ueno 2003; 2009; Daniels and Tomida 2005; Itō 2005; Taga 2005; Fujimura-Fanselow 2011; Mackie and McLelland 2015).1 The concept of ‘gender’ (jendā) has gradually become mainstream, in both popular and academic discourse in Japan, and in English-language writings on modern Japanese history. Recent theoretical perspectives thus interrogate both femininity and masculinity and look at their dynamic interaction; consider non-binary gender identities; consider sexuality alongside gender, caste, class, ethnicity, ability/disability and other dimensions of difference; look at both normative and variant sexualities; and consider the embodied dimensions of human experience.

Gender and modernity The social and cultural category of gender is a product of modernity, as the status-based relationships and structures of feudalism are replaced with a society structured according to relationships of class and gender. Modernity is a set of economic and social conditions, including ‘capitalism, bureaucracy, technological development’ accompanied by specific ‘experiences of temporality and historical consciousness’ (Felski 1995: 13). In Japan, modernity was defined against the past of a feudal economy, hierarchical status relationships and the military rule of the shoguns. In just a few decades, Japan undertook a modernization process of transformation from feudalism to capitalism involving ‘scientific and technological innovation, the industrialization of production, rapid urbanization, an ever-expanding capitalist market [and] the development of the nationstate’ (Felski 1995: 13). 348

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In the Japanese case, the understanding of modernity and modernization was overlaid with theories of cultural difference. Japan, like other Asian countries, was the subject of Orientalist projections of an essential difference from European forms of modernity (Said 1978). Japanese intellectuals resisted these projections of their own country, but also developed hierarchical ideas about Japan’s own difference from neighbouring Asian countries (Tanaka 1993). To borrow Tani E. Barlow’s terminology, modernity is necessarily understood as ‘colonial modernity’ (Barlow 1997). Recent scholarship extends beyond the borders of the Japanese nation-state: to the peripheries, the treaty ports, the colonies and the battlefields. The history of colonial modernity includes the Ryukyuans/Okinawans in the South and the indigenous Ainu in the North who were incorporated into the Japanese nation-state in the late nineteenth century. It includes colonial subjects in Korea, Taiwan, the Pacific and metropolitan Japan, settlers and subjects in the puppet-state of Manchukuo from 1932, the ways in which culture and society in the Japanese metropolis were shaped by the concerns of colonialism and imperialism, and their legacies in contemporary society (on colonialism, imperialism and migration, see Chapters 6, 8 and 9 in this volume). According to modernization theory, societies can be categorized according to a linear progression from pre-modern to modern, with the ultimate destination being the modern liberal capitalist democracy (for a critique of modernization theory and Cold War influences on scholarship on Japan, see Dower 1975). Marxist thought posits a similar linear trajectory, but with capitalist liberal democracy seen as a stage in the progress toward socialism, rather than as an endpoint. Such linear views of history have been challenged in different ways by writers informed by postmodern critiques and by theories of postcoloniality and colonial modernity (Chakrabarty 2000). According to these theorists, such binary oppositions as modern/ pre-modern, modern/traditional, developed/underdeveloped are built into the very structures of modernity.The modern society and its pre-modern ‘other’ in fact inhabit the same structured temporality. Japanese history can be divided according to imperial reigns: Meiji (1868–1912), Taishō (1912–26), Shōwa (1926–89) and Heisei (since 1989). Many contemporary leftist, feminist and anti-monarchist writers, however, prefer to avoid the use of these imperial reign names in their descriptions of modern Japanese history. Or one might divide historical periods according to political regimes: early modern/feudal Japan, imperial Japan (1890–1945), wartime Japan and postwar Japan. Imperial Japan refers to the period of Japanese history when the country was governed by the 1889 Constitution of the Empire of Japan (the Meiji Constitution, in effect in 1890) and the corresponding legal codes. The Meiji Constitution and legal codes were overhauled at the end of the Second World War. Although 1947 was the important year for the revision of the legal codes and the Constitution, a clear break was provided by the end of the Second World War in 1945. For a gendered history of modern Japan, we might posit some different turning points. For men, we could track the implementation of military conscription in 1873, the introduction of the property-based franchise of 1890, the extension of the franchise to all adult males (including colonial subjects in the metropolis) in 1925, the military campaigns carried out from 1895 to 1945 and the subsequent repatriation from the colonies and battlefields. For women, the important dates might be 1890, when the Law on Political Assembly and Association prevented them from attending or speaking at public meetings or joining political associations; 1922, when restrictions on women’s attending political meetings were removed; and 1945, when the franchise was extended to women. For reproductive control, one could track the state regulation of abortion and sterilization, from the earliest regulations in the 1870s, through the National Eugenics Law of 1937, the Eugenic Protection Act of 1947 and the Law for the Protection of 349

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the Maternal Body from 1996. More recently, we could consider how governments have dealt with the issue of assisted reproduction (Mackie 2013b; 2014a). As for gender relations in the family, the new Civil Code of 1947 amended the Meiji Civil Code of 1898 and transformed the family from a hierarchical institution based on patriarchy and primogeniture to a relatively egalitarian institution based on equality between husband and wife and equality between male and female siblings (Mackie 2009a). For the history of sexualities, we could trace particular turning points in the state management of sexuality, which took different forms under the Meiji Civil Code and the revised Civil Code of 1947. This could include the privileging of the heteronormative family, the state management of prostitution, the criminalization of particular sexual practices and the censorship of certain cultural representations of sexuality. We could also look at changing sexual subcultures over time (Aoyama 2015; Galbraith 2015; Maree 2015; McLelland 2015a; 2015b; Mackie and Tanji 2015; Suganuma 2015; Shigematsu 2015). For colonial subjects, there would be different turning points. We could track the incorporation of the Ryukyu islands (present-day Okinawa) and the northern territory of Ezo (presentday Hokkaido) in the 1870s, the annexation of Taiwan in 1895, Korea in 1910 and Pacific territories after 1919, the policies of imperial subjectification (kōminka) and assimilation, the inclusion of colonial subjects in total national mobilization, labour mobilization and enforced labour, and the revocation of imperial subjecthood for Koreans and Taiwanese between 1945 and 1952. The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 prompted the rebuilding of the physical infrastructure of Tokyo and resulted in a quickening of various social changes in a manner which cannot easily be encapsulated in the conventional chronologies which depend on imperial era names and turning points marked by military conflicts.

Gendering the nation-state Between the 1850s and 1890s the Japanese nation-state was in a state of flux as it responded to pressure from the United States and other powers to open up the country to international trade. Unequal treaties were concluded with the United States, Great Britain and major European powers in the 1850s and renegotiated around the turn of the twentieth century. Japan, in turn, imposed an unequal treaty on Korea in 1876. The feudal rule of the shoguns was overturned in 1868. By 1890, the country had established a compulsory education system, a new industrial system, a modern army and navy, and a form of constitutional government with the emperor at its peak.The years from the 1850s to the 1890s were the years when a new relationship between individual and state was being forged, and this was based on a gendered form of subjecthood, whereby men and women each had distinctive relationships to the state. Marnie Anderson (2010; 2011) traces the exclusion of women from the political sphere in these years and argues that public space was thus constituted as a gendered space. Although women were excluded from parliamentary politics, they still found ways to be politically active. They wrote articles on political topics and petitioned the government on issues which concerned them. Mara Patessio undertakes a group biography of activist women in the period from the 1860s to the 1880s, tracing the actions and connections between groups of women who aspired to citizenship and claimed a place in the emerging public sphere (Patessio 2004; 2006; 2011). Others have been interested in the ways in which women used public space for charitable purposes and in activities which supported nationalist concerns.The Japan chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) is perhaps the country’s oldest women’s organization: established in 1886 and still active. Elizabeth Dorn Lublin surveys the early history of the 350

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group, from 1886 to 1912. She emphasizes that political organizations, political meetings and voting are not the only ways for women to engage in politics; and explores ‘the many other ways in which women attempted to advance their rights, assert themselves politically, and construct roles for themselves’ (Anderson 2010: 6; see also Yasutake 2004 and Tyrrell 1991). Members of the WCTU ‘contributed to the construction of the public sphere, advanced the feminist and reform movements, and helped shape the nature of citizenship’ (Anderson 2010: 176). Although the WCTU members largely worked within the nationalist and imperialist paradigm of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they tried to expand the possibilities for women to be active within that framework and provided a critique of the behaviour of their male compatriots. We still await, though, a full English-language history of the mass women’s nationalist organizations which operated from the 1900s to the period of total national mobilization of the 1940s (see, however, Havens 1975; Garon 1993a; Wilson 1995; Morita 2005). To say that political space is gendered space is also to consider the workings of masculinity. Much of mainstream history has been about men’s activities in the public sphere but, until recently, without explicitly discussing this in terms of masculinity. Nevertheless, we have many studies of the making of modern (male) political subjectivities which can now be re-read for their insights on the making of modern masculinities. Such works include Earl Kinmonth’s (1981) study of the development of the notion of the ‘self-made man’ in Japanese thought, Kenneth Pyle’s (1969) study of debates on nationalism and Andrew Barshay’s (1992) study of selected public intellectuals in early twentieth-century Japan. Donald Roden (1980; 2005) considers masculinities in the élite schooling system. More recently, Jason Karlin (2002; 2014a; 2014b) has focused on competing forms of masculinity in the late nineteenth century.Yumiko Mikanagi (2011) takes this discussion into the international sphere, arguing that masculinity is also implicated in the practice of international relations. In imperial Japan, men’s citizenship was tied to military service, whereas women were constructed as helpmeets to men, the family and the state. After 1945, democratic reforms meant that individuals were now positioned as citizens rather than subjects. Women gained the right to vote and stand for public office with the revision of the Electoral Law in December 1945, and the Constitution of Japan (enacted 1946, effective 1947) outlawed discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, creed, social status or family origin. The formal barriers to women’s political participation were removed, but gender still shaped the public sphere (Mackie 2000a; 2002a). We have some studies of women’s political activism in the post–Second World War period, starting with Susan Pharr’s (1981) Political Women in Japan (see also Carlberg 1976; Hastings 1996; 2014; Dalton 2008a; 2008b; 2015). Robin LeBlanc has completed two book-length studies of parliamentary politics, explicitly focusing on the workings of masculinity and femininity (LeBlanc 1999; 2010; 2012). There has been recent interest in the radical leftist activism of the 1960s and 1970s (Steinhoff 1996; Igarashi 2000; 2007; Marotti 2009; Mackie 2010a; Eckersall 2013). Not all of this work has been informed by a gender analysis, though, and there is ample scope for further work on the gendering of the state and politics (Germer, Mackie and Wöhr 2014). Feminism as a political movement has also received attention in recent scholarship.

The history of feminism In late nineteenth-century Japan, men and women were positioned as subjects of the emperor, with a limited suffrage available to a small number of men who paid a certain level of property tax. Women and men were positioned in different ways in the legal system and were addressed in distinctive ways according to nationalist discourse. In other words, subjecthood was gendered. 351

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Once there was a consciousness of gendered difference, and a consciousness of the disadvantages suffered by women, this made possible the development of feminist thought. We now have studies of the feminist movement in Japan from the late nineteenth century to the present. A pioneering work was Sharon Sievers’ (1983) survey of the first decades of feminist activism in Japan (see also Mackie 1988; 1997; 2003; 2015; Kano 2016; Buckley 1994; 1997; Buckley and Mackie 1986). Educator Tsuda Umeko (1864–1929) has been the subject of several studies (Furuki 1991; Rose 1992; Nimura 2015), and Anderson and Patessio’s above-mentioned books contribute to our understanding of the early development of feminist thought in Japan. Women active in the socialist movement in the early twentieth century also contributed to an understanding of the ‘woman question’, although they identified themselves as ‘socialist women’ rather than feminists. Hélène Bowen Raddeker (1997; 2002) has studied the lives and works of anarchists Kanno Suga (1881–1911), Kaneko Fumiko (1903–26) and Itō Noe (1895–1923) (see also Kaneko 1997; Miyamoto 1975; Large 1977; Mackie 2013d; Mae 2014). Mikiso Hane (1993) has translated excerpts of the autobiography of Fukuda (Kageyama) Hideko (1865–1927), whose activism bridges the liberal movement of the late nineteenth century (see Chapter 14 in this volume) and the early decades of the socialist movement. Notwithstanding the availability of articles, we await full-length English-language biographies of Fukuda (Ushioda 1977; Mackie 1997; Loftus 2004), socialist thinker Yamakawa Kikue (1890–1980) (Shapcott 1987; Tsurumi 1996; 1998; Yamakawa 2001; Mackie 1997; 2003), and communist writer Miyamoto Yuriko (1899–1951) (de Bary 1981; 1984; Bowen-Struyk 2004; Dobson 2016). We also have several studies of the Bluestockings group (Seitōsha) and their journal Seitō (Bluestockings, 1911–16), including biographies of several figures and translations of important works (Lippit 1975; Reich and Fukuda 1976; Sievers 1983; Mackie 2003; Tomida 2004; Hiratsuka 2006; Bardsley 2007; Yamazaki 1985). Feminist poet and Seitō contributor Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) has received attention for her poetry, journalism, literary writings, travel writings and polemical writings (Rodd 1991; Rowley 2000;Yosano 2001; Baichman 2002). Pioneer campaigner for family planning, Katō [Ishimoto] Shizue (1897–2001), wrote an autobiography in 1935 (republished 1992), and has been the subject of biographical research by Helen Hopper (1995; 2004). Katō’s life exemplifies many of the themes of twentieth-century feminism in her internationalism and in her transition from restricted civil society activity in the early decades of the twentieth century to a long career as a parliamentarian in post-1945 Japan. Parliamentarian Ichikawa Fusae (1893–1981) has also been the subject of several articles and book chapters. Her life spans most of the twentieth century and includes contributions to the labour movement, pioneering activism in the suffragist movement and, like Katō, a long postwar career as a parliamentarian (Vavich 1967; Murray 1975; Molony 2005; 2011). Figures like Ichikawa present difficult questions related to gender and militarism. In Japanese-language historiography, there is criticism of those feminists who were seen to have collaborated with the wartime regime (Suzuki 1997). This has focused on such women as Ichikawa, other Bluestockings such as Yosano Akiko and Hiratsuka Raichō [Haruko] (1886–1971), and feminist historian Takamure Itsue (1894–1964). This preoccupation has also surfaced in the English-language literature, and the translation of Ueno Chizuko’s (2003) book Gender and Nationalism makes these debates accessible to an English-language audience. Nevertheless, these debates would benefit from a more thoroughgoing engagement with theories of gender and citizenship and theories of the gendering of the state (Mackie 2002b; 2005b; 2013b; Germer, Mackie and Wöhr 2014). These debates are not just about history, but are informed by concerns about the proper relationship between feminist activists and the state in contemporary Japan. Mire Koikari revisits the history of the Allied occupation of Japan (1945–52) and situates the strategic alliance between U.S. and Japanese feminists in the context of Cold War politics. 352

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It is only relatively recently that scholars have acknowledged the colonial dimension of the occupation of Japan, and have thus realized that postcolonial theoretical perspectives have much to teach us about the power dynamics of the occupation. Koikari argues that gender policy in occupied Japan cannot be abstracted from global and regional geopolitical trends. She identifies coalitions of thought where the themes of democratization, liberalization and gender equity were embedded in discourses of U.S. hegemony and anti-communism. Feminists, she argues, were complicit in the establishment of the U.S.-Japan alliance in East Asia, much as many of them had been complicit with Japanese imperialism until 1945. Koikari describes occupation -period gender policy as ‘Cold War imperial feminism in the Far East’ (Koikari 2008: 5; see also Pharr 1987; Gordon 1998; Gerster 2008; Gerster and de Matos 2009; Kovner 2012). In the immediate postwar period, feminist activism often involved women who took the speaking position of ‘mothers’. From this position, they contributed to campaigns on pacifism, nuclear disarmament, consumer issues and environmental issues (Mackie 2003; 2016). Ulrike Wöhr, however, complicates our understanding of the gendering of the anti-nuclear movement in several essays. She looks at the participation of both male and female activists and the construction of their gendered forms of citizenship, arguing that those who oppose nuclear power on the grounds of ‘protecting’ the family are guilty of ethnocentrism and a privileging of the norm of the heterosexual nuclear family. She argues for a recognition of diversity in the anti-nuclear movement and in Japanese society itself (Wöhr 2011; 2013; 2014a; 2014b).This has pressing contemporary relevance in the context of the ongoing political contestation in Japan after the compound earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster of 11 March 2011. Julia Bullock (2010) identifies an incipient feminism in literature by women in the 1950s and 1960s, a precursor of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. In Japan, as in the other advanced capitalist democracies, the 1960s and 1970s were the decades of new left and student activism, and the 1970s was the decade of women’s liberation (Tanaka 1974; 1995; Tanaka 1995; Mackie 2003; Shigematsu 2012; Iijima 2014; Bullock et al. 2017). Tokyo-based Femintern press translated English and Chinese works into Japanese and Japanese works into English in the interests of promoting international feminist dialogue (Mackie 2003). The 1970s also saw the development of a more reformist strand of feminism, with activists in Japan making astute use of local and international networks in campaigns for the ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the creation of an Equal Employment Opportunity Law (Mackie 2003; Flowers 2009). Several collections of translations in the 1990s made the thought of these feminist thinkers and activists available to English readers (AMPO: Japan-Asia Quarterly Review 1996; Buckley 1997). Miriam Murase looks at the women’s centres which were established in Japan in the wake of International Women’s Year and International Women’s Decade, policy initiatives connected with the creation of the Office for Gender Equity, and policies concerning the regulation of non-profit organizations (NPOs). Like several other scholars, Murase argues that, through the regulation of NPOs, the government is engaged in shaping civil society in Japan and that this has implications for the possibility of feminist organizations influencing government policy. Murase’s study is informed by political science, and she focuses mainly on state-recognized women’s groups (Murase 2006; see also Takao 2007; Chan Tiberghien 2004). Laura Dales (2009) deploys a combination of participant observation, ethnography and textual analysis in her account of activism focused on women’s centres. Yoshie Kobayashi traces the development of gender policy in Japan, from the establishment of a Women’s and Minors’ Bureau within the Ministry of Labour in 1947, to the enactment of an Equal Employment Opportunity Act in 1986 (and subsequent revisions), to the creation of the Basic Law for a Gender Equal Society and the Office for Gender Equality in the 353

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1990s (Kobayashi 2004; see also Gelb 2003). Kobayashi deploys the concept of ‘state feminism’ to describe the relationship between feminists and the bureaucracy. Although the concept of ‘state feminism’ is becoming increasingly influential in the description of the development of gendersensitive policy in Japan, this concept sacrifices analytical clarity in collapsing the two terms ‘state’ and ‘feminism’. The state is a complex entity riven by contradictions, and feminism is a diverse coalition of movements rather than a unitary entity (Mackie 2013b). The Japanese government’s gender-sensitive policies were the subject of contention between conservative nationalist groups and feminist groups from the 1990s to the turn of the twenty-first century. These campaigns have come to be known as ‘gender-bashing’, or ‘gender-free-bashing’ (Kano 2011;Yamaguchi 2014). Strangely enough, it is the former leader of these ‘gender-bashing’ campaigns, Abe Shinzō, who has recently chosen to identify himself with ‘womenomics’ and the promotion of women’s paid work during his second stint as prime minister (Kano and Mackie 2013; Macnaughtan 2015). A further transformation of modernity is the shift from production based on the feudal household to a system of waged labour. The development of waged labour is accompanied by segmentation of the labour market according to class, caste, gender and ethnicity and the development of a gendered division of labour which distinguishes between unpaid domestic and caring labour and paid labour.

Gendering labour history In Japan, as in other industrializing countries, the textile industry was an early means of capital accumulation, which led to the development of a highly feminized form of factory labour. E. Patricia Tsurumi (1990) traces the earliest history of the female textile workers, arguing that the forms of labour management which developed in the textile factories were forged in the struggles between management and labour. Janet Hunter (2003) brings the perspective of an economic historian to this history. Elyssa Faison considers the interplay of gender, class and ethnicity in the management of textile workers, paying attention to Japanese, immigrant Korean and Okinawan workers. Faison argues that ideologies of nationalism and ethnicity ‘were used by industry and the state to discipline and control both a labor force and state subjects; in other words, creating workers went hand in hand with creating gendered imperial subjects’ (Faison 2007: 1). Helen Macnaughtan follows the textile workers through the post-1945 period, once again with the viewpoint of an economic historian (2008). We also have a small number of works on women in the mining industry (Sone 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Smith 2005; 2006), and on rural women (Tamanoi 1998; Bernstein 1983; Smith and Wiswell 1982). Andrew Gordon’s (1985) early focus was on unions and heavy industry in Japan, and thus has implications for the consideration of masculinity and work. His second book (1992), on unions in a working-class area of Tokyo, necessarily engaged with gender in considering how maledominated unions dealt with the women in textile factories, who were a major component of the industrial workforce for much of the period of the development of Japan’s industrialization. In the early twentieth century various gendered occupations were associated with the cultural phenomenon of the ‘modern girl’, to be discussed further below. These are the dance hall girl (Mackie 2012; 2013e), the actress (Kano 2001), the female bus conductor, the artist’s model (Mackie 2009b) and the café waitress (jokyū). Aside from the media panics about modern girls, we need to think about the actual working conditions of women in gendered and often sexualized service industries. Alisa Freedman considers the cultural significance of mass transport in the formation of modern urban subjectivities. She analyzes the gendered spaces of the streetcar, the subway carriage 354

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and the bus. One chapter of her monograph, Tokyo in Transit, is devoted to the development of the occupation of female bus conductor, or ‘bus girl’ in early twentieth-century Japan. Almost from the beginning, this was an occupation which was gendered as female (in contrast to some other countries) (Freedman 2010). Once air travel developed, there was a similar gendering of the occupation of flight attendant (Yano 2010). Others remind us that waitressing was hard work, often poorly remunerated and subject to particular hazards such as sexual harassment and outright sexual exploitation (Silverberg 1998; Tipton 2002; Inoue 1998). Whether or not the café waitresses literally provided sexual service, there was undoubtedly a sexual element in their provision of food, drink and companionship. The bar hostess, who can perhaps be seen as the postwar equivalent of the café waitress, has been the focus of several studies. Anne Allison’s pathbreaking (1994) study of hostess bars in late twentieth-century Japan is as much about the masculinity of the male customers as it is about the hostesses themselves (see also Jackson 1976; Mock 1996). We also have studies of various queer forms of commodified companionship in the sexualized service industries, such as male ‘hosts’ who look after female clients, or cross-dressing ‘hosts’ and ‘hostesses’ (Takeyama 2005). This is an industry which is segmented according to ethnicity and gender, and there are studies of hostesses in so-called ‘Korean’ and ‘Filipino’ bars (Chung 2002; Parreñas 2011). We have several studies of the geisha (Seigle 1983; Dalby1983; Masuda 2003; Foreman 2008), but rarely situated in labour history. Prostitution was dealt with in different ways under the licensed prostitution regime of imperial Japan and the superficially abolitionist regime after the enactment of the Prostitution Prevention Law (enacted 1956; effective 1958), and there is much more scope for social histories of the workers in these industries, not to mention their clients (Garon 1993b: 710–32, Mackie 2009b: 256–91; Kovner 2012; Rowley 2002: 39–56). The karayuki-san – women from Japan who worked in brothels in Southeast Asia, and as far afield as Australia, the West Coast of the United States and Madagascar – have been the subject of several academic and popular studies (Sissons 1977;Yamazaki 1999; Mihalopoulos 1993; 2011; Warren 1993). Christopher Gerteis (2009) considers how trade unions dealt with women workers in the early postwar period (see also Chapter 23 in this volume). Wartime restrictions on union activities were removed in the occupation period. Unions and union federations, however, still tended to treat women as a special category, whose needs could be dealt with in separate women’s divisions. Gerteis argues that the male-dominated union federations were complicit in the construction of the high economic growth paradigm of the mid-to-late twentieth century. This paradigm was based on the model of the heteronormative nuclear family with a full-time male breadwinner supported by a housewife who would retire from full-time work on the birth of children. State, employers and unions were complicit in this privileging of the needs of full-time male workers, and these processes constructed particular forms of masculinity. This was at the expense of campaigns which might have attempted to realize the promise of the egalitarianism of the Constitution and Civil Code of the early postwar years. Dorinne Kondo (1990) focuses on women in small-scale factories in a working-class area of Tokyo; Glenda Roberts (1994) writes about women working on a factory assembly line; Alice Lam considers women in management (1992); Yuko Ogasawara (1998) places female clerical workers in the context of the gendered dynamics of the office; and Kaye Broadbent has studied part-time supermarket workers (2003). The many studies of so-called ‘housewives’ could also potentially be seen as being about forms of women’s work (Imamura 1987; Holloway 2010; Martin 2007; Faier 2009), although such unpaid work has generally been outside the purview of labour history. Although some of these works were originally contemporary ethnographies, they are now of historical interest in mapping the changes in gendered patterns of paid and unpaid work in the latter decades of the twentieth century. 355

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Many of the early works on modern Japanese labour history were about male workers (Dore 1973; Kamata 1983), but were completed before the development of masculinity studies (Roberson and Suzuki 2002; Louie and Low 2003). Nevertheless, these works can now be reread with a gender lens. We are also starting to see newer studies of masculinity at work. David Slater (2010) and James E. Roberson (2002) have each looked at working-class masculinities. Romit Dasgupta has a series of works on the middle-class white-collar worker – the sarariiman (Dasgupta 2000; 2003; 2005; 2009; 2010; 2014). There are also some studies of diasporic workers which are informed by the standpoint of gender theory (Sedgwick 2008; Fujita 2009; Kawashima 2010). The study of labour history moves into the field of political history when it is linked with the development of labour unions and the development of labour-oriented political parties.The question of labour activism returns us to the discussion of the gendering of the public sphere as outlined above. When we consider the cultural constructions of work which are revealed in the gendering of particular occupations, then that takes us into the realm of cultural politics.

Gender and the cultural politics of modernity As modernity involved the development of gendered identities, this also involved a pedagogical view of desirable and undesirable forms of femininity and masculinity, often expressed through popular cultural representations. Christine Marran considers the category of ‘poison woman’ (dokufu), a phrase used to label transgressive women from the late nineteenth century to the early post–Second World War period. Stories about [the poison woman] promoted normalizing visions of sexuality and gender that conformed to the promises of modernity, though the stories implicitly articulated the failure of those promises to include women. . . . Sexuality was an essential part of the representation of this struggle – sexuality and sexual desire came to suggestively symbolize the struggle to define women’s place in society. (Marran 2007: 171) Although Marran is largely interested in women who committed crimes, her insights about the constructions of desirable and undesirable models of femininity can be applied to much of early twentieth-century cultural history. The new woman is a theme of several recent works. Dina Lowy (2007) traces the emergence of the figure of the new woman in Japan, beginning with the staging of such plays as Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Hermann Sudermann’s Magda and the debates they stimulated in the 1910s. The label ‘new woman’ (atarashii onna) became associated with the women connected with the journal Seitō. These women were the subject of media attention for their unconventional behaviour, which included drinking exotic liqueurs, sightseeing in the licensed prostitution district, scandalous love affairs and the espousal of feminist ideas. The term ‘new woman’, however, was transformed from a stigmatizing label to a proclamation of independence through Seitō editor Hiratsuka Raichō’s defiant manifesto ‘I am a new woman’ (Hiratsuka 2006; Bardsley 2007). Lowy also includes examination of leftist feminist Nichikawa Fumiko’s (1882–1960) ‘True New Women’s Society’ (see Mackie 1997: 52, 84–5) and places Japan’s new women in the context of similar figures in other national and transnational contexts (Heilman and Beetham 2004). Barbara Sato (2003; 2008) identifies three gendered figures as being important for the analysis of modernity in Japan: the new woman (atarashii onna), the housewife (shufu) and the working 356

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woman (shokugyō fujin). Sato uses readers’ correspondence in women’s magazines as a way of tracing changes in women’s subjectivity in early twentieth-century Japan. She focuses on the rise of consumerism and the development of the discourse of self-cultivation among readers of the magazines. Sarah Frederick has also used magazines as a source for understanding gender relations in early twentieth-century Japan. She focuses on mainstream magazines like Shufu no tomo (The Housewife’s Friend), more intellectual journals like Fujin kōron (The Women’s Review) and some publications which addressed a feminist readership, such as the feminist arts journal Nyonin geijutsu (Women’s Arts) (Frederick 2006; see also Wöhr et al. 2000). Michiko Suzuki analyzes women’s fictional narratives from the 1910s to the 1930s. Her selected writers are characterized as ‘modern women’, and she argues that ‘notions of modernity and progress were . . . embedded in discussions of love, literary and otherwise’ (Suzuki 2009: 3). A related figure is the abovementioned modern girl (modan gāru, or moga) (Sato 1993; Silverberg 1991). Whereas the ‘new woman’ is a figure of the 1910s, with something of a feminist tone, the ‘modern girl’ of the mid-1920s is associated with consumerism rather than feminism. Miriam Silverberg (2006) analyzes the figures of the modern girl, the café waitress and the modern housewife in the media, particularly in movie magazines and women’s magazines. Silverberg is largely concerned with the culture of the metropolis – in the twin senses of the metropolis as mega-city, and the metropolis as an imperial centre, distinguished from peripheral, colonial and semi-colonial spaces. Her analysis of metropolitan culture always has the mechanisms of imperialism and colonialism firmly in view. I call the men, women and children of these Japanese modern years of the 1920s and 1930s consumer-subjects in order to express the double-edged nature of Japanese mass culture during that era.The consumer was both a subject of the emperor and a subject with agency, acting as autonomously as the imperial system would allow. Japanese women and men were both privy to a network of pleasures offered within mass culture and subject to an increasingly tight web of state controls on freedom of expression and consumption. And when considering them as imperial subjects, we must also recognize that not only was the imperial reign said to span countless generations, it also covered the contemporaneous geographic terrain of empire. (Silverberg 2006: 4) The partner of the modern girl was the modern boy. It is the modern girl, though, who has received the most sustained attention in Japanese language and English language scholarship. Most simply refer to the composite phrase ‘moga mobo’ (modern girls and modern boys), without analyzing the modern boy from the point of view of gender, a project which would add to our understanding of the making of masculinities in early twentieth century Japan (Menzies 1998; see also Driscoll 2010: 143–8; Omori 2009). Nevertheless, the popular discourse on the ‘modern girl’ in the 1920s and 1930s was also implicated in the discursive construction of masculinity. In their discourse on the ‘modern girl’, the men of the metropolis constructed themselves as the possessors of a powerful gaze which created a taxonomy of different types of women (Mackie 2009b). The modern boy and modern girl can also be placed in the context of the cultural forms of modernism. There has been a burgeoning international interest in modernist architecture, fashion, literature and visual culture, as evidenced by several recent touring exhibitions (Tokyo-to Bijutsukan 1988; Menzies 1998; Price and O’Connor 2001; Benton et al. 2003). The media fascination with the modern girl and modern boy in Japan roughly coincides with the period after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, precisely the period of the adoption of modernist cultural 357

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forms, art nouveau and art deco. There is ample scope for further work on the gendering of modernist cultures in Japan (Tipton and Clark 2000; Mackie 2010b). The figure of the shōjo (girl) and the culture of girls (shōjo bunka) is a theme which spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Girls’ culture appears in fiction, cinema, manga (comics) anime (animated movies), kosu pure (costume playing, cosplay) and fashion (Aoyama and Hartley 2010; Shamoon 2012). From the late twentieth century, the figure of the otaku (which might be translated as ‘nerd’, although the term otaku now has currency in English) has been the focus of attention (Azuma 2009; Galbraith 2015: 215–7). Gendered representations in popular television dramas have also received attention (Lukács 2010; Freedman and Iwata-Weickgennant 2011; Mackie 2014b), and we are increasingly seeing representations of non-binary gender identities in the mass media (Mackie 2008; Mackie 2010c;Yuen 2011). Whereas the producers and marketers of mass media tend to assume a clearly gendered readership and spectatorship of cultural forms, fans are adept in queering these genres through gender-bending parodies (McLelland et al. 2015).

Histories of sexuality in Japan We are starting to see works on ‘mainstream’ and alternative sexualities in Japan. Greg Pflugfelder traces male same-sex love from the 1600s to 1945, and Mark McLelland takes this history up to the present (Pflugfelder 1999; McLelland 2000; 2005; 2015b). Sharon Chalmers (2002) has completed one of the few English-language studies of lesbian sexuality in contemporary Japan. Pflugfelder (2005), Shamoon (2012) and Robertson (1998) focus on passionate friendships between women in early twentieth-century Japan. We await a full history of female same-sex love. Indeed, we await a comprehensive history of sexuality in Japan (on contemporary Japan, see Lunsing 2001; McLelland and Dasgupta 2005; McLelland, Suganuma and Welker 2007; on the state management of sexuality in the early twentieth century, see Frühstück 2003). Only a few works treat heterosexuality as something which needs to be historicized rather than taken for granted. The discourse of romantic love and companionate marriage was developed in Japan in the late nineteenth century (Mackie 1997; 2003: 28–36, 48–55). The discussion of the 1920s ‘modern girl’, too, often revolved around discourses of romantic love (Suzuki 2009). Mark McLelland (2012) looks at the development of discourses of heterosexual romance in the immediate postwar period, and Romit Dasgupta (2010) considers the initiation of male white-collar workers into discourses of heterosexual love. Recent work has focused on panics around low birthrates and low marriage rates and media flurries about so-called ‘herbivore’ men (sōshoku danshi) who reject conventional forms of masculinity (Steger and Koch 2013).

The history of the body in Japan The body is implicated in the performance of masculinity and femininity, whether this be through voice and deportment, adornment, ways of managing hair and body hair or clothing. One way of writing the history of the body would be to trace how these embodied performances of masculinity and femininity change across time (Monden 2014). Embodiment, however, involves much more than gender. Class distinction often involves these different forms of deportment and dress (Dasgupta 2000).The body is also implicated in distinctions between working-class and middle-class occupations, with working-class occupations having a more explicitly embodied dimension (‘manual’ versus ‘mental’ work). In colonial situations and in situations involving immigrant labour these distinctions are racialized and ethnicized (Mackie 2013f; 2014a). 358

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Governments manage bodies in various ways. They regulate reproduction and access to contraception and abortion, they regulate sexuality and gender identity and they regulate working conditions. Recent government campaigns around ‘cool biz’ and ‘warm biz’, which incorporate modifications of office wear to be more suitable for hot and cold climatic conditions have been aimed at reducing the use of air conditioning and heating for environmental reasons. These campaigns are also, however, about managing bodies. Governments provide welfare for those with physical impairments or disabilities (Stevens 2013), including those whose impairment comes from military service (Pennington 2015). The body is also implicated in various forms of violence.The state has the monopoly of particular forms of violence through the policing system, the judiciary which implements various form of punishment including hard labour and the death penalty, and the armed forces – the Army and Navy in Imperial Japan and the Self-Defense Forces from the mid-twentieth century. Interpersonal violence, including, but not limited to, domestic violence, is mediated through gendered, classed and ethnicized power differentials. The conscription system of imperial Japan disciplined male bodies in particular ways, as did the new regimes of industrial labour in the factories, as discussed above. Even occupations designated as ‘mental’ labour have particular effects on bodies – not least the phenomenon of karōshi (or ‘death from overwork’). New forms of precarious labour are associated with new forms of subjectivity and often the (self-)disciplining of bodies.

Gender, sexuality and bodies beyond borders We now have a substantial body of work on modern Japanese history which takes gender seriously. For some authors, ‘modern’ simply means the period from the late nineteenth century to the present; but a smaller number of authors are attempting to come to grips with modernity itself as involving gendered, sexed and embodied processes. This involves bringing together the concepts of ‘gender’ and ‘colonial modernity’ and extending the focus beyond the boundaries of the Japanese nation-state. Mark Driscoll, for example, builds on some of the themes introduced in Miriam Silverberg’s work on modernist cultures in the metropolis, but gives equal attention to events in the peripheral puppet state of Manchukuo. He traces three stages of Japanese capitalism and imperialism, which he calls ‘biopolitics’, ‘neuropolitics’ and ‘necropolitics’. Biopolitics (in Foucauldian terms) is concerned with the management of the population and labour power. Neuropolitics is concerned with the commodification of new forms of sensory pleasure (not to mention the sensationalism of the culture of what was known as ‘erotic, grotesque, nonsense’ [ero guro nansensu]). Necropolitics refers to the use of enforced labour, men and women who were kept in a state of bare life: enforced sexual slavery in the case of colonized women, enforced labour in mines and construction in the case of colonized men (see Foucault 1980: 138–45; Agamben 1998; Mbembe 2003). Driscoll (2010: 143–8) examines sensational literary forms which place the ‘modern girl’ and ‘modern boy’ in violent and sexually explicit contexts, and links these literary representations with the actual violence of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism in the peripheries. The modern girl has been placed in transnational context by a group of researchers based at the University of Washington. Their edited volume, The Modern Girl around the World, includes two chapters on Japan and an epilogue by Miriam Silverberg. In this volume, Barbara Sato further develops her arguments about the importance of women’s magazines for understanding women’s modern subjectivities. Ruri Itō focuses on Okinawa, where the modern girl was little more than a phantasm. Itō places the women of Okinawa in circuits of mobility which included 359

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the metropolis of Tokyo, regional urban centres, and colonies like Taiwan and Korea (Sato 2008; Itō 2008; Silverberg 2008; Matsuda 2006). Other chapters in The Modern Girl around the World focus on the figure of the modern girl in North America, Europe, Africa, Australia and other parts of Asia. A recent Japanese-language volume includes studies of the modern girl in several East Asian countries, organized around the themes of gender, empire and colonial modernity (Itō et al. 2008). It is difficult to know where to place the body of work on the system of wartime enforced military prostitution (also known as military sexual slavery). Many commentators would strenuously resist describing this as work, for this might suggest some voluntarism on the part of the women imprisoned and enslaved in these institutions. This is an issue which brings together the themes of militarism, imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, class, gender, sexuality, masculinity and femininity and the history of the body. Debates around this issue touch on important questions of historical evidence, as historians debate the relative weight to be given to oral testimonies and written evidence. This issue also has a place in the history of feminism, for much of the research around this issue has been conducted by feminist researchers in activist networks. The history of enforced military prostitution/military sexual slavery cannot be contained within nation-based historical narratives, for it necessarily involves individuals and experiences which cross national boundaries (see Yamazaki 1996; Kim 1996; O’Herne 1994; Henson 1996; Howard 1995; Kim-Gibson 1999; Schellstede 2000;Yoshimi 1992; 1995; 2000; Tanaka 2002; Mackie 2000b; 2013a; 2018). A full history of the wartime enforced prostitution/military sexual slavery system would necessitate skills in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, English and several other Asian and Pacific languages. A similar team-based approach could be applied to developing a gendered history of migratory flows in and out of Japan in its modern history. A likely direction for future studies of genders, sexualities, bodies and modernity is thus to place Japan in a transnational framework, not simply in terms of comparison, but in terms of Japan’s place in the flows of commodities, people and cultural forms in modern East Asia and beyond.

Note 1 Parts of this essay draw on Mackie (2005a; 2013a; 2013b; 2013c; 2015), but the content has been substantially revised, updated and expanded.

Further reading Germer, Andrea, Mackie, Vera, and Wöhr, Ulrike (eds) (2014) Gender, Nation and State in Modern Japan, London: Routledge. Mackie, Vera (2003) Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mackie,Vera, and McLelland, Mark (2015) ‘Framing sexuality studies in East Asia’, in Mark McLelland and Vera Mackie (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Sexualities in East Asia, London: Routledge, 1–17. McLelland, Mark, and Dasgupta, Romit (eds) (2005) Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan, London: Routledge. Molony, Barbara, and Uno, Kathleen (2005) (eds) Gendering Modern Japanese History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asia Center.

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26 Religion in the postwar era Ian Reader

This chapter will discuss how constitutional freedoms and social changes aided the growth of a wave of new religious movements after 1945, while the older traditions of Shinto and Buddhism lost ground. In looking at the rise of such new religions, it also draws attention to how religion and politics remained intertwined in the postwar period and at how a consensus about the relationship of religion, state and society, existed from 1945 until 1995.This was largely positive and protective of the position of religion and of religious freedoms. However, as the chapter indicates, in 1995 this consensus was undermined due to the violent acts of one religious group that led to calls for increased state scrutiny and control of religion and for a general weakening of the standing of religious institutions in Japanese society, a situation that remains the case today. In the prewar and war period, the state used Shinto as a nationalist vehicle, and the Shinto establishment was a willing prop of the state, legitimizing its militarism and reinforcing a state cult centred on the emperor. Buddhist sectarian institutions also actively supported militaristic nationalism and offered legitimizations for war and the subjugation of other peoples (Victoria 1997; 2003). The state exerted strict controls over religious organizations, notably via the 1925 Peace Preservation Law that restricted freedom of speech and assembly (see Chapter 12 in this volume), and through laws suppressing those who questioned the emperor’s exalted status (Hardacre 2003: 137).Various new religions were suppressed, and their leaders arrested, because they appear to challenge imperial hegemony, including Ōmoto1 in 1921 and 1935 (Stalker 2007: 97–9, 183–7, Staemmler 2009: 210–2), and Honmichi, in 1928 and then 1938 (Hardacre 2003: 137). The leaders of religious groups that opposed militarism and war were gaoled for opposing militarism, as happened in 1943, for example, to Makiguchi Tsunesaburō, founder of Sōka Gakkai2 – then a rather small lay Buddhist organization established in the 1930s on principles relating to education and to the advocacy of Nichiren Buddhism – and other senior figures in the movement. Makiguchi died in prison in 1944.

Constitutional change and religious freedom After 1945, the Shinto and Buddhist traditions were widely discredited because of their complicity with Japanese militarism and the war. The occupation authorities viewed the close links of Shinto and the state, and the repression of other religions, as significant factors in Japan’s 361

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militarism (see Chapter 11 in this volume) and addressed this in the new Constitution enacted in 1946 and going into effect in 1947. Article 20 of the Constitution guaranteed freedom of religion for all, stating that no one should be made to participate in any religious acts and that no religious organization should receive privileges from the state or exercise political authority. It also decreed that the state could not participate in religious activities. Article 89 prohibited the use of public money to support or maintain any religious institution or association. These changes broke the bonds between established religions and the state that had been an enduring element in Japanese history; at various times Buddhism and Shinto had operated as de facto state religions and both had historically legitimized the state and been elements in its support system (McMullin 1986; Hardacre 1989). In the Edo period (1603–1868), for instance, Buddhism operated in this way, whereas after the Meiji Restoration (1868) through to 1945, State Shinto, with its focus on the Imperial cult, occupied a similar position.The new Constitution thus changed the context in which religions operated, freeing them from the spectre of state control while posing challenges to those that had previously been de facto elements in the state apparatus. Shinto and Buddhism, after 1945, were weakened by a loss of state financial aid and from the repression of potential rivals. Shinto in particular faced problems in this respect, with the cessation of state funding for prominent shrines such as Yasukuni Shrine. Yasukuni, established in 1869 to commemorate and enshrine those who died for the emperor and the country, became a symbol of Japanese militarism and nationalism, a position it continues to hold in the present era for nationalists and those harking back to the prewar era (Breen 2011; see also Chapter 31 in this volume).

Consensus, the rise of the new, and the decline of the old This constitutional guarantee of religious freedom became central to the consensus that pertained after 1945, in which religion, although set apart from the state and public sphere, was viewed as a valuable element in the social framework of Japan and one that contributed to the public good (kōeki). This notion was intrinsic to the 1952 Religious Corporations Law (Shūkyō hōjinhō) under which religions were registered and through which they were recognized as meriting protection from state interference and were granted tax privileges (Mullins 1997: 38). Even though there were those (for example, left-wing intellectuals) who viewed religion as an anomalous conservative force at odds with modern society, the broader consensus was that it was a positive element in Japan’s cultural fabric and a positive force for stability that should be protected from state controls. This consensus largely held sway until 1995, when a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway on 20 March 1995 by Aum Shinrikyō, a religious movement registered under the 1952 law, changed matters drastically, breaking the consensus and leading to calls for revisions in the laws and for state monitoring of religion (Reader 2001). These legal developments allowed people a new freedom of choice in religious terms. They were no longer forced to participate in Shinto rituals and also were free to reject any religious engagement or observances. Religious movements previously repressed as potential threats to the state were liberated and new movements were able to develop unfettered. In this context, a wave of new religions offering succour and support came to the fore to meet the needs of a people suffering emotionally and materially because of war destruction and the shock of defeat, and to fill the spiritual vacuum caused by the loss of credibility among the older traditions. The challenge these new movements posed to the older religious establishment of Shinto and Buddhism has never been adequately met. One of the most significant and continuing themes of postwar religious history has been the steady weakening of support for the so-called mainstream religious traditions, along with a general shift in allegiance to newer movements. 362

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Buddhism, for example, had long relied extensively on its role as provider of funerals, mortuary rites, and memorialization services for the ancestors – the latter a major element in Japanese customary religious observances. In the Edo period, households and all in them legally had to be affiliated with a Buddhist temple, and significant life-cycle rituals such as deaths, funerals, and the memorialization of family ancestors had to be conducted at Buddhist temples. Although such obligations were officially abolished in the Meiji period, they remained a basic element in social structure, and most Japanese continued to view themselves as being affiliated, through their households and their ancestors, to Buddhist temples (Covell 2005; Reader 1991: 84–101; Rowe 2011). Likewise, traditional obligatory links between communities and local Shinto shrines had been part and parcel of Japanese social life, especially in more rural areas, villages, and smaller towns. The changing demographics of postwar Japan, coupled with a declining sense of obligation, legal or otherwise, to such traditions and practices, weakened those bonds. Many who took part in the postwar migration into the major cities to work felt that they no longer had to be associated with a local temple or shrine and instead either joined the new religions that developed in urban areas or abandoned religious affiliation altogether. Buddhist temples have closed in sizeable numbers in rural areas affected by depopulation, while its near-hegemony of the death and memorialization processes has been broken particularly in urban areas. Criticisms that Buddhism in Japan had in effect become a specialist in dealing with people after they died rather than while alive were widespread (Tamamuro 1963; 1999) as were complaints that priests charged exorbitant fees for such services and that they were thus guilty of exploiting the bereaved when they were emotionally fraught (Shimada 2010). Although by no means all priests operated in this way, popular images of Buddhist priests as mercenary and money oriented became commonplace and served to weaken the standing of the institution as a whole (Murai 2010: 49–53, 87–8; Reader 2011). Buddhism has also been increasingly challenged both by new religions that offer members their own mortuary services and by secular funeral agencies that offer simpler and cheaper ways to deal with the death of family members. This has weakened the economies of many temples, which have found it increasingly hard to recruit priests, particularly as the standard practice of priestly succession – embedded since the early Meiji era – in which the headship of a temple passes from priest to son, has weakened as temple offspring no longer feel obliged to follow the family priestly profession. By 2011 it was estimated that around one-third of all temples had no designated successor, temple closures were common, and the numbers seeking alternatives to and abandoning Buddhist mortuary practices and doing secular funerals were continuing to rise (Reader 2011). Attempts have been made in recent years to address the crisis and reform institutional Buddhism, notably by younger Buddhist priests, who have engaged in social welfare campaigns and used manga, music, and online services to get Buddhist messages across to people (Ueda 2004; Nelson 2013). However, thus far, although such activities have had some localized success, there is scant evidence that they have addressed the broader issue of decline, which continues to be the overriding tendency in Buddhist institutional terms (see Reader 2012). Shinto shrines, too, have faced not dissimilar structural problems, especially at local levels, with declining levels of community support and with numerous shrines lacking priests (Breen and Teeuwen 2010: 219; Reader 2012: 19). This picture of institutional decline does not mean that all Shinto and Buddhist practices, shrines, and temples face difficulties. Some practices – notably popular mass events and festivals such as hatsumōde, the New Year festival when people make a first visit of the year to Shinto shrines and/or Buddhist temples – can draw large crowds to important shrines and temples. Well-known shrines and temples continue also to attract sizable numbers of visitors, whether 363

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on pilgrimages or simply making visits that combine prayer and tourism (a recurrent theme in shrine visiting in Japan). However, the trend toward visiting major nationally known shrines and temples has in a sense further drawn people away from local institutions (Reader 1991: 71–2); the campaign by Shinto authorities to encourage pilgrimages to the shrines of Ise, widely viewed as the most important shrines in the tradition, when the shrines were rebuilt (as they are every twenty years) boosted Ise but at the expense (and sometimes annoyance) of regional and local shrines (Breen 2010). This pattern, in which institutional Shinto and Buddhism, especially at regional, local and village levels, have been in decline, has been one of the most significant aspects of postwar religious history and one that shows little sign of abating at present.

New religions, urbanization, and millennial orientations Not all religions have struggled in postwar Japan, where the most notable institutional development has been the emergence and growth of numerous movement known under the collective term ‘new religions’ (shin shūkyō).This term has commonly been assigned to individual religious movements that developed in Japan from the early nineteenth century onwards, while such religions as a genre have been commonly referred to in academic contexts and by the mass media, as ‘the new religions’.3 Since the early nineteenth century several hundred new religions have developed in Japan. Closely associated with Japan’s development as a modern society, they have commonly drawn on the existing structures of Japanese religiosity, often utilizing ideas, rituals, and practices from Shinto or Buddhism, but reworked into new frameworks in line with the prevailing patterns of the age. Generally they have originated around a charismatic leader who combines criticism of existing society and religions with promises of new truths, often based in revelations from a previously unknown deity or from new meanings derived from Buddhist texts, that offer salvation for all while eradicating problems and injustices in this world and bringing about a new harmonious spiritual society, while also offering individuals solutions to personal problems and promising world benefits for the faithful.4 Usually, such messages of hope are accompanied by a belief that the world is in a state of malaise and requires spiritual transformation. Some new religions, such as Ōmoto, have articulated this via the concept of yonaoshi (transforming/healing the world) – a theme that permeates many of the new religions. At times this millennial perspective has appeared to incorporate a political dimension and even to threaten a form of revolutionary change – something Ōmoto’s initial founder Deguchi Nao (1836–1918) intimated in her concept of tatekai tatenaoshi – overturning and rebuilding/ repairing existing society. However, new religions have commonly shifted from such seemingly political orientations toward emphasizing that any such social transformation must begin via individual self-transformation and spiritual practice – an orientation that has commonly led toward social conservatism and made them forces for social stability and the reaffirmation of traditional values and a force for stability (Hardacre 1986b).5 A crucial factor in their success is their ability to articulate their teachings in simple and direct language readily understood by ordinary people, and that stands in contrast to the oftenarcane language used by Buddhism and Shinto. They are also lay-centred, allowing ordinary people to have key roles in their rituals and in proselytizing and spreading the faith – again a contrast with the priestly and hierarchic nature of the older religions. Although new religions began to emerge and gain support in the early nineteenth century, it was after 1945 that their most dramatic growth – both in the numbers of movements and the adherents they attracted – occurred. Freed from state constraints, boosted by the tax privileges the 1952 law provided, filling the moral vacuum produced by war defeat and the failures of the older religions, new religions began gaining converts especially among the urban masses. Many who had moved to 364

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the cities found themselves alienated and uneasy in their new environment, and new religions such as Sōka Gakkai, that developed strong local and community networks, gave incomers a new sense of identity and a new community to belong to via their local support groups. The new religions thus provided people seeking new ways forward in a rapidly changing world, with new meanings suitable for the age. Their combination of promises of worldly assistance, moral guidance, spiritual salvation, and a sense of community belonging made them highly attractive, especially in the burgeoning cities and in contrast to the staid older traditions. Especially up to the late 1960s there was such rapid growth – in terms of members and the numbers of new movements – that the epithet ‘the rush hour of the gods’ was used to describe the period and phenomenon (McFarland 1967). Sōka Gakkai, for example, early in the postwar era, was relatively small but during the 1950s it conducted aggressive proselytization campaigns, with members going door to door urging others to join, and its membership grew exponentially, at times doubling every month; by the late 1960s it claimed to have over 8 million members. Although this number has barely changed in more recent years, Sōka Gakkai has, in the postwar period, developed not just into Japan’s largest religious organization, but also its biggest mass movement, with a reported membership of still over 8 million.6 It has established education institutions, from nurseries through to high schools and a university, Sōka University, and publishes a newspaper, the Seikyō Shinbun, which is Japan’s third largest daily, read widely by members and with a circulation of over five million copies. Sōka Gakkai has not just been the largest religious organization in Japan but one of its most controversial. The new religions in general have been distrusted by the political and social elite, including the mass media, because they challenge the status quo in religious, social, and political terms (Dorman 2012; Baffelli 2016). Sōka Gakkai has been a particular focus of such hostility (McLaughlin 2012). Its aggressive proselytization in the 1950s and early 1960s led to numerous people complaining that they had been browbeaten into joining the movement and to accusations that it was intolerant of other faiths. Its seemingly inexorable growth from the 1950s, coupled with mass rallies and by proclamations that it sought to convert the entire nation and to unite religion and politics and bring Japan under the banner of its version of Nichiren Buddhism, raised fears that it was doing something similar to the prewar state in developing a quasi-totalitarian vision of the future. At the same time, it became caught up in scandals, including a widely publicized attempt to suppress negative publications about the movement, again making some people draw parallels to the pre-1945 situation. As such, although it was the largest movement in Japan, it could also be appropriately described as the most unpopular as well (McLaughlin 2012).

So ¯ ka Gakkai and Ko ¯ meito ¯ , religion, and politics Sōka Gakkai has courted controversy also by entering the world of politics, thereby raising questions about the delicate relationship of religion and politics in the postwar context. The postwar settlement and Constitution do not actually preclude religious organizations from establishing a political presence or forming a political party, and over the period a number have done so; two new religions from the late twentieth century, Aum Shinrikyō (which also used the English name Aum Supreme Truth) in 1990 and Kōfuku no kagaku (which calls itself Happy Science in English) in 2009, both established political parties in attempts to bring their message to more people – albeit unsuccessfully. Others have engaged in political action in other ways. One of the most prominent new religions, the lay Buddhist movement Risshōkōseikai,7 for example, is an active supporter of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution.8 It has also given campaign assistance to Diet candidates who support retention of this clause and conducted extensive peace-related campaigns. 365

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However, it has been Sōka Gakkai’s engagement with politics that has raised concerns in Japan, following its establishment of the Kōmeitō (Clean Government Party) in 1964.The aim of Ikeda Daisaku (b. 1928), the charismatic third leader of Sōka Gakkai, was to cleanse the political world, advance the movement’s religious agenda, including its plan to convert all Japanese and to establish a national Buddhist ordination platform that symbolize the unity of Buddhism and state in Japan (Baffelli 2011; McLaughlin 2014: 67–8). This, of course, worried many Japanese already disturbed by the aforementioned rapid growth, mass rallies, and seemingly totalitarian orientations of the movement. Such fears were exacerbated by Kōmeitō’s electoral success; supporting and campaigning for Kōmeitō was seen as part of Gakkai members’ religious activities (McLaughlin 2014) and such zealous campaigning from legions of highly organized Gakkai supporters helped turn Kōmeitō into Japan’s third-largest party in the Diet (Ehrhardt 2014). Opposition came not just from other political parties and those who wanted to keep religion out of politics. Many religious organizations, suspicious of the Gakkai’s agenda and fearful of its intolerance, also campaigned against its entry into politics, arguing that it compromised the separation of religion and politics; some religious groups even supported candidates of parties standing against Kōmeitō candidates (Klein and Reed 2014). Over the years, as Sōka Gakkai’s membership has stalled (see later), and because of widespread antipathy to Sōka Gakkai among the general populace, the politicians of Kōmeitō have become increasingly aware that unless they demonstrate an independence from their parent religion, they will be limited in terms of electoral potential. In policy terms the party has moved somewhat closer to the Liberal Democratic Party as it seeks to appeal beyond a specific Gakkai electorate. As it has done so, it has moved away from an overt religious agenda. Both Kōmeitō, as a political party, and Sōka Gakkai, as a religious movement, have made compromises over the years, so that the earlier aims of party formation – the implementation of long-term religious ideals in the body politic and the state ̶ have been removed from their public agendas. Indeed, the religion and the political party are now formally separate, even if behind the scenes there remain close links, and there is still plentiful suspicion in Japan about their underlying relationship and a perception among many that neither the political party nor the religion is being fully open about their longer-term agendas. As the Gakkai’s growth stalled, fears about its ambitions to dominate Japan faded, and this softened attitudes to Kōmeitō and gave it leeway to be more independent. In the aftermath of the Aum Affair (see later) as politicians of all persuasions attacked religious groups, including Sōka Gakkai, the religious movement needed the support of its political partner to protect it. In 1999, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP, many of whose politicians had previously articulated views hostile to new religions, including Sōka Gakkai) failed to gain a majority in the national elections and sought a coalition partner. Kōmeitō, whose policies had become increasingly close to the social conservatism of the LDP, fitted the bill and from 1999 until 2009 was a junior partner in government. During this time observers suggest it did little to advance its former parent religion’s agenda (Hasunuma and Klein 2014: 263). However, its very presence in government served to temper the anti-religious sentiments and clamour for new regulatory controls over religion that were widespread in the wake of the Aum Affair.9 What the involvement of Sōka Gakkai with politics does show is that although the Constitution prohibits state support for religious organizations, it and the postwar settlement do not necessarily preclude the complete disengagement of religion with political affairs – and nor could it, given that the state adheres to the notion of religious freedom of expression. It is evidence not just that one cannot comprehend Japanese politics without being aware of the role of Kōmeitō (Ehrhardt et al. 2014: 3–17) but that religion, even if seemingly located in the private sphere and in a seeming age of secularization, remains an influence and presence in the Japanese political landscape. 366

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Conservatism and meaning Although Sōka Gakkai has been the most striking example of how religions can become engaged in politics, it should be emphasized that most new religions have shied away from such overt involvement. As was noted earlier, their orientations toward individual self-transformation as an essential basis for any future spiritual transformation in the world at large have tended, instead, toward a disengagement with political activity and a social conservatism. Movements such as Mahikari,10 for example, initially founded by Okada Kōtama (1901–74) in 1959, have attracted followers by offering them the potential to deal with personal problems and illnesses via spiritual healing practices grounded in Japanese folk beliefs. By emphasizing that all problems and illnesses have psychic causes and that in order to heal these maladies, one must recognize their underlying spiritual reasons, Mahikari focuses on magical healing techniques through which to drive away what it sees as the malevolent spirits that are the cause of all human problems. It counters the Western modes of medicine now prevalent in Japan with the argument that these merely treat the surface (the germ or physical manifestation) of a problem rather than the underlying psychic causes thereof. In offering spiritual healing techniques through which members can counter the effects of possessing spirits, it empowers them to take control of their problems while also becoming healers who can help others (Davis 1980: 302). Mahikari is similar to many other of the new religions that have become popular in postwar Japan, in that it offers an alternative, based in concepts of traditional healing rooted in the folk tradition, to the Westernized practices now seen as normative in modern society. It emphasizes traditional moral structures, such as caring for the ancestors; illnesses are frequently interpreted as the result of breaking such moral codes and failing to carry out such basic social and cultural obligations, with the result that either the individual or a family member is possessed and made unwell by the unhappy spirit of the ancestor. What is striking about new movements such as Mahikari is that they therefore reaffirm traditional Japanese values in a modern setting. They demonstrate that, even as Japan has become technologically advanced, there remain many concerns about the nature of modern society that lead people to find meaning in a spiritual world that empowers them and deals with their immediate concerns and worries. As studies of Mahikari indicate, engagement with such new religions enables people to continue to live and function in the modern world, enduring its pressures and being able to put up with often difficult work environments, while finding personalized meanings, moral reinvigoration and social value in their lives (Davis 1980). As has been widely noted, too, such dynamics, by placing the emphasis on individual meaning and transformation mean that Mahikari, like many new religions, has been disengaged in political terms compared to movements such as Sōka Gakkai. Yet both movements in their different ways– Mahikari by positing spirit solutions to individual problems and empowering individuals to take control of their problems, Sōka Gakkai, by affirming the importance of its Buddhist teachings and engaging in political moves to transform Japanese society and politics –indicate how religious movements, in the shape of the new religions that have been the dominant religious force in postwar Japan, have provided a means whereby people have been able to order their lives and acquire a sense of meaning in them, while expressing discontent with the status quo, questioning the normative order of things in society, and positing ways of resolving this problem.

The 1980s: new movements, millennial fears, and change By the 1980s, many of the new religions that had expanded rapidly after the war began to lose momentum; it was clear that at some point they would reach a plateau and would have 367

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converted most of the people to whom they appeared attractive. In addition, as they grew older they began to lose the lustre of newness and difference, and this reduced their appeal to new generations. As this happened they became increasingly dependent on a membership that was second or third generation in nature and that, having been born rather than converted into the movements, appeared less keen than their parents had been to go out proselytizing their faith. As this happened, a new wave of new religions came to the fore that appeared to be more dynamic and in tune with the ethos of the era, offering more exciting prospects for a new generation of seekers and potential converts. They also drew some converts from among the older generation of new religions. In the 1980s, movements (some of which had originated earlier but which really entered public prominence in that decade) such as Shinnyoen,11 Agonshū,12 GLA,13 Kenshōkai14 (a radical millennial Nichiren movement strongly critical of Sōka Gakkai), Kōfuku no kagaku, and Aum Shinrikyō began to attract attention in the mass media while gathering new waves of followers. Initially dubbed by scholars and the media as ‘new’ new religions (shinshin shūkyō) – a term that has since been largely discarded (Reader 2015) – it was widely considered that these movements shared a number of characteristics that, although seemingly little different from the earlier new religions, were reinforced by an image of newness coupled with a vibrant way of putting their messages across using new media forms that made the older movements appear behind the times. Many of the new movements that flourished in the 1980s emphasized millennial themes that resonated with the fears of many people that the world was heading toward a dramatic crisis, threatened by nuclear war, environmental degradation, and potential chaos, by the end of the twentieth century. As such, they were rearticulating the ideas of world renewal (yonaoshi) of earlier new religions, but reinforced by modern concerns about the environment and nuclear war. Toward the end of the twentieth century, such beliefs were intensified by trends in popular culture in which images of dystopian futures and the imminence of a catastrophic end-time were widespread (Reader 2000: 47–52; Shimazono 1992). At the same time, the idea of a saviour who would emerge to lead the world out of chaos and the concept that the looming catastrophe could be overcome via spiritual practice took root and were articulated by the leaders of several of these newly emergent movements (Kisala 1997). Several of the new religions of the age and the leaders that established them thus projected themselves as leading a spiritual world transformation – a notion that played into a sense of Japanese cultural and spiritual nationalism that was itself underpinned by the image, based in Japan’s economic power at the time, of ‘Japan as Number One’. Movements such as Agonshū, for example, claimed a special mission to spread peace (one reinforced by Japan’s experience of the horrors of war and nuclear weapons and strengthened by its adoption of a peace clause in its Constitution) and solve what it saw as a coming potentially apocalyptic crisis by the end of the century. This idea of peace and salvation being spread from Japan to the rest of the world was a recurrent theme in the movements that grew in this era (Reader 1988: 256). Other themes that were central to the appeal of the movements of the era included their claims to enable followers to acquire supernatural spiritual powers, an emphasis on healing, and the potential for individuals to develop a new sense of awareness through religious practices, including meditation, and a critique of contemporary materialism. Transformation was seen as predominantly grounded in spiritual and ethical practices, through which the individual could transform both him/herself and society at large (Shimazono 1992; Reader 2000: 47–52). The new religions attracting attention from the 1980s on were, like earlier new religions, highly organized in media terms, but with a readiness also to use and benefit from new media technologies to draw attention to themselves – evident, for example, in Agonshū’s pioneering use of satellite broadcasting to broadcast its dramatic mass rituals to large audiences (Reader 368

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1988; Baffelli 2016). Agonshū was a good example of a movement that captured the public mood in this era. Founded in 1954 by the charismatic Kiriyama Seiyū (1921–2016), it had fewer than 30,000 members at the start of the 1980s but by the end of the decade this had swelled tenfold, and its massive annual festival, the Hoshi Matsuri or Star festival, held every February at Agonshū’s centre near Kyoto, attracted half a million people – many of them non-members. Kiriyama’s charismatic personality and ability to communicate directly to a wide, and especially young, audience, about their problems and offer them spiritual guidance and solutions while addressing their fears about an imminent world crisis and offering the promise that Agonshū could remove the world’s negative karma and bring about a new peaceful transformation was central to this success (Reader 1988). Other movements that grew quickly and attracted much attention in this era and into the 1990s included Shinnyoen, which combined esoteric Buddhist practices and individual spiritual counselling and development (Shimada 2008: 162–4) and proved especially attractive to families and couples, and Kōfuku no kagaku. The latter was founded in 1986 by Ōkawa Ryūhō (b. 1956), a graduate of Tokyo University, after he had, according to the movement, started in 1981 to receive messages from various figures in the spiritual world. Later he declared himself to be the incarnation of a supreme deity, El Cantare, and manifestation of the Buddha. Ōkawa has published hundreds of books full of his spiritual messages, while incorporating millennial messages and discussions of Buddhist teachings as interpreted by Ōkawa and projected by Kōfuku no kagaku projects as Buddhism’s true essence. Members are encouraged to practice their faith by reading Ōkawa’s books and attending study seminars based on them. Kōfuku no kagaku’s English title, Happy Science, indicates its claim that it synthesizes science and religion (Numata 1995: 180–245) while bringing together the positive aspects of Eastern and Western cultures. It also taps into nationalist sentiments in Japan, by positing Japan as the key to world spiritual transformation and through such means has gained a major following among younger educated urban Japanese and, along with Shinnyoen, has been probably the most successful movement to develop since the 1980s.15

Numbers and the new mainstream? It is difficult to determine how many people are adherents of the movements broadly labelled ‘new religions’, or, indeed, any religious groups in Japan, because overall responsibility for reporting numbers has rested with the groups, which have an incentive and tendency to overstate their numbers. The annual report of religious statistics (Shūkyō nenkan) produced by the Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunkachō) uses the information provided by religious groups, and hence is not always reliable. This is so for older established traditions as well as new religions. The new religions have often been ‘economical’ with their membership returns, counting every member of a household as a member if just one person joins (something that Sōka Gakkai, for example, has done in the past), or including every person who attends a seminar run by the group, or who buys a book by the leader, in their membership returns. Some movements produce magazines that are used as gauges of membership – something that can inflate figures when, as is the case in some movements, members are encouraged to buy several copies of a book or magazine and distribute the spare copies to family and acquaintances as a form of proselytism.16 Nevertheless, various studies have indicated significant membership for these groups. Hardacre (2003: 139), for example, states that membership of the new religions ‘is estimated at one-quarter of the population’, with several, such as Sōka Gakkai, Shinnyoen, and Risshōkōseikai, having memberships in the millions. Even the most conservative estimates still recognize that the collective membership of new religions – a large percentage of which has joined since 1945 – runs into many millions. To this extent, it would be reasonable to say that the new religions as a whole constitute 369

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in institutional terms the largest active sector of the Japanese religious world. Institutionally, as the older traditions have weakened in the postwar era, it could also be argued that they have become, in effect, the religious mainstream in organizational terms. A continuing pattern had seemed to emerge, too, in which successive waves of new religions emerged to provide a new dynamic of vigour just as the preceding wave had appeared to lose their initial energy, as with the rise of a new wave of new religions in the 1980s as the earlier new religions that had held sway in the era after 1945 began to hit a plateau.

The year 1995 and the shattering of consensus This pattern changed dramatically after 1995, which turned out to be the most significant turning point in religious terms since 1945. If that year, with war defeat and the occupation leading to the disestablishment of Shinto, a new constitution, and a new consensus was a major turning point for relationships between religion, state and society, so was 1995, when the postwar consensus was shattered by the most dramatic act by a religious organization in postwar Japan. This was the nerve gas attack in Tokyo by Aum Shinrikyō, one of the new religions that captured attention from the 1980s on.The event itself has been widely analyzed, along with the teachings and activities of the movement and its leader, Asahara Shōkō (b. 1955), elsewhere and will not be examined further here (Reader 2000; Shimada 2001; Shimazono 1997). The Aum Affair (Oumu jiken) as it is known in Japan, in effect intensified and led to extensive questioning about the ways in which religion had been regarded and protected in postwar Japan. It occurred at a time when other events had undermined the standing of religious organizations as a whole in Japan and has cast a significant shadow over events in the religious world thereafter. The reputation of religious organizations in Japan in general had not, at the time, been positive. Buddhism, as has been noted earlier, was increasingly perceived in the public imaginary as out of touch and overly concerned with death and costly funerary rites; Shinto, although associated with festivals and popular customary events such as the New Year’s shrine visit, continued to be heavily linked with negative images of militarism and nationalism. New religions, although broadly successful in attracting followers, have, as was noted earlier, since their earliest days, faced attack in the public domain, notably by a mass media closely aligned with the establishment and that views the new religions as a threat to the status quo, and the activities of Sōka Gakkai have aroused hostility for its aggressive proselytism, attempts to suppress criticism, and links to a political party. Even though the new movements that came to the fore in the 1980s and early 1990s garnered some positive media coverage because they appeared to be exciting and new, they also became engaged in conflicts that tarnished their image and affected public views of religion in general. Kōfuku no kagaku, for instance, courted controversy when it became locked in a dispute with a major media concern, Kōdansha, whose weekly magazine Friday published a series of critical articles about Ōkawa that included claims that he had received psychiatric treatment for mental illness. The accusations were wrong; the person referred to as having had treatment was not Ōkawa but someone the magazine mistakenly identified as him. Before this error was discovered devotees of Kōfuku no kagaku, in what appeared to be an orchestrated and coordinated attack, organized pickets of Kōdansha’s buildings and jammed its telephone and fax lines (in an era when these were the main source of communications) with calls and faxes, and thereby prevented Kōdansha from conducting any business for several days. Although the dispute was ultimately settled (via lawsuits), the affair did little either for the media – because of muckraking and shoddy journalism – or Kōfuku no kagaku, whose attacks on the publishing firm, and apparent readiness to stop it operating, aroused memories of Sōka Gakkai’s earlier attempts to suppress criticism. Besides creating for Kōfuku no kagaku a public image of intolerance, the 370

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affair angered the rest of the mass media toward the movement, which became the focus of increased censure and negative publicity in the aftermath (Astley 1995: 369; Baffelli 2016). In January 1995, the public image of religious institutions was to suffer further after a terrible earthquake hit the Hanshin area and caused thousands of deaths. In its wake, various agencies were criticized for inadequate responses to a desperate public need for help, both in material and emotional terms.The government was attacked for being slow to respond, but criticism also was directed at religious organizations, which were accused of failing to provide relief, whether material or emotional, in the crisis (Yamaori 1995: 226–7). Some attacks even claimed (probably erroneously) that some religious organizations only offered help to their own followers and turned away people in need who were not of their faith (Repp 1995). It was in this febrile atmosphere that Aum’s subway attack, which killed thirteen, injured thousands, and threw Tokyo into a state of panic and fear, occurred. Aum Shinrikyō had already been controversial, with many media stories portraying its charismatic leader, Asahara Shōkō, as being power hungry and accusing him of exploiting members for personal profit (e.g., Egawa 1991; Reader 2000: 33–9), and its attempt to enter the political domain by setting up a political party, the Shinritō (Truth Party), also generated negative publicity (Young 1995). Suspected also of involvement in attacks on opponents and dissidents, Aum was already regarded as a potential source of danger before the attack. Afterwards, revelations that the atrocity had been carried out by a registered religious organization, that Aum had been engaged for some time in violent acts against dissident members and opponents, and that it had been making and stockpiling weapons in apparent preparation for a final apocalyptic war caused a huge furore in Japan. The fact that the privileges and tax breaks conferred on religious organizations under the 1952 law, had helped Aum financially and could have helped fund its weapon making also enraged public opinion. Stories and revelations about Aum, and about how society should react, dominated the press and television for months (Hardacre 2007). Although academic analyses showed that Aum’s religious beliefs and its nature as a millennial religious group were significant factors in what transpired (Reader 2000; Shimada 2001; Shimazono 1997), the general public, politicians, and the mass media viewed things in a different light: as an act of indiscriminate terror by a group that pretended to be religious in order to gain tax privileges in order to finance its terrorist activities (Baffelli and Reader 2012). It became clear, too, that one reason why the authorities had not intervened earlier (even after evidence appeared to suggest Aum was involved in criminal activities) was that the police feared being accused of acting like the police in prewar Japan and persecuting religious organizations. It became clear, too, that Aum had played upon such fears by refusing to cooperate with the police when attempts were made to examine the movement, with Aum’s legal experts claiming such investigations infringed Aum’s constitutional rights as a religion (Reader 2000: 166–7). This result was a concerted public, media, and political response. Aum was commonly described in public rhetoric as a ‘cult’ (karuto), a term that in contemporary Japanese usage implies a deviant, fraudulent group based around unhealthy and obsessive devotion to a gurulike figure who controls disciples and is able to make them carry out all manner of deeds that go against the normative mores of society. Indeed, some Aum devotees who were charged with crimes of violence tried to defend themselves (unsuccessfully as a rule) by claiming they had been ‘brainwashed’ and ‘mind-controlled’ by Asahara to commit evil deeds against their will. All of this created an atmosphere in which the image of cults (and religion in general) as potentially dangerous and capable of making anyone who became involved in them commit crimes became commonplace (Sakurai 2006; 2008). Questions were asked about other religious groups and whether they might also be ‘cults’ and hence dangerous. Politicians called for increased scrutiny of all religions, a view that gained widespread public support, and the media and various popular 371

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publications began to suggest that just about any religious organization could possibly have Aum-like tendencies and be potentially dangerous (Wilkinson 2009).Various books and media articles discussing the ‘next Aum’ (and hence implying that it was not a singular case) appeared after the subway attack, with new religions in particular being tarred with this innuendo, notably Sōka Gakkai, which was denounced in various books as the ‘next Aum’ (Baffelli and Reader 2012: 11–13; Wilkinson 2009). Even the normally staid Buddhist sects were not immune from such hostile treatment, with some Buddhist priests indicating that they were constrained after 1995 from trying to proselytize or gain new converts for fear of being accused of trying to brainwash or control the people they sought to convert.17 Thus, the consensus that pertained from 1945 in which it was agreed that religion needed and constitutionally merited protection from the state gave way in 1995 to the view that state and society needed protection from religions. Politicians, the media, and the general public voiced views that the state should exercise far greater scrutiny of religions, that the laws governing religions should be tightened up, that the tax privileges of religions should be restricted or stopped, and that the police should be proactive in intervening in the affairs of religious groups rather than refrain from so doing. Reforms to the Religious Corporations Law to make affiliation and registration more difficult, to increase the potential for scrutiny, and to give the state a mandate to monitor religions while increasing the demands for public accountability were brought in, and new laws were passed to severely monitor Aum and its offshoots (Baffelli and Reader 2012). After 1995, the Public Security Intelligence Agency (Kōan chōsachō, PSIA) became active in the area of religion; set up after the war to deal with Cold War threats and monitor Communist activity, it saw the Aum Affair as a way to broaden its activities at a time when the Cold War had ended.The PSIA set up a unit to gather information on ‘cults’, including monitoring Sōka Gakkai (Hardacre 2003: 149), and placed the small remaining groups of Aum devotees under surveillance. Legal pressure groups, too, including the Japanese Bar Association, became increasingly active in bringing lawsuits against religious groups, for instance, on the grounds that they were making false promises when selling spiritual goods that were claimed to have special powers (Hardacre 2003: 151). A number of ‘anti-cult’ organizations became active in Japan, campaigning against any group that appeared to deviate from normative and mainstream religious activities, with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Unification Church, both of which had small followings in Japan, being especially targeted.18 The police and tax agencies showed themselves ready to intervene in the affairs of groups in a way that would not have been likely prior to Aum; in 1996, for example, former members of Hōnohana Sanpōgyō,19 a group led by Fukunaga Hōgen (b. 1945) and registered under the 1952 act, came together to accuse the movement of exploiting them by getting them to pay large sums for divinations by Fukunaga. Prior to the Aum Affair it is unlikely that former members would have so overtly complained of being defrauded or that the authorities would have intervened. Afterwards, things were very different; former members vociferously articulated their complaints to the media, and tax and police authorities took up the case, raiding Hōnohana’s premises, examining its financial affairs, and prosecuting Fukunaga, who was sent to jail, and the organization lost its status as religious organization and was legally disbanded (Yonemoto 2000). Since 1995 there has been a general erosion of trust in religious organizations. Surveys have shown that a term now commonly associated, in the minds of the public with ‘religion’ is abunai (dangerous) (Inoue 1999: 35; 2003: 28), and concerns that being involved with any religious organization could be dangerous and cause one to be ‘controlled’ and manipulated into performing illicit deeds have become widespread (Sakurai 2008; Baffelli and Reader 2012: 13–5). Surveys also indicate that religious officials such as priests are the least trusted of any sector in 372

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society – lower than politicians and the media (Kisala 1999: 60–5).The upshot has been that the downward trend in religious affiliation and engagement evident in numerous surveys throughout the postwar period has intensified and affects new religions every bit as much as the older traditions (Reader 2012). The figures now being reported by new religions in their annual reports to the Bunkachō are in many cases drastically reduced from before 1995 (Shimada 2015), although some of this may be due to closer scrutiny of figures than in the past. For movements such as Soka Gakkai that had already seen their growth come to a halt, such issues have led to retrenchment and an inward turn, with more attention now being paid to trying to retain the loyalty of the generation of followers born into the movement than seeking to gain new converts (McLaughlin 2012: 71). My interviews with officials in a number of new religions in Japan since 1995 indicate similar patterns of reduced membership, lack of new converts, and fears of public proselytization for fear of being attacked as ‘cults’. Compared to earlier eras, there have been few examples of new movements emerging to provide new waves of dynamism, and those individual figures who have attracted attention as spiritual teachers have tended to reject any suggestion that they are in any way connected to ‘religion’ (shūkyō) (Dorman 2007).

3/11, spirituality, and claims of revival? There have been some suggestions that a new orientation is emerging in Japan (as has been claimed also in parts of the Western world) in which a turn away from organized religion is accompanied by moves toward a more individually oriented and self-determined arena of practice, belief, and engagement under the loose label of ‘spirituality’. This view has been expressed by some Japanese scholars who think that just because surveys and reports show declining support for and membership of religious organizations, this does not mean people in Japan are abandoning religion completely. Rather, they suggest that religion as an organized entity is being replaced or transformed as increasing numbers of people engage in a variety of have claimed that a new wave of individualized practices, from yoga and meditation, to various ‘New Age’ practices, including visiting sites that are depicted as ‘power spots’ and sources of psychic energy (Shimazono 2007a; 2007b). However, there has as yet been little empirical data to substantiate such claims; some studies, indeed, suggest this seeming ‘spiritual boom’ petered out in the middle of the last decade (Gaitanidis 2010; Horie 2010; Sakurai 2009: 142) and no evidence has yet emerged to indicate that such practices are in any way compensating for the evident decline in institutional religions (Reader 2012: 29–31). There have also been suggestions by some commentators that the tragedies of 11 March 2011 – the earthquake, tsunami, and the Fukushima nuclear reactor crisis – have led to a revival in religious terms. Certainly, religious organizations responded more positively than after the 1995 earthquake, and in general the media has reported positively on relief efforts conducted by religious groups. Reports by religious studies scholars have stressed such activities (albeit without taking much note of the fact that large numbers of organizations of all sorts throughout Japan, not just religious ones, were very active in such relief work) and portrayed them as examples of religious vibrancy and relevance in Japan (Inaba 2011; McLaughlin 2013a, 2013b; Shimazono 2013: 257–74). However, whether this evident response by religious organizations in the aftermath of a tragedy that mobilized the whole of Japan has had any effect on attitudes to religion or to public support levels is as yet unclear; thus far no empirical evidence to this effect has been manifest compared to the statistical evidence produced by those (e.g., Shimada 2015; Reader 2012) who have argued that religious affiliation and engagement in general, even among the new religions that so evidently became the most vital force in the area in the postwar period, in Japan remains in decline. 373

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Conclusion What is very clear is that the realm of religion continues to be one of many controversies, legal debates, and disputes. This is evident in discussions about continuing reforms of laws pertaining to religions and discussions about how and to what extent religions and religious devotees in the post-Aum era should be monitored or even proscribed, or in the context of the contentious relationship of religion and politics as exemplified by the question of Sōka Gakkai and Kōmeitō. The consensus that pertained until 1995 has given rise to new attitudes toward religion that have dominated the public arena ever since. Equally, seven decades after the reforms that ushered in a new era in which religious freedom and the removal of state controls led to a ‘rush hour of the gods’ and the rapid rise of new religions, Japan is now in an era where the gods have come under legal scrutiny and have receded and where increasing numbers of people appear detached from any direct affiliation with religious organizations or any self-identification as religious. In institutional terms, the postwar period has been one in which the older traditions, once privileged as arms of the state, have found their position increasingly fraught, especially Buddhism as its monopoly of the processes of death has been challenged and eroded.The significant growth in the numbers affiliated to new religions led in postwar Japan to a shift in the balance between the new and the old, with the former in effect displacing the latter as the most prominent religious presence in Japan in organizational and institutional terms. Even so, the new religions have faced a period of retrenchment as a result of the controversies they have generated, and particularly as a result of Aum; as yet there has been no sign of a new wave of new movements arising (as with the new movements that came to prominence in the 1980s) to revitalize the world of new religions and take over from earlier such movements. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that their rise and growth, and the fact that they have been at the centre of many of the most important debates and controversies of the postwar era, from legal questions about the relationship of religion and politics to questions about the role and position of religion in a modern democratic society, indicate that the new religions have constituted the most striking phenomenon of postwar Japanese religious history.

Notes 1 Some Japanese new religions also have a formal English title, whereas others do not. In this chapter, the first time I mention a Japanese new religious movement, I will either provide the official English title or, in cases where they do not have such a title, I provide a footnote with my translation of what the name means. The name of the new religion referred to here, Ōmoto, means ‘great origin’ and refers to the movement’s teaching that it is the original root of all religions. 2 Sōka Gakkai means in English ‘value creation study society’ and refers back to its roots as an educationoriented study group based in Nichiren Buddhism. 3 For a full discussion of terms used to describe such movements (including earlier pejorative terms) see Reader 2015. 4 Worldly benefits (genze riyaku) are a common theme in Japanese religious structures, found as readily in Buddhism and Shinto as the new religions (Reader and Tanabe 1998), although it is clear that new religions have been highly effective in providing such services. 5 I am summarizing a large corpus of studies of new religions and their key themes here. For a more detailed account and overview of the new religions see Reader 2015, which contains a list of references to important works on these movements, and Staemmler and Dehn 2011 for chapters on various aspects of these movements. 6 McLaughlin (2014: 52) says it reports 8.27 million households, although he recognizes this is an overstatement; his estimate is that around 2 percent of the country’s population are members. 7 Risshōkōseikai has no formal English name; it means ‘The true law realization society’, a title that refers back to Nichiren (1222–82), the Buddhist monk whose claim that he sought to established the risshō

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(the true law of Buddhism) in Japan inspired many lay Buddhist movements that developed in the twentieth century, including Risshōkōseikai and Sōka Gakkai. 8 Article 9 states: ‘The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes’ (see also Chapter 13 in this volume). 9 This point was made to me by representatives of several new religions who, although hostile to Sōka Gakkai and Kōmeitō, nonetheless recognized that the latter’s presence in the political arena did serve as a brake on some of the anti-religious noises emerging from the political sphere after 1995. 10 This new religion’s name translated into English means ‘true light’ and refers to its basic belief that Okada was the conduit through which true light emanating from a creator deity was transmitted to this world; this true light can be accessed by devotees to cure ills and transform the world. 11 This Buddhist movement’s title in English means ‘garden of truth’. 12 Agonshū takes its name from the Āgama sutras, early Buddhist texts that in Japanese are referred to as the Agon sutras, that Agonshū sees as the essence of Buddhism. Agonshū thus means simply ‘Agon sutra sect’. 13 GLA is how the movement refers to itself in Japan; it is short for God Light Association.The movement is unique in Japan in having solely an English title. 14 Literally, ‘Revealed truth society’. 15 ‘Happy Science’ promotes its messages through an English-language website,‘The Liberty Web’ (http:// eng.the-liberty.com/). 16 I am aware that I have been counted by several new religions under such terms, either after being sent publications and magazines or after attending events. 17 I base this comment on numerous conversations with priests of my acquaintance during numerous field visits to Japan in the period since 1995. 18 See Human Rights without Frontiers 2012 for fuller discussion of this topic. 19 Literally, ‘Flower of the law, practice of the three laws’ (in which the ‘law’ hō refers to the law of Buddhism).

Further reading Hardacre, Helen (1986) Kurozumikyō and the New Religions of Japan, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. _____ (2017) Shinto: A History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nelson, John (2013) Experimental Buddhism: Innovation and Activism in Contemporary Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Reader, Ian (1991) Religion in Contemporary Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. _____ (2000) Religious Violence in contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyō, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

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27 Washoku, heritage and national identity Katarzyna J. Cwiertka

This chapter was inspired by David Lowenthal’s essay titled ‘Fabricating heritage’, which was published nearly twenty years ago: ‘Heritage should not be confused with history. History seeks to convince by truth, and succumbs to falsehood. Heritage exaggerates and omits, candidly invents and frankly forgets, and thrives on ignorance and error’ (Lowenthal 1998: 7). These words resonate equally well with the Japanese culinary heritage as with the case studies presented in Lowenthal’s essay. On 4 December 2013, the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage added fourteen new elements to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.1 One of those elements was ‘Washoku, traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese, notably for the celebration of New Year’. The list is a new addition to the activities of the UNESCO and is aimed primarily at enhancing the visibility of intangible cultural heritage and the awareness of its significance. It now includes such diverse entries as ‘Tango’ (added in 2009), ‘Peking Opera’ (added in 2010), ‘Traditional violin craftsmanship in Cremona’ (added in 2012) and ‘Smoke sauna tradition in Võromaa’ (added in 2014).2 UNESCO defines ‘intangible cultural heritage’ as ‘practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces . . . – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage’.3 Between 2008 and 2014, the Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage incorporated over 300 elements into the Representative List, but what makes the inclusion of washoku interesting – in particular for the purposes of this chapter – is its national dimension and the strong promotion of it by the Japanese government. Washoku has been turned into a carefully scripted brand name, which is now being extensively utilized for nation branding, that can be broadly defined as deployment of marketing communications techniques to promote a nation’s image (Olins 2004; Fan 2006; Ahn and Wu 2015). Two weeks after the UNESCO announcement, on 20 December 2013, the YouTube channel maintained by the Japanese Prime Minister’s Office (Shushō kantei) uploaded a video showing Abe Shinzō explaining the essentials of a Japanese meal and urging the global audience (sekai no minasama) to ‘get to know about the heart of Japan through our “Washoku” ’ (Figure 27.1).4 It is worth mentioning that the Japanese flag visible on the prime minister’s right adds gravity to the seemingly trivial topic of the speech itself and that the music played in the background 376

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Figure 27.1 Prime Minister Abe Shinzo ¯ praising washoku (2015). Source: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=SXGxLaNnGO0.

involuntarily brings to mind associations with Japan’s time-honoured traditions. The message is loud and clear: washoku is part of the national culture and has a centuries-old pedigree, which with official UNESCO approval is now recognized as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Washoku is commonly known nowadays as the name for traditional Japanese cuisine, which is roughly defined as being based on rice and miso soup with other dishes, and putting emphasis on seasonal ingredients. Ever since it was added to the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, washoku has been heavily utilized by the Japanese government for nation-branding.Yet, as I argue later, there is a very large gap between the message purveyed by the Japanese government and historical reality. Washoku, I contend, is a myth that shows the vulnerability of historical truth and the dangers the agendas of cultural diplomacy pose for the narratives of the past. In the video of the prime minister, as in all promotional material produced in Japan since December 2013, washoku is portrayed as Japan’s endangered cultural heritage that needs to be cherished and protected. In reality, quite the opposite is the case. The concept of washoku – its birth, expansion and rise to its status as part of Japan’s heritage – is a modern construct, which reveals more about Japan’s twentieth-century transformations than about culinary traditions.

What’s in a name? In the nomination submitted to the UNESCO, washoku is described as a social practice based on a comprehensive set of skills, knowledge, practice, and traditions related to the production, processing, preparation, and consumption of food. It is associated with an essential spirit of respect for nature closely related to the sustainable use of natural resources.5 377

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This definition is a surprisingly imaginative interpretation of a common noun meaning ‘Japanesestyle food’ or ‘Japanese-style meal’. It has been used interchangeably with the term Nihon ryōri, the major difference being that washoku implies a ‘Japanese meal’, whereas Nihon ryōri indicates a ‘Japanese dish’ or ‘Japanese dishes’ (Masuda 1974: 1225, 1950). Some Japanese-language dictionaries offer slightly more nuanced definitions by specifying the meaning of Nihon ryōri as exclusive restaurant cuisine and linking washoku more generally to the daily food of the common people, with home-cooked food at its core (Shibata and Yamada 2002: 1042). This distinction has been emphasized by the Investigative Commission for the Nomination of Japanese Food Culture on the List of World Intangible Cultural Heritage (Nihon shokubunka no sekai mukei isan tōroku ni muketa kentōkai), which was entrusted with putting together the UNESCO nomination. It has also been highlighted on several occasions by the National Assembly for Washoku Culture (Washoku bunka kokumin kaigi), an association founded in 2014 to promote washoku-related events (Kumakura 2013: 10). Its chairman, Kumakura Isao, explains the rationale behind this strategy as follows: Japan’s traditional dietary culture is currently undergoing a rapid decline in Japan, and a national effort is required for its protection and continuation. Given this, at the heart of the proposal is hope that a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage listing will cause Japanese people themselves to reaffirm and place importance on the value of traditional dietary culture, and that this will create a national movement to pass this heritage on to the next generation. So that our aims would not be misunderstood, we consciously used the word ‘washoku’ instead of Japanese cuisine. While the ‘wa’ in washoku means ‘Japan’ and thus refers to Japanese food, washoku refers to the traditional foods that Japanese regularly eat at home on a daily basis. (Kumakura 2014) However, a closer look at the history of washoku reveals that this connotation, which since 2013 has dominated the mass media, and thus potentially the minds of millions of Japanese speakers, has emerged quite recently. The Asahi Kikuzō Visual II database and the Yomidasu Rekishikan databases are very useful research tools that enable users to search and access the content of the two major Japanese daily newspapers, Yomiuri Shinbun and Asahi Shinbun, dating back to their first issues (1874 for Yomiuri and 1879 for Asahi).6 Searches for the term washoku in both databases reveal a sudden increase in the occurrence of the word in the last two decades. For example, for the Asahi Shinbun, washoku generated more than 200 hits per year for the first time in 1998, as against only 30 hits ten years earlier. The difference is smaller in the case of Yomiuri Shinbun – eighty-eight hits in 1998, compared with sixty-one in 1988, but the number of hits had increased tenfold by 2014, the year following the inscription of washoku on the UNESCO Intangible Heritage List. The term washoku featured for the very first time in a Japanese-language dictionary in 1981, when it was defined quite broadly as ‘a Japanese-style meal’ (Nihonfū no shokuji, Nihon ryōri), without any further specification (Shōgaku Tosho 1981: 2516). An analysis of the content of the aforementioned newspaper databases over the course of the twentieth century confirmed the validity of this definition. It was only after 2013 that the new meaning of washoku as ‘heritage’ colonized the media coverage. For example, in 1941 Yomiuri Shinbun heralded that washoku was a big favourite at the banquet table on the Nanjing – Kobe cruise (Yomiuri Shinbun, 16 June 1941: 3). In 1968, Asahi Shinbun reported on instant miso soup and pickles – referred to as washoku – being sent to Mexico City to serve as ‘restorative remedies’ for Japanese athletes competing in the Mexico Olympics (Asahi Shinbun, 25 September 1968: 12). In 1986, the same newspaper 378

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proudly announced that Princess Diana liked washoku and was practising using chopsticks in preparation for her visit to Japan (Asahi Shinbun, 18 April 1986: 12). A 2005 article referred to the popularity of Japanese-style fast food in China, also using the term washoku (Asahi Shinbun, 4 October 2005: 3). In these (and many other) articles, the term washoku was not reserved for the narrow category of ‘home-cooked food’, but was utilized to designate a broad spectrum of foods that were produced and invented in Japan, from innovative products launched by the food-processing industry to banqueting dishes served to royalty. It was in precisely this way that the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries utilized the word in a promotional scheme conducted jointly with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs between 2006 and 2011. The ‘WASHOKU – Try Japan’s Good Food’ campaign consisted of events organized by Japanese embassies and consulates all over the world, at which Japanese food produce could be sampled. Roughly twenty such events were held each year, and the promoted produce ranged from food items that could be considered representative of traditional Japanese cuisine, such as rice, miso, seaweed and seafood, to ‘ordinary’ agricultural products that are commonly grown elsewhere, such as tomatoes, cucumbers, apples and peaches.7 Thus, the definition of the word washoku utilized for the purpose of this scheme did not match the one used for the UNESCO nomination submitted only a few years later. Further examination of newspaper articles reveals that washoku has often been paired with the term yōshoku (‘Western-style food’). As early as 1892, for example, washoku featured in an advertisement of the Nippon Yūsen Kaisha (NYK) shipping company, informing prospective passengers of the Kobe-Otaru ferry about the prices of Japanese and Western-style meals served onboard. The NYK lines were famous for their exquisite cooking (Asahi Shinbun, 7 October 1892: 6). An article published in 1909 revealed food preferences of the emperor’s grandchildren, which included both Japanese and Western-style food (Asahi Shinbun, 3 September 1909: 4). Fifty-five years later the readers were warned about the higher risk of developing stomach cancer as the result of a Japanese-style diet (as opposed to a Western-style diet) (Asahi Shinbun, 22 January 1965: 14). This connection between washoku and yōshoku was by no means coincidental. Both words (and categories) were created in the late nineteenth century in response to the increasing popularity of Western-style dining in Japan. The borrowing of culinary ideas from the West was not an isolated phenomenon, but was closely related to the pro-Western orientation of the government during the Meiji era (1868–1912). The adoption of Western-style dining in elite circles was part and parcel of a comprehensive set of Westernization reforms (bunmei kaika) that were instigated with the goal of turning Japan into a modern nation-state. In this context, food was a political tool expressing the autonomy and legitimacy of the new government to the political opponents at home and validating and empowering it in the eyes of foreign dignitaries (Cwiertka 2004: 122–6). During the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, this pairing of washoku with yōshoku in the newspapers occurred primarily in relation to dining out. As mentioned earlier, the advertisement for the meals on the Kobe–Otaru ferry in 1892 was the very first instance of washoku featuring in the Asahi Shinbun. In the case of Yomiuri Shinbun, it was an article titled ‘Treats in dining cars on New Year’s Day’ published fifteen years later. The article announced a new service that was being made available in the dining cars of the express trains operating between Tokyo and Kobe. Passengers travelling overnight on New Year’s Eve could enjoy a traditional New Year’s breakfast, including ozōni soup and marinated herring roe (kazunoko), for the price of a regular breakfast (Yomiuri Shinbun, 27 December 1907: 3). Another piece of news concerning washoku in connection to dining cars appeared again two years later (Yomiuri Shinbun, 18 August 1909: 2). 379

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It is hardly surprising that dining out features prominently with regard to yōshoku. With the exception of a handful of households in which Western-style cooking was practised as a pastime of the lady of the house (Cwiertka 1998), during the first half of the twentieth century Westernstyle food was primarily consumed outside the home.

Washoku and eating out The policies of bunmei kaika divided the life of the Japanese elite into two separate spheres: the Western sphere (represented by the ideogram yō) and the Japanese sphere (represented by the ideogram wa). If the occasion required it, they dressed in Western-style clothes (yōfuku) and dined Western style (yōshoku) in Western-style surroundings (yōma) (Esenbel 1994). This strict division between yō and wa was not retained for long. As Western-style fashions spread beyond elite circles, Western elements began to merge with native class- and community-based practices and conventions, creating new, hybrid Japanese-Western forms (Slade 2009). The practical meaning of what was Western and what was Japanese became less clear-cut and this has remained the case to the present day (Goldstein-Gidoni 2001). The earlier quotation uses the term seiyō ryōri, which can roughly be translated as ‘Westernstyle food’. In the late nineteenth century this expression was used interchangeably with the aforementioned yōshoku without any noticeable difference in connotation. From the 1870s onwards both terms appeared in restaurant advertisements placed in newspapers. Western-style state banquets usually took place at exclusive,Western-style hotels, which had emerged in treaty ports since the 1860s, primarily for the purpose of accommodating a growing number of foreigners. Following the convention of the time, these establishments had restaurants on their premises which served French-style cuisine – the epitome of good taste. A decade later, the hotels and restaurants that served Western-style food to a Japanese clientele began to expand as well (Cwiertka 2006: 39–41). By the turn of the twentieth century, the fashion for Western-style dining became less exclusive, adjusting itself to the tastes and budgets of the urban middle class. The most ubiquitous venue for the consumption of Western-style food became the so-called yōshokuya (the suffix ‘-ya’ meaning a shop, an establishment) – an inexpensive, Western-style cafeteria that provided the Japanese public with domesticated versions of selected Western-style dishes, such as roast beef, roast chicken, beef steak, veal cutlet, croquette, curry on rice, omelette and stew (Maenobō 2000: 97). The reliance on Anglo-Saxon cooking rather than French cuisine was determined by two factors. First of all, it was representative of British and American supremacy in the life of the Western communities in the treaty ports. Because the cafeterias were being set up and run by former employees of Western households or restaurants that were patronized by the overwhelmingly British and American community in Japan, they featured food that had been prevalent there.The second reason was the fact that English and American dishes were much less complex and therefore easier to prepare (Cwiertka 2003; 2006: 45–55). At the yōshokuya, dishes were not served as set menus consisting of several courses, as was the general practice at the more expensive establishments, but were to be ordered à la carte. They were usually served together with a plate of Japanese-style boiled rice, and the standard beverage selection was beer or sake, not wine.The taste of Western dishes served at yōshokuya was adapted to the Japanese palate as well so that customers looking for culinary adventure did not need to compromise on taste. For example, Worcestershire sauce was used on almost everything, as the Japanese understood it to be the Western equivalent of their own universal flavouring: soy sauce. The pan-frying technique required by many recipes was changed by yōshokuya cooks into deep frying, a method with which Japanese customers were much more familiar due to its use in 380

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well-known tempura (Ishige 2001: 155). Through these and other modifications, Western-style dishes served in Japan gradually lost their original shapes and tastes, acquiring an increasingly ‘Japanese’ character. The term yōshoku increasingly began to be used in connection with these Japanized forms, whereas the term seiyō ryōri came to be associated with more exclusive forms of Western-style dining, which remained closer to the European and American originals. This had not been the case a few decades earlier. For example, in an advertisement placed in Yomiuri Shinbun on 4 February 1891 by the Imperial Hotel – one of the most exclusive establishments in the capital – the word yōshoku, not seiyō ryōri, was used (see Figure 27.2). The ad announced to the newspaper’s readers that the hotel’s restaurant could prepare ‘yōshoku for meetings and banquets, and take orders to cater to groups larger than twelve people’ (Yomiuri Shinbun, 4 February 1891: 4). Similar advertisements that used the term yōshoku continued to appear in the following decade.They were placed by high-end restaurants that did not fall into the yōshokuya category.8 Yōshokuya and their menus served as a blueprint for the modern mass gastronomy that began to emerge in Japan at the start of the twentieth century. To be sure, Japanese cities had boasted a full-blown and differentiated gastronomy long before the arrival of Western-style restaurants (Nishiyama 1997: 164–78; Harada 2000: 105–27). The most important transformation that the Japanese restaurant culture has undergone since the late nineteenth century was its increasingly multicultural character. Large department stores, which started to dominate the commercial, architectural and cultural landscape of Japanese cities played an important role in this process (Moeran 1998). In many respects, the Japanese department stores resembled their counterparts in Paris, London and New York, but one of their characteristic features was the abundance of

Figure 27.2 Celebrations of the emperor’s birthday at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (Murai 1903). 381

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dining establishments, which were generally referred to as shokudō; today this term is more usually translated as ‘cafeteria’, but these eating places were more reminiscent of a restaurant or a refreshment room than the sort of place we now associate with the word. The first Japanese department store to set up a refreshment room was the Shirokiya, in 1903. The dishes served there were not cooked on the premises, but were delivered from nearby restaurants (Hatsuda 1993: 118; Miyano 2002: 76). By the 1920s, this practice had been discontinued and department stores were running large kitchens serving thousands of meals every day. The menus were expanded to offer wider choice. For example, the 1930 menu of the restaurant situated in the basement of the Mitsukoshi Department Store in Tokyo (see Figure 27.3) featured seven categories of food: 1) washoku, 2) sushi, 3) wagashi (‘Japanese-style confectionary’), 4) yōshoku, 5) shinashoku (‘Chinese-style food’), 6) yōgashi (‘Western-style confectionary’) and fruit, and 7) drinks. It was this tremendous culinary variety, along with the grandeur of the surroundings, which made dining out in department stores shokudō attractive to the Japanese city dwellers. The department stores used their restaurants to lure customers onto the premises of the store, and their prices were, therefore, lower than those in similar restaurants operating independently. Except for the interruption during the 1940s caused by wartime shortages and devastation, department store cafeterias continued to dominate the Japanese dining scene well into the 1970s, when they were increasingly confronted with competition from foreign investors, such as fast-food and family restaurant chains (Doi 1992). Department store restaurants were the primary context in which the word washoku came into common use. Some department stores set up separate washoku and yōshoku refreshment rooms, whereas others mixed different categories of food in one venue. For example, in Osaka, the Hankyū, Mitsukoshi, and Daimaru department stores had their washoku shokudō located on the seventh floor and the ones that served yōshoku on the eighth. In contrast, the Sōgō department store had a grand dining hall (daishokudō) on the seventh floor, where three different styles of food – washoku, yōshoku, and shinashoku – were served. Sōgō also ran two more exclusive dining

Figure 27.3 The 1930 menu of a restaurant in the Mitsukoshi Department Store in Tokyo. (From author’s collection.) 382

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establishments on its premises – a French restaurant on the sixth floor, which specialized in the cuisine from the south of France, and a Japanese-style fine-dining restaurant located in the basement (Hyakkaten Shūhōsha 1937: 17, 31, 37, 46). In Tokyo, the Matsuzakaya store in the Asakusa district operated two grand dining halls (one on the sixth floor and another one in the basement), where both washoku and yōshoku were served. The same formula was used by the Mitsukoshi department store in the Ginza district (Hyakkaten Shūhōsha 1937: 73, 78). Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the grand dining halls in the department stores were very popular destinations for Sunday family lunches (Kon 2010: 144–5). An entire generation of Japanese who grew up in the postwar decades shared this experience. The 1 July 1956 issue of the popular magazine Asahi Gurafu described the popularity of department store cafeterias as follows: ‘Mitsukoshi Department Store’s dining hall on the eighth floor attracts 10,000 customers daily. On Sundays and holidays, the service counters look like a war zone. A total of 80 different dishes and drinks are served’ (Asahi Gurafu 1662, 1956: 4–5). It is in this context that the word washoku came into popular use. According to the records of the National Diet Library, over 600 books with the word washoku in their titles have been published in Japan since 1981, the year when the term appeared in a Japanese-language dictionary for the first time. Like the British Library in the United Kingdom or the Library of Congress in the United States, the National Diet Library in principle holds all the books published in Japan since the its establishment in 1948.9 Before 1981, only five titles featuring the word washoku can be found on record, and they all relate to the restaurant business (Takahashi 1980; Shōten Kensetsu 1977a; 1977b; Ogasawara 1979).

Rice, soup and three side dishes Among the four characteristic features specified in the nomination of washoku as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage and widely promoted by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries10 is the ‘one soup and three side dishes’ structure of a Japanese meal. The chairman of the National Assembly for Washoku Culture explains it as follows: washoku is made up of three elements: cooked rice which serves as the staple food, soup and side dishes to make the rice more palatable, and Japanese pickles. This typical form is expressed with the term ichijū-sansai (“a bowl of soup and three side dishes”). Since rice and pickles are always included they are omitted from the term, which is therefore formed based on a single soup (miso soup) dish and three varieties of side dish. Out of the three side dishes, one corresponds to a main dish and two varieties correspond to smaller side dishes. (Kumakura 2014) This is indeed a sketch of an ideal Japanese-style meal, as it has been propagated within the Food Education (shokuiku) framework since 2005 (see also below).11 However, like the rest of the washoku myth, it relies on dressing up the current state of affairs – or even a desirable ideal – in an aura of tradition, rather than on practices of the past. Let us begin with rice. The symbolic importance of rice in Japanese history and its role as a currency in the pre-modern Japanese economy are indisputable (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993). It was, to be sure, a preferred staple, but there was not enough of it to feed everybody. According to government surveys conducted during the 1880s, for example, the proportion of rice among staples consumed by the Japanese population constituted approximately 50 per cent. Barley, wheat, sweet potatoes and millet comprised the remaining half (Nishikawa 1986: 422). Consumption patterns depended not only on social class, income and the region one lived in, but also on harvest conditions that varied from year 383

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to year (Hanley 1997: 78–9; Nishiyama 1997: 160). Scholars agree that the elite classes and the majority of urban dwellers relied primarily on rice as their staple, but opinions vary concerning rice consumption among the farming population, which in the late nineteenth century still accounted for over 80 per cent of all inhabitants of Japan. It seems reasonable to conclude that, except in certain areas particularly abundant in rice, peasants resorted to staples other than rice or lived on rice that was mixed with other grains to make it go further. Pure rice was reserved in peasant households for special occasions, such as New Year (oshōgatsu). Despite rising living standards during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the peasant diet was still considerably below urban standards. Katemeshi, a dish consisting of rice, millet and barley cooked with chopped radish and hagate, the same dish made of radish leaves instead of roots, remained a staple in many rural households throughout the 1920s and 1930s (Partner 2004: 13). For peasants who served in the Imperial Japanese Army after the introduction of conscription in 1873, a daily meal of white rice the conscripts were fed was a true luxury. After 1925, a mixture of rice and barley in the ratio seven to three officially became the standard staple in the Japanese military as a preventative measure against beriberi (Cwiertka 2006: 68–9).This measure presaged the developments that took place in the 1940s. The Food Management Law (Shokuryō kanrihō) of February 1942 introduced a uniform, nationwide system of staple-food rationing, which entitled every imperial subject to a daily ration of 2.3 gō (approximately 322 grams) of partly polished rice (Cohen 1949: 374–9; Pauer 1999: 89–102). Ironically, it was the shortage of rice following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) that turned rice – at least in theory – into the officially sanctioned staple of the Japanese population. It was, however, the same shortage, subsequently aggravated by the introduction of food rationing, which prevented the system from being put into practice (Cwiertka and Yasuhara 2010). It took another decade before all Japanese could afford the luxury of rice-based meals on a daily basis. Rice consumption in Japan peaked in 1961 and has declined ever since (see Figure 27.4). The foundations of the ichijū sansai principle (‘one soup, three side dishes’), routinely represented as one of the characteristic features of washoku, are even shakier than that of the myth of rice as the time-honoured national staple.The ichijū sansai originated in the ceremonial banquets (honzen ryōri) that were the dominant form of aristocratic dining since the medieval period (g)

Figure 27.4 Per capita rice consumption in Japan, 1946–88. (Compiled from Kenko ¯, Eiyo ¯ Jo ¯ho ¯ Kenkyu ¯kai Eiyo ¯ Cho ¯sa Kenkyu ¯han 1998: 75–6). 384

Washoku, heritage and national identity Table 27.1 Meals served in the dormitory of Tokyo Higher Normal School in May 1916. Date

Breakfast

Lunch

Dinner

2 3

Rice, pickles, miso soup Rice, pickles, miso soup

Rice, pickles, Yoshino-ni of beef Rice, pickles, grilled fish

4 5 6 7

Rice, pickles, miso soup Rice, pickles, miso soup Rice, pickles, miso soup Rice, pickles, miso soup

Rice, pickles, pork cutlet Rice, pickles, simmered fish Rice, pickles, pork in miso Rice, pickles, deep-fried fish

Rice, pickles, miso soup Rice, pickles, pork simmered in curry sauce Bamboo-shoot rice, pickles Rice, pickles, fish tempura Rice, pickles, dengaku Rice, pickles, beef in miso

Source: Compiled by the author, data from Toyokawa and Kaneko 1989: 23–4.

(Rath 2010). Because daily meals are rarely recorded, it is not easy to assess how far removed these lavish banquets were from the everyday food practices. However, based on the available evidence it seems safe to conclude that one soup or one side dish – rather than one soup and three side dishes – was the norm for daily meals served in pre-modern Japan, even in the elite households (Cwiertka and Yasuhara 2016). This tendency continued well into the twentieth century. For example, menus served in May 1916 in the dormitory of the Tokyo Higher Normal School (Tōkyō kōtō shihan gakkō) – one of Japan’s oldest and most prestigious colleges – never included more than one side dish (see Table 27.1). The same holds true for the menus of public eateries operated by the municipalities of large cities. These records are extremely valuable, because, in contrast to the restaurant setting which was usually connected with a festive occasion, the food served in public cafeterias resembled everyday meals at home, for which records are relatively scarce. In the autumn of 1926, the Tokyo Public Health Office (Tōkyō-shi eisei shikenjo) conducted a review of six public cafeterias run by the city. The evidence gathered shows that breakfasts served in those six cafeterias consistently contained rice, miso soup and pickles, at times supplemented with nori seaweed or shrimp soy preserve (tsukudani). The overwhelming majority of lunches and dinners included one side dish, while donburimono (rice in a large bowl with a topping) were customarily served only with pickles (Tōkyō-shi Eisei Shikenjo 1929: 2–36). To summarize, the washoku meal resting on the foundation of one soup and three dishes, which was presented in the application to UNESCO as part of the culinary heritage centred on home-cooked meals, did not exist in prewar Japan, perhaps with the exception of highend restaurants. If it is at all a reflection of Japan’s past, it would be in the context of the late 1950s and 1960s, when improving living standards not only made it possible for all Japanese to indulge in the luxury of eating rice at every meal, but also when culinary advice aimed at homemakers emphasizing variety in home cooking began to show results in the increasing number of side dishes.

Conclusion At first sight washoku is a classic example of the invention of tradition, broadly defined by Eric Hobsbawm as ‘a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted ruled and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past’ (Hobsbawm 1983: 1). What makes the washoku case different from many other instances of this phenomenon documented by historians in recent years is a remarkable speed in which it has taken place and a complete 385

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lack of resistance from the side of culinary historians against this historical forgery committed under the leadership of the Japanese government. The nomination of washoku for inclusion on the UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage, filed by the Japanese government in March 2012, was considered to fully meet the five criteria specified by the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.12 The first three criteria stipulate how the nominated element is embedded in society and the ways in which it is to be protected. The final two criteria specify the more formal prerequisites for UNESCO’s approval. The filed nominations must be able to demonstrate that the initiative has strong local support. As I have argued elsewhere (Cwiertka 2015), the content of the Japanese nomination for the inclusion of Japanese cuisine on the UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage was changed from ‘Distinctive Japanese cuisine with traditional features centred on kaiseki’13 to ‘Washoku, traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese, notably for the celebration of New Year’ only a few months before the deadline, in late November of 2011. This shift was most probably instituted out of concern that the initial nomination centred on Japan’s haute cuisine would be rejected by the UNESCO committee due to its insufficient social embedding, as had happened in the case of royal Korean cuisine.14 This fact alone suggests that, from the perspective of the Japanese government actively engaged in nation branding, having Japanese food recognized as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity was a goal in itself and had to be achieved at all costs, even if that meant tweaking the truth.The new nomination, with its focus on washoku, is a prime example of the fabrication of heritage, as expertly explained by David Lowenthal (1998), whom I quote at the beginning and at the end of this chapter. The designation of washoku as world intangible heritage and the marketing activities that followed have transformed a common noun into a proper noun, which is now on its way to becoming the brand name of Japanese cuisine. What makes this process most problematic is that under the impact of culinary propaganda orchestrated by the state, the fabricated heritage of washoku has been internalized by the Japanese population – as well as by the fans of Japanese cuisine worldwide. Exploring the reasons behind the involvement of the Japanese government in the formation of the washoku myth lies outside the scope of this chapter, but cannot be left entirely unaddressed. It has been pointed out that Japanese government officials regard the recognition of washoku as world heritage as yet another project that contributes to the projection of Japanese ‘soft power’, as yet another form of Japan’s so-called ‘content industries’, whose products range from Pokémon and other manga and anime, to digital media, fashion, visual arts and design (Sakamoto and Allen 2011; Bestor 2014: 60). Certainly, the recognition of washoku as part of the world’s heritage by UNESCO has helped to bolster Japanese morale (which has been battered by the long recession and the earthquake of 2011), but the stakes are much higher than that. Japan’s intangible culinary heritage is directly linked to much more tangible issues, such as foreign investment, international tourism and Japanese agricultural and fishery exports. It also helps to address Japan’s food self-sufficiency problem. Over the last fifty years Japan’s food self-sufficiency ratio has declined by half and is now oscillating at about 40 per cent (Cwiertka 2014: 97–8). This is the lowest level of food self-sufficiency of all industrialized societies. From the perspective of food security, this high dependence on food imports in the face of an envisioned global food shortage is far from ideal, without even taking into consideration the impact of this situation on the ailing Japanese agricultural sector, which is in grave need of revitalization.

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From the 1990s onwards a variety of measures have been implemented by the Japanese government to tackle the food self-sufficiency problem, but they have not brought about the desired results.The only hope now lies in persuading the Japanese people to abandon the foreign culinary trends that they have ardently embraced since the Meiji era. With this goal in mind, the government has initiated a number of ‘Eat Japanese’ campaigns, the most extensive of which is the Basic Law on Food Education (Shokuiku kihonhō) released in 2005 (Assmann 2010: 3). Three ministries are working closely together to implement the campaign – the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries; the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology; and the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare – and it features prominently in the nomination as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage as a measure geared toward the safeguarding of washoku.15 Today, nostalgia pervades every facet of public and popular culture in Japan. It is an attitude in which the past is seen in an idealized, positive light and admired for certain features which have since been lost. Scholars have argued that there are two dimensions to nostalgia that inform one another. On the one hand, in longing for what is lacking in a changed present, nostalgia for lost time involves yearning for what is now no longer attainable, simply because of the irreversibility of time. On the other hand, it is a means of taking one’s bearings for the road ahead in the uncertainties of the present (Pickering and Keightley 2006: 921). In the case of washoku, the desire to recognize aspects of the past as the basis for renewal seems to be particularly strong.Yet despite the clearly future-oriented direction of the washoku revival, it is very likely to have profound consequences on the narratives of the past. In the meantime, washoku as heritage brand name is being effectively used by a variety of organizations – from governmental agencies, associations and schools to the food-processing industry and restaurants. Most Japanese are proud of the attention Japanese food receives worldwide, although some might have preferred to see the taxpayers’ money spent differently. In the midst of washokumania, which has taken Japan by storm in the last two years, there is no place for a critical voice. The culinary historians who have directly profited from its nomination are reluctant to interfere with the lore of washoku that has been concocted for the purpose of the UNESCO nomination and is now perpetuated in print, on television, and online. The Japanese media machine is on the way to effectively wipe out any trace of reality from the washoku story, replacing it with a carefully scripted myth. A quote from Lowenthal’s essay, which inspired this chapter, seems like a very appropriate way to close it: Celebrating some bits and forgetting others, heritage reshapes a past made easy to embrace. And just as heritage practitioners take pride in creating artifice, the public enjoys consuming it. Departures from history distress only a handful of highbrows. Most neither seek historical veracity nor mind its absence. (Lowenthal 1998: 13)

Notes 1 See UNESCO, ‘Fourteen elements inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Heritage of Humanity’, www.unesco.org/new/en/media-services/single-view/news/fourteen_elements_inscribed_ on_the_rpresentative_list_of_the_intangible_heritage_of_humanity/#.VbjX2zIw_X4, accessed 29 July 2015. 2 The full list is available at UNESCO, ‘Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage and the Register of good safeguarding practices’, www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00559, accessed 28 July 2015.

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3 Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, available at www. unesco.org/culture/ich/en/conventin, accessed 22 October 2015. 4 At 2 minutes and 39 seconds into www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXGxLaNnGO0, accessed 21 October 2015. 5 See Nomination file No. 00869, p. 3, available at www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en& pg=00011&RL=00869, accessed 29 July 2015. The file is accessible by clicking on the first link in the ‘Documents’ section, titled ‘Nomination form: English’. 6 Both databases are accessible online. See Yomiuri Shinbun, ‘Yomidas Rekishikan’, www.yomiuri.co.jp/ database/en/ and Asahi Shinbun, ‘Kikuzō II’, http://database.asahi.com/index.shtml, accessed 27 January 2015. 7 The full list of promoted produce is available at www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/annai/zaigai/washoku/, accessed 29 July 2015. 8 See, for instance, the newspaper advertisement in Yomiuri Shinbun, 21 March 1899: 5 and Asahi Shinbun, 4 July 1905: 7. 9 See the website of the National Diet Library at www.ndl.go.jp/en/index.html, accessed 24 October 2015. 10 See Nōrinsuisanshō, ‘ “Washoku” ga Yunesuko mukei bunkazai ni tōroku saremashita!’, www.maff. go.jp/j/keikaku/syokubunka/ich/, accessed 25 October 2015. 11 See Nōrinsuisan-shō, ‘What is “Shokuiku (Food Education)”?’, www.maff.go.jp/e/pdf/shokuiku.pdf, accessed 25 October 2015. 12 See UNESCO, ‘Procedure of inscription of elements on the Lists and of selection of Best Safeguarding Practices’, www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00173#TOC1, accessed 24 October 2015. 13 Kaiseki, or kaiseki ryōri is a multi-course restaurant meal that could best be described as Japanese haute cuisine. 14 See 57–8 of the following document: www.unesco.org/culture/ich/doc/src/ITH-11-6.COM-CONF. 206-13+Corr.+Add.-EN.pdf, accessed 29 July 2015. 15 See Nomination file No. 00869, 8–13, available at www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en& pg=00011&RL=00869, accessed 29 July 2015.

Further reading Cwiertka, Katarzyna J. (2006) Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity, London: Reaktion Books. Ishige, Naomichi (2001) The History and Culture of Japanese Food, London: Kegan Paul. Rath, Eric C. and Assmann, Stephanie (eds) (2015) Japanese Foodways, Past and Present, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Verschuer, Charlotte von, and Cobcroft, Wendy (2016) Rice, Agriculture, and the Food Supply in Premodern Japan, London: Routledge.

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28 Environmental history Philip C. Brown

L. P. Hartley opened his most famous novel, The Go-Between, with the words alluding to the historic past as a strange, perhaps exotic realm (Hartley 1953).1 That is often taken to be so, but historians’ interests frequently emerge from the world in which they live. In varying degrees of specificity, people take issue with the less well-known words that follow this quote, ‘they do things differently there’. Historians often explore the past to discover insights, if not concrete ‘lessons’, that illuminate issues confronting their own world. Different approaches to social history, the emergence of African American history, women’s and gender history comprise just a small sample of these efforts. A widespread assumption in the extreme persists: if we study the history we can learn from the past – at the least, what mistakes to avoid today, at most optimistic, identification of practices that strike us today as having ‘worked’ in some sense. Environmental history and related fields, too, reflect concerns about the environment that were initially brought to broad public attention by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Carson 1962). That is not to say that individual instances of environmental problems had not previously generated substantial publicity and debate, as the nineteenth-century case of the Ashio copper mine pollution in Japan clearly indicates (Notehelfer 1971; Stolz 2014; Walker 2010). But it is fair to say that large segments of the world’s industrialized nations did not view environmental issues as pervasive, endemic elements of their world until publication of Carson’s work. After Silent Spring, historians specializing in disparate eras and geographic areas began to publish on ‘environmental history’, carving out a new field in the late 1960s and 1970s. Studies expanded beyond the initial emphasis on pollution to engage resource and food supply depletion, species extinction, climate change and many other issues. Early works were anthropocentric, but more recent works have tried to adopt the viewpoint of non-human actors (Walker 2005; Pflugfelder and Walker 2005).2 Also beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, new techniques for assessing climate change – dendrochronology, pollen analysis, oxygen isotope analysis, glacial ice core analysis and more – expanded the range of materials that could be exploited to reconstruct climate change and to do so with more and more precision. Such trajectories have supported a movement of intellectual interests beyond concerns with anthropogenic assaults on the environment to embrace a recognition that environmental forces, too, can be historical actors – a perspective with which nature has generously underlined in recent years: the Indian Ocean Tsunami (2004); hurricane damage in the southern United States (of which 2005 Hurricane 389

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Katrina is most famous); and multiple large earthquakes in Kobe, Niigata (Chūetsu and Chūetsu Oki, 2004 and 2007) and off the coast of northeastern Japan (2011, which damaged the Fukushima nuclear power plants).3 All of these developments – the themes, arguments, methodologies and problem awareness – have been reflected in Japanese environmental history. The studies discussed here constitute a sampling of the environmental history and related studies of Japan. Selection of articles and monographs is designed to give readers a sense of the exciting work that occupies a larger and larger element of the study of Japan. The studies reveal neither an actualization of ideals of harmonious co-existence with nature nor a black picture of human impacts on the environments. Taken as a whole, studies reveal not only human historical actors, but the environment itself as an actor, or interaction between the two. There are positive as well as pessimistic to be sure, but more important research provides much stimulus to think of human–environment interactions in new ways, out of the box of contemporary pre-dispositions.

Emergence of environmental history in Japan The emergence of environmental history in Japan has been somewhat slower than in Canada, the United States and Europe, and even those writing in European languages have slighted the Japanese case. Classic works in the field that attempt a global perspective rarely include Japan. When they do incorporate Japan, treatment is very brief and focuses mostly on the country’s modern period (for example, Ponting 1991; Penna 2010; Simmons 2008; Hughes 2001; Roberts 1998; Ponting and Ponting 2007; Brooke 2014). Instead of Japan, such works focus on much larger regions (e.g., China, or whole continents), especially for the pre-modern periods – eras for which there was very little available in English through the 1970s. Thus, any work by English authors in the 1970s, 1980s and even in considerable degree in the 1990s would have had to be completely original work, for although environmental concerns proliferated in the 1960s (Tokyo policemen directing traffic had to take oxygen breaks, the mercury poisoning of the Minamata Incident [George 2001] was publicized in Life magazine and other international publications, just to cite two examples), historians in Japan came to the field largely after the publication of Conrad Totman’s now classic study of Japanese forestry between circa 1600 and 1868, Green Archipelago in 1989 (Totman 1989). The late entry of Japanese scholars into the field of environmental history was neither the result of a lack of interest in human–nature relationships nor the result of a lack of good material from which to work or an inability of Japanese scholars to exploit it. Japanese attitudes toward nature have often been treated by Japanese and non-Japanese alike as one of special, positive appreciation and interest reflected in art, poetry and elements of daily life.4 In addition to the many resources for the study of the modern era, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Japan’s early modern (ca. 1580 to 1868) historical record is, by global standards, extraordinarily rich, composed of hundreds of thousands of documents that can shed light on water use, floods, earthquakes, resource exploitation and more. The record for medieval Japan (ca. 1200 to 1580) is considerably smaller, but archeological techniques, aerial photography, satellite imagery and similar approaches supplement the written documentation, literary references and images that remain to us, revealing changing patterns of land exploitation, vegetation, changes in river courses, deforestation patterns and much, much more. These interdisciplinary techniques have been similarly used to explore ancient and pre-historic Japan. This documentary treasure has enabled numerous Japanese authors to write on floods, fires, earthquakes, forestry practices, fishing, historical demography, epidemic disease, attitudes toward nature, transportation and more. 390

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What distinguishes Japanese (and much in other languages) work related to environmental history, but not of it, is a focus on resolving problems framed by other disciplinary perspectives such as economic history: environmental history is, at its base, the study of human interactions with the environment in order to understand their mutual influence on each other. When a scholar explores the relationship of land to agricultural development, the land is taken as a given, the conversion of land from field or forest to dry field or paddy is not, in itself, seen as disturbing the environment. An environmental historian would look not just at the ability of a given kind of land to support particular crops well, but also explore how, for example, human efforts to direct water to paddy lands may have affected a stream’s ability to support fish populations.5 Articles and books that deal with only one side of the equation may formally fall outside the realm of environmental history but have potential links to the field (a number of the works cited later fall into this category). The delay in attending to Japanese environmental history and all of the omissions of Japan’s experience in grand syntheses are unfortunate, for they have deprived the world of all of the insights, nuances, examples and counter-examples to be found in its extraordinarily rich source material.6 Japan’s history represents all of the major environmental history issues of the modern world and many from the pre-modern world – not only in its industrial pollution, its turn to mono-cultural sylviculture, its throttling of rivers with cement or its lining of coasts with tetrahedrons, but also in its insertion of chemicals into human bodies through the materials used to make cups for instant noodles and more. Its experience reminds us that water shortages are related to specific circumstances, not just those of deserts. Water supply that might appear abundant in arid contexts may be too little to grow rice well. Further, its struggles with environmental issues have involved transference of environmental risks to colonies and overseas producers, its pelagic exploitation has risked overfishing in international waters and, even as it experienced some benefits from loess, it now suffers harmful impacts of pollution, both blown across the Sea of Japan from China. In these ways and more its environmental history reflects the growth of a potential to externalize (or suffer from the externalization of) pollution across international boundaries. Its conflicting claims over ocean resources with China and Korea may even threaten international peace. Further, for extended periods in its pre-modern history Japan has, like North America, had an expanding frontier, but which, unlike the United States, Canada or Russia, experienced a relatively high degree of isolation from environmental interactions afflicting other parts of the globe: for example, the transmission of cholera came only in the nineteenth century, and it escaped the plague which wreaked havoc in many parts of Asia and Europe in the thirteenth century. Finally, Japan’s geography – its extensive mountains, coastlines, its numerous rivers – covers a land area that encompasses latitudes comparable to those between Baja California and Southern British Columbia and exposes it to earthquakes, typhoons, volcanoes and tsunami. This geography provides a natural historical laboratory for examining human interactions in a complex environment that has produced great biodiversity. Totman’s work that opened the door for the study of Japan’s environmental history was initially published in journal articles that are much less well known to his readers than his path-breaking Green Archipelago. Hints of his environmental turn were most widely apparent to his readers with the publication of Japan before Perry and have continued to inform a handful of his broader treatments of both Japanese and Korean history (e.g., Totman 1981).7 Although preceded by one monograph and followed by a handful of others, Green Archipelago exerted the greatest influence both within the field of Japanese history and outside it (Totman 1985; 1995; 2007). Its argument that Japan faced a potential collapse of its forest resources in the late seventeenth century, resources that were essential for building, fuel and production of green manure and that helped control flooding and landslides, but escaped that tragedy due to enlightened 391

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policies of domain lords (daimyo, including the shogun) and the engagement of villagers, has been taken as an example of the potential for societal resilience by such well-known scholars as Jared Diamond, Geoffrey Parker and John Richards whose works emphasize Japan’s exceptional efforts in the realm of environmental resilience (Diamond 2005; Parker 2013; Richards 2003). Broad survey treatments of Japanese environmental history or elements thereof have not been a well-populated genre in Japanese historiography, and the most far ranging are by Totman himself (Totman 1981; 1985; 1995; 2007). One way in which humans perceive and interpret their natural environment is through maps, and although there is no historical atlas of environmental change, a number of authors employ maps in Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps to reveal perceptions – non-Japanese as well as Japanese – of Japan and its natural foundations from the early modern era to the present (Wigen, Sugimoto and Karacas 1995).

Environmental histories of pre-modern Japan Totman’s prodigious body of work is distinguished by its emphasis on pre-modern history, a growing, but still small field relative to environmental history of industrializing and post–World War II Japan. In its most fully developed and recent form, Totman treats the longue durée of Japanese history based on different forms of human resource exploitation, from hunter-gathering society to early and then late forms of settled agriculture, to industrial development (Totman 2014). Although not designed as an environmental history, Brett Walker’s Japanese history text also treats elements of Japan’s environmental history, emphasizing the interaction of environment and society, each working to shape the other over the centuries (Walker 2015). Monographic treatments of pre-modern Japan’s environment are rare, but a number of stimulating articles suggest the potential for future development. At the outset, I note two distinctive treatments. In French, Jacques Joly examines nature in the thought of a major early nineteenthcentury Japanese intellectual, Andō Shōeki (Joly 1996). An example of the relationship between early Japanese religion (as opposed to intellectual history) and the environment, deer in particular, is the subject of Hoyt Long’s essay in the anthology JAPANimals (Long 2005). As a matter of convenience, I divide the remaining pre-modern studies into fundamental environmental categories of land, water, air, biota and attitudes toward nature. In pre-modern times, the first four are confined to the island land masses that are today’s Japan, whether they at any given time incorporated some ‘Japanese’ socio-cultural-political organization or not. Air, climate and ocean currents the arguable exceptions, but they are appearing more as actors on Japan than venues in which Japanese acted to alter them.8

Land As an actor in history, land – volcanoes, earthquakes, soils – has done much more than provide a stable foundation upon which inhabitants of Japan have built their communities, small and large. Indeed, relative to many parts of the world, the land of Japan comprises a persistent, destabilizing protagonist. Long before the birth of historic Japan, volcanoes erupted, destroying small communities and agricultural lands. As Gina Barnes points out, over the years, recovering vegetation and the irregularity of eruptions led to re-population and re-exploitation of the sites of volcanic disasters of lava, pyroclastic flows, debris and ash (Barnes 2015). As volcanoes built mountains, so, too, did earthquake activity, a subject taken up in several volumes by Gregory Smits (2013; 2014). Although regularly recorded in some form in historical documents, a number of the classical materials must be treated with great caution (Buhrmann 2017). Nonetheless, Smits argues that with the passage of centuries, there emerged some effort to move beyond 392

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understanding earthquakes in broadly religious terms and as retribution for moral decay to some more rational, analytical foundation that may have eased the transition to more scientific late nineteenth-century approaches. Land is both a foundation and vector for disease in his innovative Geographical Information Systems (GIS) exploration of archeological report data in the Nara-period capital of Heijōkyō (Kawasumi 2015). Discussion of pre-modern land would be incomplete without some focus on agriculture, but this has not been the subject of a substantial body of English-language work. One excellent study is that of German scholar Charlotte von Verschuer, whose original French-language study has been translated into English as Rice, Agriculture, and the Food Supply in Premodern Japan (Verschuer and Cobcroft 2016). In her detailed, well-researched volume, she gives attention to the impact of different environments on the spatial development of a variegated cultivation over Japan’s pre-modern eras, extending back to pre-historic times. One other study that addresses the adaptation of premodern, especially Tokugawa-era (1603–1868) villagers, to micro-climatic variation and flood and landslide risk, is this author’s Cultivating Commons: Joint Land Ownership in Early Modern Japan (Brown 2011).The study demonstrates some of the creative ways in which villagers spread certain natural risks among themselves by creating diversified portfolios of landholding rights to both dry field and paddy, the basis of poly-cultural agriculture von Verschuer discusses. Unconventional, but significant in a global as well as Japanese context, that odiferous combination of cured plant and animal waste, night-soil, comprises a new, current project for David Howell (2014). Given the link between paddy agriculture and irrigation, pre-modern communities were intimately tied to water, and removal of water was inevitably bound up in the creation of new, arable land. However, beyond that direct tie, pre-modern Japanese communities could use water, arable and woodland in mutually supporting ways that sustained a human–nature balance for centuries.The one English-language study, based on an award-winning book in Japanese, is Sano Shizuyo’s thoughtful study of the Lake Biwa littoral (Sano 2015).The link between local district efforts at flood amelioration and expansion of rice agriculture can readily be demonstrated by a combination of drainage and irrigation construction tied to expansion of arable. The subject is taken up in several essays dealing with different case studies (Sippel 2000; Brown 2013; 2015). We may not think of air as a significant part of the pre-modern environment, long before largescale atmospheric pollution, but if we think of it as the carrier of climatic change, it has always acted upon Japanese communities. Japanese communities were certainly aware of the polluting and sun-blocking impacts of volcanic eruptions, such as that of Mt. Asama eruption of 1783 or that of Mt. Fuji in 1707, and they were certainly attuned to annual changes in temperature, rainfall and storms. How aware they were of longer-term impacts (e.g., the Asama eruption changed climate for months and had a global reach) is questionable, but those changes that did catch peoples’ attention led them to record, even if in rough fashion, climate data – first complete freezing of water bodies, dates of cherry blossoming and the like. Employing data of this sort, a clutch of Japanese scholars have been assiduously gathering data from widely scattered sources to piece together patterns of climate change over centuries. Some of the outcome of this work is reflected in the English publications of Mikami Toshihiko, Zaiki Masumi and Hirano Junpei and Saito Osamu (Mikami et al. 2015; Saito 2015). Currently, under the direction of Nakatsuka Takeshi, the Research Institute for Nature and Humanity (RINH; the Sōgō Chikyū Kankyōgaku Kenkyūjo or Chikyūken), is conducting an assessment of climate change impact on pre-modern Japanese society.

Biota Since the publication of Totman’s work on forestry noted earlier, study of biota focused on the pre-modern era has been scarce. Also noted earlier, von Verschuer’s work should be mentioned 393

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in this context, not just that of land. Although not specifically devoted to Japan, Francesca Bray’s work on rice production, too, deserves attention (Bray 1986). Monographic focus on animals and their environments in a strictly pre-modern setting is also rare. Walker’s treatment of deer and other trade animals and fish in The Conquest of Ainu Lands deserves note (Walker 2001). So, too, does Arne Kalland’s work on early modern Japanese fishing communities (Kalland 1995). Most of the essays in JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan’s Animal Life focus on the premodern era, taking up the study of deer, wild boars, horses and birds (Pflugfelder and Walker 2005). Once again, the paucity of scholarly labour rather than a lack of materials has limited the number of studies. To get a good sense of the breadth and sophistication of Japanese premodern study of nature, simply consult the richly illustrated recent work by Federico Marcon (2015). Finally, study of human survival at the hands of climate change, climate irregularities and species self-destructive behaviour (i.e., war) have been at the heart of a number of studies of medieval Japan, most notably Saito’s previously cited work (Saito 2015) and more detailed long-term studies by W. Wayne Farris (Farris 1985; 2006). Ann B. Jannetta’s admirable work on early modern epidemics and famine remains the one major study of such phenomenon in the early modern period (Jannetta 1987).

The early modern to modern transition Several works explore elements of environmental history in the transition from the early modern to modern eras as their major focus. Both Walker’s The Conquest of Ainu Lands (Walker 2001), and Howell’s Capitalism from Within (Howell 1995) focus on Hokkaido fishing stocks and other animals subjected to pressures from increased commercial exploitation. Their work traces impacts on stocks even before Japan’s late nineteenth-century leap in commercial and industrial growth. The Savage Wars of Peace, written by anthropologist, demographer and historian Ian MacFarlane, merits attention because of its conceptualization and its suggestion of environmental links that helped transform life in Japan, not its probing of Japanese sources (MacFarlane 1997). He explores how it was that in transitions before the birth of modern science, germ theory and more, both Britain and Japan escaped Malthusian fates before other countries by the nineteenth century. He finds answers in controls on germs (the growing popularity of tea, changes in clothing, architecture and treatment of night soil) exploring air, water and other disease vectors as part of an explanation for Japan’s late nineteenth-century population growth.9 MacFarlane’s argument notwithstanding, hunger and famines were an issue for both individuals and society as a policy matter. Fabian Drixler explores infanticide in response to such pressures in both the early modern and modern eras (Drixler 2013). Work on control of microbes by Japan specialists Ann B. Jannetta and Brett Walker takes up specific issues associated with control by vaccination as introduced in mid-nineteenth-century Japan (Jannetta 2007; Walker 1999). These studies of disease control look at new, modern innovations, but there were important cases of manipulating animals in the Tokugawa era that continued and expanded in the new, export-oriented economy: silkworms, treated in summary form by Brett Walker, and specific links with Westerners in advancing traditional silkworm production in Japan and elsewhere are central to Lisa Onaga’s recent projects (see Walker 2010; Onaga 2010). Modern forms of knowledge that replaced traditional understandings of plants and animals, the importation of animal husbandry as a major form of farm activity in Hokkaido and other attitudes associated with Western contact also led to the extinction of some species by the early twentieth century (Walker 2005). Finally, Julia Thomas analyzes ways that ‘nature’ (including human bodies) was re-thought as part of Japan’s late nineteenth-century efforts to build a modern state (Thomas 2001).

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Modern Japan As with the histories of many other nations, the modern era comprises the focus of the majority of work on Japan’s environmental history. Although economic activities in the Tokugawa era caused pollution (including the Ashio mine which became a cause celebrant at the turn of the century), the range of pollution-generating activities accelerated with the industrial growth starting in the late nineteenth century. New industrial chemicals and new manufactories in new places all contributed to increased risk of contamination. In addition, new means of exploiting plant and animal life (including microbes) on land and sea and the introduction of Western science for understanding and managing both were introduced. New materials such as concrete and new engineering techniques enabled new approaches to controlling and responding to natural forces such as flooding.

Biota Forestry constitutes a continuing focus of research from the pre-modern to modern eras. Having argued in Green Archipelago (Totman 1989) that Japan’s early modern efforts to protect forest resources laid the foundation for Japan’s national forests, Conrad Totman (2007) picks up the story with a history of Japan’s Imperial Forest. The early twentieth century not only saw the rise of an imperial administrative structure for forestry, but also the birth of scientific forestry, stimulated by contact with German woodland management, applied not only domestically, but overseas as Japan built a colonial empire. Hung Kuang-chi’s explores this activity the context of efforts to map and manage Taiwan’s forests (Hung 2015). He finds an outcome considerably more mixed in the modern era than Totman did in Green Archipelago. Vegetation other than forests has drawn attention from two very different perspectives, one touched on earlier, but suggesting the role of externalization of environmental impacts, and the other an outcome of new, late twentieth-century desires to preserve nature. The balance between demand for and supply of organic fertilizers locally produced that lies at the heart of Sano’s work noted earlier began to break down on a national scale in the twentieth century to such a degree that even fishmeal fertilizer from Hokkaido failed to fill the need.Toshihiro Higuchi demonstrates a progression that transformed Manchuria into a major producer of soybean cakes to fertilize Japanese farmlands (Higuchi 2015). Modern desires to preserve the natural settings of the Ogasawara Islands intersect with multiple imperial disruptions in Colin Tyner’s work, leading him to forcefully raise the question of what status quo ante does Japan wish to reestablish when it seeks to ‘restore’ a natural setting (Tyner 2015). The rise of Imperial Japan was reflected in the animal world well beyond the realm of economic production. The link between the development of a world-ranking Tokyo zoological garden and Japan’s empire is the subject of Ian J. Miller’s intriguing Nature of the Beasts. The zoo combined images of the modern and the scientific in ways that projected a positive image of Japan and in other ways exploring the role of animals in modern, even contemporary Japanese politics (Miller 2013). Other studies provide another link between imperialism and animals, domesticated dogs and insects (Skabelund 2011; Lurie 2005). Homo sapiens, too, became an object of biological manipulation and investigation. The arrival of Western science included medicine, at the time a field exploring links between race, intelligence, inheritance and character. The link between medicine, anthropology and German medicine has also been important, particularly with the focus on the career of Erwin Baelz.10 Along with German medicine came physical anthropology, tightly woven into the fabric of Social

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Darwinism and racism. Rotem Kowner has both coordinated and published volumes on this subject, along with authoring numerous articles himself (e.g., Kowner and Demel 2013; see also Chapter 7 in this volume).Through its colonial enterprise, Japanese carried the racial consciousness and physical anthropological research into Taiwan and Korea, where it still has influence. One element of that impact was eugenics (Otsubo 2005). People associated with this movement had an important influence on the development of contraception and policy in postwar Japan (Homei 2016). Understanding of the human animal took other, constructive directions, too. One which had a direct bearing on how human individuals interacted with their environments was the study of dietary needs, especially the causes of beriberi, a vitamin B1 deficiency that Japanese investigators discovered (Bay 2012). Despite its historical import for the Japanese diet, inland water animals (e.g., salmon) have not been the focus of study; however, ocean-supported life has garnered popular as well as scholarly attention. Japan’s on-going whaling and claims to its historical role provide one theme. Dolphin hunts, spectacularly presented in the well-known film The Cove, constitute another thread. Kalland and Moeran make a case in defence of continued Japanese whaling (Kalland and Moeran 2010). Sociologist Hiroyuki Watanabe takes a more critical perspective (Watanabe and Clarke 2009). Jacobina Arch takes readers through the historical development of whaling in one Japanese coastal area in the nineteenth century and the process by which the whaling industry developed the capacity for more deep sea hunting that separated whaling from its role in individual communities (Arch 2013). Intra-species conflict among Homo sapiens and its environmental consequences have drawn modest attention, but remain a very important area for investigation. As has already been intimated in discussions earlier, one facet of such competition falls under the category of colonialism and empire building. William Tsutsui brings a distinctive perspective to understanding the colonial enterprise, proposing the growth of a Japanese ‘pelagic empire’ (Tsutsui 2013). This approach is given further detail in Micah Muscolino’s analysis of the prewar fishing competition between China and Japan (Muscolino 2013). Japanese colonial and imperial designs did not just involve extension of geographic control, but also development of programmes designed to bring a version of enlightenment to its territories, and a number of these involved re-making local environments. This effort began with efforts to register and catalogue resources, thereby mapping them (Brown 2016; also Hung 2015). Based on a combination of such inventories, long-standing domestic Japanese planners’ dreams and planning for economic expansion, Japan sought to re-shape land and water to boost agricultural output and create modern urban-scapes in its colonies. Aaron S. Moore provides a valuable overview of such efforts in Manchuria and Korea (Moore 2013). In addition, several scholars have explored externalization of supply of food, agricultural supplements and environmental costs (George 2013). The second element in environmental impacts of intra-species conflict is war. Given the magnitude of destruction Japan suffered by summer of 1945, we would expect considerable, negative impacts on Japan, but William Tsutsui comes to a much more equivocal conclusion (Tsutsui 2004). This subject is particularly well suited to cartographic representation and analysis (Karacas and Fedman 2016). In addition to intra-species conflict, we can point to several important studies of inter-species conflict. In addition to Walker’s study of wolves noted earlier, anthropologist John Knight takes up cases of boars, monkeys, deer and bears (Knight 2013). Above and beyond such relatively obvious cases, we can consider the conflict between humans and the microbes that treat humans as hosts. Demographic historian Hayami Akira has provided the most detailed study of the influenza pandemic of 1918–20 (Hayami et al. 2015).The role of modern transportation networks as vectors for transmission of disease organisms is subject of an article by Sumiko Otsubo (2014). Tuberculosis is the subject of another significant study by William Johnston (1995). 396

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Water In the context of modern Japanese history, water supply and flood control have only a small place in English scholarship. Eric Dinmore has written on the subject, touching on a variety of objectives for and environmental impacts of construction of large, multi-purpose dams (Dinmore 2015). Although recovery from tsunami have been the focus of a good bit of literature, other than immediate damage to animal and plant habitats, the environmental impacts of tsunami have not been the focus of study. More typically, water has been treated as a vector for the spread of pollution and detrimental byproducts of industrial production.These themes lie at the heart of well-known pollution incidents. A number of scholars have taken up the Ashio copper mine incident, in which mine slag produced multiple problems for streams and the lands they watered, and one of its chief critics, Tanaka Shōzō (1841–1913) (e.g., Stolz 2014; Walker 2010). An even more well-known incident, that of Minamata mercury poisoning also resulted from the spread of the poison through water, where it was consumed by fish, concentrating mercury in a food which local people and animals ate (George 2001). Other examples of water as a vector for pollutants are taken up by Brett Walker (2010).

Air With many miles of coastline relative to total land mass, Japan has been concerned about global warming and its impacts, especially because a number of coastal cities experience subsidence, have sections that are below sea level already, are partially built on polder, or are faced with a combination of these problems. But the impact of climate change in modern Japan has not received significant attention from scholars. One exception to this generalization is Scott O’Bryan’s study of heat islands in Tokyo (O’Bryan 2015). Like water, air can also be a vector for spreading poisonous substances, but although there are well-known cases (e.g., asthma associated with petroleum processing in Yokkaichi), this subject has not been explored by scholars other than scientists.

Land Earthquakes constitute the clear focus of land-related academic studies (for a recent survey of earthquakes in Japan, see Smits 2013).Targets of study include Japanese efforts to ameliorate earthquakes (e.g., in architectural design), the subject of Greg Clancey’s path-breaking studies (Clancey 2006a; 2006b). In the wake of disastrous earthquakes some have seen opportunities to create something better, and that is the subject of J. Charles Schencking’s work on the Kanto earthquake of 1923 (Schencking 2013). Apart from earthquakes, Peter Kirby directs attention to a broad array of issues associated with waste in contemporary urban Japan. It is one of the few studies that introduces the influence of social class in an environmental context (Kirby 2011).

Environmental policy Although not a specific emphasis in this essay, I would be remiss if I did not briefly introduce some material on environmental policy and public concerns in recent years. Kerr 2001 and Huddle 1975 are two older, but very readable popular treatments that can be used for undergraduate courses. A quick search of book library catalogues or bookseller web sites will soon find many issue-specific studies on contemporary Japanese environmental policy and issues.Two 397

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foundational studies are Broadbent 1998 and McKean 1981. Early work in the field, these studies analyze Japan in a temporal context that provides a benchmark for comparison with Japan today.

Japanese scholarship Although this essay focuses on English-language treatments of Japanese environmental history, I would be remiss if I excluded Japanese-language studies. As noted earlier, environmental history in Japan is even newer than it is in the English-language literature. In important ways the field operates with limited connection to broad issues raised in works that have been benchmarks in the West. Rather than explore case studies, let me briefly present the approaches of several multi-volume essay collections to provide a taste of Japanese approaches. To briefly summarize an overview of Japanese scholarly approaches to the subject, big projects in both publication and research mark a distinctive feature of Japanese environmental history work.11 Umehara et al. 1995 is an interdisciplinary fifteen-volume series that comprised the earliest major endeavour. Thematically organized, this collection not only treats Japan, but the world, and bows in the direction of environmental determinism (climate determines culture) and idealization of past human relationships with nature in pre-agricultural times.Yumoto et al. (2011) published another chronologically broad set of essays. Focused just on Japan (even to the exclusion of comparative or global contextualization), a central theme is the ability of pre-modern Japan to live in a sustainable way, a way that did not destroy nature and leading to a pre-modern chronological emphasis. This volume was followed by another multi-volume project edited by Hirakawa et al. (2012). More evenhanded than the first two series, it notes that even today nature shapes human activities (the Great Tohoku Triple Disaster), as well as the ill effects of man’s predation of nature. A stress on religion, folklore and attitudes toward nature distinguishes this publication from the previous two. Finally, I have already noted the project still under way at the Research Institute for Nature and Humanity. Under the direction of Nakatsuka Takeshi, a climatologist, the ‘Historical Climate Adaptation Project’ seeks to explore human responses to climate change in Japan from prehistory to the mid-nineteenth-century end of the early modern era. Some six dozen scholars are developing a detailed, regionally sensitive chronology of climate change in Japan and exploring the relationship between those changes, population, agricultural developments, political change, rural disturbances and other historical phenomenon. Some preliminary publication from this collaborative work has appeared in Japanese, and the project has made a substantial amount of data available to the public even though the project is in the middle of its five-year funding programme.12 In addition to the size of these projects, they are distinctive for their heavy emphasis on very broad interdisciplinary work that encompasses scientific studies as well as humanities and social science disciplines, and these approaches have led to some extraordinarily creative ways to mine data for periods and issues for which we have no written records. A partial list of techniques includes tree ring analysis, oxygen isotope analysis, DNA studies, archeological explorations and more. Of the four projects noted earlier, only Hirakawa et al. 2012 minimizes the use of the insights provided by scientific analysis of soil, building remnants and more. In other words, these projects challenge standard academic boundaries and take exciting intellectual risks that have led to very interesting work.

Omissions The preceding presentation has some important omissions, some intentional, others a product of the state of the field. Among the former, rather than choosing materials from the obvious journals (Environmental History; Journal of Asian Studies; Journal of Japanese Studies and the like), I have 398

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tried to cite work from sources less familiar to Japan scholars: edited collections that lead people to thematically related literature, often for non-Japan regions, to give readers an opportunity to see what added work might be done in Japanese environmental history, work that offers new methodological approaches that do not appear in journals such as those noted above, etc. The structural omissions are more problematic and deserve attention in the future. For the most part, direct efforts to address gender differences in environmental history are muted. So, too, is attention to influences of class.There are hints of such sensitivity to be found in the works of  Walker (2010) and Knight (2003) (e.g., the role of mercury in cosmetics as a vector; treatment of Japan’s untouchables, the burakumin), but more is possible. Authors may treat farmers and rural areas differently from urban areas, but even that effort does not consider broader issues of class, assuming a general parity in the modern world between farmers and more urban members of the middle class. Adding these and other perspectives to our study will not be simple. People whose homes in a village may be flooded by a new dam do not necessarily respond in the same way to the prospect, some focusing on loss of places and spaces that have emotional as well as economic value to them, others focusing on opportunities to start anew based on compensation for loss of land. A handful of important binaries appear in the summaries earlier, at least present in the background if not highlighted, and the relationship between paired members may require rethinking, too.The first binary is that of humans and nature. In what contexts, if any, does it make analytical or political sense to treat human society as apart from natural environments? As works such as Pflugfelder and Walker 2005 suggest, further efforts to try to see the environment from a non-human view can clarify the nature of human interactions with the environment. So, too, can approaches that recognize humans as a habitat themselves, or as the makers of habitats that host and encourage other forms of life. A second important binary is that between modern and pre-modern. Historians widely privilege the present or near present. Social and political commentators often stress the unprecedented character of an event. In some measure both perspectives have an element of truth, but as a number of examples earlier have shown, sometimes Japanese in the past dealt quiet sustainably (for selected species and environments) with challenges that parallel present-day conflicts in the exploitation of non-human environments. Industrial waste and its ill effects are not themselves new, although we have new kinds of waste (consider mining, for one). To the degree that policymakers, social scientists and others reject study of the past, they face stimuli that would help them think about breaking out of the box of their own world. In addition to these differences and similarities that focus on use of resources, the more we pay attention to the different ways in which human social factors influence the impacts of environmental change or its sources, the more similarity between modern and pre-modern we may find that suggest new dimensions requiring society’s attention as we consider, for example, effects of efforts to ameliorate environmental losses from floods. A third pair of conceptual frames is that between rapid and gradual change.The pre-modern – modern binary in Japan, marked by the 1868 Meiji Restoration, is thought of as rapid change. But we know that, as in a number of forms of waste discussed by Knight, that many significant processes work their impact on our environments over extended periods, leading to what some now refer to as ‘slow disasters’, crises that are massive but not always easy to observe, which causes are subject to dispute and even when causes can be discerned, involve such common practices that make them difficult to address (e.g., climate change). These three binaries alone suggest important issues for students of Japanese environmental history to consider as we choose subjects for exploration or as we consider how to treat a particular, well-identified project. Discussion of them helps in thinking about remedying structural 399

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omissions. Taken together, put into practice in creative ways, these perspectives can, through explanation of Japanese environmental history, help us to get beyond our current, largely Western perspectives on the environments’ history (including humans) to identify when we have options, and new arrays of options, on which we can capitalize as we seek to improve our own world.

Notes 1 This phrase later became the title of a work on the importance of the past, Lowenthal 1985. 2 In Japanese history, the best monographic work along these lines is Walker 2005. In addition, readers should see the essays in Pflugfelder and Walker 2005. 3 For a more general discussion of the agency of nature in environmental history, see Nash 2005. 4 For one discussion of the centrality of nature in defining Japan’s sense of nationhood, see ch. 2, ‘Nature’, in Morris-Suzuki 2001. The theme of special appreciation for nature is also one element of the more popular book Dogs and Demons (Kerr 2001). A more scholarly treatment of attitudes toward nature or elements of it can be found in Kalland and Asquith 1997. One final strident statement appears in Kalland and Moeran 2010. 5 In English, the classic work is White 1995. For a fine example of the human–environment interaction in medieval to early modern Japan, see Sano 2015. 6 The nearly complete omission of Japan from grand encompassing works of environmental history is counterbalanced to some degree by the important role of some facets of Japanese environmental history in several thematic comparative works discussed later. 7 For his articles, consult the bibliographies of his books noted in this essay. Longer and broader texts are Totman 1993; 2000; 2004. 8 Geographies of Japan represent one starting point for an introduction to these elements, but these are based on data, largely synchronic, at the time they were offered. Although dated from the perspective of human geography, for physical geography, see Trewartha 1965. 9 MacFarlane relies heavily on works by Susan B. Hanley, Anne Walthall and other noted Japanese historians. Reliance on secondary sources raises questions about proofs offered, but the book’s conceptualization is very suggestive of work for future historical research on human–environment interactions. 10 For material beyond Baelz that looks at both Japanese and German sides of the coin, see Kim 2014. 11 For a somewhat more detailed summary, see Batten and Brown 2015: 10–12. 12 Developments can be followed at www.chikyu.ac.jp/nenrin/index.html. Much of the site is in Japanese, but sections of the Newsletter and descriptions of the project are in English. Five volumes of essays published in Japanese are planned; at least one book-length English publication is also anticipated.

Further reading Batten, Bruce L., and Brown, Philip C. (eds) (2015) Environment and Society in the Japanese Islands: From Prehistory to the Present, Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press. Miller, Ian Jared et al. (eds) (2013) Japan at Nature’s Edge:The Environmental Context of a Global Power, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press. Pflugfelder, Gregory M., and Walker, Brett L. (eds) (2005) JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan’s Animal Life, Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan. Totman, Conrad (1989) The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Part IV

Historical legacies and memory

29 Debates over historical consciousness1 Yoshida Yutaka

This chapter introduces the ongoing debate on Japan’s historical consciousness and war responsibility and examines how this debate, in all its political and social ramifications, affects the attitudes of society at large. The main focus is on the rise of nationalism, xenophobia and historical revisionism, but the issues relating to Yasukuni Shrine and the role of the imperial family in postwar Japan are also addressed. It should be noted at the outset that the debate has gone through many stages of intensity since the end of the war in 1945. It was particularly heated in 1995, which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end. Since then, it has reached a new level of intensity due to fundamental changes in the international and domestic situation over the last two decades. This debate must be seen in the context of the recent rise of neo-liberalism. It has been argued that neo-liberalism, which takes to the extreme individual freedom, discipline, selfresponsibility, efficiency and the principle of competition, has destroyed ‘the public sphere and the sense of community that existed in the nineteenth century and created a profound division between state and individual’ (Ozawa 2006). Put differently, neo-liberalism ‘deals with discontent over inequality only in the dimension of the present, while shunning any reference to the past’ (Ozawa 2006). A precondition for this transformation is the ‘erasure of memory’ (Shibuya 2003). If references to the past are made at all, as in the case of Noguchi Yukio’s 1940-nen taisei (The 1940 System) (Noguchi 1995), history is used exclusively to legitimize policies of deregulation and structural reforms. To borrow Noguchi’s words, ‘the future comes first, history comes second’ (Noguchi 1995). The introduction of neo-liberal reforms makes the emergence of a neo-conservative historical consciousness inevitable. There are several reasons for this consequence of neo-liberal reforms. They tend to exacerbate social divisions. They bring about a decline of the middle class and increase social insecurity, and they generate a sense of depression among those losing out in competition and a sense of alienation among those without prospects. Family, local and other social ties are first eroded and then replaced by a neo-conservative historical consciousness that becomes the core of a new social integration based on the return to ‘history, tradition, and culture’.

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Enduring pacifism and the rise of nationalism Enduring pacifism The attitudes of Japanese, like those of all other nations, are subject to continuity and change. One dimension of continuity in the postwar period is deep-rooted pacifism. An opinion poll conducted in July 2014 by Japan’s national broadcaster NHK (NHK 2015) revealed a strong opposition to the cabinet decision authorizing Japan’s participation in peacekeeping operations, while showing strong support for Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. To the question ‘What do you consider the most important factor for preserving peace in the region surrounding Japan?’, only 9.4 per cent of the respondents said it was ‘reliance on military force’, whereas 53.4 per cent thought it was ‘diplomacy that did not rely on military force’. To the question ‘In what way should Japan appeal to the world to preserve peace?’, 27 per cent responded ‘Japan should do so by emphasizing the fact that the Japanese Constitution renounces war’, 26.8 per cent responded that Japan ‘should strengthen its ties with other countries through expanding economic and other exchanges’ and 21.1 per cent thought that Japan should ‘contribute to world affairs through participating in conflict resolution and peace-keeping’, whereas only 12.5 per cent were of the opinion that Japan should ‘strengthen its defence-capabilities for self-defence’. To the question ‘Should Japan put emphasis on cooperation with other Asian countries or should it strengthen the U.S.-Japan alliance?’, 43.9 per cent responded that it should ‘emphasize cooperation with other Asian countries’, whereas only 12.8 per cent said that it should ‘strengthen the U.S.-Japan alliance’. Furthermore, opinion polls show Japanese as extremely reluctant to make a military contribution to their state. In a 2005 poll, only 24.6 per cent said they would fight for their country in case of war, by far the lowest percentage among the 90 countries and regions in which the poll was conducted (Suzuki 2012). Similar results can be found in more recent polls. They suggest that a relatively anti-militarist political culture has developed in postwar Japan, which shows no sign of weakening at present.

The rise of nationalism At the same time, it is also necessary to consider the resurgence of nationalism. In an opinion poll conducted by the Yomiuri Shinbun in January 2008, 54.8 per cent of the respondents declared that they were ‘very proud’ of being Japanese and 37.9 per cent that they were ‘somewhat proud’, both categories totalling 92.7 per cent (see Figure 29.1). These changes can be traced over many years. In a March 1980 poll, ‘very proud’ stood at 54.4 per cent and ‘somewhat proud’ at 34.5 per cent (totalling 88.9 per cent), whereas in a January 1986 poll ‘very proud’ stood at 51.2 per cent and ‘somewhat proud’ at 39.9 per cent (totalling 91.1 per cent), and in a May 1995 poll, ‘very proud’ was 46.5 per cent and ‘somewhat proud’ 43.8 per cent (totalling 90.3 per cent). ‘Very proud’ as a single category and the total of both categories reached their peak in January 2008 (see Figure 29.1). In the 2008 Yomiuri poll cited earlier, one of the questions probed the concrete content of the national pride among Japanese. Among the responses (multiple responses were possible), ‘history, culture, tradition’ ranked highest at 71.6 per cent, a rise of 19 points on the 1986 survey. This poll strongly suggests that pride in their history, culture and tradition is on the increase among the Japanese. Let us have a look at NHK polls concerning ‘Japanese attitudes’. The results of the 2013 poll were recently published in book form (NHK 2015). Figure 29.2 shows the percentage of 404

1980-3

7.1%

34.5%

54.4%

Very proud

1986-1

5.2%

39.9%

51.2%

Somewhat proud

Not proud

1995-5

7.4%

43.8%

46.5%

Figure 29.1 Opinion poll: How proud are you of being Japanese? (Yomiuri Shinbun, 25 January 2008).

0.0%

10.0%

20.0%

30.0%

40.0%

50.0%

60.0%

2008-1

5.6%

37.9%

54.8%

1973

19%

41%

60%

1983

20%

57%

1988

15%

50%

62%

In character, the Japanese are greatly superior to foreigners

1978

18%

47%

65%

71%

Figure 29.2 Confidence regarding Japan (NHK 2015).

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

1998

13%

38%

51%

Japan is a first-rate country

1993

15%

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2008

17%

39%

2013

18%

54%

Japan has much to learn from other countries

2003

15%

36%

51%

57%

68%

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affirmative answers given to the following three questions: ‘Are the Japanese greatly superior to foreigners in character?’, ‘Is Japan a first-rate country?’ and ‘Has Japan much to learn from other countries?’. These figures indicate that confidence in Japan peaked in the early 1980s (see Figure 29.2). It subsequently continued to decline steadily before recovering in the twenty-first century. The eighth edition of ‘The Attitudes of Modern Japanese’ reveals that 1998 was the turning point away from a mindset that rejected tradition toward a tradition-centred mindset. The book notes that this trend toward a tradition-centred mindset has subsequently intensified. Building on the writings of sociologist Yoshimi Shun’ya (2009), the book concludes: With the advance of globalization, the homogeneity of Japanese society was lost and it was questioned what ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese’ meant. Based on Yoshimi’s argument, it can be assumed that the shift away from a mindset that rejects tradition toward a tradition-centred mindset occurred in the ‘period of unprecedented crisis caused by a loss of homogeneity’, when those harbouring a sense of crisis were influenced by the actions of the conservatives and have turned to ‘tradition’ to look for solutions (to the ongoing crisis).

Changes in the views concerning the emperor The 2013 analysis of ‘Japanese attitudes’ also shows a major change in the ways that the Japanese emperor is perceived (see Figure 28.3).The 1988 poll, conducted shortly before the death of the Shōwa Emperor (1901–89), included a question about feelings toward the emperor. Forty-seven per cent of those who took part in the poll responded that they had ‘no particular feelings at all’, 28 per cent that they ‘revere’ the emperor, 22 per cent that they had ‘warm feelings’ and only 2 per cent had ‘negative feelings’. Conspicuous is the particularly large percentage of those who said they had ‘no particular feelings’. Toward the end of the Shōwa era, ceremonies to celebrate the fiftieth and sixtieth anniversary of the emperor’s accession to the throne were held with the objective of stimulating the interest of this large number of indifferent people in the emperor and in the imperial family. Since the beginning of the Heisei era (1989), a new course has emerged in this context, that of the ‘open imperial family’. Concrete manifestations of this course have included a relaxation of security surrounding the Imperial Household as well as a more conspicuous role of the imperial family in matters relating to environmental issues, welfare and diplomacy. The imperial family has been involved prominently in expressing concern for the ‘deprived’ and consoling and commemorating war and disaster victims. Furthermore, much emphasis has been given to demonstrating gender equity within the imperial family, among others, by giving the empress an increasingly prominent role in public functions. Predictably, this adjustment to the circumstances of the new era initially led to a rise in the feelings of ‘sympathy’ for the imperial family and reduced sentiments of both ‘reverence’ and ‘indifference’. This change was also reflected in the analysis of ‘Japanese attitudes’. However, somewhat surprisingly, since the 2008 poll, feelings of ‘reverence’ for the emperor have been on the increase again, whereas ‘sympathy’ has been declining. In 2013, both stood at about the same level. The polls suggest that ‘support’ for the imperial family is fairly weak overall. According to a poll conducted by NHK in the autumn of 2009 on the twentieth anniversary of Emperor Akihito’s accession to the throne, only 19 per cent of the respondents showed a ‘strong interest’ in the imperial family. In contrast, as many as 51 per cent declared ‘some interest’, 25 per cent ‘not much interest’ and 5 per cent ‘no interest at all’. Furthermore, in the 2008 poll conducted by Yomiuri Shinbun cited earlier, the ‘emperor system’, was one of the possible responses to a

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2%

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1978

2%

22%

30%

44%

No parcular feelings

1983

2%

21%

29%

46%

1988

2%

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28%

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Figure 29.3 Sentiments toward the emperor (NHK 2015).

0%

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15%

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35%

40%

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Feelings of reverence

1993

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multiple-choice question that asked what it meant to ‘be proud to be Japanese’. Only 12 per cent of the respondents picked that answer, fewer than any other choice. This seems to suggest that neither the emperor nor the imperial family occupy a central place in contemporary Japanese nationalism. At the same time, there is also a contradiction between the views of those who worship the imperial family and the personal views of the imperial couple. At a press conference held on 20 October 2013 on the occasion of her birthday, the empress referred to the so-called Itsukaichi Constitutional Draft, which was prepared by members of the Freedom and Peoples’ Rights Movement in the second half of the nineteenth century (see Chapter 14 in this volume). She said: ‘the Itsukaichi Constitution shows that in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the common people in Japan already possessed a developed awareness of civil rights. Doesn’t this document represent a cultural heritage that is unusual even by world standards?’ Likewise, at a press conference on 18 December 2013, shortly before his birthday, the emperor remarked that of all ‘events that have left me with special impressions over the past eighty years, what stands out most in my mind is the Second World War’.2 He added: ‘After the war, Japan was occupied by the allied forces, which brought into being the Constitution of Japan and implemented all kinds of reforms, thus creating the Japan we know today’. The point here is that the emperor presented a positive assessment of the occupation reforms and the Constitution. These statements were criticized harshly by Yagi Hidetsugu (b. 1962), a law professor, who is close to Prime Minister Abe Shinzō (see Saaler 2016a). One more issue to consider in this context is the remembrance and commemoration of the war dead. In June 2005, the imperial couple went to Saipan to pay respect to those who died on the island during the war. In his address before their departure for Saipan, the emperor spoke not only of the Japanese military war dead, but also of the war dead among the American military, Japanese civilians and the ‘inhabitants of Saipan’. He stated: This time on soil beyond our shores, we will once again mourn and pay tribute to all those who lost their lives in the war, and we will remember the difficult path the bereaved families had to follow, and we wish to pray for world peace. (Mainichi Shinbun, 28 June 2005)3 Though it was not included in the official pre-departure itinerary, the emperor also visited the island’s memorial for the Korean war dead. This visit clearly represented an attempt by the emperor to distance himself from the commemoration of the war dead as practiced at Yasukuni Shrine, which exclusively worships military war dead of Japanese nationality and ignores both civilian victims of the war and war dead of other nationalities (see Chapter 31 in this volume). The emperor reiterated his position during his visit to Palau in April 2015. His ‘Address’ published on the occasion, mentioned not only Japanese but also U.S. war dead, even though, regarding war victims among the islanders, the statement was limited to stating that ‘the people of Palau . . . suffered the ravages of war’.4 Furthermore, in his address at the Memorial Ceremony for the War Dead on 15 August 2015, the emperor, for the first time ever in a public address, used the phrase ‘deep reflection’. With this phrase, he distanced himself even further from the prime minister, who only indirectly apologized for the war in his statement the day before and who made no reference at all to the victims of Japan’s wars of aggression in his address on 15 August.

The rise of xenophobia The Abe cabinet’s historical revisionism, that is, its attempts to relativize Japan’s war responsibility, justify the war’s objectives and exculpate Japan’s war record (see Chapter 30 in this volume 409

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and Saaler 2005; 2016a), combined with territorial disputes with China and South Korea, have led to the rise of xenophobia directed mainly at Koreans and Chinese. A specific example of this xenophobia is presented by the activities of the Zainichi Tokken o Yurusanai Shimin no Kai (Association of Citizens against Special Privileges of Foreigners Living in Japan, Zaitokukai). Recent research on the Zaitokukai has shown that its members are strongly committed to historical revisionism but are not necessarily poorly educated or irregularly employed (Higuchi 2014). Watanabe Osamu (2007) argues that xenophobia is particularly strong among the betteroff city dwellers, that is, those ‘profiting from the economic recovery of global corporations’. The Zaitokukai and similar xenophobic organizations represent extreme elements within that group. The rise of xenophobia is not unrelated to the recent boom in anti-Chinese and anti-Korean publications and TV and radio programmes. At the same time, narcissistic books such as Takeda Tsuneyasu’s Why Is Japan the Most Popular Country in the World? (Takeda 2011) that extol Japan’s virtues are increasingly popular as are TV programmes with the participation of foreigners that express their admiration for Japanese culture and introduce activities of Japanese abroad (Mainichi Shinbun, 25 February 2015; Asahi Shinbun, 13 March 2015). Publications critical of China and Korea and publications rapturous over Japan are the two sides of the same coin. The cultural anthropologist Funabiki Takeo (b. 1948) argues that the boom in the books that praise Japan’s role in modern history has always been rooted in a widespread sense of insecurity over what it means to be Japanese. But the current boom, he notes, is not the result of insecurity vis-à-vis the West, but rather vis-à-vis China and Korea. This rise of xenophobia is an extremely serious problem, but it seems that Japan, Korea and China have not reached a point where nationalism and xenophobia are out of control. Thus far, the general public has remained for the most part calm. In 2013 NHK conducted an opinion poll which measured the attachment of individuals to the state in various countries, including Japan. Although it showed that in Japan ‘many of those highly dissatisfied with their lives and of those with low incomes tend to embrace xenophobic sentiments toward foreign residents (zainichi, i.e., Koreans and Chinese)’, it also revealed a generally high degree of tolerance toward foreign residents.

Recent tendencies in historical consciousness debates The contradictions of historical revisionism Debates over historical interpretations of colonial rule and the Asia-Pacific War (1931–45) no longer only influence Japanese-Chinese and Japanese-Korean relations. They now also have an impact on Japanese-European and Japanese-American relations. This development goes back to the annual visits of Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō to Yasukuni Shrine between 2001 and 2006. Toward the end of Koizumi’s term as prime minister, in 2005, the U.S. ambassador to Japan and other Bush administration diplomats dealing with Japan began to find fault with the exhibit at the Yūshūkan museum, operated by Yasukuni Shrine (see Chapter 31 in this volume for details). Furthermore, in July 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution on the issue of ‘comfort women;’ the Lower Houses of the Parliaments of the Netherlands and Canada as well as the EU parliament followed suit. They demanded that the Japanese government apologize for the wartime recruitment and coercion of comfort women and that Japan pay reparations. Prime Minister Abe’s visit to Yasukuni Shrine on 26 December 2013 further exacerbated these frictions. The U.S. reacted to this visit in an unprecedented manner by expressing its 410

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‘disappointment’. Criticisms also came from the governments of Russia and the EU. But Abe decided to go through with his visit to Yasukuni in spite of the attempts by the United States government to persuade him to change his mind. Two months earlier, on 3 October 2013, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Minister Chuck Hagel had visited the Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery, where the remains of unidentified war dead of the Asia-Pacific War are buried.5 As the Asahi Shinbun reported next day, it was ‘the first time ever that members of the U.S. government went’ to Chidorigafuchi. In this way, the U.S. government sent a message to Abe not to visit the Shrine. But Abe paid no attention. At this point, it is important to note fundamental contradictions inherent in ‘historical revisionism’, which has emerged since the 1990s. The revisionists call for a rejection of the ‘Tokyo Trials view of history’, or of what they sometimes call the ‘masochistic view of (modern Japanese) history’. They advocate ‘breaking away from the postwar regime’ (sengo rejīmu kara no dakkyaku). Their views seem to accord with political views of Prime Minister Abe, who frequently uses this slogan. However, because the trials (known formally as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, or IMTFE) were held under U.S. auspices, a refusal to recognize the validity of these trials would amount to a criticism of the United States. Thus, as even conservative commentators point out, the notion of overcoming the ‘Tokyo Trials view of history’ has the potential of undermining the very foundation of the Japanese-U.S. Security Alliance (Ōhara 2008). The criticism by the Obama administration of Prime Minister Abe’s visit to Yasukuni Shrine was based on the assessment that the Yasukuni problem and the politicization of the debates on historical consciousness has a destabilizing effect on the international situation in East Asia and that it negatively affects American security policy. In a symposium in Tokyo in 2014, U.S. political scientist Joseph Nye reiterated the U.S. position when he criticized proposals to revise the1993 Kōno Statement (an apology to comfort women by Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei) and supported the proposal for the construction of a new national institution to commemorate war dead (Asahi Shinbun, 31 October 2014). U.S. criticism exposed contradictions in the arguments of those who supported the prime minister’s visits to Yasukuni Shrine. Nihon no ibuki (Japan’s Vitality), a journal published by Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), one of the main groups that support the Abe cabinet, purported to be perplexed by the American criticism (on Nippon Kaigi, see McNeill 2015). This bafflement came in tandem with calls to make Japan independent of the United States (calls for discontinuing the Japan-U.S. alliance) and demands that Japan must be capable of defending itself without reliance on other countries. For example, the cultural critic Ogawa Eitarō (b. 1967), who believes that ‘the Chinese-Korean-American encirclement of Japan has become a reality’, contended that ‘Japan, as an independent country, once again must be capable of deciding its own its fate. It must become a state that can defend itself on its own.” (Ogawa 2014) The foreign affairs commentator Takubo Tadae (b. 1933, president of Nippon Kaigi since 2015), regarded as a pro-American conservative, described America’s policy toward China as conciliatory and noted that Japan must recognize that ‘the Obama administration wishes to be on good terms both with its alliance partner Japan and with China. For Japan, trapped between China and the U.S., there is only one future course, namely that of autonomy’ (Takubo 2014). A Study Group on Consolation and Honouring the Heroic Souls of the War Dead, which held a meeting at Yasukuni Shrine in January 2014, proclaimed that ‘as the Japan-U.S. alliance ensures security in Asia, we must change historical consciousness in the U.S. if we want this alliance to continue in the future’ (cited in Yasukuni 704/2014). Thus, it appears that the Yasukuni problem has the potential of causing a split within the Japanese conservative right wing. 411

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Confusion surrounding Yasukuni Shrine, the symbol of historical revisionism Yasukuni Shrine and its supporters are now facing a number of dilemmas. The initial drive to nationalize Yasukuni by right-wing organizations such as the Japan Bereaved Families Organization and the National Association of Shinto Shrines in the 1960s was blocked by domestic opposition and by the separation of state and religion as stipulated in the Constitution. These challenges necessitated a change of approach.Thus, since the mid-1970s the efforts of the rightwing activists have focused on demands that prime ministers pay official visits to Yasukuni Shrine on 15 August each year, the government-designated day to commemorate the end of the war.They hoped that official visits would contribute to the legitimization of past wars and, at the same time, raise the shrine to a semi-official status. The first official visit in the postwar period to the shrine was made by Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro (b. 1918) on 15 August 1985. However, after strong protests from China and Korea, Nakasone made no further official visits. Subsequently, apart from one visit by Prime Minister Hashimoto Ryūtarō on 29 July 1996, no prime ministers had visited the shrine, until the practice was revived by Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō, who visited the shrine once each year between 2001 and 2006. Koizumi’s visits led to lawsuits in several regions of Japan on the grounds that visits to the shrine by the prime minister violated the Constitution. Although Koizumi initially made no clear distinction between private and official visits, at a press conference on 7 April 2004 he declared that he had visited the shrine in his capacity as a private individual (Mainichi Shinbun, 8 April 2004). The prime minister also explained that even the visits of the Shōwa Emperor (Hirohito) made before 1975 had been ‘private visits’. Because official imperial visits are regarded as an ultimate validation of the ‘Yasukuni ideology’, this retrospective downgrading of imperial pilgrimages to the status of private visits was a hard blow. Prime Minister Koizumi caused a further offence by recognizing, in his address at the official Memorial Ceremony for the War Dead on 15 August 2005, that ‘Japan caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations’ and expressed a ‘feeling of profound remorse’.6 The increasing politicization of the prime minister’s visits to the shrine made the possibility of a visit to the shrine by the Emperor even more remote. After 1945, the Shōwa Emperor visited Yasukuni Shrine seven times, the last time in November 1975. Emperor Akihito has never visited the shrine. The Imperial Household Agency official explains that the emperor ‘does not visit places that are controversial’ (Asahi Shinbun, 15 August 2001). Such a visit would conflict with the emperor’s political neutrality.

The right-wing camp’s turn to realism In this context, the right-wing camp represented by Nippon Kaigi has gradually turned to realism. Each year on 15 August, Nippon Kaigi, together with the Eirei ni kotaeru kai (Association to Respond to the Heroic Souls), holds the Senbotsusha Tsuitō Chūō Kokumin Shūkai (Central National Rally for the War Dead) at Yasukuni Shrine. Each year, this rally has adopted a resolution calling on the prime minister to make an official visit to the shrine. In addition to the activities of Tsuitō, the Heiwa Kinen no tame no Kinenhi to Shisetsu no Arikata o Kangaeru Kondankai (Discussion Group to Consider Memorials and Other Sites for the Commemoration of the War Dead and Praying for Peace) set up by the Koizumi cabinet under the chairmanship of Cabinet Secretary Fukuda Yasuo (b. 1936) submitted its findings on 24 December 2002, stating that ‘a new national and non-religious institution (to commemorate the war dead) is necessary’ (see Saaler 2005: ch. 2), the focus of Nippon Kaigi’s activities shifted to preventing the formation of such an institution, because it might undermine the raison d’être for Yasukuni Shrine. 412

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The Central National Rally for the War Dead held on 15 August 2003 adopted a declaration that ‘urged the plans to build a new commemorative institution be scrapped as soon as possible and called for the initiation of regular visits by the prime minister to Yasukuni Shrine on 15 August’. It should be stressed that the statement no longer demanded ‘official visits’, but merely ‘visits’ (cited in Nihon no ibuki, September 2003). Around that time, some commentators, such as Okazaki Hisahiko (1930–2014), though they still supported the idea of ‘official visits’, began to argue that, as visits on the Day to Commemorate the End of the War led to political strife, the prime minister should instead make his visit during the shrine’s spring and autumn festivals as this would be more natural. After the resignation of the Koizumi cabinet in 2006, no prime minister had visited Yasukuni Shrine again until, as mentioned above, Prime Minister Abe went to the shrine in December 2013. This visit had the following characteristics: first, as Abe explained in the Lower House of the Diet on 29 January 2014, he ‘went to the shrine as a private person. The flower gift was not paid for with public funds’ (Asahi Shinbun, 30 January 2014). In short, Abe followed the practice established by the Koizumi cabinet. Second, during his visit, Abe followed the Shinto ritual of bowing twice, clapping his hands twice, and bowing once again (Yomiuri Shinbun, 27 December 2013). In contrast, Prime Minister Nakasone and Prime Minister Koizumi eschewed Shinto ritual altogether so as not to violate the principle of separation of state and religion as stipulated in the Constitution. The declaration adopted by the Central National Rally for the War Dead on 15 August 2014 puts emphasis on Yasukuni Shrine retaining its status as ‘the central institution of our country (Japan) for mourning and honouring the war dead’ and applauds the fact that ‘Prime Minister Abe has revived the practice of visiting the shrine at the end of last year after such visits were discontinued for a period of time’.The declaration only calls on the prime minister to ‘continue his visits to Yasukuni Shrine’ without specifying either the date or the form of the visit. As these developments show, Yasukuni Shrine has chosen to define itself as a religious corporation without demanding ‘national protection’ or official visits by prime ministers. However, to deny the shrine’s character as a public institution would make government support impossible. Put differently, under the present Constitution, giving Yasukuni Shrine a public role would mean that the shrine would have no option but to reduce its religious essence to a minimum. But the shrine clearly rejects this course. The financial issue plays an important role in this case. Since the second half of the 1990s, various veterans’ organizations have disbanded in quick succession, and the members of the Bereaved Families Organization are growing old (Yoshida 2011). This in turn has caused a sharp decline in income from mourning ceremonies and donations, rapidly undermining Yasukuni Shrine’s financial base. In 2006, the shrine’s income was roughly half of the 3.2 billion yen that it had received in 1985, necessitating a staff reduction (Asahi Shinbun, 12 August 2006). The shrine which, unlike most other shrines, does not have a local base of supporters, has been supported financially by the Sūkei hōsankai (Worship Association) founded in 1998 which due to its rapidly shrinking membership is unable to remedy Yasukuni’s financial problems. The membership, which at its peak in 2002, stood at 93,000, was down to 64,996 at the end of fiscal year 2014 (Yasukuni 708, 2014). The implications of this decline for the shrine are obvious. This clearly shows that Yasukuni Shrine and its supporters have already given up the hope of obtaining any form of public status for the shrine and retreated to the line of protecting the shrine’s ‘special character’ in religious and ritual terms. It is important to note an increase in the number of visitors to the shrine in recent years, but the deep contradictions within the shrine’s conservative support base are also of great significance. 413

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‘Postwar seventy years’ and Japanese society The premises of the historical consciousness problem At this point, in order to position the historical consciousness problem in Japan’s postwar history, I must return to the subject of history. Two factors impinge upon this problem. First, in U.S.-Japan relations during the Cold War, the historical consciousness problem and the security question constituted basically two separate issues. Thus, as political scientist Mike Mochizuki stresses, Japan had no reason to promote historical reconciliation with its Asian neighbours (Mochizuki 2011) Second, there are problems with the San Francisco Peace Treaty which was signed in 1951 and went into effect in 1952. For a start, it was very generous to Japan, because it was concluded during the Cold War. Although the treaty recognized the right of former belligerent states to claim reparations, it did not address the issue of Japan’s war responsibility. It only stated, in Article 11, that the Japanese government recognized the validity of the IMTFE and other war crime trials.7 Further, although the original (English-language) text of the treaty stated that Japan ‘accepts the judgments’ of these trials, the Japanese Foreign Ministry, which at first translated these words literally as hanketsu o judaku, later chose to translate them as ‘accepts the trials’ (saiban o judaku). The latter, being more ambiguous than the initial translation, leaves room for multiple interpretations (Hatano 2011). At the time of the signing of the treaty, the United States put pressure on the other signatory states to relinquish their rights to reparations. In the climate of the Cold War, the United States considered it more important to ensure that Japan join the Western bloc than shed light on Japan’s war responsibility; under the circumstances, the economic recovery of Japan was given a higher priority than anything else. Neither of the governments claiming to represent the main victim of Japan’s aggression, China (the communist government in Beijing and the Nationalist Government in Taiwan), was invited to the peace conference. The Korean request for an invitation was turned down. The conference did not address the issue of Japan’s responsibility for colonial rule in Korea and Taiwan. This failure led to the development of a double standard regarding war responsibility and historical consciousness in Japan. ‘Internationally, Japan professed to recognize Article 11 of the peace treaty, that is, the recognition of the validity of the verdicts at the Tokyo Tribunal. In this way, by assuming the minimum possible degree of war responsibility, Japan re-entered the world stage as a U.S. ally. However, domestically, war responsibility was actually denied or at least not examined. The problem with Japan’s past was solved by dealing with it internationally in one way and domestically in another’ (Yoshida 1995). Incidentally, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) website has a section called ‘History Q&A’. It contains the question, ‘What is the view of the Government of Japan on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE)?’The MOFA’s answer to this question is as follows: The Government of Japan acknowledges that there are various arguments regarding this judgment. However, Japan has accepted the judgment of the IMTFE under Article 11 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. Therefore, in state to state relationship, the Government of Japan believes that it is in no position to raise any objections regarding this judgment.8 This answer, which reflects the awareness of being under scrutiny in and outside Japan, attempts to strike a balance between the two basically irreconcilable positions, namely the official position of the government and the claims of historical revisionism.

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Adjustment of the position of the Japanese government and the emergence of historical revisionism In 1982, the screening of Japanese history textbooks by the Ministry of Education led publishers to replace the word ‘aggression’ with the word ‘advance’ in reference to Japanese military operations in China. They also replaced the words ‘March First Movement’ (the 1919 Korea independence movement) with the word ‘riots’. These developments were harshly criticized in various Asian countries. The criticism intensified when on 15 August 1985 Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro made the first official visit to Yasukuni Shrine by a prime minister in the postwar period. Around the same time, frequent denials of Japanese war crimes, statements legitimizing Japanese aggression and other gaffes made by members of the cabinet caused much distrust toward Japan in Asian countries and especially in China and Korea. To limit the damage caused by such distrust, the Japanese government began to modify its position on the history of the war and the question of war responsibility. Although the Japanese government did not respond to claims for compensation, it gradually began to express remorse both for the war of aggression waged by Japan and for Japan’s colonial rule. The following five statements are of particular importance in this process9: 1

Statement by the Chief Cabinet Secretary Miyazawa Kiichi (26 August 1982). In response to the criticism from Asian countries, Miyazawa promised improvements in history textbooks. Based on this statement, the examination criteria were revised and a new ‘neighbouring nations clause’ was added, which stipulated that perspectives of ‘international understanding and international cooperation’ must be taken into account (in history textbooks). 2 Statement by the Chief Cabinet Secretary Gotōda Masaharu (14 August 1986) that, in consideration of sentiments in neighbouring countries, the prime minister would refrain from making an official visit to Yasukuni Shrine on 15 August. The statement was also critical of the enshrinement of war criminals at Yasukuni. 3 Statement by the Chief Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei (4 August 1993) acknowledging state involvement in the establishment and operating of ‘comfort stations’ and in the recruitment of ‘comfort women’ against their will. This was followed by an expression of ‘apology and feelings of remorse’. 4 Statement by Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro at a press conference on 10 August 1993, to the effect that ‘I recognize that the last war . . . was a war of aggression’. Five days later, in his statement at the Memorial Ceremony for the War Dead, Hosokawa became the first Japanese prime minister to express feelings of remorse for the victims of the war in Asia and the rest of the world. Subsequently, all prime ministers invariably included a reference to the suffering Japan inflicted on Asian countries in their statements on this ceremony, until Abe Shinzō failed to do so in 2013. 5 Statement by Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi (15 August 1995) which expressed remorse and apology for ‘colonial rule and aggression’. This adjustment of the Japanese position was made in reaction to the end of the Cold War, the rise of the influence of Asian nations in international affairs and their democratization. At the same time, the Japanese government and business circles concluded that the historical consciousness problem constitutes an obstacle both to Japan’s becoming a ‘great power’ (taikoku) and to the strengthening of the Japan-U.S. alliance (Yoshida 1995). Around that time, opinion polls showed a change in the national attitudes regarding the war. They revealed that more than half of those questioned believed Japan had waged a war of aggression.

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However, since the mid-1990s, and in particular, since the founding of the Society for the Producing of New History Textbooks (Atarashii rekishi kyōkasho o tsukuru-kai, short Tsukurukai) in January 1997, historical revisionism has resurged (Saaler 2005; 2014b; 2016a).This development must be seen in the context of the following two issues. First, for many years during the Cold War, the issues of war responsibility and war reparations were not addressed. Once the Cold War ended in 1989, Japan was finally forced to confront its wartime past, but by then, those who addressed these issues belonged mostly to the postwar generation, and not those who had a direct experience of the war. Given the inadequate history education and lack of direct experience of war or colonial rule, members of this generation, when forced to show remorse and provide reparations, naturally felt confused and resented criticism from Asian countries. Second, the 1980s and 1990s, when at long last the Japanese government and Japanese society began to confront the issues of war responsibility and reparations, coincided with the period when Japan became a great power. At the time, Japan attempted to assume political leadership in Asia and the issues of war responsibility and reparations were seen as obstacles to achieving this goal. Thus it was found necessary to downplay them for strategic reasons. Precisely because the debate was largely limited to factors affecting foreign relations, there was not nearly enough domestic discussion of the issue. As a result, Japan ended up being criticized by various Asian countries, and this caused a reaction and embarrassment at ‘being condemned’ which made many people turn to historical revisionism.

The link between the historical consciousness problem and security policy As already noted earlier, historical revisionism that calls for overcoming the ‘Tokyo Trials view of history’ is inherently anti-American. However, it is important to note that, because the historical consciousness problem has also become an issue in the United States, it has come to affect security issues and the Japan-U.S. alliance. In October 2008, Tamogami Toshio (b. 1948), chief of staff of the Air Self-Defense Forces, published an article in which he rationalized Japan’s wartime aggression and thus effectively denied the 1995 Maruyama statement.10 He was fired as a consequence. In another article written shortly thereafter, he argued that it is necessary to reduce the U.S. troops stationed in Japan and replace them with Japanese troops. The money used to pay for the U.S. troops (in Japan) should be used to strengthen the Self-Defense Forces. We must realize that it is embarrassing (humiliating) to have foreign troops stationed in Japan. (Tamogami 2008) However, have Japan and the United States reached the point of reconciliation? The minutes of the fourth meeting of the Advisory Panel on the History of the Twentieth Century and on Japan’s Role and the World Order in the Twenty-First Century formed in the process of drafting Prime Minister Abe’s seventieth anniversary end-of-war statement include the following statement by Professor Kubo Fumiaki at the Law Faculty of the University of Tokyo: ‘It can be said that both Japan and the U.S. can basically speak with pride about their (reconciliation) achievements’. It seems to me that Kubo’s evasive words betray deep concern over the prospects of achieving historical reconciliation between Japan and the United States.We can be more explicit. In May 2009, at a meeting of former U.S. prisoners of war captured by the Japanese army in the Philippines, the Japanese ambassador to the United States, Fujisaki Ichirō (b. 1947), speaking on 416

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behalf of the Japanese government, apologized for the first time for the Bataan Death March, a war crime committed by Japan. An increase in the activities of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs concerning historical consciousness problems between Japan and the United States was the consequence of the shock over the U.S. House of Representatives’ July 2007 demand that Japan apologize for the wartime system of ‘comfort women’ (Mainichi Shinbun, 22 June 2009). And now, with the Abe cabinet embracing the ideology of overcoming both the ‘postwar regime’ and the ‘Tokyo Trials view of history’, the historical consciousness problem threatens to destabilize the Japan-U.S. alliance to its very foundations (Reizei 2015).These trends explain why reconciliation between Japan and the United States is again being strongly promoted by the Abe government (whereas reconciliation between Japan and its Asian neighbours is not). One way to defuse the threat of U.S.-Japan estrangement is the ‘mutual wreath-offering diplomacy’. As proposed by Reizei Akihiko (b. 1959), such a form of historical reconciliation would consist of the heads of the Japanese and the U.S. governments laying wreaths at the Memorial of the U.S.S. Arizona in Hawaii on the Memorial Day in May, which then would be repeated by a similar act at the memorial ceremony in Hiroshima on 6 August. As a matter of fact, the possibility of such a solution was discussed in a cabinet meeting in 2015. The question was then raised whether during his visit to the United States in April/May 2015 Prime Minister Abe should be the first Japanese prime minister to visit Pearl Harbor and mourn the war dead (Mainichi Shinbun, 14 January 2015). In the end Abe did not go in 2015, but at the end of December 2016 he visited Hawaii, where at Pearl Harbor he offered ‘sincere and everlasting condolences’ to the victims of the Japanese attack.11

Popular attitudes concerning ‘the 70 years of postwar’ Next, let us take a look at the attitudes of the Japanese people. During the 1980s and 1990s, the majority of the Japanese accepted that the wars since the Manchurian Incident (1931) were wars of aggression. The Asahi Shinbun conducted a poll in November and December 2013 on the views of Japanese in the 20 to 40 age bracket. One of the questions was whether the ‘war that ended in 1945 was a war of aggression’. Forty-five per cent of those in their 20s said yes, as did 55 per cent of the respondents in their 30s, whereas, 33 per cent of those in their 20s and 26 per cent of those over 30 per cent said no (Asahi Shinbun, 29 December 2013). It must be noted that compared to similar polls conducted in the past, the proportion of those who deny that Japan waged a war of aggression increased considerably, but the proportion of those who consider it a war of aggression remains unchanged at over 50 per cent. At the same time, it should not be overlooked that considerable differences appear when respondents are presented with different sets of possible answers. A poll by the Asahi Shinbun conducted in February and March 2014 included the question ‘which statement is closest to your view regarding the war that ended in 1945?’ Thirty-seven per cent responded that ‘It was not a good war because it was a war of aggression in Asia’ and 12 per cent said that ‘it was not a good war, because Japan suffered much damage’, but as many as 42 per cent said that ‘given the international situation at the time, the war was inevitable’ (Asahi Shinbun, 7 April 2014).The ‘inevitable’ response must be interpreted as an indirect affirmation of the war, revealing a reluctance to clearly characterize it as a war of aggression. Although the tendency to consider the war ‘inevitable’ had been present before the 1980s, it was more or less imperceptible in the recent decades, so the resurgence of this tendency must be seen as a new phenomenon in twenty-firstcentury Japan (Yoshida and Mori 2007). Let us look next at how people saw the 1995 statement by Prime Minister Murayama, who expressed ‘deep remorse’ and ‘apologized’ for Japan’s ‘colonial rule and aggression’. In an opinion 417

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poll conducted by Mainichi Shinbun in January 2015, 50 per cent of the respondents were in favour of upholding the Murayama statement, whereas 34 per cent were against it (Mainichi Shinbun, 19 January 2015). This poll allowed only two possible responses, for or against, and the responses were clearly influenced by the attempt of Prime Minister Abe to issue a new statement to replace the Murayama statement. On the other hand, a study of ‘Japan’s Public Opinion 2014’, conducted by Mainichi Shinbun and Saitama University, allowed three possible responses. Twenty-six per cent of those questioned were in favour of the upholding of the Murayama statement, 21 per cent wanted to scrap it and 49 per cent were undecided (Mainichi Shinbun, 25 December 2014). The large number of undecided respondents was striking. This change is also apparent in the results of a poll conducted by Asahi Shinbun in March and April 2015. The poll included the following question in reference to the 1995 Murayama statement and the 2005 reaffirmation by Prime Minister Koizumi of the Murayama statement: ‘The Japanese government, in the statements issued on the occasion of the 50th and 60th anniversary of the end of the war expressed ‘deep remorse’ and a ‘heartfelt apology’ for the great suffering inflicted on Asian peoples by aggression and colonial rule. Do you think that this was appropriate?’ Seventy-four per cent said yes, whereas only 13 per cent disagreed. In response to the question ‘Should Japanese politicians continue to deliver messages of apology to the countries that suffered damage during the war or do you think that is unnecessary?’ Forty-six per cent said they should continue, whereas 42 per cent saw no need for further apology. In response to the question ‘What kind of wars Japan did Japan fight: a war of aggression, a war of self-defence, or both aggression and self-defence?’, 30 per cent said that Japan waged wars of aggression and 6 per cent replied that it fought wars of self-defence; 46 per cent believed that the wars had both aspects, whereas 15 per cent were undecided (Asahi Shinbun, 18 April 2015). It is clear that those who considered Japan had fought wars of self-defence represented a small minority, but the most common view was that the wars were simultaneously wars of aggression and wars of self-defence. Although many acknowledged that remorse and apologies were necessary, many others thought no further efforts in this direction were necessary.

Conclusion The changes in the attitudes of Japanese described here are related to the gradual passing away of the generation that directly experienced the war. What is required of historians at this time? First, we must give serious consideration to disseminating the awareness about the cruel reality of war. This is related to the following words by World War II historian, Tanaka Hiromi (Tanaka 2009): In Japan, political scientists and modern historians have done much fruitful research on the causes of the war, on the ending of the war, and on the occupation policies. However, only few researchers have given any attention to the period between the outbreak and the end of the war, i.e. the war itself. Perhaps they think that it is ‘war history’ which deals with the war itself and that it is not the subject to be done by political scientists or modern historians, but in any event, they don’t try to tackle this subject. With regard to my own research interests, I have always been conscious of the need to engage in a different form of research from the traditional approach to war history as done by ‘drill book’ historians, while hoping that one day there would be strong demand to turn history of ‘the battle’ itself into a major subject (Yoshida 2009). 418

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Second, there is the problem of conveying the war experience. Historian Akazawa Shirō recognized that the great significance of criticisms of Japan by Asian countries was that they introduced an external perspective to postwar Japanese pacifism. As the criticisms have intensified since the end of the Cold War, he observed, ‘it marked the moment of departure from the lineage of the narrative of war experience that formed the basis of postwar pacifism’, which until then had been based on the framework of the nation-state (Akazawa 2000). This is an important point. From a different perspective, Hayashi Hirofumi has pointed out that postwar pacifism has its limits. Although the argument that ‘war is bad’ remains highly influential in postwar Japanese society, the flipside is that it has thwarted the development both of awareness that Japan engaged in a war of aggression and of the pursuit of individual responsibility for war crimes (Hayashi 2008). In a recent article titled ‘On “War Experience”,’ Akazawa agreed with Hayashi’s point, and, having classified afresh the characteristics of recollections and records concerning ‘war experience’, asserted that ‘reminiscences of “war experiences” and the peace movement probably, in many cases, exist as the starting point that supported spiritual changes in postwar Japan’ (Akazawa 2014). Let me add for caution’s sake that Akazawa’s argument recognizes the possibility that ‘war experience’ makes it difficult to argue that the people in general also bear war responsibility and that, with its insistence that it is a period of peace now, it leads to a complete affirmation of the status quo. In as much as ‘war experience’ began with the changes of the value system in the postwar period and is a rearrangement of the memory of the past, its starting point was created independently by the Japanese masses in the postwar period. What remains to be done by us is to question the meaning of this ‘war experience’, and to discover both possibilities of ideological change that it contains as well as the problems that it brings in its tow. If ‘war experience’ is to be taken over by future generations, this kind of re-examination is indispensable. (Akazawa 2014) Keeping in mind Hayashi’s observation, we must conclude that it is necessary to re-examine various arguments about the war experience from today’s perspective. Third, there is the question of colonialism, which has received much attention in recent years. In her article ‘Reflections on the Debate concerning “Postwar Responsibility” in “Postwar Japan”,’ Nagahara Yōko (2014) points out that the German way of ‘reconciliation with the past’ constituted a major reference point for discussions about historical responsibility in postwar Japan. However, Germany did not address the question of colonial rule (because it had lost its colonies as a result of World War I) and that helps explain why colonialism was not consciously addressed in the Japanese debate. There has been a certain focus on Japanese wartime colonialism, but little interest either in colonialism before the war or in post-colonialism. From the perspective of a Japanese historian, the causal relation between the German process of ‘coming to terms with the past’ and Japanese debates on ‘postwar responsibility’ does not seem very strong, because Japanese debates emerged in the context of the question of how the postwar generation should think about its own responsibility. However, the point made by Nagahara that the perspective of colonialism has been neglected cannot be denied. As I have already stated, Akazawa in the article quoted earlier has classified the characteristics of ‘war experience’, but his framework leaves no room for incorporating the discourse on colonialism. Given the lack of a colonial perspective, it is necessary to reexamine both historiography and postwar history. (Translated by Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman) 419

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Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Narita and Yoshida 2015: 37–66. This chapter is a translated version that has been revised and updated in cooperation with the author to take account of the most recent political developments. Copyright 2015 by Yutaka Yoshida. Reprinted by permission of the author and Iwanami Shoten, Publishers, Tokyo. 2 English translation from the website of the Imperial Household Ministry, www.kunaicho.go.jp/e-oko toba/01/press/kaiken-h25e.html. 3 English translation: ‘Remarks by His Majesty The Emperor at His Departure for Saipan, June 27, 2005 (Provisional Translation)’, www.kunaicho.go.jp/okotoba/01/speech/speech-h17e-saipan-e.html. 4 English translation: ‘Remarks by His Majesty the Emperor at the Time of Their Majesties’ Departure for the Republic of Palau (April 8, 2015)’, www.kunaicho.go.jp/e-okotoba/01/address/speech-h27e. html. 5 See Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery, ‘Outline’, www.env.go.jp/garden/chidorigafuchi/english/ index.html. 6 English translation from the official website of the Prime Minister’s office, http://japan.kantei.go.jp/ koizumispeech/2003/08/15sikiji_e.html. 7 See ‘Treaty of Peace with Japan. Signed at San Francisco, on 8 September 1951’, https://treaties.un.org/ doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%20136/volume-136-I-1832-English.pdf. 8 English version cited from an archived version of the MOFA website accessible at https://web.archive. org/web/20130105081347/www.mofa.go.jp/policy/q_a/faq16.html#q9. 9 The statements are available in full on the MOFA website: www.mofa.go.jp/policy/postwar/. 10 See Tamogami Toshio,‘Was Japan an Agressor Nation?’, http://ronbun.apa.co.jp/images/pdf/2008jyusyou_ saiyuusyu_english.pdf. 11 See BBC, ‘Japan PM Shinzo Abe offers Pearl Harbor condolences’, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia38438714.

Further reading Hashimoto, Akiko (2015) The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Japan, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Narita Ryūichi, and Yoshida Yutaka (eds) (2015), Kioku to ninshiki no naka no Ajia Taiheiyō sensō, Iwanami Shoten. Saaler, Sven (2005) Politics, Memory and Public Opinion:The Textbook Controversy and Japanese Society, Munich: Iudicium. _____ (2016a) ‘Nationalism and history in contemporary Japan’, in Jeff Kingston (ed.) Asian Nationalisms Reconsidered, London: Routledge, 172–85. Yoshida Yutaka (1995) Nihonjin no sensō-kan, Iwanami Shoten.

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30 History and the state in postwar Japan Hatano Sumio

The history problem (rekishi mondai) has been plaguing Japanese foreign relations in the postwar period. Japan is often criticized as being unable to come to terms with its past, and doubts are cast on the historical awareness of the Japanese government and the Japanese people. Neighbouring countries have pointed out that the coverage of war-related issues in Japanese history textbooks is inadequate. In the background of such criticisms there are strong fears, based on the experience of Japanese colonialism and aggression toward Asia before and during the Second World War, that Japan might once again become a ‘military superpower’. In addition, it is frequently pointed out that reparations, indemnities, expressions of remorse and apologies concerning damages caused by Japanese colonialism and aggression to Asian countries and peoples have been insufficient and that many issues remain unresolved. Many in Japan share this view. Of course, these questions could have been settled all at once by means of a peace treaty between the victorious and defeated powers, as had been done in the Versailles Peace Treaty after the end of the First World War. However, that did not happen in East Asia after 1945. It is true that Japan signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1951 (in effect from 1952) with 48 countries including the United States, Britain, France and Australia. But not all allied nations that had been at war with Japan signed this treaty.1 As expressed in the phrase ‘a separate peace’, the United States was keen to go ahead with granting Japan independence, and in the climate of the intensifying Cold War gave priority to peace treaties with countries in the Western bloc, whereas the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and other socialist countries stayed away from the peace conference. As a result, Japan had to negotiate separate agreements with the countries absent from San Francisco to normalize relations. Such separate agreements included the 1952 Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty (the Treaty of Taipei between Japan and the Republic of China, i.e. Taiwan), the 1956 Soviet-Japan Joint Declaration (between the Soviet Union and Japan), the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of South Korea and the 1972 Japan-China Joint Communiqué (between Japan and the PRC). In addition, the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma (Myanmar) and Vietnam had refused to sign or ratify the San Francisco Peace Treaty on the grounds that reparations were insufficient. With those four Southeast Asian countries, the Japanese government later signed bilateral ‘reconciliation’ agreements that conformed to the model of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. As a result, Japan at present takes the position that problems caused by the war and colonial rule were settled 421

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through these ‘public acts of reconciliation’ (i.e., the San Francisco Treaty System) and that it thus made a contribution to the stability of the international order in the Asia-Pacific area. However, even now there are quite a number of people in the neighbouring countries, in the former Allied Powers and even in Japan who think that Japan has not properly come to terms with its past and that reparations to the victims, apologies and remorse about the war have been inadequate. Especially with regard to Korea and China, one must conclude that the attempt to establish sufficient trust has failed as a result of problems with history and that this failure constitutes an obstacle to an improvement in Japan’s relations with these two countries. What is the root of this problem? How has Japan reacted to it? What is necessary to achieve ‘historical reconciliation’? I will try to address these questions by focusing on how the position of the Japanese government has evolved over time (see Hatano 2011 for details).

The ‘history problem’ prior to 1970 War reparations and war responsibility The 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty made a provision concerning war responsibility and imposed reparations on Germany. However, the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty in principle waived any claims to reparations. In the peace treaty, also known as a ‘generous’ peace, the chief allied powers, that is, the United States, Britain and France, waived their right to claim reparations from Japan. However, countries that objected to this waiver, such as the Philippines, obtained the right to conduct separate negotiations with Japan.This led later to the conclusion of reparation agreements and peace treaties between Japan and a number of Southeast Asian countries. Japan paid reparations to four Southeast Asian countries, namely, the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma (Myanmar) and Vietnam. The payment of these reparations, totalling 1 trillion yen, was completed by the end of the 1960s. However, this huge amount was not paid to compensate for direct damage to the countries. The settlements gave priority to ‘economic cooperation’ (economic aid) that brought benefit to both parties. As such they contributed both to the revival of Japan and to the economic development of Southeast Asia. But it is also a fact that they weakened the original goal of reparations that was to bring a sense of responsibility and remorse to Japan.This formula of ‘economic cooperation’ was also applied in 1965 in the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of South Korea and an agreement regarding mutual claims signed at the same time. Immediately after these treaties were concluded, doubts were expressed in the Japanese press as to whether the original goal of reparations would be grasped properly if reparations and economic cooperation were not treated separately, but in no time such doubts were silenced by a chorus of approval for the settlements. From the point of view of war responsibility, it must be said that, compared with the Versailles Treaty, the 1951 peace treaty with Japan was incomplete. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE, aka Tokyo Trials) which had tried 28 Japanese war leaders came to an end in December 1948, with 7 of the accused being sentenced to death. In addition, proceedings in other international military tribunals dealing with so-called class B and C war criminals had more or less ended before the treaty was concluded. The question of what significance to give to these international military tribunals in the text of the peace treaty arose in the process of drafting it. Article 11 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty stipulated that Japan ‘accepts the judgments of the international military tribunals’, but made no reference to the question of war responsibility. As a result, this has given rise to an interpretation that the Japanese government ‘accepts the judgments’ of the Tokyo Tribunal that had sentenced General Tōjō Hideki (1884–1948), the wartime prime minister, to death, but that it does not necessarily accept the 422

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reasons for the sentence as given by the tribunal. Moreover, in Japan this has led to claims that the War Crimes Tribunal represented ‘victors’ justice’ by the Allies and thereby to doubts being cast on the legitimacy of the tribunal. The cause of the ambiguity of the peace treaty concerning war reparations and war responsibility, as compared with the Versailles Treaty, lies in the gradual relaxation of the early postwar policy of punitive measures toward Japan by the United States, a country which played the leading role in drafting the text of the peace treaty. This was especially because, as the Cold War in East Asia intensified with the formation of the PRC in 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, America decided to position Japan as a ‘bulwark against communism’. Instead of the policy of rendering Japan powerless, the United States now put emphasis on Japan’s economic revival and economic autonomy and the questions of the pursuit of war responsibility and war reparations were put on the backburner. Be that as it may, until the 1970s the Japanese people generally regarded themselves as ‘victims’ of the war. References to the suffering inflicted by Japan upon the neighbouring Asian countries were few and far between. The discussion of war responsibility in the Japanese media focused upon the nature of wartime Japan’s political-economic structure, such as the role of the emperor or of the military, but there was little awareness that Japan had been a perpetrator. Japan’s role as a perpetrator began to be properly addressed in the 1980s, when its conduct in the war was examined and the victim consciousness questioned.

The normalization of Japan–Korea relations and the question of ‘coming to terms with the past’ Korea was a Japanese colony until 1945. After obtaining independence, Korea demanded that it participate in the San Francisco Peace Treaty conference as a ‘victor’. Had it become a signatory of the Treaty, it would have been able to exercise its right to claim indemnities from Japan just like any Allied Power. In the end, however, Korea was not invited to the Peace Conference on the grounds that it had not been at war with Japan, although at the same time the United States promised to treat Korea in the same way as other Allied Powers. On the assumption that Japanese-owned property on the Korean peninsula would be ceded to Korea, the United States put it under the administration of the U.S. military government but left the final disposition of this property to negotiations between Japan and Korea. In this way, the disposition of Japanese property in Korea at the Japan–Korea talks, which started at the end of 1951, became a contentious issue. The Japanese side argued that, having lost all public property in Korea, the national sentiment would not allow further concessions, and it continued to insist that Japan had the right to make claims on privately owned Japanese property in Korea. On the other hand, the Korean side, on the grounds of the enormity of the damages caused by 36 years of Japanese rule, refused to be content only with Japanese property abandoned in Korea and insisted that it was entitled to make claims with regard to the return of cultural assets, and the repayment of obligations to Koreans including post office savings, insurance, pensions, etc. The Japan–Korea talks brought to the fore a difference in historical awareness between the two countries on whether Japan’s colonial rule was legitimate or not. Korea insisted that the 1910 Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty was ‘null and void’. On the other hand, Japan insisted that the Annexation Treaty was legally binding, and from this premise argued that economic activity by Japanese in Korea was legitimate. In October 1953, in what is known as the Kubota statement, the Japanese delegate Kubota Kan’ichirō (1902–77) hinted at the possibility of mutual liabilities cancelling themselves out when he declared that Japan had ‘made mountains green, built 423

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railroads, constructed harbours, created irrigated rice fields, . . . and spent large sums of subsidies to develop the Korean economy’. In December 1957, the Japanese government retracted the Kubota statement and abandoned its claims to Japanese property in Korea. In the end, in the 1960s, things moved toward a settlement through ‘economic cooperation’ whereby Japan offered financial aid in exchange for Korea’s renunciation of its claims. In this way, the perspective of indemnities for colonial rule and war receded to a large degree from the subject of discussions at the Japan-Korea talks. Keen to promote the economic development of both countries, the United States supported a solution based on this formula, because it gave priority to Korea’s economic development and ‘the unity of the non-communist bloc’ over settling the claims question. In these circumstances, in June 1965 Japan and Korea signed the Treaty on Basic Relations2 and the Agreement concerning the Settlement of Problems in regard to Property and Claims and Economic Cooperation.3 The treaty established diplomatic relations between Japan and South Korea, and the agreement settled claims between the two countries. Japan agreed to provide Korea with economic cooperation funds consisting of a 300 million dollar (non-returnable) grant in economic aid and 200 million dollars in loans. Both countries confirmed that the issue of claims ‘have been settled completely and finally’. The South Korean government used the funds, among other things, toward the construction of the Pohang Iron and Steel Plant (POSCO) and the multi-purpose Soyanggang Dam. It should be added that under the terms of this agreement the Korean government was also supposed to use these funds to compensate individual victims of colonialism and war. As a result of the Japan–Korea agreements, the question of Japan’s coming to terms with the past was neglected. In reference to the legacy of Japanese colonial rule, it should be pointed out that Korea managed to take over some 80 per cent of Japanese-owned property on the Korean peninsula immediately after the liberation, and it can be said that this takeover formed the basis of Korea’s economic development. However, this fact proved difficult to acknowledge, given the Korean view of its colonial past. As regards the Republic of China (Taiwan), which like Korea had also been a Japanese colony, the issue of reparations was raised during the 1952 Japan–China Peace Treaty negotiations with the Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi, 1887–1975) government. The negotiations ran into trouble when the Chiang government claimed reparations and the Japanese countered that these claims were cancelled out by the Japanese property abandoned in China. In 1952, Japan and the Republic of China signed a peace treaty in which they renounced any claims to reparations.4 Subsequently, the Japanese government continued to take the position that no reparations problem existed between Japan and China. However, this one-sided understanding was called into question during the 1972 negotiations to normalize diplomatic relations between Japan and the PRC.

The normalization of diplomatic relations between Japan and the PRC and the reparations question Negotiations to normalize diplomatic relations between Japan and the PRC were tricky as they had the potential to undermine the San Francisco Treaty system. To begin with, the People’s Republic of China whose territories had suffered the heaviest damages during the war, had objected to the very idea of a peace treaty led by the United States. As I have noted above, under the terms of the 1952 Japan-China Peace Treaty, the government of the Republic of China had renounced claims to reparations from Japan. The Japanese government interpreted this treaty as applying also to claims from mainland China. However, the PRC refused to recognize this and 424

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insisted that it was entitled to claim reparations separately from the government of the Republic of China. In its ‘Three Principles for the Normalization of Relations (with Japan)’, the PRC made it clear that the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty was illegal and should be renounced. However, the Chinese insistence on reparations that ignored the peace treaty between Japan and the Republic of China threatened to prevent the restoration of relations between the PRC and Japan for many years to come. It also had the potential to harm U.S.–China relations and even threatened to undermine China’s strategy toward the Soviet Union.This is why the government of the PRC made it clear that it would renounce claims for reparations even before the start of the negotiations to restore diplomatic relations. At the end of September 1972, however, Premier Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai, 1898–1976) reacted strongly to the legalistic position of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs by declaring that ‘we will not accept the view that the issue has been settled by Chiang Kai-shek’s renunciation of [claims for reparations]’. The Chinese policy that renounced claims for reparations rested on the premise that Japan should accept responsibility and show remorse for ‘the war of aggression’. Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei (1918–93) and Foreign Minister Ōhira Masayoshi (1910–80), who had to contend with opposition within the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), agonized over how to respond.The joint communiqué eventually signed contained a strong statement that ‘the Japanese side is keenly conscious of the responsibility for the serious damage that Japan caused in the past to the Chinese people through war, and deeply reproaches itself ’.5 This statement was inserted on Foreign Minister Ōhira’s insistence. Also, with regard to the claims for reparations, the Chinese side announced that the PRC renounced claims, but instead of using the expression ‘the right to claim’, it used the word ‘claim’. That is probably because, from the Japanese perspective, China had already renounced its ‘right to claim reparations’ in the Japan–China Peace Treaty of 1952. Clearly, this high-level political compromise was reached thanks to the strong political leadership of the leading figures in both governments. Fifteen years before the start of the negotiations to restore relations between Japan and China, a Japanese cabinet minister had observed that ‘should China demand reparations, Japan’s economy would not be able to meet them’, so it would seem that Japan was saved by the Chinese leaders’ ‘magnanimous heart’. That indeed may have been the case, but the fact that it was the Chinese people who had overwhelmingly suffered during ‘the war of aggression’ did not go away. As seen from China, visits to Yasukuni Shrine (on this shrine, see Chapter 31 chapter in this volume) by Japanese prime ministers amount to glorifying those responsible for the Chinese suffering during the war. Such steps must appear as ‘mistaken actions that willfully hurt the feelings and dignity of the people of a victim nation’.

The internationalization of the history problem in the 1980s The history textbook controversy The 1980s marked the beginning of controversies over history textbooks and Yasukuni Shrine, leading to international scrutiny of Japan’s historical consciousness and war responsibility. On 26 June 1982, the leading Japanese newspapers published the results of the Ministry of Education’s screening of high school history textbooks. All the newspapers reported that as a result of the screening, which is a part of the process of textbook approval, the word ‘aggression’ (shinryaku) was replaced with ‘advance’ (shinshutsu) in a section on ‘the Japanese Army’s aggression in China’.These press reports were mistaken in the sense that they claimed that the changes had been ordered by the Ministry of Education. That was wrong, because under the Japanese textbook approval system, all that the ministry can do is to present the authors of a textbook 425

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with an ‘improvement guidance’, but it cannot order revisions to be made. It is nevertheless true that there were some textbooks, which, in reaction to the ‘improvement guidance’, replaced ‘aggression’ with ‘advance’. In any event, the Chinese government condemned the Ministry of Education by stating that ‘Japanese militarism falsified the history of the Japanese aggression against China’ and demanded that the falsification be rectified. The Korean government also criticized accounts of Japan’s colonial rule in textbooks, but China took a much tougher stance than Korea. The fact that the Japanese government made no revisions in reaction to the Chinese criticisms caused an even stronger backlash. In the end, Miyazawa Kiichi (1919–2007), the chief cabinet secretary, published a statement saying that ‘the spirit of the Japan-Republic of Korea Treaty and the Japan-China Joint Communiqué naturally should also be respected in Japan’s school education and textbook authorization’ and that ‘from the perspective of building friendship and goodwill with neighbouring countries, Japan will pay due attention to these criticisms and make corrections at the Government’s responsibility’.6 In reaction to this statement, in November 1982 the Ministry of Education created a new authorization criterion for screening history textbooks known as the ‘Neighbouring Countries Clause’ (kinrin shokoku jōkō). This stipulated that ‘from the position of international understanding and international harmony, due consideration must be given when dealing with events in modern and contemporary history that affect Japan and neighbouring Asian countries’.7 Within the LDP there were complaints that this would hamper the preparation of independent textbooks, but in effect priority was given to international considerations. This ‘Neighbouring Countries Clause’ represented the first time that the Japanese government took a clear ‘historical reconciliation policy’. Two years after the textbook controversy, during a visit by the President of Korea Chun Doo-hwan (b. 1931) to Japan in September 1984, the Shōwa Emperor (1901–89) said he found it ‘regrettable indeed that at one time in this century there was an unfortunate past between our nations that I believe must not be repeated’.8 The Korean side interpreted this statement as a ‘diplomatic apology for the past history’. From the point of view of overcoming ‘the past’ shared by Japan and Korea, it was thought that Japan–Korean relations entered a new stage, but just then the textbook controversy flared up once again. In May 1986, just before the ministry released the results of the textbook examination for that year, a scoop in Asahi Shinbun revealed that the New Edition Japanese History textbook compiled by ‘The People’s Conference to Protect Japan’ (Nihon o mamoru kokumin kaigi) had ‘a reactionary tone’. The ‘People’s Conference’ was a political body whose declared goals included the drafting of an ‘authentically’ Japanese constitution (it considers the current Constitution to have been imposed by the United States), but it also got involved in the compilation of a history textbook in reaction to what it considered the weak-kneed response of the Japanese government to the 1982 textbook controversy. There was no doubt that New Edition Japanese History tended to justify Japan’s overseas aggression by claiming, among other things, that Japan embarked on the Greater East Asian War to ‘liberate East Asia’. It was moreover full of passages that emphasized Japan’s suffering. Both China and Korea reacted with fury. China in particular was furious that the textbook obscured the character of the war as a ‘war of aggression’.The Japanese Ministry of Education responded to this by issuing a ‘guidance’ to the publisher to revise the relevant passage. But when this second textbook controversy seemed to have died down, there was an outcry over an article by Education Minister Fujio Masayuki (1917–2006) in the October 1986 edition of the monthly Bungei Shunjū, in which he asserted that the Korean side bore its share of responsibility for the annexation of Korea by Japan. He also criticized Prime

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Minister Nakasone (b. 1918) as weak-kneed for his decision to discontinue official visits to Yasukuni. Nakasone immediately fired Fujio, in what was the first dismissal of a Japanese cabinet minister in thirty years.

The question of visits to Yasukuni Shrine On 15 August 1985, Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro made an official visit to Yasukuni Shrine (for the background of this shrine, see Chapter 31 in this volume). That was the first official visit to the shrine by a serving prime minister since the end of the war. Until then, if there had been any problems surrounding the shrine at all, they were of a purely domestic nature, namely, over whether visits to the shrine by cabinet ministers did or did not violate the Constitution, which stipulates the separation of politics and religion. The visit by Prime Minister Nakasone was based on the government’s (specifically, the cabinet legal bureau’s) opinion that a visit did not violate the Constitution as long as the form of the visit had no religious character. However, the government received an unexpected reaction from China. At the end of August, Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily) took up the subject of the enshrinement of the class A war criminals9 at Yasukuni and raised the issue of the prime minister’s visit to the shrine by describing it as ‘obscuring the character of the war and the question of war responsibility’. The former prime minister Tojō Hideki and other executed class A war criminals had been enshrined at Yasukuni in 1978,10 and this was what the Chinese side was reacting to. At the same time, Renmin Ribao insisted that ‘the Chinese government has steadfastly and consistently taken the policy that distinguishes between a small circle of militarists and the wide masses of the Japanese people’. This was the so-called ‘bisected responsibility argument’. When in the process of normalizing relations between Japan and the People’s Republic, China renounced its claim to reparations, the same argument had been used to persuade the Chinese people to accept this renunciation. By the logic of the bisected responsibility argument, the Japanese people including class B and class C war criminals were victims of Japanese militarism, and a distinction should be made between them and the class A war criminals who bore the brunt of responsibility for the Japanese aggression from the Manchurian Incident on. As the Chinese side saw it, official visits by cabinet ministers to Yasukuni Shrine where the class A war criminals were enshrined meant the reaffirmation of aggression and evasion of responsibility for the war. In this way, the textbook controversy and the Yasukuni problem were suddenly ‘internationalized’ in the 1980s, but the significance of these two problems is that the historical consciousness and the war responsibility of the Japanese government were once again called into question. The evaluation of the Tokyo Trials also became a problem in the National Diet. For example, Chief Cabinet Secretary Gotōda Masaharu (1914–2005) in a parliamentary reply stated that the government could not repudiate the Tokyo Trials, but that did not mean that it accepted the legitimacy of the verdict, whose underlying view of the war was as a ‘war of aggression’. That was the government’s position on the Tokyo Trials in the 1980s, and this position remains unchanged today. Over the period of 10 years, 1987–97, after the resignation of the Nakasone cabinet, no prime minister made either an official or private visit to Yasukuni Shrine.That was because LDP bosses and cabinet ministers were successfully persuaded to refrain from official and unofficial visits to the shrine that might cause offence.The grounds for this were that ‘others’ feelings cannot be ignored’, based on Chief Cabinet Secretary Gotōda’s statement that Japan accepted the verdict of the Tokyo Trials by signing the Peace Treaty.

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While the government discontinued visits to Yasukuni by the prime minister and other cabinet members, it also began to search for a way out of the difficulty surrounding the class A war criminals’ enshrinement at Yasukuni through constructing a new memorial facility and contemplating separate enshrinement (bunshi) for them. Separate enshrinement means transferring the spirits of the seven executed class A war criminals to a facility other than Yasukuni Shrine. An expansion of the Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery (established in 1959) was also considered as part of a plan to build a new government-funded memorial facility. This cemetery is the only central government-funded war memorial facility in Japan and it is a purely secular site.11 It is basically a memorial to unknown soldiers, that is those whose names and places of death could not be identified. At present, the remains of some 350,000 ‘unknown soldiers’ and a number of civilians are laid to rest there. However, the proposals for separate enshrinement and construction of a new facility were rejected by Yasukuni Shrine and have not been put into effect. For many of the bereaved families Yasukuni Shrine remains the only memorial facility where the war dead are enshrined, and for them the alternative of a separate enshrinement or the construction of a new facility is unacceptable. Yasukuni Shrine is a religious corporation, and under the Japanese Constitution with its provision for the separation of politics and religion, the government has no choice but to respect the view of the shrine. This question has remained unresolved to the present day.

The 1990s: the question of postwar reparations and the Asian Women’s Fund Postwar reparations and the question of comfort women As we have seen, Japan achieved a settlement regarding reparations for war damages with many Asian countries in the 1950s and 1960s. However, in the 1990s Korean and Chinese individuals began to raise the issue of ‘postwar reparations’. Postwar reparations included payments to individual war victims in Asian countries, such as slave labour, so-called comfort women, victims of the bombing of Chongqing (Chungking, the provisional capital of the Republic of China from 1937 to 1945) and others. On this postwar reparations question, the Japanese government has taken the view that compensation for damages caused to Asian countries, whether to states or to individuals, were settled under the San Francisco Peace Treaty and also under the Sino-Japanese Joint Declaration and the 1965 Japan-Korean Basic Treaty (and the claims agreement signed at the same time). Therefore, it takes the position that it is not legally obliged to offer compensation to individuals, but does so in certain cases on the grounds of moral responsibility and human rights. This view has resulted in ambiguities in some cases. On the judicial level, the number of postwar cases in which Chinese and Korean victims were seeking compensation and apology from the Japanese government in Japanese courts showed a sharp increase in the 1990s, but none of the plaintiffs have been successful to date. Though in many court cases judgments recognized the fact of suffering, they were nevertheless clear that international law specifies that an individual cannot be a party in an international lawsuit. This legalistic position has formed an insurmountable obstacle to providing compensation to individual war victims. At the same time, questions of postwar reparations were debated in the Japanese Diet. These included the issues of slave labour and comfort women. In particular, the question of comfort women assumed a symbolic meaning in this context. These are women who during the war were placed in Japanese military brothels, where they were forced to engage in 428

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sexual acts with soldiers. Especially, after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, as the Japanese army occupied more and more Chinese territory and a large number of troops were sent to China, Japanese military brothels proliferated rapidly. This proliferation resulted partly from the concern that frequent incidents of rape of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers would exacerbate anti-Japanese sentiments among the Chinese. Another factor was the need to prevent the spread of venereal diseases. In 1941, when the Pacific War broke out and Japanese troops occupied Southeast Asia and islands in the Pacific, military brothels were gradually set up also in those areas. Comfort women sent to these areas included Japanese women recruited in Japan by procurers for the army and women from the Japanese colonies of Korea and Taiwan. The recruitment methods used by the procurers were diverse, as were the circumstances in which the women became comfort women. Many applied in response to advertisements; others applied in order to pay off the parents’ debts or due to other family circumstances; and a large number were deceived by the procurers. For many years after the war, the existence of comfort women had been confined to the memories of the affected women and soldiers: it was rarely discussed in public until the 1980s. But on the crest of the democratization movement in Korea in the latter half of the 1980s, the question of comfort women began to attract attention due to ‘accusations’ made by women’s groups, whose activities focused on the question of sexual violence toward women. In late 1991, former comfort women filed a lawsuit for the first time against the Japanese government in the Tokyo District Court, seeking compensation from the Japanese state. The Miyazawa Kiichi cabinet, which had been formed just a month before, launched a full-scale investigation into the comfort women issue and the question of compensation. Previously, whenever asked what his stance on comfort women was, Prime Minister Miyazawa had merely repeated that all legal obligations resulting from Japan’s wartime actions had been settled under the San Francisco Peace Treaty and other agreements. But when, as prime minister, he was confronted with the question of how a ‘great economic power’ like Japan was to fulfill its international obligations, he concluded that Japan should recognize the suffering it had caused to the peoples of Asia and that some form of ‘compensation’ was necessary. As a result of the investigation into the comfort women question launched by the Miyazawa cabinet, the government released 117 documents relating to the Japanese Imperial Army that were held in the archives of government institutions. The report concluded that there was no evidence that either the military or government officials were directly involved either in the recruitment of, or in the setting up of brothels for comfort women. However, in August 1993 just as the final report of the investigation was published, Chief Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei (b. 1937) issued an unofficial statement, in which he declared as follows: Comfort stations were operated in response to the request of the military authorities of the day. The then Japanese military was, directly or indirectly, involved in the establishment and management of the comfort stations and the transfer of comfort women. The recruitment of the comfort women was conducted mainly by private recruiters who acted in response to the request of the military. The Government study has revealed that in many cases they were recruited against their own will, through coaxing, coercion, etc., and that, at times, administrative/military personnel directly took part in the recruitments. They [comfort women] lived in misery at comfort stations under a coercive atmosphere. . . . Undeniably, this was an act, with the involvement of the military authorities of the day, that severely injured the honour and dignity of many women.12 429

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The Kōno statement was the result of a comprehensive investigation: witness testimony collections were published by Korean women’s groups; there were testimonies by brothel managers; and there was an ongoing search for documents in the National Archives in the United States. In addition, in the final stages of the investigation an oral survey of comfort women was also conducted. With regard to ‘coercion’ at the recruitment stage, which was the focus of this investigation, the Kōno statement accepted it as a fact, as is evident from the quotation cited above.The phrase ‘involvement of the military authorities of the day’ was based on facts like the Semarang Camp Women Incident in Indonesia, in which Dutch women were forcibly taken to comfort facilities. The Kōno statement applied to comfort women throughout the entire Asian region and was not limited to the Korean peninsula. However, as a concession to the Korean side, for which the comfort women issue was particularly delicate and which emphasized the issue of ‘coercion’, the following phrase was added: ‘The Korean Peninsula was under Japanese rule in those days, and their [comfort women’s] recruitment, transfer, control, etc., were conducted generally against their will, through coaxing, coercion, etc.’13 The Kōno statement, which skillfully interwove both Japanese and Korean claims regarding the ‘coercion’ involved in the recruiting of women, for a time was accepted by the Korean government, which praised it as a ‘complete recognition of the coercion involved in the recruitment, transportation, and management of military comfort women’. In the statement, the Japanese government promised to find ways to realize in concrete terms ‘the best way of expressing this sentiment’.

The Asian Women’s Fund Subsequent cabinets also shared the Miyazawa cabinet’s awareness of the comfort women issue, but did nothing about it on the grounds that the option of direct compensation to individuals by the Japanese state was ruled out by courts. It was only the cabinet under Murayama Tomiichi (b. 1924) that, in 1994–95, addressed the lack of a concrete ‘historical reconciliation policy’ with respect to the comfort woman question in the broader context of finding a method of ‘compensation’. At the end of August 1994, Prime Minister Murayama announced a ‘Peace, Friendship and Exchange Initiative’ to achieve ‘mutual understanding and trust’ between the Japanese and the peoples of Asia. This policy consisted of two planks. One of these concerned projects that supported historical research ‘to take a direct look at history’; the other concerned intellectual exchanges and youth exchanges. The centrepiece of the former was the founding of the Japan Centre for Asian Historical Records (JACAR), whose purpose was to make historical documents available online.14 There were altogether some 60 projects, with a total budget of 90 billion yen. Prime Minister Murayama also promised to find a ‘way of broad participation by the Japanese people’ to solve the comfort women issue and share with them the ‘feelings of apology and remorse’.The policy of responding to the comfort women question formed the second part of the ‘Peace, Friendship and Exchange Initiative’. In reaction to these statements and initiatives, a subcommittee was formed by the three parties in power, the Japan Socialist Party, the Liberal Democratic Party and the New Party Sakigake. But it turned out to be difficult to reconcile the position of the Socialist Party with the position of the Liberal Democratic Party. The Socialist Party started from the premise that the state should compensate the victims and insisted on a form of compensation that would combine government funds with money raised by the Japanese people, whereas the Liberal Democratic Party and the cabinet were against it. In the end, the report of the subcommittee rejected 430

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the idea of compensating individuals by the state and proposed a ‘People’s Fund’ that would be raised from contributions by the Japanese people in order to fulfill Japan’s moral responsibility. According to this proposal, the government would cooperate with this fund in various ways, including contributions of capital to the fullest extent possible. In July 1995, in response to the subcommittee report, the government launched the Asian Women’s Fund (the Asian Peace and Friendship Fund for Women, usually known as AWF) in the form of an incorporated foundation.15 A full-page ‘appeal’ to the Japanese people asking for donations was published in five national newspapers on 15 August 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Asia-Pacific War. The operations of the AWF consisted of four planks. First, it would pay each former comfort woman 2 million yen as compensation. Second, each former comfort woman would be given a letter signed personally by the Japanese prime minister, which would contain a clear apology. The letter recognized that the ‘issue of comfort women, with an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time, was a grave affront to the honour and dignity of large numbers of women’. The prime minister16 also extended ‘anew my most sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women’.17 The third plank consisted of operations supporting medical treatment and welfare financed with government funds, and the fourth plank was to compile materials relating to comfort women in order to provide a ‘history lesson’. The first two planks, which constituted the most important aspects of the fund, did not proceed smoothly. Although the South Korean government had initially welcomed the launch of the fund, it soon gave it a negative evaluation and turned down the offer of money to former comfort women. This was the result of a powerful opposition movement in Korea, backed by the mass media and women’s groups which supported the former comfort women. Only seven former comfort women from Korea recognized the good faith of the fund and accepted ‘compensation money’, and it is said that they were subsequently subject to strong public criticism. Under the circumstances, the fund suspended its operations for a period of time, but resumed them in 1998. However, President Kim Dae-jung (1924–2009) severed contacts with the fund and adopted a policy of offering livelihood support to victims who pledged that they would not accept money from the AWF. The fund did not encounter such problems elsewhere. The Indonesian government, taking the position that the war claims question had been settled by the Japan–Indonesia Peace Treaty, expressed its hope that assistance would be provided toward the construction of a facility for the elderly instead of individual ‘compensation’ payments. This was accepted by the AWF. Although in Taiwan and the Philippines, there was some resistance by groups insisting that the Japanese state ought to pay reparations directly, the payment of ‘compensation money’ through the AWF went relatively smoothly. The situation with the Netherlands, which had signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty, was complicated, but eventually a settlement was reached when medical welfare assistance was given to 79 former comfort women. The fund, which ended its operations in March 2007, collected donations to the tune of 600 million yen, while the government contributed 480 million. As many as 285 victims (211 in the Philippines, 61 in Korea and 13 in Taiwan) received letters from the prime minister and were given financial compensation. Copies of the letter were also delivered to the prime minister of the Netherlands and the president of Indonesia.18 Successive prime ministers who put their signature on the letter included Hashimoto Ryūtarō, Obuchi Keizō (1937–2000), Mori Yoshirō (b. 1937) and Koizumi Jun’ichirō (b. 1942). In this way, the fund operations were partly successful with positive evaluations received in the Philippines, Indonesia and the Netherlands. In Korea and Taiwan, however, fewer than one-third of the total of those 431

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identified and registered as victims accepted compensation. In addition, one of the problems with the fund was that its operations did not extend to China, where a large number of victims are thought to exist.

The Murayama Statement and the Japan–Korea and Japan–China joint declarations On 15 August 1995, Prime Minister Murayama issued the so-called Murayama Statement (‘Statement on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the War’s End’).19 The expressions of ‘profound remorse’ and ‘heartfelt apology’ to the peoples of Asia for the suffering caused by Japan’s ‘colonial rule and aggression’ constituted the fundamental part of this statement. Words of apology and remorse offered by prime ministers and members of the cabinet had not been unheard before in the past, but they had been distinguished by their stopgap and ‘lightweight’ character. However, there was nothing stopgap about the Murayama Statement, which had been drafted in the main by the Prime Minister’s Office as an expression of will by the government, which should be adhered to even after a change of administration. It was moreover based upon a unanimous cabinet decision.The statement was not intended to overcome divisions in historical awareness that had arisen in Japan, but at least cabinet ministers no longer could assert that ‘it is debatable whether the war was a war of aggression’. The Murayama Statement was possible not so much because it was made by a coalition cabinet led by a socialist prime minister, but because it was based on the understanding shared by the successive cabinets since the early 1990s, which had been trying to sincerely address the outpouring of complaints from Asian victims while adhering to the legal framework provided by the San Francisco Treaty and other agreements. At the same time, the effects of the Murayama Statement percolated to the neighbouring countries. The spirit of the statement was reaffirmed in bilateral agreements, such as the Japan–South Korea Joint Declaration20 of October 1998 and the Japan–China Joint Declaration21 of November 1998. The Japan–South Korea Joint Declaration (officially titled The Japan–South Korea Joint Declaration: A New Japan–Korea Partnership towards the Twenty-first Century) was signed during the October 1998 visit of South Korean President Kim Dae-jung to Japan. In the declaration, Prime Minister Obuchi repeated the exact words of the Murayama Statement to express his ‘profound remorse’ and ‘heartfelt apology’ for Japan’s past transgressions. In response, President Kim stated that he accepted with sincerity this statement of Prime Minister Obuchi’s recognition of history and expressed his appreciation for it. He also expressed his view that the present calls upon both countries to overcome their unfortunate history and to build a future-oriented relationship based on reconciliation as well as good-neighbourly and friendly cooperation.22 In other words, progress was made in the process of reconciliation as the Japanese prime minister expressed his ‘heartfelt apology’ for war and colonial rule of Korea, and the South Korean side ‘accepted with sincerity’ this Japanese apology. It was done without great fanfare, but to judge by its content, it was an epoch-making declaration in the history of Japanese–South Korean relations. The Japanese government took the position that the history question was settled. In his statement, President Kim declared that the South Korean government would no longer raise the history question on the government level, which suggested that historical reconciliation had been achieved. At the same time, the ban on Japanese popular culture in South Korea (pop 432

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music, anime and manga) was lifted and a new Japan–South Korea Fisheries Agreement was also concluded, further symbolizing Japanese–Korean rapprochement. The joint declaration issued in November 1998 by the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Jiang Zemin (b. 1926), who arrived in Japan a month after President Kim, and Prime Minister Obuchi, referred directly both to the 1972 Joint Japan–China Joint Communiqué and to the 1995 Murayama Statement and specified that the Japanese side is keenly conscious of the responsibility for the serious distress and damage that Japan caused to the Chinese people through its aggression against China during a certain period in the past and expressed deep remorse for this.23 This was the first joint communiqué in history which referred to ‘responsibility for aggression’ with respect to China only. At the same time, Jiang Zemin, in a speech at the dinner at the Imperial Palace and in a lecture at Waseda University, strongly criticized the war of aggression waged by ‘Japanese militarism’ and even made references to concrete damages by stating that China ‘suffered the loss of 35 million casualties and economic damage in excess of 600 billion U.S. dollars’. In Japan, this criticism came as a bolt out of the blue, but Jiang Zemin had been putting much stress on ‘patriotic education’ that taught the younger generation of the Chinese about the experience of the war of resistance against the Japanese, so most probably the speech was aimed at the Chinese people. The spirit of the Murayama Statement was also reflected in subsequent government statements such as the Japan–North Korea Pyongyang Declaration of September 2002, the speech by Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō at the Asia-Africa Summit Conference in Singapore in April 2005 and the statement by Prime Minister Kan Naoto (b. 1946) in August 2008.

The history problem in the twenty-first century The merging of territorial disputes and the history problem In spite of the successes in reconciliation described above, the history problem remains a divisive issue in East Asia in the twenty-first century. In April 2001 China and South Korea reacted strongly to the approval by the Ministry of Education of the junior high school history textbook compiled by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashii rekishi kyōkasho o tsukuru kai). The society had been founded in reaction to the statements in textbooks concerning the comfort women question that were based on the Murayama Statement. China demanded revisions to over 30 passages. However, unlike previous Japanese cabinets, neither the Mori cabinet nor the succeeding Koizumi cabinet made any changes in response to China’s demands. In July 2001, matters got to such a pass that the Korean government re-imposed the ban on Japanese culture, and many exchange events on the level of local authorities and by private bodies were cancelled. However, the Chinese and Korean fury abated soon.That was probably because the neighbouring countries had come to understand the textbook screening system and because the textbooks in question had extremely low rates of adoption by junior high and high schools.24 Prime Minister Koizumi visited China in the first days of October 2001, and having toured the Marco Polo Bridge and other sites related to the Sino-Japanese War,25 apologized again for Japan’s aggression against China. During his visit to Korea in mid-October, the prime minister visited a prison site where independence activists had been held in colonial times, and in his meetings with Korean politicians, he made clear his intention to ‘apologize and show remorse’ for Japan’s past. He also agreed to the launch of joint research into history textbooks. 433

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At the same time, Prime Minister Koizumi resumed the practice of visits to Yasukuni Shrine. With the first visit taking place on 13 August 2001 and the last one on 15 August 2005, he made altogether six visits to the shrine during his time in office. After each visit, both China and South Korea reacted strongly. Both countries rejected Japanese proposals for summit meetings, which were not held while Koizumi remained in office. However, the prime minister kept insisting that his official visits were intended to commemorate the war dead and to renew his commitment to world peace and that they were not meant to legitimize past actions. A statement he made after his first visit to the shrine expressed the same historical awareness as the Murayama Statement. Even at a time when mutual visits of heads of state of Japan and China ceased, however, the Japan–China strategic dialogue continued. After Koizumi resigned in 2005, bilateral relations were improved as the Abe Shinzō cabinet initiated a Strategy of Mutual Relationship. Abe underlined the importance of relations with China by deciding that he would visit the country on his first official visit abroad as prime minister. As a result of this decision, summit meetings were resumed for the first time in five years. Thereafter, the history issue ceased to be a major point of contention in diplomatic relations, and the Japanese side assumed that reconciliation had been achieved. But soon circumstances arose that led to the disappointment of such assumptions. The main cause of this was the emergence of territorial disputes. South Korean–Japanese relations deteriorated rapidly as a result of the Shimane prefectural assembly introducing a ‘Takeshima Day’ in February 2005. Both countries claim sovereignty over a small group of islands known as Takeshima (Dokdo, aka Liancourt Rocks), which were declared Japanese territory in 1905, when Korea was turned into a Japanese protectorate. Following the normalization of relations between Japan and South Korea in 1965, both sides, to prevent a diplomatic dispute, tacitly agreed not to address the question of sovereignty over the islands. But this tacit agreement was now violated. The introduction of a purely ceremonial ‘Takeshima Day’ may have been an action by a prefectural assembly, but as the Korean side saw it, the fact that the assembly was not restrained by the national government amounted to an act of legitimization of past aggression. As a result, relations between the two countries deteriorated rapidly as President Roh Moo-hyun (1946–2009, in office 2003–08) reversed his originally Japan-friendly position and started criticizing Prime Minister Koizumi’s stance on the history question. His successor as president, Lee Myung-bak (b. 1941, in office 2008–13), added to the tension when he visited Takeshima and demanded that the Japanese emperor apologize to Korea for colonial rule. There is also the question of sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands (Diaoyutai) in relations between Japan and China. This question had remained dormant for many years after the normalization of relations between the two countries in 1972, but it reemerged in September 2010, when a Chinese fishing boat rammed a Japanese Coastguard vessel. Subsequently Chinese ships frequently violated Japanese territorial waters, leading to a rapid deterioration in relations. Tensions between both countries reached a high point with the nationalization of the Senkaku Islands by the Japanese cabinet in September 2012. In this unfortunate fashion, the history question became entangled with territorial disputes and continues to haunt relations between Japan and its neighbours at present.

The ‘settlement’ of the question of postwar reparations and the internationalization of the comfort women question From the mid-1990s on, there were increasingly frequent moves by Chinese to seek individual compensation in Japanese courts of law. This was based on the reasoning that there was a 434

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distinction between war reparations paid by a state to another state and compensation for damages paid to the people of that state. The legal argument was that although the former had been renounced in the 1972 Japan–China Joint Communiqué, the latter had not. These individual initiatives were also accepted by the Chinese government. In April 2007, Japan’s Supreme Court, in decisions in two lawsuits concerning postwar compensation in which Chinese victims were plaintiffs, dismissed the claims while recognizing the fact of forced labour and sexual violence and expressing sympathy for the physical and mental suffering of the victims.This decision was based on the legal opinion that the validity of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, which did not recognize compensation based on ‘the right to individual claims’, extended to the joint declarations between Japan and China, and between Japan and the Soviet Union, even though neither the People’s Republic of China nor the Soviet Union had signed the Peace Treaty. In other words, the final judgment issued stated that the right to claim compensation by individuals would not be recognized. The Supreme Court decision further stated that the exercise of the right to claim compensation by nationals of victim countries ‘would impose excessive burdens on any state and people that were difficult to estimate at the time of the concluding of the Peace Treaty and, moreover, there were concerns that this might also lead to a state of confusion, which would prevent the realization of the goals of the Peace Treaty’. In short, the Supreme Court was attempting to ensure the legal stability of the Peace Treaty system by putting the brakes on the growing number of individual compensation lawsuits. Another significant point of the Supreme Court decision was that it forced the government, the people and the concerned businesses to find a solution, as it was no longer possible to settle by legal means a historical question dating back more than 60 years. The Supreme Court decision noted parenthetically that ‘it hopes that efforts would be made to compensate the victims’. As a result of this, a number of Japanese corporations such as Nishimatsu Construction reached reconciliation agreements with the victims in the following years. In this fashion, the way for citizens of the victim countries to seek compensation from the state through lawsuits in Japanese courts was effectively closed. But the history problem transcended the responses of the Japanese government, as well as the Japanese judiciary, and it even transcended the question of bilateral relations. The comfort women issue is a perfect example of this. This issue is no longer a problem only between Japan and Korea, but has become internationalized as a question of humanity and human rights. Since 1993 the issue has been regularly discussed by the United Nations Human Rights Committee. The Coomaraswamy Report, based on investigations in Japan and Korea and submitted to the Human Rights Committee in 1994, designated former comfort women as ‘sex slaves’ (victims of sexual coercion) and recommended that the Japanese government accept legal responsibility, offer a public apology, pay compensation and punish the persons responsible. In addition, the report pointed out that, ‘although the Special Rapporteur welcomes the (founding of the Asian Women’s Fund) from a moral perspective, it must be understood that it does not vindicate the legal claims of “comfort women” under public international law’.26 The Japanese government rejected the report, taking the position that it had dealt with the issue with sincerity by means of the Asian Women’s Fund. In July 2007, the so-called Comfort Women Resolution (House Resolution No. 121) was unanimously passed by the United States House of Representatives.27 The resolution strongly criticized the Japanese Army for coercing ‘young women into sexual slavery’ and demanded that the Japanese government offer a public apology. It also called for the introduction of thorough historical education on the subject. The passing of this resolution by the House of 435

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Representatives led to similar resolutions being adopted by the parliaments of Australia, Holland, Canada and the European Union. Also in Japan, as many as 40 resolutions and declarations were passed by various local assemblies demanding a sincere response from the government. On the other hand, a campaign has been launched by a number of private groups and members of Japan’s National Diet seeking a revision of this issue in an effort to ‘protect Japan’s honour’. This resulted in an issue-advocacy advertisement titled THE FACTS in the 14 June 2007 issue of the Washington Post, which contended among other things that no document had been found to show that anybody was forced to become a military comfort woman. The advertisement also denied that comfort women were sex slaves and claimed that the Kōno Statement itself, which recognized ‘abduction’, constituted the most significant piece of evidence various countries drew upon to criticize Japan. In December 2015, the foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea signed a new agreement with the intention of ‘finally and irreversibly settling’ the comfort women issue. This would be achieved by means of an expression of apology and remorse by Prime Minister Abe and the provision of 1 billion yen by the Japanese government to set up a relief foundation for former comfort women. Both governments announced that they would not mutually criticize each other in international venues such as the United Nations from that point on.28 With the conclusion of this agreement, the comfort women question reached a final settlement between Japan and Korea, but, of course, it does not mean that all history problems between Japan and Korea have been settled. The Korean government continues to adhere to the interpretation that claims for reparations for ‘illegal acts that violate humanity’ fall outside the scope of the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of South Korea. It insists that these ‘illegal acts’ include the coercive recruitment of comfort women, the abduction of workers and coercive mobilization. In July 2013, the Seoul High Court, in a lawsuit in which four plaintiffs forcedly recruited by Shin Nittetsu (New Japan Steel Corporation) sought to obtain compensation, issued a decision which ordered the payment of compensation.The decision held that ‘coercive mobilization under Japanese rule clashed with the core values of the South Korean Constitution that regards such actions as illegal’ and strongly criticized the position of the Japanese government that this issue has been ‘settled perfectly and finally’ under the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations and the claims agreement. It is clear that Japan must continue to address problems emerging as a result of the internationalization of the comfort women issue in the context of humanity and human rights.

Prospects for reconciliation After the end of the war in 1945, the Japanese government avoided the public examination of the question of war responsibility, nor did it seek to formulate an official government opinion concerning war and colonial rule, as well as the true nature of the mobilization system related to both. This is why no government ever produced a clear answer to the questions: ‘Who are the true victims of the war?’ and ‘Who bears the brunt of responsibility for the war?’ This lack of a uniform and coherent view on the wartime past resulted in the loss of international trust, as every time that a history problem arose, the government responded inadequately and often too late. In order to overcome this problem, from the 1990s on the Japanese government initiated a variety of reconciliation policies within the framework of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. These include the Peace, Friendship and Exchange Initiative, the Murayama Statement, the Asian Women’s Fund, Japan–China and Japan–South Korea joint history research projects and 436

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the 2015 Prime Minister Abe statement that followed up on the Murayama Statement. These policies, which to some extent have been appreciated by the neighbouring countries, have contributed to an improvement in international relations, but it is difficult to say that they have been fully appreciated in the key countries of China and South Korea. Why is that? One can think of many reasons. For example, some groups in Japan have always denied the evils of colonial rule. This is one factor that undermines trust in the government’s reconciliation policy. In addition, because the government has stubbornly stuck to its legalistic view that the right to claim compensation does not extend to individuals, there has been no way to respond to individual victims. Another obstacle is caused by the territorial disputes between Japan and South Korea over the Takeshima Islands and between Japan and China over the Senkaku Islands, which have become interwoven with the history question. ‘Historical nationalism’ has become inseparable from the territorial question, compounding the difficulty of overcoming the problem. Looking at more fundamental causes, there are the differences in historical awareness concerning colonial rule and war in each country.The People’s Republic of China has imposed ‘the anti-Japanese resistance war view’, which maintains that the postwar development of China is based on victory in the war against Japan, whereas South Korea regards ‘the illegality’ of colonial rule as ‘the core value’ of the South Korean Constitution, placing it at the centre of the nation’s historical outlook. These differences can be seen also in the joint research projects between South Korea and Japan, and between China and Japan, that are supported by the governments of the states involved. South Korea and China share a clear tendency to judge the legacy of human endeavours and actions in terms of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, in other words, to see history as a question of morality and moral principles. In contrast, for the Japanese the fundamental view is that ‘history’ is best left to historians and other researchers, and it should not be affected by politics or morality. This kind of view is reflected in historical interpretation and history education, and in this respect attitudes toward Japan as ‘the perpetrator’ have a tendency to turn into criticisms that are affected by moral judgments. It is not easy to overcome these differences. Until the 1980s in Japan an optimistic view prevailed that reconciliation with China and South Korea would come naturally with democratization, economic development, generational change of the leaders and the expansion of exchanges. This expectation has dissipated since the 2000s, when the policy of reconciliation that Japan can pursue appears to have reached its limits. However, historical research in China and South Korea has made much progress since the 1990s, and international academic exchanges are now frequent. Under the circumstances, Japan could take the initiative by opening and sharing resources on the modern and contemporary history of East Asia. As a first step in this direction, the digital archive JACAR has made sources available to all citizens of East Asian countries (and elsewhere). This, it is to be hoped, will contribute to the formation of new historical perspectives that will, by means of a multi-faceted dialogue, eliminate mutual criticisms, prejudices and misunderstandings. If factions that regard the wars waged by Japan and its colonial rule as a positive achievement are an obstacle to the historical reconciliation policy of the Japanese government, then a strong political leadership is necessary to restrain them. In any event, apologies and reparations based on a peace treaty for large-scale wars and colonial rule possess only a symbolic significance that cannot possibly compensate for the mental suffering of the victims or restore the cultural damages caused. For that reason, there will be a need to continuously strive for reconciliation, even after it is believed to have been achieved at a state level. To look at historical reconciliation as a process that is a continuous effort, not to 437

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falter in one’s sincere attitude to confront history, and to ensure that this effort is taken up by future generations, are the only means of winning back the trust of neighbouring countries and overcoming the history problem. A long road lies ahead before this can be achieved. (Translated by Christopher W. A. Szpilman)

Notes 1 See ‘Treaty of Peace with Japan. Signed at San Francisco, on 8 September 1951’, https://treaties.un.org/ doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%20136/volume-136-I-1832-English.pdf. 2 See ‘Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea’, https://en.wikisource.org/ wiki/Treaty_on_Basic_Relations_between_Japan_and_the_Republic_of_Korea. 3 See ‘Agreement Between Japan and the Republic of Korea Concerning the Settlement of Problems in Regard to Property and Claims and Economic Cooperation’, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ Agreement_Between_Japan_and_the_Republic_of_Korea_Concerning_the_Settlement_of_ Problems_in_Regard_to_Property_and_Claims_and_Economic_Cooperation. 4 ‘ Treaty of Peace between Japan and the Republic of China’, http://worldjpn.grips.ac.jp/documents/ texts/docs/19520428.T1E.html. 5 ‘Joint Communique of the Government of Japan and the Government of the People's Republic of China’, website of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/china/ joint72.html (last accessed 2 September 2016). 6 ‘Statement by Chief Cabinet Secretary Kiichi Miyazawa on History Textbooks’ (26 August 1982), website of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, www.mofa.go.jp/policy/postwar/state8208.html (last accessed 2 September 2016). 7 See the Examination Criteria for High School Textbooks, website of the Ministry of Education, www. mext.go.jp/b_menu/hakusho/nc/1284728.htm (last accessed 2 September 2016). 8 Cited in The New York Times, 7 September 1984, A6. 9 The International Military Tribunal for the Far East categorized defendants into class A war criminals (accused of crimes against peace), class B (accused of conventional war crimes) and class C (crimes   oneyama 2016; Totani 2008; 2015; Picciagainst humanity). See Kushner 2015; Lingen 2016; 2017; Y gallo 1979. 10 Enshrinement is a religious ceremony dating back to the Meiji period. All those who sacrificed their lives in incidents and wars in the name of the emperor are enshrined at Yasukuni as deities. Of 2.46 million souls who are enshrined there, those who died during the Pacific War are the most numerous. 11 See Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery, ‘Outline’, www.env.go.jp/garden/chidorigafuchi/english/ index.html. 12 ‘Statement by the Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono on the result of the study on the issue of “comfort women”,’ 4 August 1993, www.mofa.go.jp/policy/women/fund/state9308.html. 13 ‘Statement by the Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono on the result of the study on the issue of “comfort women”,’ 4 August 1993, www.mofa.go.jp/policy/women/fund/state9308.html. 14 See the centre’s website, www.jacar.go.jp. 15 For more on the history of the AWF, see www.awf.or.jp/e-preface.htm. 16 The letter was eventually signed by Murayama’s successor, Hashimoto Ryūtarō (1937–2006). 17 ‘Letter from Prime Minister to the Former Comfort Women’, 1996, www.awf.or.jp/e6/statement-12. html. 18 For details, see Asian Women’s Fund, ‘Atonement Project of the Asian Women's Fund’, www.awf.or.jp/ e3/index.html. 19 ‘Statement by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama ‘On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the war’s end’. (15 August 1995), www.mofa.go.jp/announce/press/pm/murayama/9508.html. 20 See ‘Japan-Republic of Korea Joint Declaration. A New Japan-Republic of Korea Partnership towards the Twenty-first Century’, www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/korea/joint9810.html. 21 See ‘Japan-China Joint Declaration. On Building a Partnership of Friendship and Cooperation for Peace and Development’, www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/china/visit98/joint.html. 22 See ‘Japan-Republic of Korea Joint Declaration. A New Japan-Republic of Korea Partnership towards the Twenty-first Century’, www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/korea/joint9810.html. 23 See ‘Japan-China Joint Declaration. On Building a Partnership of Friendship and Cooperation for Peace and Development’, www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/china/visit98/joint.html. 438

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2 4 On the Tsukuru-kai textbook, see Saaler 2005: ch. 1 and Saaler 2014b. 25 It was at the Marco Polo Bridge that the Sino-Japanese War broke out in July 1937. 26 ‘Addendum. Report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy, in accordance with Commission on Human Rights resolution 1994/45. Report on the mission to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Republic of Korea and Japan on the issue of military sexual slavery in wartime’, awf.or.jp/pdf/h0004.pdf. 27 See ‘H.Res.121 – A resolution expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the Government of Japan should formally acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its Imperial Armed Forces’ coercion of young women into sexual slavery, known to the world as “comfort women”, during its colonial and wartime occupation of Asia and the Pacific Islands from the 1930s through the duration of World War II’, www.congress.gov/ bill/110th-congress/house-resolution/121/text. 28 See ‘Announcement by Foreign Ministers of Japan and the Republic of Korea’, 28 December 2015, www.mofa.go.jp/a_o/na/kr/page4e_000364.html.

Further reading Hatano Sumio (2011) Kokka to rekishi, Chūō Kōronsha. Ishikida, Miki (2005) Toward Peace:War Responsibility, Postwar Compensation, and Peace Movements and Education in Japan, New York: iUniverse. Yamazaki, Jane (2006) Japanese Apologies for World War II: A Rhetorical Study, London: Routledge. Yoneyama, Lisa (2016) Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes, Durham, NC: Duke Uniersity Press.

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31 The politics of Yasukuni Shrine and war memory Jeff Kingston

At the January 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos, Prime Minister Abe Shinzō stumbled on the world stage when he warned of the dangers of complacency regarding the possibility of conflict between China and Japan, drawing a parallel between Great Britain and Germany on the eve of World War I when European diplomats were ‘sleepwalking’ into the abyss. The media suggested it was a warmongering speech, based apparently on a misleading translation. Abe’s spin doctors were fuming at the damaging misinterpretation, but given that Abe made a pilgrimage to Yasukuni Shrine only three weeks earlier on 26 December 2013, it is understandable that the press was primed to assume the worst. This is because Yasukuni is widely viewed as a ‘ground zero’ for an unrepentant, glorifying narrative of Japan’s wartime rampage 1931–45 (Kingston 2007). Although Beijing and Seoul’s criticism of Abe’s visit to the shrine was anticipated, Washington’s swift and sharp rebuke was not. Abe thought he would get a pass from Washington despite extensive behind the scenes lobbying warning him not to visit the shrine, including a phone call from U.S. Vice-President Joseph Biden. He had just closed a deal with then governor of Okinawa Nakaima Hirokazu (b. 1939) to proceed with plans to build a bitterly contested new airbase in Ōura Bay, Henoko (see Chapter 9 in this volume), in exchange for a little over $20 billion spread out over eight years. The base is important to the Pentagon, and Abe appeared to deliver on security what his predecessors could not. But he and his advisors completely misread Washington on history issues and paid the price. Champagne corks were no doubt popping in Beijing and Seoul celebrating Abe’s ‘own goal’ at Yasukuni and media drubbing at Davos. There was also a war of words conducted in op-eds in European and U.S. newspapers as usually dignified diplomats exchanged insults and invective, even invoking Harry Potter characters to vilify their counterparts. In the Daily Telegraph (1 January 2013), for example, the Chinese ambassador to the U.K. wrote: ‘If militarism is like the haunting Voldemort of Japan, the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo is a kind of horcrux, representing the darkest parts of that nation’s soul’ (emphasis added). The Japanese ambassador replied in the same tabloid, East Asia is now at a crossroads.There are two paths open to China. One is to seek dialogue, and abide by the rule of law. The other is to play the role of Voldemort in the region by letting loose the evil of an arms race and escalation of tensions. (Daily Telegraph, 1 May 2014) 440

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Yasukuni’s symbolism is thus embedded in twenty-first-century popular discourse in ways that implicate no other site in the world for honouring the war dead. This chapter elucidates why this is so by examining the history and politics of Yasukuni and what the shrine and the adjacent Yūshūkan Museum signify about Japan’s troubled relationship with its wartime past and what this portends domestically and internationally.

Origins and evolution The Meiji Emperor (1852–1912) established the Tōkyō Shōkonsha (‘Shrine to Summon the Souls’) in June 1869 to commemorate the soldiers who died in the Boshin War that toppled the Tokugawa shogunate in the so-called Meiji Restoration.1 In 1879, it was renamed Yasukuni Jinja, becoming the apex of a national network of State Shinto shrines that promoted devotion to, and sacrifice for, the emperor and nation. In 1887, the military took over enshrinement duties. Subsequently, soldiers and others who lost their lives in service to the empire were enshrined there as eirei, ‘heroic souls’.Yasukuni came to provide an ideological and spiritual foundation for the expanding war in the 1930s and 1940s as the enshrined souls were considered deities and revered as national heroes, symbols of unequivocal dedication to the empire. As such, Yasukuni served to maintain national morale during a time of tremendous sacrifice and great loss. Although there are no actual remains at Yasukuni, the names of those enshrined are recorded in the ‘Repository for the Register of Deities’ at the shrine. A total of 2,466,532 men, women and children are currently enshrined there,2 including 1,068 war criminals, 14 of which were convicted as Class A war criminals by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMFTE, usually referred to as the Tokyo Trials), meaning the leaders deemed guilty of crimes against peace and orchestrating Japan’s Asian rampage between 1931 and 1945. In addition, the souls of ethnic Koreans and Taiwanese, who were subjects of the empire at that time, were enshrined there during and after World War II. Many of these non-Japanese, and some Japanese Christians and other dissenters, have petitioned to be dis-enshrined, but to no avail. After World War II, the Allied occupation authorities issued the ‘Shinto Directive’, establishing the separation of religion and state, the principle underlying Article 20 of the new Constitution that came into effect in 1947 (see also Chapter 11 in this volume). This meant that Yasukuni Shrine was no longer a state operated entity and has been maintained as a privately funded and operated religious corporation (dokuritsu shūkyō hōjin). The relationship between the government and the shrine has been a source of controversy. Between 1956 and 1959 the government provided information to shrine authorities about the war dead to facilitate their enshrinement at Yasukuni, an act that seemingly contravened the Constitution. A similar transfer of information also facilitated the enshrinement of Class B and C war criminals between 1959 and 1967. Information about the fourteen Class A war criminals was sent to the shrine officials by the government in 1966, but it was not until 1978 that they were secretly enshrined, apparently in some cases without their families’ consent (personal communication with Tōgō Kazuhiko, grandson of wartime Foreign Minister Tōgō Shigenori, one of the Class A war criminals enshrined at Yasukuni). Their enshrinement has been controversial and is cited as one reason there have been no visits to the shrine by an emperor since 1975.The presence of the men convicted of orchestrating Japan’s war of imperialist aggression in Asia ensures that this site is about much more than just commemorating the war dead. It is politically divisive among Japanese and is also a stumbling block in diplomatic relations with China and South Korea because the enshrinement of the Class A war criminals is interpreted as a gesture aimed at justifying Japan’s baleful actions and thus deemed offensive. 441

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After the end of the Allied occupation of Japan in 1952, prime ministers have visited Yasukuni Shrine, but the first to do so on 15 August, the anniversary of Japan’s surrender, was Miki Takeo (1907–88) in 1975.That proved to be the same year as the emperor’s eighth and last visit. In 1988, Hirohito (Shōwa Emperor), told the Grand Steward of the Imperial Household Agency, Tomita Tomohiko (1920–2003), that he refrained from visiting Yasukuni Shrine because the Class A war criminals were enshrined there (Breen 2007: 3). In 1985, Nakasone Yasuhiro (b. 1918) became the second premier to visit the shrine on 15 August, but he and his twentieth-century successors refrained from visiting thereafter due to the harsh backlash in China and South Korea (Akazawa 2005; 2015). Prime Minister Hashimoto Ryūtarō (1937–2006) interrupted this unofficial moratorium when he visited on his birthday in 1996. Nakasone’s visit sparked numerous lawsuits around Japan challenging the constitutionality of such visits because they appeared to blur the line between state and religion enshrined in the Constitution. In 1992, the Osaka High Court issued a curious ruling, stating that it suspected that prime minister visits are unconstitutional. In 2004, the Fukuoka High Court ruled that prime ministerial visits were unconstitutional, and in 2005 the Osaka High Court concurred. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō visited Yasukuni every year during his 2001 to 2006 tenure, and Abe Shinzō visited in 2013, after letting it be known that one of his greatest regrets was not having visited during his first term as premier in 2006–07.

Identity politics and Yasukuni In the twenty-first century, Yasukuni Shrine serves as an awkward talisman for national identity in Japan because it is the epicentre for an unrepentant view about Japan’s shared history with Asia in the twentieth century (Kingston 2007). The adjacent Yūshūkan Museum features a valourizing and exonerating narrative of Japan’s imperial aggression 1895–1945. Ironically, the Imperial Household revered by Japan’s reactionaries continues to boycott Yasukuni, a poignant renunciation by its erstwhile head priest. In Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory and Japan’s Unending Postwar, Akiko Takenaka complicates the Yasukuni problem, arguing that ‘to some it portrays an inexcusably distorted view of the past; for others, its representation of military death helped them through the difficult postwar years’ (Takenaka 2015: 191). She reminds us that the shrine has had varying and often shifting meanings to the Japanese over the years and that the shifts reflect larger trends in society. It serves as a stage for war memory and remains a symbol of Japan’s purported collective amnesia overseas, but the real problem is not the shrine, but rather, she argues, the difficulties that vanquished aggressors have in commemorating the stigmatized war dead who died for an ignominious cause (see also Nelson 2003). Americans are familiar with this problem as the fraught battles over the Vietnam War Memorial eloquently attest. Yasukuni, however, is a religious institution where the souls of the dead are enshrined, people go there to pray and participate in seasonal rites of Shintoism. Thus, in some respects it is an entry into the realm of the otherworldly and appeals to the transcendent spiritual needs of visitors. Moreover, Yasukuni institutionalizes grief, thereby providing solace to war-bereaved relatives. Takenaka also recalibrates the Yasukuni problem, arguing that criticism focusing on the presence of the class A war criminals at Yasukuni Shrine reinforces the idea that Japanese were victims and, ‘only a handful of men were responsible for what happened during the war’ (Takenaka 2015: 16). Nelson (2003) points out how the ‘cult of the war dead’ consecrated at the altar of Yasukuni plays a redemptive role that stokes pride while thwarting apology, restitution and reconciliation.

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Yet, Takenaka asserts, Yasukuni Shrine can serve as a reminder of the tumultuous history of modern Japan, facilitate debate on the ways in which the war is remembered over time, and, in particular, become a reminder of the ongoing need to examine the concept of postwar responsibility (sengo sekinin) as it applies to past, present, and future generations. (Takenaka 2015: 196) Agreeing with Takenaka, Akiko Hashimoto in her incisive The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory and Identity in Japan reminds us that The divisiveness of cultural trauma makes it all the more difficult for the nation’s past to be fully comprehended by later generations, but it ensures that those memories are kept alive in a continuous struggle to imagine the nation’s future (Hashimoto 2015: 141) Clearly,Yasukuni has become a politicized symbol of Japan’s incomplete reckoning regarding wartime misdeeds 1931–45 and thus an impediment to reconciliation. It remains divisive among Japanese precisely because it is not only seen to be a sacred site for honouring the sacrifices of Japan’s war dead.Takenaka draws attention to grassroots efforts to reposition Yasukuni as a ‘countermonument’ highlighting state betrayal. There is considerable criticism of politicians paying their respects to Japan’s war dead at the sacred site because such gestures appear motivated more by temporal political concerns than solemn devotional commemoration. As Seraphim (2006) notes, there is a powerful democratic movement among Japanese that rejects reactionary revanchism and efforts to glorify the past, ensuring that Yasukuni and what it stands for remains a symbol of betrayal and perfidy. She elucidates how civic organizations have shaped and been shaped by public commemorations and exhumations of war memory. But revisionist voices persist in contesting the incriminating narrative, no more conspicuously than at Yasukuni, the ‘home field’ so to speak of the Nihon izokukai (War Bereaved Families Association) established in 1947. She details how the Nihon izokukai has promoted a narrative of martyrdom based on denial, silence, deception and ambiguity as it politicized war memory from the corridors of political power due to its close relations with the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Japan’s dominant political force since 1955 (cf. Nelson 2003). Brian Masshardt (2007) also explores Yasukuni as a site for political contestation between conservative organizations like Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), established in 1997, which advocates support for the shrine and politicians’ visits, versus anti-Yasukuni citizen movements like Heiwa izokukai (The Association of War Bereaved Families for Peace) that was established in reaction to Prime Minister Nakasone’s 1985 visit on 7 July 1986, the anniversary of the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge incident that sparked an escalation of Japanese hostilities in mainland China. Members of Heiwa izokukai refer to Yasukuni as the ‘war shrine’ and ‘invasion shrine’ and claim to be the genuine voice of the war bereaved because they don’t honour the militarist aspects of Yasukuni. Yasukuni kaitai kikaku (1993), a leftist organization that focuses on organizing protests on 15 August every year, embraces a more confrontational anti-Yasukuni activism in the limelight of media attention while assaying police cordons on the day when the conservative turnout is reliably large. Overseas perceptions of monolithic support among the Japanese public for Yasukuni are misleading, but the conservative elite that wields political power does embrace the exonerating

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narrative enshrined at Yasukuni and on display at the Yūshūkan Museum located on the shrine grounds (Saaler 2005: ch. 1). Domestic opinion about shrine visits vacillates as tensions with neighbours and press perspectives influence public attitudes (Seaton 2006; 2007). When Prime Minister Koizumi visited Yasukuni between 2001 and 2006, most of the media was highly critical, and a number of former prime ministers and prominent figures and key business organizations spoke out against his provocative pilgrimages (Kingston 2007). Following his final 2006 visit, however, 49 per cent of the public supported Koizumi’s visit, whereas only 37 per cent said he should not have gone (Asahi Shinbun, 28 January 2014). More recently, under Abe’s staunchly nationalist government, one that at the time enjoyed minimal media criticism, 46 per cent said he should not have gone, whereas only 41 per cent of voters had no objection to Abe’s 2013 visit, a fairly large swing against visiting compared to 2006; in seven years, support for prime ministerial visits fell by 8 per cent and opposition increased by 9 per cent at a time when many observers worried about a significant rightward shift in Japan.3 A majority in 2014, 51 per cent, also said Abe should take criticism of his visit seriously. Interestingly, the 2014 survey conducted by the daily Asahi Shinbun found that half of the respondents voted to support the establishment of a secular state memorial facility for commemorating the war dead to replace Yasukuni Shrine, whereas only 29 per cent opposed this plan. Clearly, voter support for Yasukuni is ambivalent. Soon after Nakasone visited in 1985, a poll indicated that 52 per cent supported ‘official worship’, whereas only 25 per cent opposed, suggesting that since then there has been an incremental erosion of public support for, and a sharp increase in opposition to, politicians’ visits to Yasukuni (Breen 2007: 183). Seaton attributes this erosion of support to a split among conservatives between hardliners and pragmatists who don’t believe that genuflecting at Yasukuni is worth the negative impact on regional relations and Japan’s global image. It is striking just how isolated Koizumi was among the conservative elite with a number of former prime ministers, LDP party heavyweights, Keidanren and Keizai Dōyūkai (Japan’s two leading business federations) and even the conservative Yomiuri Shinbun counseling against visiting (Kingston 2007). But reactionary extremists resorted to thuggery, mailing a bullet to the Fuji Xerox chairman after he called on Koizumi to refrain from visiting and even setting fire to the house of the mother of Katō Kōichi (1939–2016), an LDP veteran known for promoting closer ties with China who criticized Koizumi for his grandstanding gesture at Yasukuni. In addition, extremists firebombed the offices of the daily Nihon Keizai Shinbun (Nikkei) in 2006 after it published the memo about Hirohito confiding to his grand chamberlain that he was boycotting Yasukuni due to the enshrinement of the Class A war criminals. These twenty-first-century neo-nationalist menacing tactics suggests a degree of desperation and evoke the violence of 1930s Japan when unhinged rightists resorted to assassination of business and political leaders to promote an agenda that lead Japan to instigate and widen war in Asia and eventually the United States in 1941 (see Chapters 12 and 13 in this volume). The contributions to the edited volume Yasukuni the War Dead and the Struggle for Japan’s Past (Breen 2007) exemplify the divisive character of the Yasukuni issue, making it an invaluable source to understand the fault-lines of contemporary discourse. Breen draws our attention to the desire by many bereaved families to have their family members dis-enshrined and the refusal of the shrine authorities to countenance such an action. Ethnic Koreans, Taiwanese and Okinawans, along with many Japanese, bristle at the non-consensual enshrinement of their relatives and still lobby for their liberation from a shrine that symbolizes a vindicating and valourizing narrative of the war. Interestingly, some conservative politicians advocate removal of the Class A war criminals as a way of making the shrine suitable for a resumption of imperial visits, but shrine authorities refuse partly because they don’t accept the verdicts or war criminal designation, and their presence has become part of Yasukuni’s indelible identity (Killmeier and Chiba 444

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2010). Others have advocated a moratorium on politicians’ visits (Togo 2006), and between 2006 and 2013, all prime ministers once again heeded this commonsense advice. Kevin Doak (2007a) emphasizes the religious nature of Yasukuni, arguing that, from his perspective as a Catholic, official visits to this shrine by government leaders do not violate the Constitution. Indeed, Doak wishes that Koizumi, Abe and other leaders would visit Yasukuni regularly, positioning such gestures in the frame of a ‘healthy’ civic nationalism. He also rejects an alternative site for honouring the war dead, suggesting that a secular site would be an insult to both those who made the ultimate sacrifice and their surviving families.That many of the families whose relatives were enshrined at Yasukuni against their wishes feel insulted is not Doak’s concern. He also argues that China’s atheistic leaders are incapable of truly understanding the sacred nature of Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni and congratulates him for avoiding the trap of secularism. One wonders, however, why visiting Yasukuni only became a passion for Koizumi after he had become prime minister. Political scientist Gerald Curtis says that Koizumi confided that he not only wanted to pray for peace as he declared in public, but also sought to normalize Yasukuni visits (personal communication). It was a way to liberate Japan from this past and reduce the neighbours’ diplomatic leverage. Interestingly, Doak confesses that at the time of writing he had not visited the Yūshūkan Museum, refurbished in 2002, that highlights the political agenda of shrine visits and yet asserted, ‘How one comes to terms with Yasukuni is fundamentally a question of how one come to terms with the sacred’ (Doak 2007a: 69). Similarly, Seki (2007) legitimizes patronage of Yasukuni because it is spiritually meaningful while castigating China’s ‘abnormal obsession’ with shrine visits. Nitta (2007) approves of Yasukuni visits, but his reasoning is quite different from Doak. In Nitta’s view, the historical view embodied by Yasukuni, one that is unapologetically unrepentant about Japan’s wartime depredations, is unobjectionable. Moreover, he believes that the fourteen Class A war criminals enshrined there since 1978 were convicted in a dubious judicial process, the IMTFE, and believes they are innocent martyrs. Wang Zhixin (2007) disagrees with Doak and Nitta, asserting that Yasukuni serves as a symbol of modern Japan’s lack of contrition over its Asian rampages. In the same volume, Takahashi Tetsuya (2007) warns against renationalizing Yasukuni to facilitate a resumption of emperor visits. In his view, narrowly focusing on the issue of the Class A war criminals minimizes the scope of Japan’s war responsibility, an issue that Takenaka (2015) helpfully elaborates on. In her view, Yasukuni is a convenient scapegoat that allows Japanese to avert their eyes from a more encompassing popular war responsibility that implicates well beyond the elite put on trial at the IMTFE. It is clear that Yasukuni resonates with talismanic symbolism and is the nexus where the cult of the emperor, imperial expansion and militarism are inextricably intertwined. Although some advocates seek to downplay, deny or otherwise minimize the historical baggage of Yasukuni, it is precisely because of this legacy that the site has become such a fierce battleground. Rhetorical sophistry notwithstanding, visits to Yasukuni by Japanese leaders are not principally about honouring the war dead; they are meant to convey a political message paying homage to pre-1945 Imperial Japan and rehabilitating the ignominious past. Japan can honour its war dead, however, without antagonizing its victims and embarrassing it allies by focusing commemoration rites at the nearby Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery, a secular facility established in 1959 as a repository for the remains of 352,297 unidentified soldiers, where annual ceremonies are held every 15 August, which are attended by the prime minister and emperor. In October 2013, before Prime Minister Abe made his December visit to Yasukuni, two senior U.S. officials, Secretary of State John Kerry and Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel, seemed to be making a statement when they laid flowers at Chidorigafuchi, but the message was apparently ignored. During the brief rule of the Democratic Party of Japan (2009–12) 445

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there was an unofficial moratorium on visits to Yasukuni by cabinet ministers, but this ended with the recrudescence of nationalism under Abe and the return to power of LDP politicians beholden to Nippon Kaigi. More than three-quarters of Abe’s cabinet members (2012–15) belong to this reactionary group that promotes shrine visits, revisionist history and constitutional revision (Mullins 2016; McNeill 2015).

The ‘Abe Statement’ and the cornerstone view Cabinet endorsement of the 2015 Abe Statement marking the seventieth anniversary of Japan’s surrender elevated the myopic and exculpatory revisionist narrative of history to Japan’s official policy. The vague and ambiguous references to past misdeeds, the inadequate recognition of Japanese aggression and the horrors inflicted, the minimalist nods toward contrition and putting an end to apology are now state policy. This is a major watershed in Japan’s postwar history that digs a deep diplomatic hole and casts a shadow over the nation’s significant and praiseworthy achievements over the past seven decades. Ironically, given Abe’s intention of making a futureoriented statement, his circumlocutions about history have only heightened scrutiny of Japan’s wartime past and an evident perpetrator’s fatigue. There was a very interesting contrast in the seventieth-anniversary commemoration statements by Emperor Akihito and Prime Minister Abe Shinzō that highlights the ongoing political divide between revisionists and the understanding of most Japanese about how Japan got to where it is today. Citing the deaths of more than 3 million Japanese during the war and the deprivation that prevailed, Abe asserted that, ‘The peace we enjoy today exists only upon such precious sacrifices. And therein lies the origin of postwar Japan’. This is the revisionist conceit, the ‘cornerstone myth’ boldly asserted at Yasukuni/Yūshūkan, that insists that the carnage was worthwhile because it is the basis for the peace and prosperity now enjoyed by contemporary Japanese (Breen 2007: 156).Yet Abe’s handpicked advisory panel termed this a ‘reckless’ war, undermining any attempts to exalt it or bestow such a glowing legacy (Advisory Panel 2015).This panel was established in February 2015 and delivered its final report to Abe on August 6 as a reference for his statement. It was striking that this report was presented on the day that Japanese commemorate the bombing of Hiroshima and contemplate the folly of war. The panel also noted that Japan wreaked havoc in Asia, presiding over a cruel colonial system that stifled self-determination and brought devastation to the homeland. As a result, ‘the responsibilities of the Japanese government and military leaders from the 1930s and beyond are very serious indeed’ (Breen 2007: 156). The Abe Statement is equivocal on this issue of responsibility and hazy about the suffering inflicted. It honours the war dead by honouring their sacrifice, but also suggests that the nightmare imposed on the Japanese people and Asian neighbours by irresponsible wartime leaders somehow led to peace. Well, yes, the devastation and defeat of Japan led to surrender and then peace, but the logic is unsettling. Abe is suggesting that the peace enjoyed today came from Japanese aggression in the 1930s and 1940s and thereby tries to confer some legitimacy on those actions. This sly justification of war reified at the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan complex is not necessary to honouring the war dead. They died because Japan’s leaders at the time, including Abe’s grandfather Kishi Nobusuke (1896–1987), launched Japan into this avoidable tragedy. Those leaders held Japanese lives cheap, sacrificing them to awful horrors for an unredeemable cause. Dressing up this sanguinary rampage as the bedrock of contemporary Japan is a deplorable deceit. Their deaths were in vain because Japan’s inglorious regional rampage claimed perhaps as many as 20 million Asian lives4 and trampled on the dignity and welfare of countless more.

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Abe’s advisory panel pointedly rejected the revisionist assertion displayed at the Yūshūkan that Japan fought the war to liberate Asians from the yoke of   Western colonialism. Revisionists often invoke this ostensible Pan-Asian crusade in an effort to ennoble Japan’s ignoble aggression. They try to portray Japan’s sacrifices as worthwhile because they were in service of an altruistic mission. But Abe’s advisory panel bluntly rejected this retrospective wishful thinking, stating that decolonization in Asia was an unintended consequence, and never a goal, of wartime Japan. On 15 August 2015 Emperor Akihito spoke for most Japanese in repudiating Abe’s revisionist assertion that wartime sacrifices begot contemporary peace: Our country today enjoys peace and prosperity, thanks to the ceaseless efforts made by the people of Japan toward recovery from the devastation of the war and toward development, always backed by their earnest desire for the continuation of peace. (Imperial Household Agency 2015) Peace and prosperity, in Akihito’s view, did not come from treating Japanese like cannon fodder during the war, but rather was based on the postwar efforts of Japanese to overcome the tragedy inflicted by Japan’s warmongering leaders who provoked and prolonged the suffering endured. He clearly did not honour the senseless waste of Japanese lives as the foundation of twentyfirst-century Japan as Abe did and instead gave credit where it was due – to the people and their ongoing commitment to pacifism. The subtext here appears to be a not-so-subtle suggestion that Abe is leading the nation away from this peaceful path with his 2015 security legislation targeting constitutional constraints on Japan’s military forces. Such are the political fault-lines of wartime history in Japan that form the backdrop to the rituals of remembrance and rites of contrition and atonement at Yasukuni. The revisionists, those who seek to craft a more positive and vindicating narrative of Japan’s wartime past, now dominate the corridors of power and under the aegis of Abe are waging an all-out offensive that extends from textbooks and public diplomacy to constitutional revision and efforts to stifle press freedom. Nippon Kaigi seeks to overturn what is derided as Japan’s masochistic history, end a diplomacy involving apologizing for the war, revise the allegedly U.S.-imposed 1947 Constitution and put the emperor back in the driver’s seat (Mullins 2016; McNeill 2015). It promotes patriotic education, applauds Japan’s wartime Pan-Asian crusade and boasts an impressive membership of nearly 40,000, including retired CEOs, top brass in the military, party heads, university presidents and prominent pundits. It circulates petitions that garner millions of signatures. Nippon Kaigi stances would have been condemned as extremist in the 1990s, but are now mainstreamed; most of Abe’s cabinet and about one-third of the Diet are members, and Abe serves as ‘special advisor’ to the nation’s most influential nationalist lobbying group (Saaler 2016a). It is like the U.S. Tea Party with power. Most Japanese are not keen to whitewash the nation’s wartime history (Saaler 2005: ch. 3), but they also don’t relish assuming the burdens of that history. As the generations with a more direct connection to that era pass on, younger Japanese may shrink from donning the hair shirt of war responsibility. New government educational guidelines issued in 2015 promote patriotic education and a more valourous and vindicating narrative that will reinforce this inclination (Tawara 2015). Publishers have been given marching orders and responded by removing mention of comfort women from all of the textbooks that dominate the market and hewing to the government line of territorial disputes and other historical controversies.

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Reconciliation There is a logic, and appeal, in Abe’s call for an end to apology in a nation where more than 80 per cent were born after 1945. If indeed divining the path to ‘moral recovery’ is at the core of Japan’s history problem, is the revisionist vision of an airbrushed, unapologetic approach to history a viable option? Hashimoto demurs, arguing that, national memories of war are no longer self-contained in a globalizing culture of memory, and forgetting is no longer an option as it had been in the past.The new international world order demands imaginative concessions and innovative compromise to break the logjams of historical grievances. For the Japanese this will mean giving up their comfort zone of ambiguity in the amorphous middle ground between guilt and innocence in World War II. (Hashimoto 2015: 141) Yet the prospects for regional reconciliation in northeast Asia remain bleak due to patriotic grandstanding and efforts to orchestrate national solidarity. Anti-Japanese nationalism is a touchstone of Korean national identity and a useful distraction for the Chinese government from myriad domestic problems. Problematically, both nations demand apologies even as they overlook their own dark histories. So given that apologies are unlikely to achieve reconciliation and may fall on deaf ears, why should Abe or anyone else in Japan take the measure of this shared history and offer an apology? Hashimoto argues that doing so is an ‘ennobling act’ and is a ‘pathway to transcend stigma’ (Hashimoto 2015: 132). Based on Germany’s experience she argues that, ‘rapprochement ultimately presupposes a compelling apology, an admission of wrongdoing, to achieve a common sense of justice’ (Hashimoto 2015: 132). But doing so requires leadership and strength of character and would require Abe to renounce his deeply held views. In extravagant understatement, Abe’s history advisory panel concluded that, ‘it cannot be said that reconciliation with China and the Republic of Korea has been fully achieved’ (Advisory Panel 2015). Going forward, it advised grasping the nettle of history and expressing ‘remorse over the past and reclosing the buttons done up incorrectly in the past’. But those awkward buttons have proven quite tricky, especially given the revisionists’ fumbling fingers. The advisory panel also contends that Japan’s failure to achieve reconciliation with regional victims is not really Tokyo’s fault. Japan is often compared unfavourably to Germany in terms of forthrightly facing the past and thereby advancing reconciliation, but the report contends that this was because Germany’s victims magnanimously responded ‘with a heart of tolerance’. But of course it is easier to be magnanimous, tolerant and future oriented when the perpetrator is not denying, downplaying, diluting and otherwise shifting blame and responsibility, opposing reparations or glorifying and valourizing the past, as Japan’s revisionists continually do. The report asks what the differences are in how victims in Europe and in Asia have embraced reconciliation without probing the differences between the perpetrator’s stances on war responsibility, that is, Germany’s unequivocal acceptance versus Japan’s incomplete, grudging approach. As Germans know very well, the burdens of history are heavy and relentless. Rituals of commemoration and rites of war memory are especially fraught for vanquished aggressors, but Germany has been a nonpareil penitent, embracing a forthright reckoning of the horrific past and advancing reconciliation with victims and former adversaries with admirable perseverance. Of course, this enviable record comes with caveats because it took the better part of two decades for West Germany to fully embrace the imperatives of reconciliation, but after a slow start it has been unflinching in scrutinizing the Nazi era and unflagging in efforts to assume responsibility 448

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and atone for the suffering inflicted. It is not just neo-Nazi skinheads who are questioning this penitent identity, but political leaders remain steadfast on the need for Germany to embrace the ‘everlasting responsibility’ Chancellor Angela Merkel affirmed at war commemoration ceremonies in 2015,5 and none are genuflecting toward the Nazi past. Abe’s stand on history may appeal to his conservative base, but does not play well in the region and is a major obstacle to reconciliation. Japan as the perpetrator doesn’t get to unilaterally decide when it can dispense with apologizing, especially given the deeply flawed recognition of war responsibility evident at the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan complex and repeated vacillations in expressions of contrition by Japan’s ruling politicians.

Arlington and Yasukuni In a May 2013 interview with Foreign Affairs, Abe compared Yasukuni Shrine to Arlington National Cemetery and cited Kevin Doak in saying that ‘visiting the cemetery does not mean endorsing slavery, even though Confederate soldiers are buried there’.6 So Abe is apparently arguing that visiting Yasukuni doesn’t mean endorsing Japanese imperial aggression, but whereas Arlington has not been controversial, Yasukuni is precisely because within and without Japan many people believe that visits there are not innocuous and do convey support for the wartime order. Abe also asserted that ‘I think it’s quite natural for a Japanese leader to offer prayer for those who sacrificed their lives for their country, and I think this is no different from what other world leaders do’. Surely Abe is right that every nation honours and mourns the war dead. So isn’t the fuss over prime ministerial visits to Yasukuni unfair? The question to ask is whether Yasukuni is really like Arlington. True, both sites were established in the aftermath of civil wars in the 1860s, but there the similarities end (Kotler 2014). The Arlington National Cemetery was built on the grounds of General Robert E. Lee’s (1807–70) estate. Lee was the military commander of the Confederacy, and the expropriation of his land was intended to be a reminder of the folly of war and the horrific destruction caused by the South seceding from the Union, thereby instigating the conflict. Most importantly, at Arlington both Union and Confederate soldiers are buried in an effort to heal the national rift. At Yasukuni, however, the vanquished in the civil war that lead to the Meiji Restoration in 1868 were excluded. In addition, none of those interred at Arlington are considered deities as the enshrined at Yasukuni are. At Arlington, war dead of all faiths are buried, whereas Yasukuni is an explicitly Shinto Shrine. Christian war dead and non-Japanese are enshrined there, but often against family wishes. Arlington is an ecumenical site for sorrow and contemplation, whereas Yasukuni glorifies war and the sacrifices of those who died for the Empire and in that sense represents a bridge to State Shinto and the wartime militarist order that many Japanese feel is out of step with postwar pacifist norms and values. Arlington’s spiritual centre is the ‘Tomb of the Unknown Soldier’ with four crypts containing the unidentified remains of soldiers from the two World Wars, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.7 Yasukuni’s spiritual centre is the emperor-centred imperial system. At Yasukuni, the souls of those identified and approved for enshrinement by the shrine’s Shinto religious authorities are apotheosized. Arlington only allows the burial of those with an honourable discharge, whereas Yasukuni enshrines over 1,000 soldiers deemed to be war criminals. This designation is disputed partly because the war crimes tribunals were deeply flawed in terms of judicial process, fairness and international law, but also because some conservatives maintain that Japan fought a ‘just war’, a defensive war against the white imperial powers that aimed at liberating Asia from the yoke of   Western domination (Saaler 2014b).Yasukuni authorities reject the war crimes convictions and instead embrace a glorification of the war that they 449

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display at the Yūshūkan Museum. Sanctifying the war dead as heroes supports this narrative. Thus the ‘war criminals’ are positioned as martyrs, underscoring the problem of honouring the war dead who engaged in atrocities in a sanguinary rampage that lasted the better part of fifteen years, 1931–45. But in dismissing the judgments at the IMFTE and other war crime tribunals scattered around the region, Yasukuni represents a rejection of Article 5 of the San Francisco Treaty (1951/52) that ended the war and provided the basis for Japan’s rehabilitation into the international order.8 There are certainly good reasons why some Japanese believe that Japan was subjected to ‘victor’s justice’, but this miscarriage of justice is slyly conflated with an exonerating narrative. This subterfuge is evident just outside the Yūshūkan Museum where there is a monument to Radhabinod Pal (1886–1967), an Indian who served as a judge at the IMFTE and wrote an over 1,200-page dissenting opinion rejecting the convictions of the Class A war criminals. For taking this stand, Pal has been lionized in Japan, but also misleadingly appropriated by historical revisionists to declare the nation and its leaders innocent. As a matter of fact, this is not what Pal argued at all. He rejected the conviction because he argued that the IMFTE had no standing in international law, retroactively applied laws to the defendants in breach of international legal norms and the proceedings were fundamentally biased. This is because the judges came from the combatant nations, the judicial process was biased against the defendants and the Allied nations were not held accountable for their war crimes. But Pal never exonerated Japan and acknowledged that its soldiers and officers had committed extensive war crimes. This aspect of Pal’s dissent is ignored at Yasukuni and by revisionists in Japan (Tanaka, McCormack and Simpson 2011). Yasukuni thus politicizes history in ways that are completely absent at Arlington and takes a stand in promoting a boosterish narrative of Japan’s war conduct, whereas Arlington does not embrace explicitly any political or moral judgments about U.S. wars or military policies. Politicians’ visits to Yasukuni resonate with political purpose and are intended to send a defiant message, but that is not the case with Arlington. Kotler concludes: The Yasukuni Shrine is about declaring victory.The Emperor God was right, the victorious foreigners were wrong. Yasukuni is not about contrition or reflection, but about certainty. There, Japan did not lose the war. Imperial Japan, when Japanese were said to noble, selfless and brave, is longed for as a better time. Yasukuni is a place of defiance, and this is what separates it most from places of memory like Arlington National Cemetery. (Kotler 2014)

Time warp It is not possible to travel back in time, but the Yūshūkan Museum next to Yasukuni Shrine certainly tries. There visitors can understand what it must have been like for ordinary Japanese during the wartime, force fed a steady diet of propaganda, plausible in some regards as long as one doesn’t dwell on the evasions, circumlocutions and selective amnesia.The Yūshūkan presents a version of Japan’s wartime history that all Japanese in wartime Japan were expected to support or at least not openly question or disparage.9 It is a narrative that asserts much that does not stand up to scrutiny or the facts, but it is a compelling glimpse of how the wartime leadership wanted the nation to think about their actions, brimming with justification and what Pankaj Mishra, an Indian writer, refers to as ‘aggressive self-pity’ (personal communication).This is how revisionists want the world to understand Japan’s noble crusade. This narrative elides memory, shifts and denies war responsibility while portraying Japanese as the principle victims in this era of clashing imperialisms. As such, the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan narrative is anathema to Chinese and 450

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Koreans and provokes an angry nationalist backlash where the battle lines extend well beyond museum spaces. John Breen (2007) examines the Yūshūkan Museum and points to the absence of the enemy victims in the exhibits, thus evoking critical comparisons with Germany. He argues. ‘What the absence achieves splendidly is an amnesia of perpetration, of defeat, and, above all, of the horror of war’. From this perspective,Yasukuni and the Yūshūkan serve to reinforce the inadequate reckoning of war memory and responsibility that appears ascendant in Abe’s Japan. Probably few visitors will connect the locomotive on display at the entrance of the museum to the infamous ‘Railway of Death’ linking wartime Thailand and Burma, silently commemorating the deaths of tens of thousands of Asian slave labourers and Allied prisoners of war (POWs) who died while building it in pestilential jungle conditions and inhospitable terrain, a nightmare that is powerfully evoked in a recent film The Railway Man (2014). Allied POWs have also written extensively about the abuses inflicted on them by the Japanese troops while drawing attention to the far more heinous treatment of Asians by the Japanese ‘liberators’. The Yūshūkan imparts the revisionist narrative with brio and projects an exculpatory and glorifying narrative that dwells at length on suffering endured while overlooking completely the suffering that Japanese forces inflicted. The Class A war criminals are presented as martyrs, the war was legitimate and Japan forced to defend itself. This enables visitors to imagine what it must have been like to live in the dark days of militarism when fabulists orchestrated news that conformed to what wartime Japan’s leaders wanted to believe. Alas, Takenaka notes, there is increasing acceptance of this blinkered revisionist history because it helps the younger generation overcome this inherited past and evade war responsibility. What she calls the ‘post-memory generations’ prefer to be cast as victims of Western imperialism than vilified for atrocities committed by ancestors (Takenaka 2015). Blame is shifted, responsibility diluted and mitigated and those who died can be honoured without guilt. Yes, bad things may have happened in China, but didn’t Chinese bandits and terrorists instigate that? Wasn’t Japan responding to widespread aggression to defend its interests? Wasn’t it really fighting to liberate Asia from white domination, a race war for justice and dignity? Weren’t the so-called Class A war criminals subject to ‘victor’s justice’, railroaded in a dubious tribunal, only guilty because they were defeated while Allied war crimes were ignored? The version of what happened in 1937 Nanjing is a lesson in the politics of war memory. Visitors can watch a video showing Japanese troops bellowing a collective ‘Banzai!’ from atop the Nanjing city wall that abruptly cuts to a scene of a soldier distributing food to Chinese while the narrator helpfully explains that the Japanese troops entered the city and restored peace and harmony. The diorama about Nanjing is equally evasive, sidestepping considerable evidence about the massacre and widespread rape committed by Japanese troops. The Yūshūkan asserts: After the Japanese surrounded Nanking in December 1937, Gen. Matsui Iwane distributed maps to his men with foreign settlements and the Safety Zone marked in red ink. Matsui told them that they were to maintain strict military disciplines and that anyone committing unlawful acts would be severely punished. The defeated Chinese rushed to Xiaguan, and they were completely destroyed. The Chinese soldiers disguised in civilian clothes were severely prosecuted. (exhibition room 10) That is precisely the problem. The atrocities committed by Japanese troops are ignored. There are eyewitnesses, however, to the utter lack of military discipline and the impunity enjoyed by Japanese soldiers as they slaughtered and raped their way around the city and repeatedly violated 451

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the demilitarized area set up to protect Chinese civilians by the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, led by German businessman and Nazi Party member John Rabe, on the eve of Japanese troops entry into the city (Rabe 1998). Moreover, in the 1980s, the Kaikōsha, a military veterans’ organization, surveyed members who served in Nanjing during 1937–38 to describe their experiences, expecting they would refute the horrific revelations of rape and murderous mayhem widely accepted by Japanese historians. However, these participant observers acknowledged the atrocities, and to its credit, the organization published these findings and the chairman apologized to China for the misdeeds. At one time, the Yūshūkan blamed President Franklin Roosevelt for deliberately provoking the attack on Pearl Harbor and thus instigating the Pacific War as a way to help revive the U.S. economy from the depths of the Great Depression, but critics in the U.S. Congress and media successfully pressured the curator to modify the panel; he averred, however, that the Chinese and Koreans have nothing to complain about and there would be no further revisions (Kingston 2007). Elsewhere at the Yūshūkan, Japan’s invasion of China is portrayed as a campaign to quell ‘Chinese bandits and terrorists’. At the museum, there is no mention of invasion, aggression, massacres or atrocities committed by Japanese troops in China. Japan is portrayed as the champion of Asia, on a noble mission to liberate the region from Western colonialism. The saga of wartime sex slaves known as comfort women is overlooked (on this issue, see Yoshimi 1992; 2000) and there is no mention of the cruel vivisection and biological warfare experiments conducted by Unit 731 in Manchuria (on this issue, see Barenblatt 2004; Harris 1994; Sensō to I no Rinri no Kenshō o Susumeru Kai 2015). Indeed, the only suffering on display is that endured by Japanese – the millions of Asian victims of Japanese aggression are completely absent. Undaunted by facts, the revisionists soldier on, wrapping themselves in the flag while impugning the nation’s ‘dignity’ by minimizing, denying, shifting responsibility and otherwise distorting what happened. Despite gaping holes in the revisionist apologia, these pundits, professors and politicians attract considerable attention (Saaler 2016a; 2016b) and are a significant factor in why Japan has made little progress on reconciliation with its East Asian neighbours. Regarding the Yasukuni narrative, Mark Selden writes, ‘Throughout the twentieth century, nationalism has everywhere been the handmaiden of war: war has provided a powerful stimulus to nationalism; nationalism has repeatedly led nations to war; and war memory is central to framing and fueling nationalist historical legacies’ (Selden 2008). Paying homage to Yasukuni is clearly not about promoting liberal values and human rights, but rather a spiritual revanchism steeped in a discredited militarism.

Conclusion Yasukuni shrine symbolizes Japan’s unfinished business on war memory, accountability and reconciliation while also serving to sustain ongoing debate about these issues, a discourse that places the Japanese government in the crosshairs of international criticism for its selective amnesia about the history of the 1930s and 1940s ranging from museums and textbooks to rites of commemoration. The shrine is a politicized religious site where neo-nationalists seek and promote national redemption and attend to the spiritual needs of a traumatized nation (Mullins 2016; Hashimoto 2015). It is where the vanquished aggressor finds space to honour the war dead, but in ways that skirt the reality that the nation was betrayed by its leaders in a folly of imperial aggression that required futile sacrifice for an ignominious cause: domination of Asia. Fused with the Yūshūkan Museum, it is a space where Japan’s wartime activities are sanitized, sacrifices glorified and patriotic adulation and emperor worship is extolled. It is a site that provides emotional succor to relatives who lost loved ones, but hijacks their grief in ways that 452

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resonate with political purpose. It is a stage where revisionists proclaim a vindicating and exonerating narrative of Japan’s Asian rampage and try with limited success to convince the Japanese public that the tragedy was necessary and fruitful and that their sacrifices were not in vain. For many Japanese, including most of Japan’s professional historians, it is a theatre of the absurd where history is turned upside down, vainglorious perpetrators are recast as martyrs and the horrific maelstrom they inflicted on Japan and Asia is justified. It is where the cornerstone of the revisionist conceit is laid, asserting implausibly and unconvincingly that the peace and prosperity Japan enjoys today is due to the crucible of war and the unwarrantable sacrifices of the wartime generation. This narrative asks contemporary Japanese to thank the wartime militarists for what they wrought when in fact, what has been achieved since 1945 constitutes a sweeping repudiation of their agenda and violent means. Yasukuni visits by prime ministers matter geopolitically, too, because Japan risks further antagonizing China and South Korea at a time when Japan needs to develop cooperative ties. Trampling on the neighbours’ sensitivities about the shared past limits room for managing territorial disputes involving both countries or making headway on a range of other pressing contemporary issues. Abe has long championed a beautifying of Japan’s history inconsistent with established facts and seeks to promote patriotic education (Saaler 2016a). In doing so he tarnishes the national reputation by backtracking on previous apologies and muddying the waters on what exactly Japan acknowledges about its wartime excesses. ‘Abe-nesia’ is counterproductive and an obstacle to reconciliation, providing ammunition to the Chinese and Korean governments as they invoke history as a diplomatic weapon.The incessant hammering of Japan on the anvil of history owes much to Japan handing its neighbours the hammer by not effectively addressing history issues. Nippon Kaigi and other Japanese fabulists on the right ensure that battles over the past are intensifying in the twenty-first century, and actually benefit from the regional backlash and rising tensions, using this as pretext to advance their wider agenda on memory, the war, pacifism, the Constitution and the emperor (Nakano 2016b).Their repeated pledges to overturn the postwar order, one that has bequeathed significant benefits on the Japanese public, reflects concerns that this order has emasculated Japan and torn it from its traditions and customs.Yasukuni embodies their hopes for rehabilitating and restoring the pre-1945 order. Thus as the war recedes into time, the war memory battles have escalated as the vanquished seek redemption, belatedly appealing the guilty verdicts handed down at the Tokyo Trials in 1948. In striking contrast to skeptical revisionists today, in the wake of war there were no such illusions or doubts.The war was viewed as an unmitigated catastrophe and the judgments helped allocate blame to a handful of leaders at the top, conveniently excusing everyone else. In the aftermath of war the militarists were reviled and many Japanese felt a deep and lingering sense of betrayal. During the war, everyone was indoctrinated into unquestioning loyalty to the emperor and unequivocal support for the war effort.The public was told that their sacrifice was necessary and justified, but suddenly everyone confronted the disquieting abyss of surrender and disgrace. Does the brainwashing of the day provide a collective alibi and diminish individual responsibility? Yasukuni conveniently keeps that story alive. Maruyama Masao (1914–96), a prominent postwar Japanese political theorist, masterfully exposed the ‘system of irresponsibility’ (musekinin no kōzō) in which all Japanese evaded blame for the war (see Takenaka 2015: 15).Yasukuni and the Nippon Kaigi revisionists are part of this system, one aimed at rehabilitating the irredeemable wartime past while extolling the soldiers’ deaths. This posthumous tribute belies the reality that they were cannon fodder, sacrificed by reckless leaders who plunged their nation into a nightmare that killed some 20 million Asians in the name of liberating them and 3 million Japanese in the name of the emperor. This staggering 453

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loss of Japanese lives is an indelible aspect of Japanese war memory, passed down through families, popularized in manga, novels and films, and scholarly research and media reports that raise awareness about the Asian inferno that undermines the revisionist conceit and infuriates Nippon Kaigi members. These wellsprings of historical consciousness explain why Abe’s 2015 security legislation easing constitutional constraints on the Japanese military has stirred bitter memories and provoked such an angry backlash. Thus, the Yasukuni issue keeps the limelight on these battles over history, memory and identity, subjecting them to a scrutiny that belies stereotypes of a monolithic consensus while confronting new generations of Japanese with issues of war responsibility and reconciliation.

Notes 1 For more detailed information and analysis of the origins and evolution of Yasukuni Shrine see Takenaka 2015; Nelson 2003; Saaler 2005: ch. 2. On State Shinto, see chapter 11 in this volume. 2 See Yasukuni Shrine, ‘History’, www.yasukuni.or.jp/english/about/index.html. 3 Nakano (2016a) and Kingston (2016) point out that there has been a rightward shift in the LDP leadership and political agenda that is not reflected in grassroots sentiments. 4 There are various estimates of war-related deaths in Asia due to Japan’s invasion and occupation. Mitter (2013) cites a figure of 14 million for China 1937–45. Dower (1986) cites 4 million deaths for Indonesia (Netherlands East Indies), Marr (1995) cites up to 2 million famine-related deaths in Vietnam for 1944–45, Rottman (2002) cites 1.1 million deaths of Filipino civilians in the Philippines and Rummel (1997) estimates over 270,000 Korean deaths during the war. 5 ‘Merkel: “We must not forget” ’, Deutsche Welle, 26 January 2015, www.dw.com/en/merkel-we-mustnot-forget/a-18215798. 6 ‘Interview. Japan is back: a conversation with Shinzo Abe’, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2013, www.for eignaffairs.com/interviews/2013-05-16/japan-back. See also Doak 2007a. 7 See Arlington National Cemetary, ‘The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier’, www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/ Explore/Tomb-of-the-Unknown-Soldier. 8 See ‘Treaty of Peace with Japan. Signed at San Francisco, on 8 September 1951’, https://treaties.un.org/ doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%20136/volume-136-I-1832-English.pdf. 9 See Yasukuni Shrine, ‘Photo Gallery’, www.yasukuni.or.jp/english/photo/.

Further reading Akazawa Shirō (2005) Yasukuni jinja. Semegiau ‘senbotsusha tsuitō’ no yukue, Iwanami Shoten. _____ (2015) Senbotsusha tsuitō to Yasukuni jinja,Yoshikawa Kōbunkan. Breen, John (ed.) (2007) Yasukuni, the War Dead and the Struggle for Japan’s Past, London: Hurst Publishers. Hashimoto, Akiko (2015) The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory and Identity in Japan. New York: Columbia University Press. Nelson, John (2003) ‘Social memory as ritual practice: commemorating spirits of the military dead at the Yasukuni Shinto Shrine’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 62(2): 443–67. Takenaka, Akiko (2015) Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

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514

Index

2600th anniversary of the founding of the Japanese Empire (1940) xx, 114, 260, 287 Abe Shinzō 10, 126 – 9, 132, 195 – 6, 346, 354, 376 – 7, 409 – 11, 413, 415 – 18, 434, 436 – 7, 440, 442, 444 – 9, 453 – 4 Adachi Buntarō 95 Afghanistan 195 Agonshū (religious movement) 368 – 9 agriculture/agricultural households/farmers xxiii, xxx, 80, 90, 107, 109 – 14, 174, 202, 205, 208, 232, 237, 240, 245, 268 – 75, 290, 301, 314, 316 – 17, 319, 320 – 2, 328, 386, 391 – 3, 396, 398 – 9 Ainu 77, 94 – 5, 101, 112, 295, 303, 349 Aizawa Seishisai 26 Ajia jiron (The Asian Review) 32 Akita 88, 302 Akita Minoru 256 Allied occupation of Japan xxvi – vii, 22, 31, 43, 99, 124, 148 – 9, 182, 191, 210 – 11, 222, 287, 292, 319 – 20, 329 – 30, 335, 352, 409, 441 – 2 Amami 118, 124 Amaterasu (Sun Goddess) 147, 287 America see United States Amō (Amau) Eiji 38 – 9, 74 Anami Korechika 191 Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902) xxxvii, 16, 19 – 20, 75, 96 – 7 animals 394 – 7 anime 358, 386, 433 An Jung-geun 29 An Kyong-su 29 Annam 31, 50, 120, 122 Anpo disturbances (1960) xxvi, xxxviii, 193, 211, 320, 337 Anti-Comintern Pact (1936) xxxviii, 21 anti-Japanese demonstrations/anti-Japanese nationalism 60, 81 – 2, 238, 254, 429, 437, 448 anti-nuclear movement 353

Anti-Russian Society (Tairo dōshikai) 31 anti-war movement see pacifism Aoki Kon’yō 289 – 90 Arai Hakuseki 289, 291 Araki Sadao 178, 190, 209 Arao Sei 26, 30 Arima Yoriyasu 180 Arishima Takeo 174 Arlington National Cemetery 449 – 50 Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan 182, 192 – 6, 210, 365, 375, 404 Asahara Shōkō 370 – 1 Asahi Gurafu (magazine) 383 Asahi Shinbun (newspaper) 26, 36, 195, 257 – 8, 263, 293, 378 – 9, 410 – 13, 417 – 18, 426, 444 Ashio copper mine pollution incident 389, 395, 397 Asia-Africa Summit Conference (2005) 433 Asian independence movements xxviii, 81, 85 Asian Women’s Fund (AWF) xxxiii, xxxix, 428, 430, 431, 435 – 6 Asia-Pacific War (1931–45) xxvi, xxxi, 189, 191 – 2, 196, 210, 251, 253, 310, 321, 410 – 11, 431 Asiatic Humanitarian Brotherhood (Ashū washinkai) 31 Assembly of the Greater East Asiatic Nations (Daitōa kaigi, 1943) 43 Association of Southeast Asian States (ASEAN) 45 Atlantic Charter (1941) 10, 210 atomic bombs xxxviii, 22, 85, 99, 320 Aum Shinrikyō (Aum Supreme Truth Sect) xvi, xxxix, 362, 365, 368, 370 – 1 Australia 9, 63, 68, 84, 90, 106, 108 – 9, 116, 355, 421, 436 Austria/Austria-Hungary xxxvii, 9, 14, 16, 122, 172 autocracy 173, 200, 202 – 3, 210 Axis Powers see Tripartite Pact Baba Bunkō 138 Baba Takeyoshi 314 515

Index

Baba Tatsui 201 Bandung Conference (1955) 44 banking system/banks 272 – 3, 276 – 7, 282, 316 Bank of Japan (Nihon ginkō) 282, 285 – 6, 289 – 90, 293 – 4 Bank of Korea (Chōsen ginkō) 286 baseball 260, 274, 306 Bataan Death March (1942) 417 Beijing/Beiping xxv, 16, 62, 83, 119 – 20, 122 – 3, 414, 440 Berlin 21, 50, 165, 315 biodiversity/biopolitics 128, 359, 391 black companies (burakku kigyō) 345 Bluestockings (Seitōsha) 204, 352 Boissonade de Fontarabie, Gustave Émile 164 bokuminkan (shepherds of the people) 181, 216 – 17, 235 Bolshevism 18, 20, 33, 81, 172 – 3, 175, 217, 325, 327 Bonin (Ogasawara) islands xxviii, 78 – 9, 90, 124, 395 Bose, Rash Behari 38 Bose, Subras Chandra 43 Boshin War xxi – xxii, xxxvi, 185, 441 Boxer Rebellion xxv, xxxvii, 16, 31, 68, 79 Brazil xxxiii, 109 – 12, 115 – 16 Bretton Woods Agreements/Bretton Woods System 262, 280 Britain see Great Britain British Malaya see Malaya bubble economy xxxix, 23, 277, 292, 294, 324, 332, 344 Buddhism 138, 148, 150 – 1, 153, 157 – 8, 162, 288, 361 – 7, 369 – 70, 372, 374 – 5 bureaucracy/bureaucrats xix, xxv, xxxi, 20 – 1, 33, 36, 82, 86 – 7, 103 – 6, 111, 116, 145, 156, 165 – 6, 170, 172 – 3, 175 – 7, 179, 181 – 2, 188, 190, 204, 207, 208, 212 – 14, 226, 235, 238, 241 – 2, 245, 247, 249 – 50, 262, 274, 276, 289, 292, 325 – 6, 337, 342, 348, 354 Burma 31, 42 – 3, 85, 98, 421 – 2, 451 Busan 78, 111 bushido 72, 187, 204, 253, 293 Byas, Hugh 66, 69 Cabinet Information Bureau (naikoku johokyoku) 70 – 1, 74, 258 – 9 Cabinet Planning Board (Kikakuin) 219 – 23 California/San Francisco 7, 50, 105, 107, 109, 115, 391 Cambodia 194 Canada 7, 9, 109 – 10, 310, 390 – 1, 410, 436 Canton 62, 66 516

capitalism xxiii, 18, 44, 59 – 60, 200, 203 – 4, 206, 218, 226 – 8, 237, 239 – 41, 248 – 9, 274, 276, 284, 286, 295 – 6, 304, 310, 312, 317, 321, 348 – 9, 353, 359, 394 Catholicism/Catholic church in Japan see Christianity censorship, in imperial Japan 65, 69, 137, 142, 207, 209, 247, 254, 256, 261, in occupied Japan 43, 227, 350 Central Association of Industrial Cooperatives (Sangyō kumiai chūōkai) 316 Chang Hsueh-liang see Zhang Xueliang Chang Tso-lin see Zhang Zuolin Chaplin, Charlie 197 Chiang Kai-shek xxxiv, 39 – 40, 44, 66, 75, 84, 229, 238, 261 – 3, 424 – 5 Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery xxxviii, 411, 428, 445 children xxix, 58, 88, 90, 100, 112, 147, 156, 159, 170, 203, 252, 255, 259 – 61, 284, 296, 304, 309, 322, 326 – 7, 335, 341 – 2, 344, 355, 357, 441 China xx – xxii, xxv, xxvi, xxix – xxx, xxxii, xxxvii – viii, 6 – 7, 10 – 11, 14 – 15, 17 – 20, 25 – 35, 37 – 40, 42 – 5, 47, 50, 52 – 3, 61 – 76, 78 – 9, 81 – 6, 88 – 9, 92, 96 – 8, 105 – 6, 111 – 12, 114, 117 – 23, 132, 138 – 9, 151, 153, 162, 170, 173, 175 – 7, 190, 193 – 4, 196, 205 – 6, 209 – 10, 212 – 13, 220, 229, 231, 238 – 9, 242, 244 – 5, 250 – 1, 253 – 5, 257, 260 – 2, 269, 286 – 7, 314, 320, 328, 379, 390 – 1, 396, 410 – 12, 414 – 15, 441 – 5, 448, 451 – 4 China, Republic of (Taiwan) xxv, xxxviii – xxix, xxxvi – vii, 6, 10, 38, 44, 79 – 81, 86 – 7, 96, 98, 112 – 17, 119, 188, 204, 238, 243, 255, 260 – 1, 273 – 4, 349 – 50, 360, 395 – 6, 414, 421, 424 – 5, 428 – 9, 431, 441, 444 Chinese nationalism 34, 67, 248, 254, 410, 448, 452 Chiossone, Edoardo 284 Chongqing 428 Chōshū (feudal domain) 162, 184 – 5, 201 Chou En-lai see Zhou Enlai Christianity 7 – 8, 13, 49, 51, 55, 139, 147 – 8, 150 – 1, 158 – 9, 209, 310, 315, 317, 319, 325, 350, 441, 445, 449 Churchill, Winston 10, 21 Citizens’ Cooperative Power Stations 322 Citizens’ League for Peace in Vietnam (Beheiren) 44 city planning 300, 302, 306, 308 – 9 Civil Code (1898) 50, 204, 350 civilian control of the military 176 – 7, 185 – 7, 190, 192, 195 – 6 civil rights 201 – 3, 207, 209, 409 climate 389, 392 – 4, 397 – 9

Index

clothing 252, 259 – 60, 269, 275, 301, 358, 394; see also kimono Cold War 10, 22 – 3, 44, 64, 124 – 5, 130, 184, 192 – 3, 211, 238, 242, 312, 330, 336, 344, 349, 352 – 3, 372, 414 – 16, 419, 421, 423 collective bargaining see labour relations colonial modernity 88, 246 – 7, 259, 349, 357, 359 – 60 comfort women xxxiii, 359 – 60, 410 – 11, 415, 417, 428 – 31, 433 – 6, 439, 447 – 8, 452 Comintern 229, 249 communism 33, 67, 85, 124, 173, 182, 207, 229, 242, 248, 256, 262, 274, 310, 317 – 19, 327, 353, 423 Concordia Association (Hsie ho hui) 71 concubinage see marriage Confucianism xx, 55, 98, 122, 138 – 9, 161 – 2, 165, 181, 200, 208, 212 – 13, 216, 235, 290 – 1 conscription xx, xxii, 89, 94, 98, 107, 184 – 5, 196, 204, 260, 349, 359, 384 conservatism xx, xxvii, xxxii, 15, 27 – 8, 30, 45, 60, 87, 130, 140, 158, 160 – 6, 170 – 83, 195 – 6, 209, 211, 215, 217 – 18, 220, 222 – 4, 231, 235, 237, 293, 304, 315, 320 – 1, 326, 330, 335 – 7, 342 – 5, 354, 362, 364, 366 – 7, 403, 407, 411, 413, 443 – 4, 449 Constitution of Japan (1947) xxi, xxvi – xxvii, xxxiii, xxxviii, 124 – 5, 127 – 9, 132, 182, 191 – 2, 194 – 6, 210 – 11, 329 – 30, 349 – 51, 355, 361 – 2, 365 – 6, 368, 370 – 2, 404, 409, 412 – 13, 426 – 8, 436, 441 – 2, 445, 447, 453 – 4 Constitution of the Great Japanese Empire (1889) xxii, xxv, xxxvi, 50, 94, 144 – 5, 148, 151 – 2, 158, 161, 165 – 6, 170, 172, 176, 187, 189, 199, 202 – 3, 205, 213 – 14, 237, 349 consular jurisdiction see extraterritoriality consumerism 85, 206 – 7, 238, 252 – 3, 257, 259 – 60, 269, 273 – 7, 299, 301, 310, 312, 315, 317 – 23, 357; see also mass culture Contemporary Japan (journal) xxxiii, 69 cooperatives 206 – 7, 310, 312 – 23, 327 – 8, 334, 336 – 9, 341 – 4; see also Nōkyō cotton spinning see textile industry Cuong De, Prince 38 currency see yen Dai Ajia (Greater Asia; journal) 38 Dai Ajia kyōkai (Greater Asia Association) 38 Daimaru (department store) 382 daimyo (feudal lords) 138, 166, 201, 392 Dairen 115 Daitō (The Great East; journal) 31 Daitōa-shō 71, 99; see also Ministry of Greater East Asia Dan Takuma 177

Dazai Shundai 138 – 9 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN) 130 Deguchi Nao 364 demilitarization of Japan (1945) xxvii, 191, 212 democracy xxiii – xxvi, 21, 131, 161, 165 – 6, 170, 173 – 4, 181 – 2, 187, 189, 199, 205, 210, 228, 232, 237, 244 – 5, 325, 330, 335, 349 Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) 195, 344, 445 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea 193, 439 Den Kenjirō 188 department stores 259, 274 – 5, 305 – 6, 309, 381 – 3 developmental state 274, 276, 296 diaspora 105, 112, 115 – 16 discrimination 29, 34, 87, 93, 95, 97, 101 – 2, 112, 131, 133, 328, 332, 335, 340, 342, 345, 351, 353 Dodge, Joseph 335; see also Dodge Line Dodge Line 335 – 6 Dōmei (trade union) 343 – 4 Dōmei News Agency (Dōmei tsūshinsha) 71 – 2 Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) 40, 42, 454 East Asian Shared Culture Association (Tōa Dōbunkai) 30 Eastern Association (Tōhō kyōkai) 30 economic miracle xxxi, 11, 100, 223 – 4, 241, 243, 267, 269 – 71, 275 – 7, 331 – 2, 334, 337 – 8, 340 – 1, 343, 347, 355; see also high economic growth Edo xxii, 51, 120 – 2, 137 – 41, 161 Edo period xx, xxviii, xxxvi, 25, 94, 107, 111, 137, 162, 212, 269, 281, 304, 307, 313, 362 – 3 education see school system EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) xxix – xxx Eirei ni kotaeru kai (Association to Respond to the Heroic Souls) 412 Election Law (1890) xxxvii, 204 Electrical Utility Worker’s Union (Densan) 330 – 1 Emigrant Protection Law (1896) 105 – 6, 108 emigration see settlers enlightenment 7, 160 – 1, 165, 170, 200 – 2, 303, 396 Enomoto Takeaki 29, 108 enterprise unions/unionism xxxvii, 217, 260, 310, 315, 318 – 20, 324 – 47, 354 – 6 environment/environmental history xxxi, 3, 11, 118, 302, 305, 307 – 9, 320, 322, 353, 359, 368, 389 – 400, 407; see also climate Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL, 1985) xxxviii, 342, 353 ethnocentrism 100, 353 Eugenic Protection Act (1947) 349 Europe xxviii, xxxvi, 5 – 11, 13 – 23, 26, 32, 34, 40, 44, 49, 51, 53, 70, 81, 85 – 6, 89, 93 – 7, 99, 102, 517

Index

132, 140 – 1, 143, 160, 162, 165 – 6, 185, 200, 203, 212 – 13, 220, 229, 235, 237, 239 – 43, 247 – 8, 250, 267 – 71, 277 – 8, 284, 299, 314 – 15, 317, 349 – 50, 360, 381, 390 – 1, 410, 436, 440, 448 extraterritoriality/consular jurisdiction xxxvi, 14, 47 – 61, 67, 78 Ezo see Hokkaido Factory Law (Kōjō-hō, 1911) 326 – 7 family/family system (ie seido) 170, 172, 174, 178, 182, 238, 324, 326, 331, 335, 350 – 3, 355 Far Eastern Review (journal) 66, 70, 74 fascism xxiii, xxv, 20 – 1, 44, 87, 152, 154, 179, 181, 189, 192, 199, 209 – 10, 219 – 20, 225 – 35, 237 – 50, 255, 257 – 8, 275, 309, 328 February 26 Incident (1936) xxv, xxxviii, 189 – 91, 219 – 20, 256 feudalism xxii – xxiii, xxviii, xxx, xxxvi, 27, 48, 77, 119, 121 – 2, 145, 161, 184 – 5, 202, 227 – 8, 231, 239 – 40, 244, 268 – 70, 281, 348 – 50, 354 Fifteen Years’ War see Asia-Pacific War First Sino-Japanese War (1894/95) xxv, xxxvii, 6, 15, 26, 28, 30 – 1, 48 – 9, 52, 96, 108, 132, 145, 153, 230, 254, 280, 286 First World War see World War I fishery 51, 113, 303, 319 – 20, 379, 383, 386 – 7, 390 – 1, 394 – 5, 433; see also whaling folklore 305, 308, 398 food 5, 9, 78, 89 – 90, 121, 209, 253, 269 – 75, 277, 301, 330, 343, 355, 377 – 80, 382 – 9, 393, 396 – 7, 451; see also washoku Food Control Act (1942) 275 Food Management Law (1942) 384 food security 386 forced labour/rōmusha 42, 98, 113, 350, 359, 428, 435, 451 forests/forestry 303, 305, 320, 390 – 1, 393, 395 France xxxvi – xxxvii, 6, 10, 14 – 16, 19, 21, 23, 32, 44, 50 – 3, 56, 58 – 9, 61, 79, 85, 96, 119, 121, 166, 194, 229, 383, 394, 421 – 2 Freedom and People’s Rights Movement (jiyū minken undō) xxiv, 28, 115, 132, 143 – 4, 161, 165 – 6, 201 – 2, 289 – 90 Friday (weekly magazine) 370 FRONT (journal) 259 Fujin kōron (The Women’s Review; journal) 357 Fujio Masayuki 426 Fujisawa Rikitarō 72 Fujiwara Kamatari 285 Fuji Xerox Corp. 444 Fukuda Hideko 202, 352 Fukuda Yasuo 412 518

Fukunaga Hōgen 372 Fukuoka 28, 31, 313, 442 Fukuzawa Yukichi xxvii, 53, 107, 112, 141 – 3, 200, 289 – 90, 293, 315 Funabiki Takeo 410 Furukawa Corp. 328 G5 summit 1975 in Rambouillet 23 Gaimushō see Ministry of Foreign Affairs Galtung, Johan 132 Gannenmono 103 – 4, 106, 112 Gapsin Coup (Korea, 1884) 28 geisha 355 gender, discrimination 332, 342, 345, 351, 353, policy 342 – 6, 350, 353 – 4 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) xxxviii, 22 General Council of Trade Unions see Sōhyō General Federation of Labour see Sōdōmei General Headquarters (GHQ, SCAP) 254, 292, 330, 335 General Staff (Imperial Japanese Army, sanbō honbu) 26, 30, 39, 71, 177, 185 – 6, 191, 258 Genyōsha 28, 31 geopolitics xxviii, 10, 105, 132, 248, 353, 453 Germany xxi, xxxvii – xxxviii, 9 – 10, 13 – 16, 18, 20 – 1, 24, 33, 40, 50, 52 – 3, 56 – 7, 59, 79, 81, 92, 96 – 7, 99, 102, 161, 172 – 3, 182, 188, 194, 196, 210, 220, 229, 232, 235, 238, 241 – 2, 247, 249 – 52, 255 – 6, 315, 419, 422, 440, 448 – 9, 451 Ginza 383 GLA (God Light Association; religious movement) 368, 375 globalization/globalism xxvii, 4 – 11, 271, 407, 448 Gneist, Rudolf von 165 Goebbels, Joseph 252 Gojong, King of Joseon 15 gold standard 208, 274, 280 – 1, 285 – 6, 294 Gotōda Masaharu 451, 427 Gotō Fumio 216, 218, 221 Gotō Ryūnosuke 181 Gotō Shinpei 204 Gotō Shōjirō 59, 201 Great Ansei Earthquake (1855) 139 Great Britain xxii, xxvi, xxxii, xxxvii, 6, 9, 13 – 14, 16 – 17, 19, 23, 32, 34, 40, 43, 50 – 3, 59, 61, 64, 68, 79, 85, 96 – 7, 173, 229, 231, 238, 253, 269, 280, 326, 350, 440 Great Depression (1929) 9, 19, 110, 218, 238 – 9, 241, 245 – 6, 248, 250, 273 – 4, 279 – 80, 287, 310, 452 great divergence 268 – 71

Index

Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Daitōa kyōeiken) 9 – 10, 42 – 3, 45, 62, 71, 75, 85, 99, 258 Greater East Asian Declaration (1943) 210, 253 Greater East Asian War (1941–45) xxxii, 41 – 3, 287, 426 Great Hanshin Earthquake (1995) xxxix, 193, 371 Great Kanto Earthquake (1923) xxxvii, 110, 174, 273, 318, 350, 357, 397 Great War see World War I Guam 106, 126 Gulf War (1990–91) 126, 194 – 5 Guomindang (Kuomintang) 19, 39 – 40, 44, 64, 67 – 8, 69, 76, 82 – 4, 254 Guo Sungtao 122 Hague Convention on the Laws and Customs of War (1907) 131 hakkō ichiu 37, 80, 114, 287 Hakkō Ichiu Tower (monument) 287, 289 Hakodate xxxvi, 48, 56 – 7 Hakusan Shrine 305, 307 Hamaguchi Keiichirō 340 Hamaguchi Osachi 176, 188 – 9 Han-Ajia kyōkai (Pan-Asian Society) 38 Hankyū (railway line, department store and corporation) 382 happiness (of the people) 144 Hara Takashi xxxvii, 33, 173, 188 – 9, 205, 215 – 16, 293 Harmonization Society (Kyōchōkai) 217, 219 Hashimoto Ryūtarō 412, 431, 438, 442 Hatoyama Ichirō 223 Hatoyama Yukio 45 Hawaii 6 – 7, 51, 84, 103, 105 – 17, 122, 132, 417 heavy industry 15, 223, 250, 270, 272, 274, 326 – 8, 338, 354 hegemony 15, 68, 243, 280, 353, 361, 363 Heisei era xxi, xxxix, 349, 407 Heiwa izokukai (The Association of War Bereaved Families for Peace) 443 Heiwa Kinen no tame no Kinenhi to Shisetsu no Arikata o Kangaeru Kondankai (Discussion Group to Consider Memorials and Other Sites for the Commemoration of the War Dead and Praying for Peace) 412 Henoko base (Okinawa) 118, 126 – 30, 133, 440 Hesperia Incident (1879) 57, 61 Hibiya Riots (1905) xxiv, 31 high economic growth, era of xxxi, 223 – 4, 243, 269 – 71, 276, 299, 331 – 2, 334, 337 – 8, 340 – 1, 343, 347, 355 High Treason Incident (1910) xxxvii, 256

Higuchi Ichiyo 292 – 4 Hirano Kuniomi 26 Hiranuma Kiichirō 40, 171 – 4, 231 Hiranuma Yoshirō 174 Hiraoka Kōtarō 31 Hirasawa Keikichi 318 Hirata Atsutane 164 Hirata Tōsuke 172, 315 – 16 Hiratsuka Raichō 204, 207, 352, 356 Hirohito see Shōwa Emperor Hiroshima xxxviii, 85, 99, 112, 116, 191, 417, 446 Hiroshima Peace Memorial xxviii Hirota Kōki 38, 190, 197, 221 historical consciousness (rekishi ninshiki) xix, 227, 255, 348, 403, 410 – 11, 414 – 17, 425, 454 historical revisionism (rekishi shūseishugi) xxxi – xxxii, 403, 409 – 10, 412, 414 – 16 history problem (rekishi mondai) 421 – 2, 425, 427, 433, 435 – 6, 438, 448 history textbooks xxxi, xxxviii, 11, 303, 415 – 16, 421, 425 – 6, 433, 438, 447, 452 Hitachi 341 Hitler, Adolf 97, 179, 182, 191, 210, 255 Hokkaido 57, 77, 95, 109, 112, 116 – 17, 132, 165, 295, 302 – 3, 306 – 7, 350, 394 – 5 Hokkaido Development Agency (Kaitakushi) 112, 281 Holland see Netherlands Holtom, D. C. 147 – 8, 153, 157 – 8 Home Ministry see Ministry of Interior Affairs Hong Kong 62, 114 Honmichi (religious movement) 361 Hōnohana Sanpōgyō (religious movement) 372 Hosokawa Morihiro xxxi, 344, 415 Hosoya Matsuta 330 House, Edward 51, 55, 73 Hozumi Yatsuka 164, 172 Hull Note (November 1941) 84 Humanity Declaration (ningen sengen, January 1946) 225 human rights 11, 127, 130 – 1, 428, 435 – 6, 439, 452 Ichikawa Fusae 207, 209, 352 iconography, of currency and stamps 280 – 6, 289, 294, of the modern 308 Ikeda Daisaku 366 Ikeda Hayato xxxviii, 22, 223, 331 immigration 7 – 8, 34, 95 – 7, 108, 110 Immigration Act of 1924 (U.S.) 97, 110 imperial democracy 234, 244, 246, 325 – 6 Imperial Diet xxxvii, 49 – 50, 161, 203 – 4, 233, 326 Imperial Headquarters (Daihon’ei) 254 519

Index

Imperial Household xxi, 142, 403, 407, 409, 442 Imperial Household Law (Kōshitsu tenpan, 1889) xxi imperialism xxv, xxviii, 4 – 7, 9 – 11, 18, 25 – 8, 30 – 3, 36, 41, 43 – 5, 47 – 8, 60 – 1, 64, 67 – 8, 77 – 8, 80, 82, 86, 88, 93, 98, 104, 121, 123, 151, 162, 170, 185, 187, 200, 204, 206, 210, 237, 239, 245, 247 – 8, 250, 255, 259, 272, 276, 286, 349, 351, 353, 357, 359 – 60, 395, 441, 450 – 1 Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) 30, 114, 179, 184 – 7, 190 – 1, 196, 359, 384, 429 Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) 30, 176 – 7, 182, 184 – 6, 191, 359 Imperial Palace 145, 150, 161, 190, 433 Imperial Rescript on Education (1890) 151, 153 – 4, 170 Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors (1882) 186 Imperial Reservists’ Association (Zaigō gunjinkai) 71 Imperial Rule Assistance Association (IRAA) xxxviii, 179 – 80, 190, 209, 220, 222, 231 Income Doubling Plan (1960) xxxviii, 337 India 6, 17, 31 – 4, 38, 43, 50, 55, 81, 194, 269, 272, 389, 450 individualism 160, 165 – 6, 170, 172, 174, 203, 247 Indochina 6 – 7, 40, 85, 98, 122, 125 Indonesia 88, 98, 194, 421 – 2, 430 – 1 Industrial Cooperatives Law (Sangyō kumiai-hō) 316, 318, 320 industrial revolution/industrialization xxvii – xxviii, xxx – xxxi, 78, 81, 217, 250, 267 – 73, 277 – 8, 299, 324, 348, 354 Inō Tadataka 289, 291 Inoue Hide 207 – 9 Inoue Junnosuke 208 Inoue Kaoru 49, 164 Inoue Kiyoshi 233 Inoue Kowashi 145, 151, 165 Inoue Tetsujirō 174 Inoue Tomoichi 156 Institute for the Study of Western Books (Bansho shirabesho) 140 International Labour Organization (ILO) xxviii, xxxvii, 337 International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE, aka Tokyo Trials) xxxviii, 85, 90, 191, 229, 239, 411, 414, 416 – 17, 422, 427, 438, 441, 445, 453 International Monetary Fund (IMF) xxviii Inukai Tsuyoshi xxv, xxxvii, 31, 177, 189 Iran 34 Iraq 126, 195 Ireland 9, 65 Isawa Takio 216 520

Ise Shrine 147, 153, 155 – 6, 364 Ishibashi Tanzan 199, 209, 223 Ishida Takeshi 229 Ishigaki 121 Ishii Keiichi 127 Ishiwara Kanji 39, 66, 98, 219 Itagaki Taisuke 27, 201, 203, 214, 289 – 90 Italy xxxviii, 16, 20 – 1, 24, 52, 210, 220, 229, 235, 238, 241 – 2, 247, 249 Itō Hirobumi 16, 29, 145, 163 – 4, 166, 172, 214 – 15, 292 – 4 Itō Noe 175, 352 Itsukaichi Constitutional Draft 409 Iwakura Mission to Europe (1871) xxxvi, 94, 141, 315 Iwakura Tomomi 26, 141, 164 – 5, 201, 289 – 90, 293 – 4 Japan Advertiser 63 – 6, 72 – 3, 75 Japan Bereaved Families Organization 412 – 13, 443 Japan Centre for Asian Historical Records (JACAR) xiii, xxxiii, 263, 430, 437 Japan-China Joint Communiqué (1972) 421, 425 – 6, 433, 435 Japan Chronicle xxxiii, xxxv, 63 – 5, 67, 72 – 5 Japanese Association of Racial Hygiene (Nihon minzoku eisei kyōkai) 97 Japanese Consumers’ Cooperatives Union (JCCU) 319 – 20 Japanese-German War (Nichidoku sensō) 102, 251 Japanese National Coastguard 128, 434 Japan Gazette 51, 57 Japan Herald 51 Japan-Indonesia Peace Treaty 422, 431 Japan-Korea Treaty of Amity (1876, Treaty of Ganghwa) xxxvi, 27, 48, 78 Japan-Korea Treaty of Annexation (1910) xxxvii, 80, 130, 350, 423 Japan Mail 51, 73 Japan National Railways 299, 309, 337, 343 Japan-North Korea Pyongyang Declaration 433 Japan Productivity Centre (JPC) 338 – 9 Japan Socialist Party (JSP) 344 Japan Times xxxiii, 10, 51, 63 – 6, 72 – 5 Japan Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) 339 Japan Weekly Mail 54 – 7, 59 Jiang Zemin 433 Jiji shinpō (newspaper) 107 Jimmu Emperor xx, xxii, xxxiv, 305 Jingū Empress 283 – 5 Joseon Kingdom see Korea journalism see newspapers

Index

kabuki 137, 258 Kagawa Toyohiko 310 – 14, 317 – 18, 322 Kageyama Hideko see Fukuda Hideko Kagoshima 113, 119, 120 – 1, 185 Kaibara Ekiken 189, 191 kaikin 13 Kaikōsha 452 Kajima Morinosuke 45 Kakehi Katsuhiko 174 Kalakaua, King of Hawaii 132 kamikaze 225, 257 kamishibai 261 Kanazawa 295, 298 – 302, 304, 306, 309 Kaneko Fumiko 352 Kanghwa (Ganghwa) Treaty 27, 48, 78; see also Japan-Korea Treaty of Amity Kan Naoto 433 Kanno Suga 352 Kanō Jigorō 293 Kanokogi Kazunobu 37, 235 Karafuto/Sakhalin xxxvi, 6, 31, 78 – 81, 112 – 14, 117, 124, 255 Karatani Kōjin 132 karayuki-san 355 karōshi (‘death from overwork’) 343, 359 Katakura Tadashi 178 Katayama Sen 7, 315, 325 Katō [Ishimoto] Shizue 352 Katō Genchi 148 Katō Hiroharu 177 – 8 Katō Hiroyuki 140, 143 Katō Kōichi 444 Katō Tomosaburō 188 Katsu Kaishū 289, 291 Katsu Nihon (journal) 30 Katsura Tarō xxiv, 17, 29, 171, 186 Kawada Shirō 172 Kawakami, Karl Kiyoshi 72 Kawasaki Corp. 327 Kawashima Naniwa 32 Kaya Okinori 262 Keidanren (business federation) 444 Keio University 33, 107, 112, 293 Keizai Dōyūkai 444 Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) 176, 206, 231 Kennedy, John Russell 64, 73 Kenseikai (political party) 176, 214, 216 – 17, 326 Kenshōkai (religious movement) 368 Kido Takayoshi 141, 201, 289 – 90 Kim Dae-jung 431 – 2 Kim Ok-gyun 28 kimono 259, 269, 275

Kim Yun-sik 286 Kinkei Gakuin (Golden Pheasant Academy) 219 Kiriyama Seiyū 369 Kishida Toshiko 202 Kishi Nobusuke 87, 193, 219, 223, 262, 446 Kita Ikki xxiii, 33 – 4, 241 Kita Sadakichi 171 Kiyosawa Kiyoshi 209 – 10 Knackfuss, Hermann 96 Kōa-in (Agency for the Development of Asia) 40 Kobayashi Hideo 299 Kobe xxxix, 48, 51, 56, 62, 64 – 5, 67, 72, 303, 315, 317, 319, 327, 378 – 9, 390 Kobe Chronicle 51 Kodera Kenkichi 32 Kōfuku no kagaku (Happy Science) 365, 368 – 70, 375 Koganei Yoshikiyo 95 Koiso Kuniaki 191 Koizumi Jun’ichirō 128, 195, 410, 412 – 13, 418, 431, 433 – 4, 442, 444 – 5 kokugaku 139 Kokuhonsha (National Foundation Society) 174 – 8, 180 Kokuryūkai (Amur Society or Black Dragon Society) 28 – 9, 31 – 3 Kokusai News Agency 71, 73 Kokusaku kenkyūkai (National Policy Research Society) 219 kokutai (national body) 70, 151, 162, 175, 183 Kōmeitō (Clean Government Party) 366, 374 – 5 kōminka (policies of imperial subjectification) 350 Konoe Atsumaro 15, 30 – 1, 33 Konoe Fumimaro xxxviii, 33, 38 – 9, 124, 179 – 80, 190, 218, 231 – 2 Kōno Statement (1993) 411, 415, 429 – 30, 436 Kōno Yōhei 411, 415, 429 Korea xxviii – xxix, xxxii, xxxvi – xxxviii, 6 – 7, 10, 14 – 15, 27 – 32, 38, 43 – 5, 48, 50, 62, 65, 68, 70 – 1, 75, 78 – 82, 87 – 9, 98, 105, 110 – 11, 114 – 17, 120, 122, 130, 138, 188, 205, 212, 238, 242, 255, 260 – 1, 273 – 4, 283, 286, 349 – 50, 360, 391, 396, 410, 412, 414 – 15, 422 – 4, 426, 429 – 31, 435 – 6; see also Democratic People’s Republic of Korea; Republic of Korea Korean War xxvi, 192, 194, 409, 423, 449 Kōtoku Shūsui xxiii, xxxvii, 31, 171 Kōzaha (Lecture School Group) 226 – 7 Kubota Kan’ichirō 423 – 4 Kuga Katsunan 30, 163 – 4 Kume Kunitake 141 Kuratomi Yūsaburō 177 521

Index

Kuril archipelago xxix, xxxvi, 78 Kusunoki Masashige 287 Kwantung Army xxv, 20, 34, 71, 81 – 3, 176 – 7, 238, 247, 254 Kwantung Leased Territory 34, 81 Kyōritsu shōsha (Cooperative Trading Company) 315 Kyoto 161, 166, 202, 297, 307, 369, 393 Kyushu 28, 77, 118, 132, 337 labour laws 327 – 8, 335 – 6, 339, 342 – 3, 345 – 6; see also Factory Law labour relations 326 – 8, 330 – 1, 334, 336 – 9, 342, 344 – 7, 354 labour unions xxiv, xxxvii, 217, 310, 315, 318, 324 – 47, 354 – 6 Lake Baikal 81 Land Tax Reform (1873) xxii, 268 Lansing-Ishii Agreement (1917) 64 Latin America 8, 103, 106, 108 – 10, 112, 114, 117 Law for the Protection of the Maternal Body (1996) 349 – 50 Law on Political Assembly and Association (1890) 349 League of Nations xxviii, xxxvii, 18, 20, 33 – 5, 68, 70, 81 – 2, 97, 173 – 5, 206, 231, 237, 260 Lee, Robert E. 449 Lee Myung-bak 434 Lenin,Vladimir I. 172, 237, 327  Liancourt Rocks see Takeshima islets Liaodong Peninsula 6, 15, 79, 96 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) xxxii, xxxviii, 126, 128, 130, 195 – 8, 223 – 4, 292, 321, 344 – 5, 366, 425 – 7, 430, 443 – 4, 446 liberalism xix, xxiv – xxv, 143, 145, 160 – 1, 165 – 6, 170 – 5, 178 – 9, 182, 187, 199 – 202, 205 – 6, 208, 218, 242, 274, 326, 403 Liberal Party (1881–1884) 201 – 3 lifetime employment 334, 340 Li Hongzhang (Li Hung-chang) 123 local cities (chihō toshi) 296 London Naval Conference (1930) xxxvii, 189, 206, 230 lost decades 277 loyalism 151, 178, 285, 287 Lytton Commission 35 MacArthur, Douglas 75, 124, 330, 335 Mahikari (religious movement) 367 Mainichi Shinbun 409, 412, 417 – 18 Makiguchi Tsunesaburō 361 Malaya 40 – 2, 84 – 5, 98 522

Malaysia 89, 120 Malthus, Thomas Robert 107 Manchukuo xxv, xxix, 34 – 6, 39, 41, 43, 63, 71, 79, 82 – 3, 85, 87, 98, 111, 217, 247 – 8, 251, 254 – 5, 261, 319, 349, 359 Manchuria xxv – xxvi, xxviii, xxxiii, 6 – 7, 10, 15 – 17, 19 – 20, 31 – 2, 34 – 6, 38 – 9, 66, 69 – 70, 79 – 82, 85, 87 – 90, 96, 98, 111, 113 – 15, 117, 177, 189, 208, 219, 238 – 9, 245, 247 – 50, 254, 260, 262, 274, 395 – 6, 452 Manchurian Incident xxv – xxvi, xxxii, xxxvii, 62, 71, 74, 82, 111, 177, 189, 218, 233, 240, 253, 256, 260, 417, 427 Manchurian Motion Picture Corporation (Man’ei) 259 manga 358, 363, 386, 433, 454 Mannheim, Karl 160 Mantetsu see South Manchurian Railway Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) 44 March First Independence Movement (1919, Korea) 29, 81, 286, 415 Maritime Province (Primorsky Krai) 15 marriage 56, 100, 105, 182, 202, 358 Maruyama Masao 199, 225 – 8, 230, 233, 239 – 41, 250, 453 Marxism xxiii, 199, 223, 225 – 8, 231, 233, 235, 237 – 42, 249, 326 – 7, 349 Masaki Jinzaburō 178, 190 Masaoka Shiki 293, 297 – 8 mass culture/consumption 249, 258 – 60, 274 – 6, 302, 309, 322, 357; see also consumerism mass media xxxi, 44, 227, 237, 247, 296, 309, 358, 364 – 5, 368, 370 – 1, 378, 431 Matsudaira Shungaku 140 Matsuda Michiyuki 121 Matsui Iwane 38 – 9, 178, 451 Matsukata Masayoshi 285, 289, 291 Matsuo Denzō 190 Matsuoka Yōsuke 40, 66 Meiji Civil Code (1898) 164, 172, 349 – 50 Meiji Constitution (1889) xxii, xxvii, xxxvi, xxxviii, 94, 144 – 5, 148, 151 – 2, 158, 161, 166, 170 – 2, 176, 187, 189, 201 – 3, 205, 210 – 11, 213, 237, 349 Meiji Emperor xxi – xxiv, xxxvi, 78, 103, 121, 142, 151, 154, 161 – 2, 166, 170, 205, 284, 293, 441 Meiji Restoration xxi – xxiii, xxviii, xxxvi, 48, 52, 78, 92, 94, 140 – 2, 150, 160 – 2, 166, 184 – 5, 201, 212 – 13, 227 – 8, 238, 241, 268, 270, 280, 290 – 2, 294, 296, 362, 399, 441, 449 Meiji Shrine xxiii – xxiv, 156 Meirokusha (Meiji 6 Society) 162

Index

Mencius 139, 200 Merkel, Angela 449 Mesopotamia 34 Mexico 108 – 9, 378 Micronesia (Nan’yō) 86, 106, 114 middle class 171, 206 – 7, 210, 223, 237, 246 – 7, 301, 315, 317 – 18, 331, 343, 356, 358, 380, 399, 403 Midway, Battle of (1942) xxxviii Miike mine strike (1960) 337 Miki Takeo 442 militarism xix, xxiii, xxv, 44, 118, 147 – 8, 151, 154, 161, 177 – 8, 184 – 5, 187, 189 – 91, 196, 200, 210 – 11, 239, 241, 244, 272, 288, 328 – 9, 352, 360 – 2, 370, 404, 426 – 7, 433, 440, 443, 445, 449, 451 – 3, and military dictatorship 189 – 90, 250, symbols of 288, 362, 445, 452 Military Police (kenpeitai) 175, 222, 256 military prostitution 360 Mill, John Stuart 143 – 4, 200 Millard, Thomas 66 millennialism 364, 367 – 9, 371 Minamata Incident 390, 397 Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries 379, 383, 387 Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce 217 Ministry of Colonial Affairs/Colonial Ministry (Takumushō) 110 Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI) 219, 223, 273 – 4, 276 Ministry of Communication/Ministry of Transportation and Communication 70, 221, 258 Ministry of Defence xxxiii, 192 – 3, 195 Ministry of Education 70, 159, 171, 183, 204, 258, 415, 425 – 6, 433 Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology 387 Ministry of Finance (Finance Ministry) 155, 217, 281, 288, 293 – 4 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Foreign Ministry) 63 – 4, 68 – 70, 72 – 3 Ministry of Greater East Asia (Daitōa-shō) 71, 99 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 387 Ministry of Interior Affairs (Home Ministry) 70, 142, 151, 155, 176, 181, 214 – 19, 221 – 3, 231, 233, 235, 258 Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) xxxviii, 276 Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLITT) 127 – 8 Ministry of Public Affairs 281 Ministry of the Army 190, 258 Ministry of the Navy 71, 176 – 7, 258

Minobe Tatsukichi 172, 177 – 8, 209 Minseitō (political party) 177, 214 – 15, 217 – 18, 223, 250, 326 Mitsubishi (zaibatsu) 59, 327 – 8, 341 Mitsubishi Heavy Industries 341 Mitsui (zaibatsu) 177, 208, 328 Mitsukawa Kametarō 33, 37 Mitsukoshi (Department Store) 382 – 3 Miura Gorō 162 Miyake Setsurei 309 Miyako Island 121, 123 Miyamoto Yuriko 352 Miyazaki Ryūsuke 174 Miyazawa Kiichi 415, 426, 429 Mizuno Rentarō 156, 216 mobo (modern boys) 357 modernity 13, 51, 88, 92, 119, 237, 239, 244, 246 – 50, 252, 259, 275, 295 – 6, 299, 306, 348 – 9, 354, 356 – 7, 359 – 60 modernization xx, xxvii, 5, 8 – 9, 13 – 14, 16, 19, 23, 29, 59, 78, 94, 101, 162, 164 – 5, 181 – 2, 199, 224, 234, 237, 239, 268, 274, 277, 295 – 6, 315, 320, 348 – 9 moga (modern girls) 357 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (Treaty of Nonaggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Repcs, 1939) 21 Mongolia 32, 34, 83 – 4, 255 Monroe Doctrine 9, 30, 38 – 9, 232 Mori Arinori 164, 189 Mori Kaku 177 Mori Ōgai 293 Morito Tatsuo 174 Mori Yoshirō 431 Morrison, George Ernest 73 Moscow 67, 124 most-favoured nation status 14, 22 Motoda Nagazane 162 Motoori Norinaga 138 Movement to Preserve National Essence 30 Mt. Asama 393 Mt. Fuji 304, 393 Mukden 82 Murakami Shigeyoshi 150 Murasaki Shikibu 292 – 3 Murayama Statement (1995) xxxix, 415, 417 – 18, 430, 432 – 4, 436 – 7 Murayama Tomiichi xxxiii, xxxix, 192, 415, 417, 430, 432 Mussolini, Benito 191, 240 Mutsu Munemitsu 49 Mutual aid societies 313 – 14, 328 523

Index

Nabeyama Sadachika 256 Nagai Ryūtarō 66, 209 Nagano 233, 317, 321 Nagasaki xxxvi, xxxviii, 14, 48, 53, 59, 85, 92, 99, 111, 191, 320 Nagata Shigeshi 111 Nagata Tetsuzan 178, 219 Nago 118, 126 Naha 121 – 2, 127 – 8 Nakae Chōmin 144, 201 – 3 Nakai Chikuzan 138 Nakaima Hirokazu 139, 440 Nakajima Kumakichi 178 Nakajima Michio 152 Nakajima Nobuyuki 202 Nakajima Park 306 Nakamura Masanao (Keiu) 143, 162, 200 Nakano Shigeharu 298 – 9 Nakasone Yasuhiro 101, 343, 412 – 13, 415, 427, 442 – 4 Nakatani Takeyo 38 Namihira Tsuneo 132 Nanba Daisuke 175 Nanjing 39, 43, 83 – 4, 89, 250, 254, 261, 378, 451 – 2 Nanjing Massacre 39, 83 – 4, 245, 250, 451 – 2 Nan’yō (Micronesia) 81, 86 Nara era (710–794) 285, 289, 393 National Archives of Japan xxxiii, 142 National Assembly for Washoku Culture (Washoku bunka kokumin kaigi) 378, 383 National Association of Shinto Shrines 412 National Banknotes see currency National Confederation of Trade Unions (Rengō) 332, 343 – 4, 347 National Defence Academy 192 National Diet Library xxxiii, 383, 388 National Eugenics Law (1937) 349 national heroes 284 – 5, 441 national holidays 150, 152 national identity/national character xxix – xxx, 9, 32, 95, 100 – 1, 294, 376, 442, 448 nationalism in Japan 5, 9, 26, 59, 65, 99 – 100, 203, 228, 235, 305, 351, 354, 361 – 2, 370, 403 – 4, 409, 410, 437, 445 – 6, 448, 452 national mobilization 188, 209, 220 – 2, 350 – 1 National Mobilization Law (1938) xxxviii, 220, 251, 256 National Shrine Priest Association 156 National Spiritual Mobilization Movement 220 nation-branding 377, 386

524

nation-state xx, xxv, xxviii, 103 – 4, 114, 116, 121, 125, 129, 131, 184, 212 – 13, 240, 248, 280, 284, 295, 349 – 50, 359, 379, 419 Natsume Sōseki 289, 293 Neighbouring Countries Clause (kinrin shokoku jōkō) 415, 426 nenkō wage system 334 – 5, 340 – 1 neo-conservatism 196, 403 Netherlands/Holland xxxvi, 40, 52, 89, 98, 119, 121, 269, 410, 431, 436 New Bureaucrats (shin-kanryō) see reform bureaucrats New Caledonia 106, 108 New Order in East Asia (Tōa shin chitsujo) 62, 220 New Order Movement 179 New Party Sakigake 430 newspapers xxxiii – xxxiv, 36, 50 – 2, 57 – 8, 62 – 76, 84, 110, 129, 137, 140 – 2, 144 – 6, 173 – 4, 177, 191, 202, 207 – 8, 252, 257, 259 – 61, 274, 352, 365, 370, 378 – 81, 425, 431, 440 New Women’s Association 207 Nichikawa Fumiko 356 Nichiren Buddhism 361, 365, 368, 374 Nihon izokukai (War Bereaved Families Association) 443 Nihonjinron see national identity/national character Nihon Keizai Shinbun (Nikkei) 444 Nihon no ibuki (journal) 411, 413 Nihon oyobi Nihonjin (journal) 33, 164 Nihon Yoshisa Emigration Company (Nihon Yoshisa imin kaisha) 108 Niigata 48, 295, 299 – 307, 390 Ninomiya Sontoku 288 – 90 Nippon (journal) 259 Nippon Fujin (women’s magazine) 259 Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference) 195, 411 – 12, 443, 446 – 7, 453 – 4 Nippon Steel Corp. 341 Nippon Yūsen Kaisha (NYK) 108, 379 Nishi Amane 293 Nishida Kitarō 309 Nishida Mitsugi 33 Nishimatsu Corp. 435 Nishimura Shigeki 162 Nissan (zaibatsu) 336, 339 – 41 Nitobe Inazō 72 – 3, 204 – 6, 208 – 9, 292 – 3 Nixon Shock 292 Noguchi Hideyo 289 – 90, 293 Nōkyō (agricultural cooperatives) 320 – 1 Non-Aligned Movement 44

Index

non-regular workers/irregular workers 338 – 47, 410 Norman, E. Herbert 234, 250 Normanton shipwreck court case (1886) 49 The North-China Herald and Supreme Court and Consular Gazette 50 Northern Territories (hoppō ryōdo) xxix, xxxvi, 78; see also Kuril archipelago North Korea see Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Norway 192, 286 NTT 343 Obuchi Keizō 431 Occupation reforms xxvi – xxvii, 22, 210, 212, 222 – 4, 250, 275, 320, 409 Office for Gender Equality 353 Ogasawara Islands see Bonin Islands Ogata Taketora 258 Ogawa Eitarō 411 Ogyū Sorai 138 Ōhama Chūsaburō 57 Ōhira Masayoshi 425 Ohkawa Kazushi 268 Ōi Kentarō 201 – 2 oil shock (1973) 23, 277, 341, 343 Okada Keisuke 190 Okada Kōtama 367 Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin) 15, 72, 293 Okamura Tsukasa 172 Ōkawa Ryūhō 369 Ōkawa Shūmei 33, 44, 66, 98 Okayama 295, 297 – 302, 304 – 6, 308 – 9 Okazaki Hisahiko 413 Okinawa xix, xxvi, xxviii – xxix, xxxv – vi, xxxviii, 78, 101, 112 – 14, 116 – 19, 121 – 33, 243, 328, 349 – 50, 354, 359, 440, 444 Okinawa, Battle of (1945) xxxviii, 118, 124 Okinawa, reversion of see reversion of Okinawa Ōkubo Toshimichi 141, 164, 189, 289 Ōkuma Shigenobu 49, 164 – 5, 187, 203 – 4, 214, 293 Olympic Games/Olympiad xxxviii, 82, 209 – 10, 260 Ōmoto (religious movement) 361, 364, 374 Onaga Takeshi 127 Ōoka Shōhei 99 Opium War (1839–42) xxii, 26, 47, 93, 104, 184 Ordinance of Public Peace and Security (1887) 145 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) xxviii, xxxviii, 22 Oriental Development Company (Tōyō takushoku kabushiki kaisha) 110 – 11

Osaka xxxi, xxxiv, xxxviii, 55, 112 – 13, 145, 295, 299, 307, 315, 317, 325, 327, 382, 442 Ōsugi Sakae 175 Ōta Kaoru 331 Ōtake Hideo 229 otaku 358 Otaru 306, 379 Ottoman Empire 47, 50 Ozaki Saburō 142 Ozaki Yukio 204 – 5 Pacific xxviii – ix, 7, 10, 15, 18, 21, 77 – 8, 80 – 1, 83, 85, 96, 103 – 4, 107 – 12, 115 – 17, 124, 126, 173, 206, 222, 253, 295, 299 – 300, 349, 350, 360, 429, 439 Pacific War xxvi, xxxviii, 22, 41, 72, 84, 92, 160, 191 – 2, 212, 230, 310, 318, 321, 429, 438, 452 pacifism 33, 125, 173 – 4, 176, 184, 192, 195 – 6, 204, 207, 210, 262, 288, 353, 404, 419, 447, 449, 453 Pal, Radhabinod 450 Pan-Asianism 15, 22, 25 – 6, 28 – 36, 38 – 45, 66, 95, 97 – 8, 230, 255, 281, 447 Paris Peace Conference (1919) xxxvii, 97 parks 31, 303 – 6 Part-time Workers Law (1993) 343 Patriotic Service Association (Sangyō hōkokukai) 329 patriotism 159, 170 – 1, 174 – 5, 178, 220, 245 – 6, 260, 262, 282, 319, 433, 447 – 8, 452 – 3 Peace, Friendship and Exchange Initiative (1994) 430, 436 Peacekeeping Operations (PKO) xxxix, 194, 196, 404 Peace Preservation Law (Chian ijihō, 1925) xxv, xxxvii, 175 – 6, 180, 207, 256, 328, 361 Pearl Harbor 10, 21, 40, 74, 84, 98 – 9, 238, 249, 251, 253, 287, 417, 420, 452 Penghu islands (Pescadores) 79 People’s Conference to Protect Japan (Nihon o mamoru kokumin kaigi) 426 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 22, 421 – 9, 432 – 5, 437 – 8 Persia 47 Peru 51, 59, 104, 109 – 12 Pescadores see Penghu islands Phibun Songkhram 42 Philippines 6, 31 – 2, 41 – 3, 85, 98 – 9, 108, 112, 116, 416, 421 – 2, 431, 454 Pickering, Edward 65 – 6 Plaza Accord (1985) 343 Poland 10, 122

525

Index

pollution 389, 391, 393, 395, 397 popular culture 32, 368, 387, 432 population growth/population decline xxxi, 300 – 2, 344, 346, 363, 394 Port Arthur 79 – 80 Portugal 13, 51 – 2 postal system 67, 76, 280 Post-colonialism 4, 86, 246, 349, 353, 419 Potsdam Declaration (1945) 132, 262 poverty 105, 293 – 4, 317, 345 prisoners of war (POWs) 22, 84 – 5, 90, 99, 245, 416, 451 propaganda xix, 10, 22, 31, 35 – 7, 43, 63, 68 – 72, 85, 92, 99, 148, 175, 191, 234, 251 – 63, 280, 284, 287, 329, 386, 450 prostitution/sex work 89, 104 – 7, 250, 293, 317, 350, 355, 360; see also military prostitution Prussia 14, 51, 55 – 6, 122, 166 public opinion xxiv, 20, 29, 33, 38, 132, 137, 139 – 46, 205, 244, 254, 257, 341, 371, 418 Public Security Intelligence Agency (Kōan chōsachō) 372 public sphere xxxii, 65, 87, 137, 201, 203, 207 – 8, 350 – 1, 356, 362, 403 Pu Yi, Emperor 34, 82, 255 Qingdao 18, 32, 79, 81 Qing dynasty 6, 26, 34, 78, 80, 82, 96, 106, 112, 119, 122, 153, 205, 251, 255 Rabe, John 452 racism 8, 34, 92 – 6, 98 – 9, 101 – 2, 110, 200, 396 Radek, Karl 249 Raiffeisen, Friedrich Wilhelm 315 – 16 railways 6, 13, 18, 34, 60, 71, 80, 82, 85, 111, 115, 164, 217, 268, 274, 299, 300 – 1, 304, 306 – 9, 337 Raise Asia Society (Kōakai; or: Asia Society (Ajia kyōkai)) 29 – 30, 38, 40 Rape of Nanjing see Nanjing Massacre reconciliation xx, xxxi, 262, 414, 416 – 17, 419, 421 – 2, 430, 432 – 7, 442 – 3, 448 – 9, 452 – 4 Red Purge 335 reform bureaucrats (kakushin kanryō) xxv, 87, 218 – 19, 221, 223, 230 – 3, 235 Reischauer, Edwin O. 199, 241 Religious Corporations Law (Shūkyō hōjinhō; 1952) 362, 372 Rengō see National Confederation of Trade Unions Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily) 427 renovation (kakushin) see reform bureaucrats reparations 414, 416, 421 – 5, 427 – 8, 431, 434 – 7, 448 526

Republic of Korea (South Korea) xxxviii, 45, 192, 194, 262, 410, 421 – 2, 424, 426, 431 – 4, 436 – 9, 441 – 2, 448, 453 Rescript on Education see Imperial Rescript on Education Reuters News Agency 74, 76, 198 reversion of Okinawa (1972) 124 – 6, 130 – 1 rice 80, 85, 173, 269 – 75, 285, 301, 303, 320, 327, 377, 379 – 80, 383 – 5, 391, 393 – 4, 424 Rice Riots (1918) xxiv, 173, 186, 217, 273, 325 Richard, Paul 33 Rikken Dōshikai 214 Rikken Minseitō see Minseitō Rikken Seiyūkai see Seiyūkai Ri Kōran (Yamaguchi Yoshiko) 259 Risshōkōseikai (religious movement) 365, 369, 374 – 5 Rōdō kumiai kiseikai (Labour Union Establishment Association) 315 Roh Moo-hyun 434 Rōnōha (Workers and Peasants Group) 226 – 7 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 10, 21, 452 Roosevelt, Theodore 96 Rōsōkai (Old and Young Society) 33, 38 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 162, 202 Rōyama Masamichi 69, 209 rural fundamentalism (nōhonshugi) 273 Russia xxix, xxxvi – xxxvii, 6, 14 – 18, 20, 23, 28 – 9, 31, 33, 45, 51 – 3, 61, 66 – 8, 78 – 81, 92, 95 – 6, 108, 122, 171 – 3, 187, 194, 196, 205, 229 – 30, 251, 286, 318, 325, 327, 411 Russian Revolution (1917) 18, 33, 67, 172 – 3, 318, 327 Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) xxiii, xxv, xxxii, xxxvii, 6, 16 – 17, 23, 31, 80, 92, 95 – 6, 109, 115, 152, 187, 196, 244, 254, 325 Ryukyu Kingdom xxviii – xxxvi, 6, 77 – 8, 85, 112, 118 – 25, 130, 328, 349 – 50 Ryukyu-U.S. Friendship Treaty (1854) 121, 129 Saga 28, 185 Saigō Takamori 27, 164 Saionji Kinmochi 171, 187, 215 Saipan 115, 409, 420 Saitō Makoto 178, 190 Saitō Takao 69, 197, 244, 250 Sakaguchi Ango 225 Sakhalin see Karafuto Sakigake see New Party Sakigake samurai 27, 107, 112, 120, 137, 139 – 40, 184 – 5, 189, 200 – 2, 204, 212 – 13, 268 – 9, 285, 303 – 4, 315

Index

Sanbetsu kaigi (Congress of Industrial Unions) 329 – 30, 335 – 6 San Francisco Peace Treaty (1952) xxxviii, 85, 124, 414, 421 – 4, 428 – 9, 432, 435 – 6, 450 Sanjō Sanetomi 164, 201, 289, 291 Sano Manabu 256 Santō Kyōden 138 Sapporo 295, 299 – 304, 306 – 7, 309 Sasaki Takayuki 162 Sassa Hiroo 226 satire (as political criticism) 137 – 9 Satō Eisaku 223 Satō Nobuhiro 26 Satsuma 78, 119 – 23, 184 – 5, 201 Satsuma Rebellion xxxvi, 48, 285 schools/school system xxii, xxvii, 3, 5, 11, 88, 109, 116, 151, 154, 203 – 4, 207 – 8, 243, 246, 252, 272, 284, 296 – 9, 308, 327, 338, 350 – 1, 365, 387, 425 – 6, 433, 437, 447, 453 Sea of Japan 298, 302, 391 Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) see AsiaPacific War Second World War see World War II Seikatsu Club Consumers’ Cooperative 319 – 20, 322 Seikei Higher School 298 Seikyō Shinbun (newspaper) 365 Seinen Ajia dōmei (Young Asia Alliance) 33 Sei Shōnagon 293 Seitō (journal) 204, 352, 356 Seiyū Hontō 214 Seiyūkai 171 – 3, 176 – 7, 214 – 18, 223, 326 Self-Defense Forces (SDF) xxxviii, 192 – 7, 359, 416 self-determination 29, 33, 82, 85, 130 – 1, 173, 373, 446 Senbotsusha Tsuitō Chūō Kokumin Shūkai (Central National Rally for the War Dead) 412 Senkaku Islands (Diaoyutai) xxix, 434 Seoul 38, 62, 74, 81, 111, 436, 440 settlers, Japanese settlers in Korea and China, xix, xxxiii, 7, 68, 77 – 8, 80, 82, 87 – 8, 90, 93, 105 – 6, 113 – 16, 245, 274, 303 Japanese settlers in the Americas 107 – 12, 117 Shandong 79, 81, 176 Shanghai 26, 28, 50, 60 – 70, 72, 82 – 3, 89, 121 shepherds of the people see bokuminkan Shibusawa Eiichi 286, 289, 293 Shida Sokin 297 – 8 Shidehara Kijūrō 69, 175, 191 – 2 Shiga Shigetaka 26, 163 Shikoku 132, 297 Shima Yoshitake 303

Shimonaka Yasaburō 38 Shinagawa Yajirō 315 Shin Nittetsu (New Japan Steel Corporation) 436 Shinnyoen (religious movement) 368 – 9 Shinritō (Truth Party) 371 Shinto 138, 147 – 59, 162, 214, 221, 288, 361 – 4, 370, 374, 413, 442, 449 Shinto Directive 441 shipbuilding/shipbuilding industry 270, 326, 338, 340 shogunate see Tokugawa shogunate shokugyō fujin (the working woman) 357 Shokumin kyōkai (Colonial Association) 109 Shō Nai, King of Ryukyu 120 Shō Tai, King of Ryukyu 122 Shō Taikyū, King of Ryukyu 120 Shōtoku Taishi 285, 287, 293 Shōwa Depression 110 Shōwa Emperor (Hirohito) xxi, xxv, xxxviii, 22, 33, 124, 175, 191, 219, 225, 233, 255, 263, 349, 407, 412, 426, 442, 444 Shōwa fascism 233 Shōwa Financial Crisis (1927) xxxvii, 279 Shōwa Kenkyukai (Showa Research Association) 219, 231 Shōwa Restoration 241 Shufu no tomo (The Housewife’s Friend; magazine) 207, 357 shuntō (spring wage offensive) 331 – 2, 337 – 8, 341 Shuri Castle 120 – 2 Siam (Thailand) 42 – 3, 47, 60, 84 – 5, 120, 451 Siberia 6, 81, 85, 90, 97 Siberian Intervention xxv, xxxvii, 187, 196 Siebold, Alexander von 53 silk see textile industry Singapore 63, 89, 105, 433 Sino-Japanese Convention of Tianjin (1885) 78 Sino-Japanese Friendship and Trade Treaty (1871) 26 Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty (1952) 421, 425 Snow, Edgar 66 Social Darwinism 95 Sōdōmei (General Federation of Labour) 327, 329, 335 soft power xxviii, 386 Sōgō (Department Store) 382 Sōhyō (General Council of Trade Unions) xxxviii, 330 – 2, 336 – 7, 343 – 4 Sōka Gakkai 361, 365 – 70, 372 – 5 Sokolsky, George E. 66 – 7 Somalia 194 Sone Toshitora 26, 29 527

Index

Sonpo Japan Nippon Kōa (Kōa Sonpo) 40 South Korea see Republic of Korea South Manchurian Railway (Mantetsu) 34, 71, 80, 82, 111, 115 Southwest War (Satsuma Rebellion, 1877) xxxvi, 186, 285 Soviet-Japan Joint Declaration (1956) xxxviii, 421, 435 Soviet Union xxix, xxxviii, 20 – 3, 39, 83, 85, 161, 229 – 30, 255 – 6, 320, 330 Soyanggang Dam 424 Spain 192 Special Higher Police (Tokubetsu kōtō keisatsu, tokkōtai) 222, 256 sports 86, 260, 309, 331 Stalin, Joseph 179, 229, 240, 255 State Shinto xix, 147 – 59, 361 – 2, 441, 449; see also Shinto steel industry see heavy industry Stein, Lorenz von 165 strike 81, 326 – 7, 329 – 30, 335 – 7, 341, 343, 345 Suehiro Tetchō 144 Suematsu Kenchō 72 Suetake Yoshiya 233 Suetsugu Nobumasa 177 – 8 suffrage xxiv, xxxvii, 173, 175 – 6, 204, 206 – 7, 210, 215 – 16, 218, 237, 324, 326, 351 suffragist movement 352 Sugawara no Michizane 285, 287 – 9, 291 Sugiura Shigetake 163 Sugiyama Hajime 191 Suita Incident (1880) 57 Sūkei hōsankai (Worship Association) 413 Sumitomo (zaibatsu) 328 Sun Yat-sen 66 Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in Japan (SCAP) 75, 288 – 92, 330, 335 – 6 Supreme Court 50, 55, 435 Suzuki Bunji 325 Suzuki Daisetsu 309 Suzuki Kantarō 191 Suzuki Kisaburō 176, 218 Taiping Rebellion 26, 122 Taishō Democracy xxiii – v, 187, 189, 233 – 4, 246, 325 – 6 Taishō Emperor xxi, xxiii, 174 Taishō Political Crisis (1912–13) xxiv, xxxvii, 187, 205, 215 Taiwan Expedition (1874) xxv, xxxvi Taiyō (journal) xxxiii, 30 Takahashi Korekiyo 190, 273, 286, 292 528

Takamura Naosuke 228 Takamure Itsue 352 Takano Fusatarō 325 Takarabe Takeshi 176 Takenouchi no Sukune 285, 287 – 8 Takeshima Day 434 Takeshima islets (Liancourt Rocks) xxix, 45, 434, 437 Takeshita Noboru 293 Takigawa Yukitoki 178 Taki Rentarō 293 Takubo Tadae 411 Tamamatsu Misao 164 Tamogami Toshio 416 Tanaka Giichi 176, 218 Tanaka Ippei 34 Tanaka Kakuei 425 Tanaka Shōzō 397 Tang Jiezhi 66 Tani Tateki 162 Tanrō (coal miners’ union) 337 tariff autonomy 6, 14, 47, 49 Tarui Tōkichi 27 – 9 Tazawa Yoshiharu 218 technology xxvii, xxxiv, 4 – 5, 7, 13 – 14, 78, 86, 93, 95 – 6, 160, 164, 181 – 2, 184, 206, 227, 235, 258 – 60, 262, 268 – 76, 279, 292, 294, 305, 327, 338 – 9, 341, 348, 367 – 8 Temporary Worker Law (1997) 345 tenkō (apostasy) 256 tennō (Emperor) 26, 77, 147, 231, 239 Ten’yūkyō (or: Chivalrous Knights of Heavenly Assistance) 28 Terashima Munenori 49 Terauchi Masatake xxiv, 172 – 3 territorial disputes xxix, 45, 119, 410, 433 – 4, 437, 447, 453 terrorism xxv, xxxix, 34, 177 – 8, 189, 193 – 4, 196, 198, 218, 227, 232, 242, 245, 255, 371, 451 – 2 textile industry/textile mills 19, 58, 120, 205, 269 – 70, 278, 275, 314, 326 – 8, 341, 354, 394 Tianjin 26, 38, 62, 78 Tōa Dōbun Shoin (Same Culture Academy) 38 Tōgō Shigenori 441 Tōhoku Earthquake (2011) 193 Tōjō Hideki xxxviii, 71, 181, 190 – 1, 221, 422, 427 Tokio Times 50 – 1, 53 – 5, 73 Tokuda Shūsei 299 Tokugawa shogunate xxii, xxxvi, 13, 23, 48, 78, 103, 120 – 1, 137 – 8, 140, 160 – 1, 178, 183 – 5, 213, 281, 303, 441 Tokutomi Sohō 15

Index

Tokyo xx, xxii, xxviii, xxxi, xxxiv, xxxvii – xxxix, 10, 30 – 3, 39, 42 – 3, 57 – 9, 62 – 3, 65 – 6, 69, 72, 78, 81 – 2, 90, 104 – 8, 110 – 12, 117, 120 – 3, 125 – 7, 129, 131 – 2, 142, 144 – 5, 156, 161, 183, 190 – 1, 193, 202, 207, 217, 220, 239, 245, 256, 286, 295 – 300, 306 – 7, 309, 315, 318, 323, 325, 327, 329 – 30, 335, 350, 353 – 5, 357, 360, 362, 370 – 1, 379, 381 – 3, 390, 395, 397, 411, 429, 440, 448 Tokyo Conference of Overseas Japanese (Kaigai dōhō Tōkyō taikai) 114 – 15 Tokyo Higher Normal School (Tōkyō kōtō shihan gakkō) 385 Tokyo Imperial University 33, 66, 94 – 5, 140, 164 – 5, 171 – 4, 178, 183, 205, 209, 216, 256 Tokyo Public Health Office 385 Tokyo Shōkonsha (Shrine to Summon the Souls) see Yasukuni Shrine Tokyo trials 85, 90, 182, 229, 411, 414, 416 – 17, 422, 427, 441, 453; see also International Military Tribunal for the Far East Tokyo University (Tokyo Imperial University) 140, 165, 210, 226, 243, 293, 297, 369, 416 Tomita Tomohiko 442 Tomizawa Uio 249 Torio Koyata 162 – 3 Toshiba Corp. 322, 336, 341 totalitarianism xxv, 114, 154, 161, 179, 190, 220, 227, 229, 231, 233, 245, 247, 365 – 6 Tōyama Mitsuru 28, 31 Toyoda Kumao 262 Toyohira River 303 Toyota Corp. 336, 339 – 41 Toyotomi Hideyoshi 27 Trade Union Law 329 trade unions /trade union movement see labour unions traditionalism xxvii, 281 transcendentalism (chōzenshugi) 213 – 14, 216, 218 transnationalism xix, xxviii – xxx, 3 – 5, 8, 25, 45, 51, 62, 65, 67, 76, 105, 244, 246, 356, 359 – 60 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) 321 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan xxvi, xxxviii, 22, 125, 193, 198, 292, 337, 353, 404, 417 Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) 21 Treaty of Portsmouth (1905) xxxvii, 31, 68, 80 Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) xxxvii, 79, 96 Treaty of St. Petersburg (1875) xxxvi, 78

Treaty of Versailles (1919) 68, 102, 206, 421 – 3 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of South Korea (1965) 421 – 2, 424, 436 treaty ports 14, 47 – 8, 50 – 2, 56, 58 – 61, 72, 76, 349, 380 treaty revision 14, 47 – 50, 58 – 9 Tripartite Pact (1941) xxxviii, 21, 29, 220 Triple Intervention (1895) xxxvii, 15, 30, 79 – 80, 96 Trotsky, Leon 67, 240 Tsuboi Shōgorō 95 Tsuji Masanobu 44 Tsukiji settlement 58 Tsukui Tatsuo 44 Turkey 34, 194 Twenty-One Demands (1915) 18, 32, 73, 75, 81 Uchida Ryōhei 28, 31 Uchimura Kanzō 293 Uehara Yūsaku 187 – 8 Ueki Emori 122, 132, 143 – 4, 201, 211 Uemura Takashi 294 Uesugi Shinkichi 172 Ugaki Kazushige 209 – 10 Ukita Kazutami 204, 206 ultranationalism 147 – 8, 152, 182, 196, 288 – 9 Unequal Treaties xxxvi, 6, 14, 27, 47, 67, 78, 96, 111, 145, 165 – 6, 184, 205, 281, 343, 350 UNESCO 130, 206, 293, 376 – 9, 383, 385 – 7 Unification Church 372 Union movements 318, 324 – 5, 328, 334 – 5, 339, 343 – 4 Unit 731 452 United Nations (U.N.) xxviii, xxxviii, 130, 194, 262, 436 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS; 1982) xxix United Nations Human Rights Committee see human rights United States xxvi, xxxii, xxxvi, xxxviii, 4 – 7, 9 – 11, 13 – 14, 18 – 23, 32 – 4, 40, 43 – 4, 50 – 4, 59, 61, 63 – 6, 70, 74 – 5, 81, 84 – 5, 92, 96 – 9, 101, 104 – 5, 107, 109 – 12, 114, 119, 124 – 7, 129 – 30, 141, 143, 161, 172 – 3, 177, 185, 187, 190, 192 – 4, 196, 198, 200, 204, 208, 211, 221, 225, 229 – 31, 234, 238 – 9, 241, 253, 262, 275, 277, 280, 282 – 4, 286, 310 – 12, 317, 320, 325 – 6, 330, 350, 355, 383, 389 – 91, 411, 414, 416 – 17, 421 – 4, 426, 430, 435, 444 United States-Japan Security Treaty see Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan 529

Index

universal suffrage see suffrage urbanization xxx – xxxi, 237, 272, 277, 295, 302, 348, 364 U.S.-Japan Alliance see Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan Utagawa Kuniyoshi 139 Vatican 159 Vietnam 32, 38, 40, 44, 88, 120, 421 – 2, 454 Vietnam War xxvi, 242 – 3, 449 Vietnam War Memorial 442 Vladivostok 15, 31, 81, 110 Wada Hiroo 223 Wakabayashi Han 34 Wakatsuki Reijirō 176 – 7, 208 Wakatsuki Toshikazu 321 Wake no Kiyomaro 285, 287, 293 Wang Jing-wei 40, 43, 84, 261 Wang Yang-ming (Ō Yōmei) 200 Wang Yi 45 war crimes 39, 44, 85, 90, 191, 233, 239, 262, 414 – 15, 417, 419, 423, 427 – 8, 438, 441 – 2, 444 – 5, 449 – 51 war of aggression (shinryaku sensō) xxxi, 148, 409, 415, 417 – 19, 425 – 7, 432 – 3 War of Resistance Against Japan xxvi, 433 war responsibility (postwar responsibility) xix, xxxi, 191, 233, 403, 414 – 16, 419, 422 – 3, 425 – 7, 436, 443, 445 – 52, 454 Waseda University 203 – 4, 293, 433 Washington Conference (1921/22) xxxvii, 19, 69, 74, 97, 174, 188 – 9, 206, 208 washoku (‘Japanese-style food’) 376 – 88 Watanabe Hiromoto 29 Watanabe Jōtarō 190 Western colonialism/imperialism 4, 7, 25 – 6, 28, 32 – 3, 36, 41, 44, 47, 61, 77, 80, 85, 93, 162, 210, 254, 447, 451 – 2 Westernization 8, 160, 162, 164, 166, 171, 181 – 2, 275, 379 Western Powers xx, 6 – 7, 25, 27, 29 – 30, 33 – 4, 38 – 9, 41, 44, 47 – 9, 67 – 8, 78, 80 – 1, 98, 145, 162, 166, 184, 190, 239, 248 – 9, 260, 274 whaling 396 Wilhelm I 57 Wilhelm II 96 Wilson, Woodrow 81, 173 Wilsonianism 33, 173, 206 Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) 350 – 1 530

womens’ rights 176, 202, 207, 209, 246, 250, 322, 326, 342, 351, 435 women workers 103 – 6, 204, 207, 259, 322, 324, 326 – 9, 331 – 3, 340 – 7, 351 – 60 Workers’ Cooperative Network Japan (WNJ) 322 working poor 345 World Bank xxviii World Economic Forum (2014) 440 World Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity 378, 386 – 7 World War I xxi, xxv, xxxvii, 9, 18 – 19, 21, 32 – 4, 61, 64, 81, 87, 97, 172 – 3, 182, 185, 188, 196, 206, 216 – 18, 226, 230 – 1, 246, 251, 256, 267, 271 – 2, 280, 299, 308, 317, 325 – 7, 419, 421, 440, 449 World War II xix – xxi, xxvi, xxix, xxxi – xxxiii, 9, 13, 22 – 3, 34, 88 – 9, 101, 114, 118, 150, 188, 224, 238 – 9, 251 – 3, 267 – 8, 272, 279, 324, 328, 349, 351, 356, 392, 409, 418, 439, 441, 448 xenophobia 93, 102, 170, 184, 403, 409 – 10 Yaeyama 113, 123 Yamagata Aritomo 170 – 3, 186 – 7, 215 Yamagata Bantō 138 Yamaguchi 107, 112, 116, 185 Yamakawa Kikue 352 Yamamoto Gonnohyōe 188, 215 Yanagawa Heisuke 180 Yanagihara Byakuren 174 Yanaihara Tadao 66, 69, 209 – 11 Yano Harumichi 164 Yasukuni Shrine xx, 151, 155 – 6, 288, 362, 403, 409 – 13, 415, 425, 427 – 8, 434, 438, 440 – 7, 449 – 54 Yasumaru Yoshio 152, 154 Yasuoka Masahiro 235, 262 Yellow Peril 15, 17, 20, 92, 96 yen (currency) xix, 19, 84, 208, 241, 273, 279 – 82, 284 – 94, 306, 343, 383 Yokohama xxxi, xxxvii, 19, 48, 50 – 61, 64, 66, 73, 103 Yomiuri Shinbun (daily newspaper) 378 – 9, 381, 404, 407, 444 yonaoshi (world renewal) 139, 364, 368 Yosano Akiko 293, 352 Yoshida Shigeru 192, 214, 219, 223, 235, 335 Yoshihara Shigetoshi 289 – 90 Yoshino Sakuzō xxiii – xxiv, 173 – 4, 199, 205, 317 yōshoku (‘Western-style food’) 379 – 83 Yōshokuya (Western-style cafeterias) 380 – 1 Young, Arthur Morgan 66 Yūaikai (Friendly Society) xxxvii, 325 – 7 Yuan Shi-kai 18

Index

Yūshūkan museum 410, 441 – 2, 444 – 7, 449 – 52 Yūzonsha (Society of Those Who Yet Remain) 33, 38, 233 zaibatsu 177, 223, 237, 273 – 4, 276, 328 Zenrōkyō (labour union) 344

Zenrōren (labour union) 344 Zhang Taiyan 31 Zhang Xueliang (Chang Hsueh-liang) 66, 82 Zhang Zuolin (Chang Tso-lin) 81, 176, 254 Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai) 425 Zhou Hua-ren 40

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