A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan: Placing the People (Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 5 Japan)

A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan

Handbook of Oriental Studies Handbuch der Orientalistik Section Five Japan

Edited by

M. Blum R. Kersten M.F. Low

VOLUME 13

A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan Placing the People

by

Kevin M. Doak

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Detailed Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data are available on the Internet at http://catalog.loc.gov

ISSN ISBN-13: ISBN-10:

0921-5239 978 90 04 15598 5 90 04 15598 8

Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

To my parents Samuel and Peggy Doak Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam

CONTENTS Preface ……………………………………………………………… ix Chapter One Representing the People as a Nation ………………... 1 Contemporary Nationalism Theory: What is Nationalism and Who are the Nation.……………………………………… 5 Theoritical Influences on Japanese Discourse on the Nation ..… 11 Contemporary Japanese Theories on Nationalism . ……………. 25 Chapter Two The Preconditions of Japanese Nationalism . ……… 36 The Bakamatsu Years and the Preconditions of National Identity ……………………………………………………… 37 Creating a Public and Building a State in Early Meiji . …………45 Mitsukuri Rinsh and the Legal Theory of “Minken”. ……… 65 Miyazaki Mury and the Concept of “Minzoku” .... ………… 71 Mitsukuri, Miyazaki and Japanese Nationalist Discourse ...... 80 Chapter Three Tenn …………………………………………….. 83 The Monarch as Liberator of the Japanese People . …………… 84 Monarchy and the Moral Nation .………………………………. 92 The Monarch as Emperor (Ktei)..……………………………. 102 The Tenn as Symbol of the Nation .. …………………………. 113 Chapter Four Shakai . …………………………………………… 127 Coming to Terms with Society in Meiji Japan ..... …………….. 129 Constructing Society, Conceiving of Shakai ..... ………………. 135 Society as a Problem ..………………………………………… 143 Taisho Sociology and the Problem of the “People” .................. 149 Postwar Japan and Shakai ……………………………………. 154 Chapter Five Kokumin …………………………………………. 164 Civilization and Nationalism, 1868-1890 .................................. 169 Meiji Kokumin Aesthetics ....……………………………….. 177 Meiji Kokumin Theology ...………………………………… 184

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Meiji Kokumin Political Theory ........................................... 191 From Political to Cultural Nationalism, 1890-1945 ………….. 194 The Postwar Return of the Kokumin, 1945-Present... ………… 203 Chapter Six Minzoku …………………………………………… 216 Minzoku and Empire. ………………………………………….. 219 Minzoku and Liberal Political Theory .. ………………………. 226 Minzoku and War . …………………………………………….. 236 Minzoku and the Postwar Nation...……………………………. 250 Chapter Seven Afterword: The Place of the Nation in Japan Today.. ………………………………………………….. 265 Bibliography ……………………………………………………… 275 Index ……………………………………………………………… 285

PREFACE My effort to provide a comprehensive analysis of Japanese nationalism has occupied–indeed, all too often, preoccupied–my thinking, research and publications for most of my professional career. It stems from my first book published in 1994 that focused on a group of romantic nationalists during the wartime, but seeks to provide a broader context for that work by outlining the various strains of nationalism that often vied for dominance and official recognition over the course of modern Japanese history. The all-encompassing nature of this study makes it more difficult than usual to identify the particular sources of support and influence I have received from so many people and institutions over the years I have been engaged with this project. I am painfully aware of the fact, and need to admit it from the outset, that many who gave tirelessly and patiently to help me understand the nuances of nationalism, both in Japan and as a general sociological feature of modern societies, inadvertently will be overlooked in my acknowledgements, and to them I can only offer my apologies. This book is the result of work that I have done over the last twelve years at six universities on three continents. The idea of a synthetic approach to Japanese nationalism that emphasized the internal contestations of nationalist discourse was sketched out in my classes on Modern Japanese History at Wake Forest University in the early 1990s. Exceptional colleagues and students accompanied me on the incipient stages of that journey, and I particularly would like to thank Yuri Slezkine, Alan Williams, Michael Hughes, Simone Caron and a former student at Wake Forest, David Ellis, who is now an Associate Professor of German History at Augustana College. The actual research and writing of the book commenced during my tenure at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana from 1994 to 2002. I received financial support from a William & Flora Hewlett Summer International Research Grant in 1995, and an early draft of Chapter Two was composed during spring of 1997 when I was appointed a Fellow in the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of

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Illinois. During my eight years in Urbana, there were simply too many colleagues, students and friends who stimulated my thinking and provided various forms of support for me to list them all. But I would be remiss not to mention Ronald Toby, George Yu, David Goodman, Atsuko Ueda, Emanuel Pastreich, Jason Karlin, Jinhee Lee, Paul Droubie, Curtis Gayle, Harry Liebersohn, and especially Fred Jaher. To those whom I have neglected to single out, my apologies. All of you have shaped me in ways that I may never fully realize and for which I can only express my gratitude. One highlight of those years was a grant I received from the Social Science Research Council to conduct research on the formation of the nation-state in Meiji Japan from May through August 1998 at the National Humanities Institute, Kyoto University. Yamamuro Shin’ichi graciously agreed to direct my work and gave generously of his time and resources. I can never adequately thank him for all he did for me during those hot summer months in Kyoto. His support extended to securing for me Ministerial appointment as a Visiting Researcher so I could return to Kyoto during 2002-03 to complete this book. I regret that I was unable to accept that appointment as I had just accepted a new position at Georgetown University that began the same year. Undoubtedly, that appointment would have expedited what was already a long-overdue book. I would also like to thank Akitoshi Shimizu of Hitotsubashi University for inviting me to present a paper on “Nakano Seiichi and Colonial Ethnic Studies” at the workshop on Wartime Japanese Anthropology in Asian and Oceania, held in 1999 at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka. Some of the material from that presentation is incorporated in Chapter Six of this book. Also, I am deeply grateful to Konan University and its International Exchange Center (KIEC) for support during 2000-2001 when I was appointed as the Resident Director of Illinois’s Year in Konan Program. They provided me with a quiet and spacious office, where I was able to finish much of Chapter Two and parts of Chapter Five, in between teaching a course and administrating the Year in Konan program. Many faculty and administrators at Konan were extraordinarily generous with their time and support and I thank them all, especially Takano Kiyohiro. Over the course of that year, I was able to meet other professors in Japan who were very generous in their support and helpful in my work on Japanese nationalism. Yonehara Ken of Osaka University invited me to make a presentation to his seminar and has been an exceptional guide on Japanese nationalism, particularly during the Meiji period. Matsuda Kichir at Rikkyo University has

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also been an invaluable aid, providing me with research materials and inviting me to join his collaborative project during 2001-02 on “Research into the Political Theory and Political Study of Contemporary Problems in Ethnicity and Nationalism.” Masako Katano of Osaka University of Commerce alerted me to the range of influence that Meiji Christian intellectuals had on civic nationalism. And Takada Yasunari of the University of Tokyo has been an ideal friend, collaborator and intellectual provocateur who opened up new worlds of ideas to me. I must thank also my colleagues at Georgetown University, especially Philip Kafalas, Michael McCaskey, Yoshiko Mori, Jordan Sand and Jingyuan Zhang. It was only after I joined them in 2002 that this book really began to come together and their support has been essential in bringing it to fruition. A semester leave in 2003 was pivotal in making that final push to completion. I thank the Dean of Georgetown College, Jane Dammen McAuliffe, for granting me the leave and John Witek, SJ for taking on additional administrative responsibilities so I could accept the leave. It was at this point that Rikki Kersten at Leiden University began to make such a difference in moving this project toward completion. First, she invited me to present the gist of the project in a talk on “Nationalism and the Issue of Ethnicity in Japan” as part of the workshop she organized with Axel Schneider on “Historical Consciousness and the Future of Modern China and Japan: Conservativism, Revisionism, and National Identity” at Leiden University on May 25, 2003. Then, after including me on a real instance of “traveling theory” that took this project on historical consciousness to Harvard and then on to the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Chicago, she invited me to spend the month of June 2005 in Leiden as a Lecturer in Residence for the Workshop on Historical Consciousness in China and Japan. Traveling theory was fine, but nothing like spending a summer month in Leiden devoted to writing the book. It was during this period, and with remarkable resources from the Leiden University East Asian library collection, that I was able to complete drafts of Chapters Four and Five and begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. During that brief summer in Leiden, I was blessed with a rich intellectual and social life, and I wish to thank Rikki, Axel Schneider, Maghiel van Crevel, Christopher Goto-Jones and Albert Hoffstädt for showing me a life in Leiden that even now seems as though it were only a dream. To Albert and Patricia Radder, my editors at Brill, my deepest gratitude for not giving up on me as this book missed one deadline after another.

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Finally, there are those whose influence on me and this book has been so pervasive that they require special mention. Kosaku Yoshino of Sophia University was a critical influence in helping me find the conceptual tools and theoretical sources for understanding Japanese nationalism in a comparative framework. Harry Harootunian and Tetsuo Najita were true Doktorvaters: without them, none of this would have been possible. In terms of this particular project, I am indebted to Tets for teaching me to think about nations as internally contested forms of identity (especially his model of bureaucratism/ idealism which has influenced my understanding of Japanese nationalism as a struggle between civic and ethnic nationalisms) and to Harry for turning me and a generation of his graduate students on to the significance of minzoku ideology in modern Japanese culture and politics. They, along with all those acknowledged above, cannot be held responsible for the faults of this book: for that, the responsibility is mine alone. My wife Therese and my sons Anatole and Emile have contributed to this book in ways that go beyond the usual things families often endure in the course of a book project. Yes, they put up with my frequent absences and my inattentiveness to them even when I was home. But they also gave up much of their lives to accompany me to Japan not once, but three times. Anatole and Emile accepted their new life as students for a year in Okamoto Dai-Ni Elementary School in Kobe, where they learned Japanese in order to do their assignments and speak with their classmates, and they had to develop new techniques to deal with soccer fields composed more of sand than grass. But through their experiences in Japan and at home, and especially through what they have taught me about soccer, I have been able to understand nationalism from a vantage point that all the libraries in the world could not have given me. But it is to Therese that I must confess my greatest debt: she has not only prepared the final manuscript, under great pressure and time constraints, but she has been my constant companion throughout my journey into the world of nationalism and the nationalism of the world. There are some debts that no formal acknowledgement will ever suffice to cover. My debt to her is one.

CHAPTER ONE

REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE AS A NATION Much of what is written about Japanese nationalism is not really about nationalism at all. This is the first paradox that anyone who wishes to understand the past, present and future of Japanese nationalism must confront. It is not only true about academic writing on nationalism in Japan, but a fortiori of journalistic accounts of “rising nationalism” or “neo-nationalism” that plague so many of the contemporary English language media reports on politics in Japan. When narratives of this “neo-nationalism” in Japan today are tied, implicitly or explicitly, to the historical militarism or expansionism of Imperial Japan during World War II, then misunderstanding of Japanese nationalism only deepens. That is not to say that history is irrelevant to nationalism in Japan or elsewhere. It certainly is relevant, and that is one reason that this study takes a historical approach to understanding Japanese nationalism. It is, rather, a question of “getting the history right,” or in this case not only of getting the history right, but of accurately identifying the subject of analysis: nationalism itself. The legacy of World War II, compounded with the institutional bias of postwar modernization theory, has left a strong tendency in works on Japanese nationalism to focus on the role of the state. State indoctrination, state control of the economy and education, state predominance over regional and local governments—all combine to yield the impression that the main story line of Japanese nationalism is how the state emerged to control so much of life in modern Japan. This study does not deny the significant presence of the state in modern Japanese life, and particularly in political life. It simply argues that much of this narrative about the state is not really a narrative about nationalism. In fact, the statist bias in some writings on Japanese nationalism often yields a lesson, not in “seeing like a state,” as James C. Scott put it,1 but in how trying to see like a state 1

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

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can result in a blindness to the reality of nationalism. Put succinctly, nationalism is a principle that asserts the people as the privileged principle of political life. But this principle of the people is more than a political one. It makes certain cultural claims that go to the heart of identity, individual and collective, and as such it can place itself as a conflicting relationship with the state. It certainly did so for much of modern Japanese history. More than twenty years of reading the literature on Japanese nationalism has left me with a strong sense that what is said in English and what is said in Japanese about the subject are often worlds apart. This difference is not so much one of evaluative positions: it is easy enough to find authors in either language who reject nationalism completely or who support it, at least for limited strategic reasons (most commonly, for what is believed to be its value in anti-imperialism). But what has been most striking is the rather casual use of the term “nationalism” in English writing, and the more attentive and discriminating use of terminology to convey the idea of nation or nationalism in Japanese. In part, this is due to a specific linguistic feature of Japanese that needs to be stated at the outset here, and indeed in any study on Japanese nationalism. There are two distinct words in Japanese for “nationalism,” kokuminshugi and minzokushugi, just as there are two distinct words in Japan for “nation,” kokumin and minzoku. A third term, kokkashugi, is often mis-translated into English as “nationalism,” but it really denotes what the French language captures better as étatisme, or “statism.” And, similarly, the root word kokka should be translated into English as “state” rather than “nation.” Anyone who speaks or writes on nationalism in Japanese must come to some understanding as to what these different ways of articulating nationalism in Japanese signify, and then sometimes make a choice between these alternative ways of articulating “nation” or “nationalism.”2 To choose one term over the other is to select, explicitly or implicitly, a particular understanding of what nationalism is. To fully appreciate the subtle differences that emerge from the choice of terminology requires some understanding of basic political 2

In recent years, there has been an increasing tendency to use the English word “nationalism” in phonetic form (nashonarizumu). This approach has had two effects on Japanese discourse on nationalism: one, an increase in theoretical ambiguity about what exactly is being addressed (i.e., “what is nationalism?”); and two, a tendency to exoticize nationalism as something that comes from, or is characteristic only of, the West.

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theory on nationalism and the state. But in the first place, it is important simply to recognize that the Japanese language forces a conscious choice in terminology on one who wishes to discourse on nationalism in Japanese. When a person speaks or writes about nationalism in Japanese, he must decide whether the subject is minzokushugi, kokuminshugi, or even kokkashugi—with considerable differences in connotation. The first “nationalism” is rooted in a concept of minzoku, the people as an ethnic (some argue “racial”) group; the second is based on the principle of the kokumin, the people as constituted into a political unit (which may, but need not, be ethnic); and the final, as we have seen, is really about placing the state (kokka) above all else, potentially even above the nation. The English language has not developed a plurality of terms for “nation” or “nationalism.” Consequently, in recent years, theorists of nationalism writing in English have developed modifications of nationalism to convey these distinct conceptions of nationalism: “ethnic nationalism,” “civil nationalism,” “political nationalism,” and the like. “Cultural nationalism” is less a modification of nationalism than an umbrella term that reminds us of how ideologies mobilize identity within various forms of nationalism. “Cultural nationalism” can be merely a way of indicating how ethnic, civil and even statist variants of nationalism are mobilized through cultural discourse. In Japanese, the term “cultural nationalism” (bunka nashonarizumu) is an awkwardly translated term at best, since the existing terms in Japanese for nationalism already convey a particular theory and mode of cultural nationalism.3 The primary challenge in writing an English language handbook on Japanese nationalism then is how to represent the subject matter without either relying on the traditional, and inadequate, modes of writing about Japanese nationalism in English (and erasing the distinctiveness of specific language choices in the Japanese sources) or falling into that particular form of Orientalism that asserts the inherent incommensurability of languages and concepts of nonWestern cultures (emphasizing those different terminologies as if they were untranslatable). Language issues aside, such an Orientalism is, as many have already pointed out, fatally flawed for its ethical implications alone. But it is especially important to note that it would be tautological in a study on nationalism to employ Orientalist 3 Cf. It Kimiharu, Yanagita Kunio to bunka nashonarizumu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002). Yoshino Ksaku, Bunka nashonarizumu no shakaigaku (Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 1997).

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conceits: for it is not Orientalism that presents the strongest case for cultural incommensurability, but nationalism itself. Any argument about Japanese nationalism that even implicitly asserts the uniqueness of Japanese ideas about their national identity would not inform us about Japanese nationalism so much as it would merely re-present that nationalism itself. To deny the uniqueness of Japanese nationalism is not, however, to reject the historical particularity of people, ideas and debates that contributed to a received discourse on nationalism in modern Japan. Here, we need to walk a fine line between the obvious fact that a universal human nature underlies all intellectual activities (including conceiving of national distinctiveness) and the equally true fact that all intellectual work is done by particular individuals in particular historical and social contexts and thus cannot be reproduced completely in another place or time. Explanations of Japanese nationalism that merely assert Japan as another case of a universal theory of capitalism or the ubiquitous state of human nature simply are not particular enough to constitute a compelling argument about Japanese nationalism, just as a history of the Japanese as a distinct, unchanging nation from ancient times to the present are less histories of Japanese nationalism as instances of nationalism itself! Given this inherent challenge in identifying the subject of nationalism without running aground on the Scylla of a reductive Japaneseness or the Charybdis of a bland universalism, it is essential to chart a middle course. My own approach is first to foreground my understanding of Japanese nationalism in an overview of major developments in nationalism theory (theory that, I hasten to add, is not a Western “mastertext” to be applied to a non-Western case study, but which has been fully absorbed by Japanese political theorists and to which Japanese theorists have contributed). Theory and culture are not in conflict, but in many ways mutually interdetermined. This is particularly so in the case of nationalism, which is at once a theory of culture and a cultural manifestation of a particular theory of identity and politics. But once we have come to understand, through a theoretical introduction, what the subject of nationalism is, we must then move to the particular manifestations of that theory in the substance of Japanese nationalism itself. Thus, in the body of this book, I trace the historical developments in modes of conceiving the nation in Japan in concrete detail, alongside the historical events that provided the context for major nationalist assertions. Finally, in the conclusion, I return to the question of what such a historical approach can tell us about nationalism in Japan, past and present. Whether this

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course will avoid shipwreck is for others to decide: for my part, I will try to maintain a steady course through these perilous waters so as to avoid the dangers that lie on either extreme.

Contemporary Nationalism Theory: What is Nationalism and Who are the Nation? To ask “what is nationalism?” first requires that we understand what a nation is, for nationalism, as chimeric as it can seem at times, certainly is a matter ultimately of elevating the “nation” to the central principle of social and political life. Historically, the concept of nation is older than the concept of nationalism. As theorists of nationalism have consistently stressed for decades, the English word “nation” and its European cognates have their origins in the Latin word natio, meaning “a being born, having come into being.” It is also sometimes pointed out that this word natio has a common root in the word for nature, thus linking a nation with something natural. Yet, we need not leap to the conclusion that nations are natural entities. The word nationem was used in Medieval European universities to loosely distinguish students by geographical or linguistic regions. Thus, the “nation de France” included students from France, Italy and Spain, the “nation de Germanie” included those from England and Germany, the “nation de Picardie” referred to Dutch students, and the “nation de Normandie” were students from the Northeast. Yet, as Liah Greenfeld points out, this “national identity” was merely an administrative category and not an identity embraced by the students themselves: “this identity was immediately shed when their studies were completed and they returned home.” 4 It was certainly not a natural identity for these university students. As the universities sent representatives to church councils (especially the Council of Lyon in 1274), the concept of nation was applied to mean “representatives of cultural and political authority, or a political, cultural, and social elite.”5 Of course, concepts are not easy to control, and there is some evidence that the concept of nation in the medieval Europe was used also in a more broad sense to refer to “the people.”6 Even so, the word

4 Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 4. 5 Greenfeld, 4-5. 6 Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300, (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1984), excerpt reprinted 137-40 in John Hutchinson &

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nation lacked its contemporary meaning, one that would connect it to the later emergence of nationalism. The origins of nation in its modern sense are found in early sixteenth century England, when “the word ‘nation’ in its conciliar meaning of ‘an elite’ was applied to the population of the country and made synonymous with the word ‘people.’”7 Greenfeld maintains that nationalism began at this moment and spread around the world from its origins in England. In the process, it gave rise to different apprehensions of “the people” based on the historical conditions found in the major incubators of nationalism: England, where the people were defined as equal; France, where the people were defined by social contract in relation to étatism; Russia, where the people were defined in paradoxical relationship to the soil and the state; Germany, where resentment against England and France gave rise to an ethnic (Volkisch) concept of the people, and America, where British contractual nationalism gave birth to an idealistic civic nationalism. Because Greenfeld identifies the emergence of this new concept of the nation at this early date, she also concludes that nationalism began at that very moment. Hers is an intellectual history of nationalism precisely because she, following Hans Kohn, grasps that nationalism is first a mode of conceiving of identity and only then a political movement: The specificity of nationalism, that which distinguishes nationality from other types of identity, derives from the fact that nationalism locates the source of individual identity within a “people,” which is seen as the bearer of sovereignty, the central object of loyalty, and the basis of collective solidarity. The “people” is the mass of a population whose boundaries and nature are defined in various ways, but which is usually perceived as larger than any concrete community and always as fundamentally homogeneous, and only superficially divided by the lines of status, class, locality, and in some cases even ethnicity. This specificity is conceptual. The only foundation of nationalism as such, the only condition, that is, without which no nationalism is possible, is an idea; nationalism is a particular perspective or style of thought. The idea which lies at the core of nationalism is the idea of the ‘nation.’8

Anthony D. Smith, eds., Nationalism: Oxford Readers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 140. 7 Greenfeld, 6. 8 Greenfeld, 3-4. Cf. “Nationalism is first and foremost a state of mind, an act of consciousness, which since the French Revolution has become more and more common to mankind.” Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (New York: Collier Books, 1944), 10-11.

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Greenfeld’s understanding of the nation as an idea corresponds to Hans Kohn’s similar approach that seeks the origins of “the idea of nationalism.” Both emphasize that the nation is a mode of conceiving of the people. But because Kohn starts with nationalism and works back to the nation, while Greenfeld starts with the nation and then deduces nationalism from it, they arrive at very different conclusions about nations and nationalism. The most significant difference is that Kohn insists on the centrality of popular sovereignty in relation to territory, while Greenfeld considers the territorial question secondary (cf. in sixteenth century England, the territorial question was not a significant one in the emergence or historical impact of the idea of nation). In this regard, Greenfeld’s approach to nationalism is more helpful in understanding nationalism in Japan, where the territorial issue was more similar to the situation in sixteenth century England than to disputes that emerged elsewhere over state boundaries or even the creation of new states as national homelands for displaced peoples. Although there is considerable debate over when, how and in what forms the concept of nation emerged in world history, there is substantial agreement that it was an effort to conceive of “the people” in a significantly new fashion. Even scholars of nationalism who emphasize the pre-modern originals of nationalism recognize that the “nation” was an effort to represent the people in some collective fashion. Hugh Seton-Watson and John Armstrong both argue for the emergence of nations before nationalism, and both accept that the nation was a means of referring to the people and not to a unit of territory.9 Perhaps the most influential theorist on the question of what is a nation is Anthony D. Smith who has argued forcefully that the core of any true nation lies in what Smith terms a pre-modern “ethnie,” or an ethnic community. What is an ethnie? In the first place, it is an ideal, but one that has tremendous attraction for those who are caught in its web. Smith lists six characteristics of an ethnie: (1) a collective proper name; (2) a myth of common ancestry; (3) shared historical memories; (4) one or more differentiating elements of common culture; (5) an association with a specific ‘homeland’; (6) a sense of solidarity for significant sectors of the population.10 Note that while Smith finds an ethnic origin to all nations, he stresses that 9

See Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States (London: Methuen, 1977) and John Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press). Both works are excerpted in John Hutchinson & Anthony D. Smith, eds., Nationalism, 134-7 and 140-7. 10 Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991), 21.

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this ethnie is not equivalent to race, nor does this ethnic origin of nations negate the fact that all nations have both ethnic and civic elements to them.11 The association with a homeland opens the door for an ethnie to later become a nation through the mediation of a territorial state. But Smith is quite persuasive on the distinctiveness of the nation as rooted in a primordial sense of ethnic identity, and not in either biological race or a territorial, administrative sense of the state. The distinction between a nation and a state is recognized even by political theorists for whom the state is the primary focus of concern. Charles Tilly, one of the foremost practitioners of state-centered political analysis, noted this distinction in a volume on the rise of national states which he edited thirty years ago. Speaking for his collaborators, Tilly noted that we concentrated our attention increasingly on the development of states rather than the building of nations. There were several reasons for this drift. One was the greater ease with which we could arrive at some working agreement on the meaning of the word “state. “Nation” remains one of the most puzzling and tendentious items in the political lexicon. Another was our early fixation on the periods in which the primacy states was [sic] still open to serious challenge; they were not generally periods of nationalism, of mass political identity or even of great cultural homogeneity within the boundaries of a state.12

Abstract theory and historical discourse converge in testifying to the important distinction between nation (minzoku, kokumin) and state (kokka), a singularity shared from early modern Europe to contemporary Japan. In fact, Gidon Gottlieb reminds us that “the idea of nation is entirely absent from the definition of the state which can be found in the writings of the thinkers–Machiavelli, Bodin, and Hobbes–who first mapped out the new landscape of the modern political world.”13 To understand the dynamics of nationalism, either as a political or cultural ideology, we must first recognize the distinctive claims that can be raised in the name of the state or in the 11

Smith, 15, 21. Cf. “In fact, every nationalism contains civic and ethnic elements in varying degrees and different forms. Sometimes civic and territorial elements predominate; at other times it is the ethnic and vernacular components that are emphasized.” (13). 12 Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 6. 13 Gidon Gottlieb, Nation Against State: A New Approach to Ethnic Conflicts and the Decline of Sovereignty (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993), 137. Gottlieb is summarizing the work of A. Passerin d’Entreves, The Notion of the State (Oxford, 1967).

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name of the nation, and particularly how the nation configures the people into a privileged subjectivity for cultural and political purposes in a way that is not necessarily true of the state. When we hear that in a given society, nation and state are one and the same thing or, alternatively, that ethnicity and nation (minzoku, kokumin) are identical, or that making such distinctions is a meaningless parsing of the real integral nature of nationalism, we are likely hearing not so much an objective analysis of nationalism as an instance of nationalist aspirations. Similarly, arguments that assert nationalism is always a method by which a nation achieves its own territorial state reveal a particular nationalist agenda, and when that “nation” is conceived as an ethnic group, then the formula simply expresses ethnic nationalist ideals. One of the reasons that this handbook does not include a chapter on the state (kokka) as a key component of Japanese nationalism is to counter precisely this nationalist presumption that nationalism is always intertwined with the state, in spite of so much scholarship that demonstrates that the nation and the state are separate matters. More political histories of Japan should follow Tilly’s lead and decide whether they will focus on the state or the nation, not confuse the two in an effort to do both simultaneously. In this study, I opt for the nation as my subject of analysis. But having said that, I do not completely ignore the Japanese states (prewar imperial and postwar democratic), rather I note when the trajectories of nation and state intersected and collided in Japan’s modern history, and especially what the historical and political implications of those periodic intersections were. Just as the nation is not the same as the state, neither is the nation reducible to ethnic identity. As Greenfeld’s study reveals, not all nations are ethnic ones, and similarly not all theorists of nationalism assert ethnic nationalism as the only form of nationalism. Some do. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, for example, adopts an anthropological perspective on social identity that leads him to conclude that true nations are ethnic nations, although he allows for a distinction between a nation and an ethnic group based on whether a certain ethnic people have their own state. When they do not, they may be considered merely an ethnic group; when they do, then they are an (ethnic) nation-state. The process by which an ethnic group obtains its own state is called “nationalism”, but it is possible for an ethnic group residing within the boundaries of another ethnic national state to

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express its identity in terms of a “nationalism against the state.”14 This ethnic reductivism aside, Eriksen’s anthropological perspective thus augments the point that Kohn, Greenfeld and many others have made: nationalism is a product of intellectual or emotional activity, rather than the expression of a primordial object or the natural manifestation of an underlying reality independent of human cognition. At the identity level, nationhood is a matter of belief. The nation, that is the Volk imagined by nationalists, is a product of nationalist ideology: it is not the other way around. A nation exists from the moment a handful of influential people decide that it should be so, and it starts, in most cases, as an urban elite phenomenon. In order to be an efficient political tool, it must nevertheless eventually achieve mass appeal.15

While Eriksen sides more with Ernest Gellner’s “nationalism creates nations” rather than Greenfeld’s “nations create nationalism,” in his emphasis on the core element of ethnicity and his recognition of the key role of subjective agency involved in determining national consciousness, he is closer to Greenfeld. Yet, overriding their differences on these minor points is a broadly shared belief that nations are not to be reduced to states but that the nation is a particularly powerful way of conceiving of the people, as a cultural unit with a shared identity, and as a political agent independent of the political state. The state of theory on the nation at present may be summarized in the following manner. There is now a general agreement among most specialists that nation refers to a particular mode of conceiving of the people as a collective subject of cultural and political identity. Further, this concept of the people, which often historically has been rooted in an ethnic sense of identity, can at times be extended to a political sense of civic unity (eg., “citizenry”), although there remains a vigorous debate over whether non-ethnic, or “civic,” nations are likely to have the same historical staying power as ethnic nations have demonstrated over the years. There remains a further divide over the historical origins of nations between modernists like Greenfeld and Gellner who assert that nations are recently constructed subjectivities that have much to do with the contingencies of historical events, industrialization, political centralization, uniform educational systems, 14

Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives (London: Pluto Press, 1993) 109-111.This idea of “nationalism against the state” is shared by the legal scholar Gidon Gottlieb who, nonetheless, takes a diametrically opposed position to Erkisen’s on whether nations must always be ethnic ones. See Gottlieb, Nation Against State. 15 Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism, 105.

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etc., and primordialists like Smith who argue that nations are rooted in ancient ethnic identities that underlay what often passes as civic or modern forms of nationality. Yet, all these theorists recognize the difference between a nation and a state, and in fact that distinction is one of the most important features of contemporary nation theory. For primordialists, the relation between nation and state is often a contentious one, particularly if a given ethnic nation does not possess its own state. This tension is often articulated in terms of anti-imperialism and movements for national self-determination. Yet, even among primordialists (and quite common among modernists), one finds a recognition that national identity, even ethnic identity, is a mode of conception, a way of thinking about identity that need not have any necessary basis in nature. Consequently, how national identity is produced, propagated and consumed is also a major area of debate among contemporary theorists of nationalism. All of this suggests that nationalism is ultimately a complex and multi-leveled effort to address the relationship of a people with each other, and also with the political organization particular to their collective life: the state. When the nation and the state are in close conformity, one can then, and only then, speak of the existence of a “nation-state.” But a true “nation-state” is more frequently the ideal goal of nationalist rhetoric and action than it is a source of nationalist ideology. Theoretical Influences on Japanese Discourse on the Nation All too often, historians of Japan seek to uncover cultural and intellectual features of Japanese life by eschewing theory itself as “foreign” to Japan and relying on an implicit, indigenous assumption of Japanese culture. Or, alternatively, historians who use theory merely impose current theories (almost always from the West) on the presumed indigenous field of inert cultural data drawn from Japan. The first approach is merely insufficient, if not dishonest, since there are always theoretical assumptions employed in any cultural analysis, and the indigenous approach itself is deeply entrenched in a particular theoretical assumption about the incomensurability of social and cultural orders. Most commonly, this approach derives from a theory about the incomensurability of Japanese culture (as “Oriental”) and Western theory, and it often makes an implicit argument about cultural imperialism. Eschewing any theoretical component to the study of society not merely indulges in a particular romantic embrace of particularity and collective authenticity, but it also reproduces the very assumptions of cultural, especially ethnic, nationalism in its

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interpretive framework. As noted above, such an indigenous cultural theory is merely a tautology when it attempts to explain nationalism. At the same time, efforts to explain Japanese nationalism through whatever theory happens to be in vogue at the time is at best only half a solution. It can shed light on our current prejudices, but it does not necessarily explain the internal development of the object of analysis: the nation itself as a historical development of concepts of identity that stems from particular ideas about self, other, and culture. For that, we need to both address theoretical influences on how a particular mode of conceiving the nation came to be, and also to be aware of which theoretical approaches were read, absorbed and debated within the discourse of a particular nation. That is to say, a universal “one-size-fits-all” theory cannot explain every national formation in the world, but neither can a rejection of theory in the name of empirical indigenousness suffice to explain the historical formation and reformation of a nation. So, to understand the historical formation of concepts of the nation in modern Japan, I turn next to those theories about the nation that have been widely and demonstrably influential on Japanese discourse on the nation. Of course, we cannot assume that Japanese writers on the nation merely reflected the conclusions of these non-Japanese theorists. To complete our understanding of the relationship of theory to the formation of national consciousness in Japan, we will conclude with a look at how influential Japanese language theorists understood and discussed the problem of the nation. One of the most influential developments in nation theory was Friedrich Meinecke’s distinction between the nation as a cultural body (Kutlurnation) from the nation as invested in the political state (Staatsnation).16 Meinecke’s distinction was, of course, part of his own national concerns, especially a sense that by the late nineteenth century the Bismarkian state had lost its chance at winning over the hearts and minds of the German people. Under these conditions, he turned to romantics like Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel and Adam Müller as the true bearers of the German nation.17 Note that, in contrast to modernization theorists for whom the nation is only of interest to the extent it is involved in a movement toward building a nation-state, Meinecke’s theory worked against the presumption that a nation-state was the inevitable political expression of the nation. For this reason, 16

Anthony Smith, National Identity, 8. Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 27. 17

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his sense that true national identity was cultural was attractive to many early twentieth century Japanese nationalists, since their own monarchical state had rejected calls for a true nation-state and severely restricted the franchise. It had placed the people on the margins of political life. Disappointments with the failure of the “People’s Rights” Movement led to an embrace of Meinecke’s concept of a Kulturnation in post-Constitutional Japan. Takayama Chogy introduced this concept as Kulturvölker, which he then rendered into Japanese as jimbun minzoku. In contrast to Meinecke, Takayama argued that civilization required that a nation (minzoku) had its own state: he was not ready to give up on the modern state just yet. In fact, his overriding concern was to identify the conditions and procedures through which a people moved from the category of a Naturvölker (shizen minzoku) to a Kulturvölker. But he had no doubt that all Naturvölker would inevitably become Kulturvölker, and at that point they would become their own kokumin, or a Staatsnation.18 Takayama’s argument about the historical development of nations moved in precisely the opposite direction of Meinecke’s. But the more important point is how he incorporated Meinecke’s romantic concept of the nation in Volkisch terms. In doing so, Takayama not only provided the foundations for the modern Japanese concept of an ethnic nation, but he did so in explicit contrast to the concept of the political, or statist nation. Japanese theorists on national identity and nationalism used this distinction in various ways. Takayama used the idea of a Kulturnation to challenge broad racial categories that, albeit popular in late nineteenth century political theory, undervalued the particularities of specific nations with a single racial category. But in the wake of the populism and “culturalism” of the Taisho period, the very idea that a nation need not be invested in a political state, or at least the idea that the two–nation and state–are distinct, began to have a tremendous influence on the Japanese discourse on nationalism. In 1917, Sakaguchi Takakimi of Kyoto Imperial University built on Takayama’s early awareness of the significance of culture in national identity, arguing that particular national cultural traditions were more important that regional racial categories. Without mentioning Meinecke or Takayama by name, he foregrounded Meinecke’s distinction between a Kulturnation and a Staatsnation, but in contrast to Takayama, he did not render either sense of nation in terms of a 18

Takayama Chogy, Sekai bummei shi (1898), reprinted in Chogy zensh (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1930) volume 5: 1-282, at 20, 32-3.

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minzoku or Volk. For Sakaguchi, the corresponding terms were bunka kokumin and kokka kokumin. One cannot conclude that this terminology was a result of Sakaguchi being unaware of the distinction between minzoku and kokumin, or that he intentionally collapsed the two concepts. His article bore the title, “Minzoku, kokumin and global culture,” and was in fact one of the earliest contributions to the Japanese discourse on ethnic nationality as a distinct mode of national identity.19 His decision to render nation here in both instances in terms of kokumin is a central feature of this understanding of nation, nationalism, and its relationship to the state, ethnicity and global influences. The distinction between a cultural nation and a statist nation remained a cardinal feature of Japanese discourse on nationalism, especially among sociologists. Usui Jish’s 1934 essay, discussed below in chapter four, had a tremendous influence in this regard. Usui’s understanding of the various possibilities of what a nation could mean had changed since Sakaguchi’s day, but he retained Sakaguchi’s translation terms for cultural and statist nation: bunka kokumin and kokka kokumin. He did not credit Meinecke directly for this distinction, but cited A. Kirchhoff’s zur Verständigung über die Begriffe Nation und Nationalität (Vorwort, 1905) as his source, along with Kirchhoff’s original terms, Staatsnation and kulturelle Nation. 20 Usui was largely alone, however, in privileging the kokumin, or civic, sense of nation. Most of his fellow sociologists were shifting to an ethnic bias, one that sometimes even clouded their ability to recognize basic facts. Nakano Seiichi was one such ethnically driven sociologist. In his own essay a few years later, “Staatsnation and Kulturnation,” Nakano declared he would retain the original European terms because, while he conceded that Usui’s translations were technically accurate, he was concerned about the polysemy in the Japanese translations for nation. The problem is that he misrepresented Usui’s translations as kokka minzoku and bunka minzoku, whereas Usui had not used the term minzoku but kokumin in translating both Staatsnation and Kulturnation.21 This slip was undoubtedly a reflection of Nakano’s 19

Cf. my discussion of Sakaguchi’s article in the context of a renaissance of ethnic national theories in the Taisho period in “Culture, Ethnicity and the State in Early Twentieth-Century Japan,” chapter in Sharon Minichiello, ed., Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900-1930 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998): 181-205. 20 Usui Jish, “Kokumin no gainen,” Nihon shakaigakka nenp, Shakaigaku, daini sh (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1934), 1-97, at 49. 21 Nakano Seiichi, “Staatsnation to Kulturnation,” Shgaku Tky volume 13 (December 1938), 1-30, at 1, n.1

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own infatuation with ethnicity as the basic underlying principle of national identity. He did, however, explicitly acknowledge the influence of Meinecke, along with J. Neuman and Kirchhoff, in this distinction between a cultural nation and a state-nation. By the early twentieth century, there was already among Japanese scholars of nationalism a recognized field of literature with which some familiarity was expected of any serious contributor to theories on nation and national identity. An invaluable source of insight into this field is Kada Tetsuji’s 1939 survey of the literature on the nation, nationalism, sociology and economics. Among European texts most influential on Japanese ideas of the nation were J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902), Ramsay Muir, Nationalism and Internationalism (1916), G.P. Gooch, Nationalism (1921), Carlton J.H. Hayes, Essays on Nationalism (1926), Heinrich Schnee, Nationalismus und Imperialismus (1928), Bernard Joseph, Natonality, its Nature and Problems (1929), Herbert Adams Gibbons, Nationalism and Internationalism (1930), and Harry Elmer Barnes, World Politics in Modern Civilization (1930); and on the left, Otto Bauer’s Nationalitätsproblem und die Sozialdemokratie (no date given), and Lenin and Stalin’s writings on the nationality question available by then in Japanese translation. Equally interesting are the Japanese theorists recognized by Kada as the leading voices on the problem of nation theory: Takata Yasuma, Yanaihara Tadao, Koya Yoshio, Komatsu Kentar, and Kada himself.22 To the Western books Kada listed, one might add W.B. Pillsbury’s The Psychology of Nationality and Internationalism (1919) and William McDougall’s The Group Mind (1920), both of which were often cited texts by the important Japanese writers on nationalism discussed below, especially in chapter six. A brief survey of some of these theorists, with particular emphasis on how they understood what nation and nationalism meant, will go far in elucidating the contours of Japanese discourse on national identity and how it developed. Hobson’s study positioned nationalism in the context of imperialism, and thus immediately raised the question of how one might determine the limits of one nation and the beginnings of another. For Hobson, nationalism was merely the establishment of a political union on the basis of nationality, and thus what constituted a nationality needed to be defined. He turned to J.S. Mill for his answer. 22 Kada Tetsuji, “Bunken: minzoku, minzokushugi, sens shakaigaku, keizaigaku,” chapter in Shimmei Masamichi, et al., Minzoku to sens (Tokyo: Nihon Seinen Gaik Kykai, 1939), 205-244.

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Mill held that “a portion of mankind may be said to constitute a nation if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and others.”23 Hobson accepted Mill’s pluralistic approach to defining the elements of this common sympathy (race, descent, language, religion, geographical limits, but especially a common history of shared pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret), but his interest was not really in defining the constitutive elements of nation. Rather, his focus was on imperialism, “the debasement of nationalism” that occurs when a nation attempts to “overflow its natural banks and absorb the near or distant territory of reluctant and unassimilable peoples.”24 Imperialism was a recent phenomenon, not something that might have characterized British power in the New World, as the colonial people were not seen as unassimilable, regardless of how reluctant they may have been. Rather, it was the destablizing proliferation of empires during the late nineteenth century that rendered unavoidable the question of what are the limits of a nation (“what is a nation”). Hobson’s was very much a British theory of imperialism, but it also was informed by a functional pragmatism that simply left the fundamental question of what a nation is unanswered. For all its apparent similarity to Renan’s famous point that a nation is merely a daily plebiscite, Hobson’s theory was quite different. He was less concerned than Renan was with the internal processes that constituted a nation. His definition of a nation was far from satisfactory, but he had foregrounded a subjective element in the determination of national identity. And that subjective element, moving the discussion from biological race, was deemed progress and reason enough to read Hobson. It did not take long for political theorists to focus on the weakness of Hobson’s definition of a nation. Ramsay Muir was one of the earliest and most important theorists to do so. Like Hobson, Muir was a British academic who was opposed to imperialism, having traveled in India in 1913-4. He began with Hobson’s idea (from Mill) that a nation is merely a group of people who feel naturally linked together, but then he evaluated what possible grounds there could be for this linkage. Geographical boundaries? These were most important to Hobson in determining when a nation “overflows” its proper place. But Muir noted that not all nations could be spatially determined: the Greeks were scattered around the world, the Poles were not clearly 23 J.S. Mill, “Representative Government, “ chap. xvi., cited in J.A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (New York: James Pott & Company, 1902), 3. 24 Hobson, 4.

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delineated by bounded territory, and even France and Germany had difficulty establishing their national boundaries. Unity of “race”? No, Muir pointed out that there is no nation that is not of mixed “racial” origins. But, of equal significance, he insisted that the ideas of race and nation be kept distinct. Race, he noted, has led to German claims over Holland, Denmark, and Belgium—even though these nations have their own distinctive national cultures. Unity of language? Again, Muir had no difficulty pointing out weaknesses to this theory. The Irish and Welsh have adopted the Celtic language, German speakers east of the Elbe are largely Slavonic in ethnicity, Indians have only the English language in common and yet do not feel they are of the English nation, and unity of language does not necessarily lead to national unity (Latin American), nor does disunity of language necessarily prevent a nation from coming into being (USA, Switzerland, Belgium). Unity of religion has never defined a nation. Muir recognized that nations have divided over religion (Dutch and Belgium, North and South Ireland), but in other places religion simply has not posed an obstacle to national unity (Germany, England). Muir evaluated other claims, too: unified government, community of economic interest and a common tradition, only to find that while there is some merit to all these factors, none ultimately could account for the formation of nations, as there were exceptions to them all. Ultimately, Muir concluded that no single theory could account for the formation and continued existence of nations: Nationality, then, is an elusive idea, difficult to define. It cannot be tested or analyzed by formulae, such as German professors love. Least of all must it be interpreted by the brutal and childish doctrine of racialism. Its essence is a sentiment; and in the last resort we can only say that a nation is a nation because its members passionately and unanimously believe it to be so. . . . and even this may be mistaken or based upon inadequate grounds.25

Like Hobson, Muir ultimately arrived at a pragmatic conclusion about the inability to define a nation. This reply was of course a rejection of Stalin and Bauer’s efforts to lay out a final theoretical formula for national identity. But in contrast to Hobson (and Stalin and Bauer), Muir added the heady idea that nationality can be nursed into existence even in places where it had never existed before or when

25

Ramsay Muir, Nationalism and Internationalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917): 51, 54.

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most of the above elements are lacking.26 His point was not so much to force nations upon the word, but to recognize that nations are contingent and not necessary or essential features of human life throughout history. This understanding of a nation, its origin, nature, substance, limits and possibility for change, was associated with a political liberalism that placed primacy on the freedom of individual feelings (at least to the extent they did not conflict with existing power structures). If a nation were simply a matter of sentiment, an idea that exists in a person’s mind, then it was only a matter of time before psychologists weighed in on the matter. Two of the most important were W.B. Pillsbury, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, and William McDougall, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. The two men were aware of each other’s writings, and even referred to one another in their texts. Pillsbury set the tone with his The Psychology of Nationality and Internationalism (1919) in which he tried to explain the nation as a psychological unit that “as a whole resembles the activities of individual animal or man.”27 His point was that the nation could neither be understood analogously as a “crowd” (Marxism) or as its own particular self (conservatives) but only as a social embodiment of the instincts of an individual. Pillsbury tried, not too successfully, to avoid racial nationalism while rooting his theory of the nation in the biological instincts of an individual. He insisted that instincts are unique to the individual and can change. His purpose was to underscore the idea that nations are ideational, but to locate this ideational function as an emotional, rather than rational, expression of life and to open the door to historical change within nations, as within individuals. McDougall went even further. Citing Muir’s effort to define a nation as a “mental condition,” McDougall believed that psychological science could avoid Muir’s failure to adequately explain what a nation is. Without a serviceable definition of a nation, McDougall pointed out that the Statesmen of the Paris Conference are to reply—“We do not know whether your claim is well-founded; for the historians and political philosophers cannot tell us the meaning of the word ‘nation.’ Go to and

26

Muir, 51. W.B. Pillsbury, The Psychology of Nationality and Internationalism (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1919), 22. 27

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fight, and, if you survive, we shall recognize the fait accompli and hail you a Nation.28

Conservatives and Marxists might accept this situation as reality, but not liberals like McDougall. He sought the answer to the slippery task of defining the nation in the field of psychology, and he found it: “a nation, we must say, is a people or population enjoying some degree of political independence and possessed of a national mind and character, and therefore capable of national deliberation and national volition.”29 McDougall understood that this definition of a nation required that he then offer some analysis of what “a national mind” is and how it functions. Not surprisingly, he did not make much success in that effort, and instead got mired down in all sorts of racial stereotypes of groups of people. Such racial and ethnic stereotyping was not his objective, but in fact ran counter to the main thrust of his argument, which was a caution against “excess in the direction of the unalterability of race” and an effort to explain “not merely the history of the rise of nations, but rather of the perpetual rise and fall of nations.”30 But it was an inevitable effect of assigning a “group mind” to ethnic groups and then trying to account for their achievements on the basis of that collective mentality. In that sense, McDougall’s psychological approach was far more collective than Pillsbury’s equally ill-fated effort to provide an individualist, instinct-driven model of the nation. But what attracted Japanese national theorists to McDougall and Pillsbury was not this slip into racism. Rather, it was the promise they held out that a nation, as a mental artifact, could be understood on the basis of scientific knowledge, not merely determined through violence. A breakthrough in nationalism theory occurred with Carlton J.H. Hayes’s very influential 1926 essay, “What is Nationalism?” Hayes’s article was many things, not the least of which was a repudiation of biologically-determined, psychological efforts to define a “group mind” or “nation-soul.” He accepted the general conclusion of nationalism studies that the underlying force of nationalism is an 28

William McDougall, The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology with Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character (New York & London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920), 139. This passage was well-known to Japanese theorists of nationalism, as it was cited in Japanese translation in Masaki Masato, “Minzoku to wa nani zo?” Shigaku vol. 1, no. 1 (1921): 148-155, at 153. 29 McDougall, The Group Mind, 141. 30 McDougall, The Group Mind, 168, 144. Emphasis in original.

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emotional factor, or the sentiment of being a nation. But he also was one of the first to recognize how terminological confusion (he actually alleged intentional efforts to “corrupt” the language) was complicating the task of understanding what nationalism is. Hayes noted that the word nation had its roots in the Latin word natio (birth or race, a social group based on a community of blood and language), and he also knew that the word “nation” had been used since the seventeenth century to describe certain populations that had nothing to do with racial or linguistic unity: It was in part to atone for the abuse of the word “nation” that the word “nationality” was coined in the early part of the nineteenth century and speedily incorporated into most European languages. Thenceforth, while “nation” continued chiefly to denote the citizens of a sovereign political state, nationality was more exactly used in reference to a group of persons speaking the same language and observing the same customs. The jurists have done their best to corrupt the new word “nationality,” just as they had corrupted the old word “nation”; they have utilized “nationality” to indicate citizenship…. A nationality, by acquiring political unity and sovereign independence, becomes a “nation,” or, to avoid the use of the troublesome word “nation,” establishes a “national state.” A national state is always based on nationality, but a nationality may exist without a national state. A state is essentially political; a nationality is primarily cultural and only incidentally political.31

As Hayes explained with powerful clarity, nationality (what we might today call “ethnicity”) has been around as far as history or anthropology can reach, but nationalism is a modern phenomenon that seeks to fuse nationality and patriotism, a sense of loyalty to the idea of the state. Yet, it was perhaps Hayes’s contribution to identify nationality and patriotism as separate phenomenon more that it was to find the Holy Grail of a final definition of nation, nationality or even patriotism. More important was his cultural approach that rejected biological, racial arguments for national identity and his assertion that “political independence is not an indispensable condition of nationality.”32 In this sense, Hayes was the source both of justification for imperialism and for contemporary theories of the multi-ethnic civic nation (state). Hayes’s effort to get at the heart of nationalism was influential among Japanese political theorists, but they did not simply swallow 31 Carlton J.H. Hayes, “What is Nationalism?” in Essays on Nationalism (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1926), 1-29, at 4-5. 32 Hayes, “What is Nationalism?” 20.

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everything he said on the topic. Kamikawa Hikomatsu reviewed Hayes, along with McDougall, Muir, Pillsbury and others, and correctly identified the key problem all these theorists sought to resolve: how much of a nation is racial and how much is not. Kamikawa found the psychological approach too subjective, but he also rejected the conservative racial theories of Joseph-Arthur Gobineau as insufficiently historical. He proposed a middle way between these two extremes, but his middle way was essentially the position staked out by Hayes, i.e., that nationality was a cultural phenomenon, the product of social environment, which included elements of consciousness. 33 Nakatani Takeyo’s two-part essay covered many of the same theorists (Pillsbury, McDougall, Muir, Hayes) but he was a bit more critical than Kamikawa of Hayes’s assertion that “most of the tribes described by anthropologists and most of the peoples whom we encounter in history are nationalities.”34 Nakatani objected that since it had been established that a nation (minzoku) was merely a form of consciousness, a psychological unit, it was necessary to recognize that the mode of consciousness itself was a product of modernity.35 He rejected Hayes’s theory that separated the nation from nationalism, arguing that the two were deeply intertwined. Rather than seeing national consciousness flow from the prior existence of the nation, or assert than national consciousness produced the nation, he countered that “the nation, national consciousness and nationalism are all three locked into a simultaneous, mutually dependent relationship.”36 Of course, Hayes had distinguished nationality (ethnicity) from nationalism as part of a broader argument that all forms of nationalism need not be ethnic, but in fact should emphasize patriotism or citizenship. Nakatani’s essay was a harbinger of a new emphasis during the 1930s on ethnicity as the expression of a self identity that allowed no distinction between nationality (ethnicity) and citizenship (see Chapter Six below). The theorists discussed above may be criticized as apologists for imperialism. By that, I do not mean that they were jingoistic or necessarily advocated the exploitation of other peoples by a foreign 33 Kamikawa Hikomatsu, “Minzoku no hon’shitsu ni tsuite no ksatsu,” Kokka gakkai zasshi, volume 12, no. 1(December 1926): 1825-51 at 1835-6. 34 Hayes, “What is Nationalism?,” 21; cited in Nakatani Takeyo, “Minzoku ishiki oyobi minzokushugi,” Gaik Jih, no. 541 (June 1927): 116-128. The first part of this two-part essay was “Minzoku, minzoku ishiki oyobi minzokushugi,” Gaik Jih, , no. 537 (April 1927): 110-120. 35 Nakatani, “Minzoku ishiki oyobi minzokushugi,” 121. 36 Nakanati, “Minzoku ishiki oyobi minzokushugi,” 126.

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state. Rather, they tended to see in the distinction between a cultural nation and a statist nation (which was not equivalent to a “nationstate”) a recognition of how history impacted different societies differently, creating unevenness in the modern political order. Various prescriptions flowed from Japanese theorists who shared this perspective. For some, this unevenness in development meant that Japan had a moral obligation to lead other nations in achieving their own independent statist nation; for others, it simply meant Japan had to provide political protection through its state for other cultural nations who had yet to establish their own statist nations; and for others yet, it meant Japan had to assist other peoples in making the transition from the state of a natural nation to becoming a true cultural nation. Imperialism then could be the mark of regional dominance, regional development, or even of a multi-ethnic civic national identity within the homeland itself as well as within the periphery. The distinction between bunka kokumin and kokka kokumin, much like the contemporary theoretical distinction between an “ethnic nation” and a “civic nation,” had a range of practical applications and implication for the form and function of the political state, but it was never simply reducible to the state. For these liberal theorists, the problem of “nationality,” an ethnic form of social identity, was far more attractive than the issue of the state and its governance. Today, after Auschwitz, Serbia and Rwanda, it may seem strange that liberals in early twentieth century Japan would extol the ethnic nation. But praise it they did, albeit under different terms and from different theoretical sources from those used by Marxists and conservatives. Both Marxists and liberals were drawn to the notion of ethnic nationalism at roughly the same time, the years during and immediately after the First World War. But whereas Marxist interest in nationalism was instrumental, liberals sought in a new substantive understanding of ethnic national identity as means of overcoming racism. For them, a theory of the ethnic nation as a form of consciousness was a way to break free of the determinism of the older, racial theory of the nation as a primordial, organic identity that could not easily be reconciled with the state. What was distinctive about this liberal approach to ethnic nationalism was that it was less territorial and more conceptual in orientation than conservative and Marxist theories of the nation. Yet, in the hands of Yanaihara Tadao, both conceptual and territorial, ethnic and civic aspects of the nation were mobilized to assert an anti-imperialist theory of nationalism that was independent of Stalinist agendas. Liberal nationalists, including Yanaihara, were drawn to a constructivist notion of national con-

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sciousness both as a way to limit the claims of the state over the selfexpression of the individual and to condemn biological racism that was founded in the claims of nature. If this new liberal approach to national consciousness emphasized the difference between nation and state, it also encouraged diverse ways to think about the nation itself, although oftentimes these new and diverse ways of thinking about the nation ultimately settled on an ethnic concept of national identity.37 Ethnic nationalism held particular fascination for Marxists and socialists who found in that particular theory of nationalism a valuable tool for their global, political agendas. Worldwide Marxist interest in ethnic nationalism stemmed from disagreements over nationalism that came to the fore at the Congress of the Second International at Basel in 1912. What sparked this debate was Otto Bauer’s 1907 Die Nationalitatenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie [“the nationality problem and social demoncracy”]. Bauer’s argument, which subsequently became known as the “Austro-Marxian position on nationalism,” was that national identity had to be accepted as basic form of identity and thus multiple nationalities must be recognized within a single, multiethnic (socialist) state. Bauer went so far as to suggest that national identity was more fundamental than class, at least to the extent that class was projected in some international system. To effectively counter Bauer’s argument that national identity was more important than class consciousness, while at the same time holding together the coalition of nationalities within the Eastern European Marxist movement, Stalin needed to concede something to national identity while subordinating it to the international Marxist agenda. It was not an easy thing to do. Stalin’s conclusion, articulated in his influential Marxism and the National-Colonial Question (1913), was that national identity should be recognized to the degree that it was a useful tool against capitalist imperialism. But it should not be allowed to undermine Marxist solidarity in the struggle against imperialism. The debate over nationalism and Marxism crystalized in the way the two men defined a nation. Bauer maintained that “the nation is a totality of men bound together through a common destiny into a community of character.”38 Stalin insisted on a definition of the nation that employed more criteria, and his definition subsequently shaped 37 See my “Colonialism and Ethnic Nationalism in the Political Thought of Yanaihara Tadao (1893-1961)”, East Asian History, no. 10 (December 1995): 79-98. 38 Otto Bauer, “The Nationalities Question and Social Democracy,” (1907); reprinted in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay, eds, The Nationalism Reader (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: The Humanities Press, 1995), 183-91 at 183.

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many others. “A nation,” he argued, “is a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture.”39 Stalin’s definition was more determinant of a nation (rather than descriptive, as was Bauer’s), in the sense that he did not accept that national character could override these other elements, especially the demands of territory. In short, he made it explicit that Bauer’s definition of a nation could not, indeed would not, exclude the imperialism implicit in Austria establishing jurisdiction over other nationalities (eg., Czechs, Poles, Germans) within its territorial boundaries. Stalin introduced the most powerful definition and theory of a territorialized concept of the nation so as to provide both a justification of the emerging Soviet solution (autonomous national-territories within the boundaries of the Soviet Union) and especially to harness the nation to a theory of anti-imperialism. Here, it is worth noting that imperialism, as a theory and practice, is inconceivable without first an embrace of the territorial claims of ethnic nationality along the lines Stalin drew. Today, such “de-territorialized” ethnic identity is simply positioned within the concept of a liberal democratic “multi-ethnic” nation. Stalin’s instrumental ethnic nationalism was, and remains, inordinately influential among Japanese nationalist theorists from the 1920s to the present. As discussed below in Chapter Six, his theories (and Bauer’s) were widely debated among theorists of nationalism (chiefly among Marxist political theorists) such as Nagashima Matao, Sano Manabu, Nishi Masao, yama Ikuo, Matsubara Hiroshi and others. During the wartime, Stalin’s theory of nationalism was referenced and rejected by Nakano Seiichi, Takata Yasuma and others who proposed a Japanese “third option” to Wilsonian or Soviet (Stalinist) theories of nationality. Perhaps the best way to understand the theoretical context for Japanese wartime national theory is to see how it sought to revise Stalinist theory into a national socialist approach that was premised on the construction of a new ethnic identity that would be consistent with the boundaries of the state. While this constructivist conceit was short-lived, the postwar saw a return to Stalin’s territorialized ethnic nationalism among the Japanese left as early as 1949.40 But perhaps the most compelling 39 Joseph Stalin, “Marxism and the National-Colonial Question,” (1913) reprinted 192-7 in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay, eds, The Nationalism Reader, 192-7, at 192. 40 Cf. Yokota Kizabur, et al. eds., Kokusai seiji to minzoku mondai, shakaishugi kza volume 9: kokusai seiji (Tokyo: Sangensha, 1949).

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example of Stalin’s postwar influence is the lead position of Matsubara’s 1935 article in the postwar collection of seminal work on minzoku theory edited by Band Hiroshi and published in 1976 and again in 1998.41 After the discrediting first of Stalinism and then the general rejection of Marxism in the 1990s, Stalinist theories of the nation have generally been abandoned, except in some circles of literary theory, where they are embraced as a necessary tool in the struggle against imperialism. Contemporary Japanese Theories on Nationalism Without a doubt, the most important political theorist of postwar Japan was Maruyama Masao. The influence and scope of Maruyama’s thinking on political issues was so vast that it is nearly impossible to overestimate and certainly impossible to do justice to it in this short a space. Even a synoptic treatment is beyond the limitations of this handbook.42 Here, I will only focus on the core contribution of Maruyama to nationalism theory: his approach to the perennial question of what a nation truly is, and how he saw the overall dynamics of nationalism in Japanese history. Much attention in the West has been given to Maruyama’s theory of “ultranationalism,” as his concept of ch-kokkashugi was translated by Ivan Morris. 43 But “ultra-nationalism” can be misleading, especially if it is understood as a hyper-intense nationalism, rather than a nationalism that “goes beyond” or “supercedes” the state, which is closer to what Maruyama’s concept of ch-kokkashugi truly signifies. Those (primarily, but as we shall see not exclusively, scholars in the West) who have failed to grasp this vital point have often compounded their misunderstanding of Maruyama by concluding that he saw nationalism as a terrible thing and devoted his entire oeuvre to preventing a recurrence of it in postwar Japan. Such an impression is 41 Cf. Band Hiroshi, ed., Rekishi kagaku taikei 15: minzoku no mondai (Tokyo: Ks Shob, 1976) 42 Fortunately, there are good works on Maruyama that provide such an overview of his thought and his contribution to nationalism theory. See especially Rikki Kersten, Democracy in Japan: Maruyama Masao and the Search for Autonomy (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) and Curtis Anderson Gayle, “Progressive Representations of the Nation: Early Postwar Japan and Beyond,” Social Science Japan Journal 4 (1), 1-19. In addition, most of Maruyama’s writings on nationalism are available in English translation. 43 Maruyama Masao, “Theory and Psychology of Ultra-Nationalism,” originally published in Sekai (May 1946), trans. Ivan Morris and published in Ivan Morris, ed., Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics (London: Oxford University Press, 1963): 1-24.

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a reasonable one after reading Maruyama’s essay on “ultranationalism,” since in that 1946 essay his focus was on explaining the political situation during the war. He was not primarily concerned with explaining modern Japanese nationalism, and he certainly did not condemn nationalism per se. In fact, Maruyama strove throughout his life to complete what he considered as Fukuzawa Yukichi’s unfinished project: the construction of a democratic, or “healthy,” nationalism in modern Japan.44 But to understand that key feature of Maruyama’s thought, one needs first to see what he understood nationalism and the nation to mean. One must begin by recognizing that Maruyama’s theories on nationalism began not in the postwar period, but at the end of the wartime. His understanding of nationalism thus bridged the two periods and thus brought into the postwar period what he considered to be the lessons of the wartime state. Writing in 1944 on the eve of his induction into the Imperial Army, Maruyama outlined a theory of nationalism in which he sought “to trace the development of nationalism since the Restoration in terms of a transition from modern—democratic—nationalism to bureaucratic statism.”45 Maruyama took up Meinecke’s introduction of the concept of a “cultural nation” as distinct from the “political nation” yet he rejected the term minzoku in favor of kokumin to convey this sense of a “cultural nation.” His reasons for this conscious choice of terminology, occurring as it did during the height of the war, deserves our attention: Nationalism has been translated into Japanese as minzokushugi (sense of racial [sic] identity), but this term is appropriate to a people with the status of a minority race [sic] in another nation-state, or a colonized people, that gains its independence, or when a race that has been split into several groups under different nation-states unites to constitute an independent nation. But its use is questionable in the case of Japan, where racial [sic] homogeneity has been preserved from the past and where there have never been any serious racial [sic] problems. When the term minzokushugi is used in Japan, it sounds as if it involves only 44

Gayle, “Progressive Representations of the Nation,” 1; Kersten, Democracy in Japan, 149. 45 Maruyama Masao, “Author’s Introduction,” Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, Mikiso Hane, trans., (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), xxxiii. This essay, “The Premodern Formation of Nationalism” appeared in the Kokka Gakkai Zasshi (1944), the very journal that had carried Kamikawa Hikomatsu’s earlier article on the nature of a minzoku. Maruyama had originally intended to title it “The Emergence of the Theory of Nationalism,” but, running out of time before his deployment, limited himself to the premodern period.

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external problems, but nationalism, as will be shown below, is indeed a matter of external problems, but also one of internal problems. The term kokkashugi (étatisme) is frequently used as a concept in opposition to individualism, so it too is not an appropriate term. At a certain stage in its development, nationalism is inextricably linked to the tenets of individual autonomy. To cover all these nuances, the term kokuminshugi is used here.46

Maruyama’s history of nationalism’s emergence in Japan began with cultural and intellectual theories in the Tokugawa period, but culminated in the suppression of democratic (populist) nationalism by the Meiji state. Subsequent nationalism was an effort to recover those initial democratic aspirations for nationalism and to reassert the people as the truly sovereign subject of cultural and political life in modern Japan. But he parted company with those who sought to use the concept of minzoku to achieve this goal, recognizing that however attractive minzoku might seem in articulating presumptions of oppression by Western powers, it wreaked more havoc in destabilizing the delicate balance of democratic possibilities and autocratic structures that had taken shape in modern Japan. For the most part, Maruyama simply ignored the minzoku form of nationalism, preferring the term kokumin and kokuminshugi in his writings. But in one important essay, published in 1961 just after Marxist historians had revived the wartime glorification of minzoku nationalism, he reminded his readers that wartime fascism was not merely the dominance of the state: he decried the irrational contributions to the culture of fascism by literary types who extolled minzoku during the war.47 What had brought Maruyama to this shift in emphasis from his immediate postwar concern with statist oppression of kokumin nationalism was the turn among Marxist historians in the late 1940s and early 1950s to a renewed embrace of minzoku nationalism.

46

Maruyama, “Introduction: the Nation and Nationalism,” in Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, 324, n.2. The term “racial” for minzoku is the translator Mikiso Hane’s. But in light of the theoretical discussion in the Japanese discourse on nationalism, outlined above, it should be clear that Maruyama would not have equated minzoku with “race,” but with ethnicity or nationality. 47 “Yet another group discovered in the myth of ethnic nationality [minzoku] and the emperor the ir-rationality which had been rejected in the previous clamor over ‘the supremacy of politics.’ They tried very hard to burn up their literary selves in the totality of irrationality which was the flip-side of the totality of rationality.” Maruyama Masao, “Kindai nihon shis to bungaku,” reprinted in Nihon no shis (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2000, reprint of 1961), 105-6.

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Tyama Shigeki was the intellectual leader of these Marxist ethnic nationalists.48 He articulated most powerfully the reasons for the attraction of ethnic nationalism among early postwar Marxists, in spite of the role ethnic nationalism had played in justifying the war only a few years earlier. In a seminal essay published in the highly influential journal Ch Kron in 1951 (the final year of Japan’s military occupation by Allied Forces) Tyama argued that there was not one Japanese nationalism but two, a “progressive nationalism” and a “reactionary nationalism,” and they were in contention with each other. Undeniably, he was drawing on Stalin’s instrumental approach to nationalism, extolling ethnic nationalism as a nationalism of the people (specifically, of the “working class”) that was in opposition to, and oppressed by, a nationalism cynically deployed by the ruling class. But Tyama did more than simply apply Stalin’s theory of nationalism to Japan. He explicitly labeled reactionary nationalism in Japan as “ultra nationalism” (he uses the English word), thereby appearing to align himself with Maruyama’s critique of the wartime state. Yet, unlike Maruyama, Tyama did not restrict this ultra-nationalism to the wartime period, but placed it in a broader historical perspective that posited this reactionary nationalism against indigenous, populist nationalism as early as the People’s Rights Movement of the late nineteenth century, and it was only in this populist nationalism that he found the sole hope for “a future, progressive victory.”49 Most important, however, was the way this article sought to legitimate ethnic nationalism by blurring the actual distinct forms through which Japan’s indigenous nationalism(s) arose. Whereas Maruyama was scrupulous in recognizing the different conceptual forms of nationalism in Japan, Tyama dismissed the importance of conceptual and linguistic form, finding in all forms of nationalism a deeper significance in how it was used. Thus, from the outset, he lumped minzoku nationalism together with patriotism and other expressions of nationalism, and referred to the topic not as minzokushugi, kokkashugi or kokuminshugi, but through the English 48

On these early postwar Marxist ethnic nationalists, see Curtis Andeson Gayle, Marxist History and Postwar Japanese Nationalism (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) and my own article, “What is a Nation and Who Belongs: National Narratives and the Ethnic Imagination in Twentieth-Century Japan,” The American Historical Review, vol. 102, no. 2 (April 1997): 283-309. In Japanese, see Amino Yoshihiko, Rekishi to shite no sengo shigaku (Tokyo: Nihon Edit Sukru Shuppanbu, 2000). 49 Tyama Shigeki, “Futatsu no nashonarizumu no taik: sono rekishi-teki ksatsu,” Ch Kron (June, 1951); reprinted in Band, ed., Minzoku no mondai, 119-35, at 123, 135.

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loan word “nashonarizumu.” It was a brilliant move, as it allowed Tyama to co-opt the appeal of ethnic nationalism without being tarnished with the notoriety it had gained during the war. But he did not admit that this dismissal of any significant distinction between minzokushugi and kokuminshugi was a rejection of Maruyama’s thesis that a cultural nationalism supportive of liberal democracy could be found in non-ethnic expressions of Japanese cultural identity. Instead, Maruyama’s three-dimensional model of Japanese nationalism was flattened out to a two-dimensional one that was wrapped in the unfamiliar cover of nashonarizumu. But in Tyama’s subsequent writings, this “progressive nationalism” was explicitly identified as ethnic nationalism (minzokushugi), although he himself never identified is as “ethnic” per se.50 Nonetheless, he placed it alongside the ethnic nationalism that Marxists were supporting around the world as “liberation movements” and invested similar hopes in the completion of Japan’s ruptured nationalism through the victory of this ethnic, populist nationalism. One of Tyama’s strongest legacies on contemporary Japanese nationalism was his earlier effort to legitimate ethnic nationalism by obscuring its real historical nature under the cover of the ambiguous English loan word nashonarizumu along with a denial that there was a meaningful distinction between minzokushugi and kokuminshugi. Those today who follow this line of argument almost always end up implicitly supporting ethnic nationalism in substance even while disavowing the form. After the 1960 US-Japan Security Treaty Revision riots (“Anpo”), which had brought together rightist and leftist nationalists in a joint effort to protest what was seen as a violation of Japanese national sovereignty (both by the Treaty itself and by the Kishi government’s handling of the revision process), a new voice emerged in Japanese nationalism theory. Yoshimoto Taka’aki combined elements of the rightist and leftist populist nationalism with a deeper intoxication with the “indigenousness” than even Tyama’s anti-imperialist ethnic nationalism had imbibed. Yoshimoto went further than Tyama, whose appeal to indigenous identity was encapsulated within a Stalinist theory of global capitalism that gave indigenous identity a universal theoretical context. Yoshimoto argued that nationalism lay outside of intellectuals and their representations and rested with the amorphous and undefinable “people” themselves. Yoshimoto argued 50

Cf. Tyama Shigeki, Kindaishi: kaiky to minzoku no kaimei o shu to shite, kza rekishi, vol. 2 (Tokyo: tsuki Shoten, 1955).

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that once the people were represented by intellectuals in one fashion or another (minzoku, kokumin), they lost their claim on indigenousness and thus their role in defining a Japanese national identity. Although Yoshimoto favored the term taish for “the people” and nashonarizumu for nationalism, he was highly aware of the irony in this effort to represent the unrepresentable that is the populist nation itself. His brilliant 1964 summary of Japanese nationalism presented a sweeping historical survey that argued that this populist nationalism was constantly being co-opted by the intellectuals and the state for various purposes, thus never allowing the full flowering of nationalism as a populist mode of selfexpression.51 He vigorously condemned the Stalinists for betraying the common people during the Anpo protests, was no less excoriating of liberals whose nationalism was equally derived from foreign (Western) political theories, and only vaguely gestured toward a principle of “autonomy” (jiritsu) and the people as locked in a structure of animosity with elites and political institutions like the state.52 Yoshimoto’s vision of a populist, yet conceptually undefinable, nationalism had appeal for many Japanese intellectuals (ironically) who were growing tired of the highly theoretical discussion of nationalism and yet were aware of the long history of nationalism in Japan as an effort to place the people at the center of political and cultural affairs. That legacy continues on among many contemporary Japanese writers who sidestep the conceptual definition of a nation or nationalism (kokuminshugi? minzokushugi?) and follow Yoshimoto in referring to the phenomenon through the English loan word nashonarizumu. It also continues on among many who embraced Yoshimitsu’s populist argument that the nation, as the Japanese people, only has been exploited by the state and the social and intellectual elites. A third position, neither Yoshimitsu’s unrepresentable populism nor Tyama’s Stalinist minzokushugi was set out with exceptional theoretical and historical vigor by Hashikawa Bunz in his 1968 book Nashonarizumu (reprinted in 1994). Unlike Tyama, who set ethnic nationalism within Stalin’s global framework for proletarian nationalism, Hashikawa drew from a host of Western specialists on 51

Yoshimoto Taka’aki, “Nihon no nashonarizumu,” 7-54 in Yoshimoto, ed., Nashonarizumu, gendai nihon shis taikei volume 4 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shob, 1964), 10. 52 Lawrence Olson, Ambivalent Moderns: Portraits of Japanese Cultural Identity (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992), 105-7.

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nationalism theory (eg., E.H. Carr, F. Hertz, E. Kedourie) to argue that nationalism is one side of a general cultural fulcrum that shifts between universalism and particularism, and the particularism of nationalism stemmed from a specific historical moment that sought to replace God as a signifier of universal morals. In this sense, he contrasted nationalism to patriotism, which “is a universal sentiment common to all races and ethnicities and not a new idea that arose at a specific historical period, as did nationalism.”53 In essence, Hashikawa made a distinction between a universal love of homeland and modern nationalism which seeks to effect a nation-state (kokumin-kokka). This historicist approach impelled him to seek the foundations of modern Japanese nationalism in Edo period Shintoist and neo-Confucian philosophy, even as he recognized its fruition only after the arrival of Perry and the construction of a state that went seeking a nation. The key was how nationalism and the state were linked–or better, disconnected–in the early Meiji period. To make his point that nationalism in modern Japan was corrupted by the state, he drew from Shimazaki Tson’s historical novel, Before the Dawn, to illustrate how populist Shintoists were expelled from the modern, secularizing state. Like Tyama and Yoshimoto, he saw the basic feature of modern Japanese nationalism as a bifurcated rift between the people and the state. Yet, unlike Tyama he did not place this rupture within a universal theory of class conflict, nor did he explicitly identify populist nationalism as minzokushugi. And unlike Yoshimoto, Hashikawa did not argue that the people were entirely unrepresentable, nor did he include all intellectuals as functional equivalents to the state in repressing the amorphous masses. Yet, like Yoshimoto, Hashikawa played his own conceptual sleight of hand. While he was quite insistent on the conceptual difference between nation (kokumin) and state (kokka), and on the difference between nationalism (nashonarizumu) and patriotism (aikokushin, sokokuai), he never really addressed minzokushugi as a form of nationalism in Japanese history. He did explicitly identify something he called “ethnic nationalism”, (jinshu chshin-teki nashonarizumu; i.e., race-centered nationalism) but his idiosyncratic gloss of the thing distanced this “ethnic nationalism” from any existing form of, or discourse on, Japanese nationalism. He did ultimately associate the “ethnic nationalism” of the nineteenth century Hirata School nativists with minzoku and a “Missionsidee” (minzoku no shimei kan), avant la 53

Hashikawa Bunz, Nashonarizumu, Kinokuniya Shinsho B-32 (Tokyo: Kinokuniya, 1968; reprinted 1994), 16.

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lettre, but only to argue for its universality through comparison with similar forms of ethnic nationalism in Europe.54 Thus, it may be said that, cum Yoshimoto, his point was to legitimate Japanese minzokushugi without calling it as such, but in sharp contrast to Yoshimoto, he concluded it was the universality of this “ethnic nationalism” that constituted its grounds for legitimacy: every people loves its homeland. This argument left Hashikawa’s theory of nationalism a bit contradictory, both internally and in relation to how most theorists of nationalism and patriotism understand these distinct, political movements: it would seem that, for Hashikawa, ethnic nationalism was really patriotism, and state-driven nationalism (the quest for a kokumin kokka) was not patriotism but a form of state oppression of the people. To explain these contradictions, one must not forget Hashikawa’s own personal experience during the war. Because of these wartime experiences, his main concern was to argue against the heavy-handed exploitation of the people by the state. Within this framework, even efforts to assert a populist nationalism (which for Hashikawa cannot be the project of building a nation-state, or kokumin-kokka, since that project is inevitably the exploitation of the people by the modern, secular state for its own purposes) can only be articulated as the unfinished business of grounding the Japanese people’s “General Will” within their political and social institutions, a business that Hashikawa correctly identified as “awaiting the next generation.”55 In reviewing the intersecting trajectories of how nationalism is understood today, how it has been understood by influential theorists in the past, and especially how these ideas have shaped the modern Japanese discourse on nationalism, two characteristics loom large. First, the main emphasis on nationalism has been an effort to come to terms with a new subjectivity in modern history that rests in some fashion on “the people,” collectively conceived. Yet, how the people are conceived (kokumin? minzoku? taish?) held implications for how nationalism was understood and enacted. This struggle to identify and then place the people as the key agent of cultural and political life was forced to confront terminology and concept, as the complex and conflict-laden history of nationalism in modern Japan spun off various interpretations of who the people as nation are and what their political prospects should be. Broad historical events such as the 54 55

Hashikawa, Nashonarizumu, 123-6. Hashikawa, Nashonarizumu, 186.

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emergence of a multi-ethnic empire, the demands of national solidarity during wartime, the destruction of the Japanese state during the Occupation, and the reconstruction of the nation formally as a kokumin under the postwar constitution played significant roles in directing and diverting nationalism. It was not the case that such historical events determined Japanese nationalism. Rather, they became key interventions in how nationalism was understood and articulated, but this intervention often raised counter-articulations to the expectations of the dominant structures. At the heart of Japanese discourse on nationalism was a belief that the nation was both imminent and transcendent, that it actually existed in the present but also had potential that was yet unrealized. This belief shaped the development of nationalism in Japan in ways that emphasized articulation, discourse, and representation as the very stuff of nationalism. It also signified a strong sense that national aspirations were never fulfilled in any given moment. The nation always needed to be articulated and rearticulated. This leads us to the second major emphasis one finds in modern Japanese nationalism. Throughout the theoretical literature, and especially the theoretical literature that shaped the Japanese discourse on nationalism, there was a consistent emphasis on the difference between the state (kokka) and the nation (kokumin, minzoku). This awareness that the state is not the nation was shared broadly by liberals, Marxists and ultra-conservatives. When counter-arguments were raised, such as during World War II, it was to displace this discourse of conflict between nation and state and to suggest the successful completion of Japan’s quest for a modern nation-state (kokumin kokka). Few were convinced by such assertions. And since the Meiji state was not designed constitutionally or institutionally as a nation-state (it shifted from being a monarchical state to a multiethnic imperial state and finally, during 1945-52, to no state at all), such assertions of being a nation-state only gave rise to counter-state populist nationalism, often in the form of minzokushugi (ethnic nationalism). Japanese nationalism was, and still is, in this sense a “conflictual nationalism.” By calling it “conflictual,” I do not mean the usual sense that it was a nationalism in conflict with other peoples or only with its state. This dynamic inter-relation and contestation between state and nation was mirrored in the contestations that took place within nationalist discourse over whether the Japanese nation is a minzoku (ethnic nation) or a kokumin (civic, and thus potentially multi-ethnic, nation). That debate continues even today, providing

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evidence that Japanese nationalism remains, internally, a highly “conflictual” nationalism. Nationalism, always and everywhere, is an effort to place the people in a conceptual, political and social order that makes sense for those who espouse that nationalism. Nationalism, then, is both cause and effect of this conception of a collective group of people as a nation. It both shapes them into a nation, and represents the effects of thoughts and actions taken on behalf of that nation. At the same time, nationalism is an ideological effort to erase the gap between the historical emergence of the nation (which may precede or postdate the state) and the political structures that claim to speak and act in the name of the nation. Consequently, any effort to assert when nationalism arises in relation to the emergence of a state is not only a matter for historical debate but also represents evaluative differences over what a nation or state truly is. Separate historical developments may provide for separate ideological claims made in the name of each. To differentiate nation and state (and sometimes different articulations of the nation) is a key step to a critical, scholarly evaluation of nationalism. It is characteristic of nationalism itself to conflate state and nation (and in some forms, to conflate all articulations of national and ethnic identity), and to suggest that the nation must be the primary identity in all aspects of one’s life. The precise significance of that claim–and thus the objective of a specific nationalist movement–rests in what meaning is attributed to “the nation” in particular cases. To answer that question with respect to Japan, we must now turn to how the nation emerged and was articulated in modern Japanese history. In the chapters that follow, I try to do precisely that. The next chapter surveys the preconditions for nationalism in Japan: the social hierarchy and decentralized political structure of early nineteenth century and how its transformation gave rise to various efforts to construct a modern nation in Japan. Out of the intricacies of revolutionary fervor came a notion of the public that grew increasingly inclusive and ultimately was utilized as the foundation for a new concept of the people as a nation. The third chapter looks at the role the monarchy played in raising and suppressing nationalist aspirations, even as it argues that in Japan, as elsewhere, monarchy did not accommodate itself to nationalism without serious conflict. But the main point of that chapter is to demonstrate that, as important as the monarchy was and remains in Japanese cultural and political life, it is not synonymous with Japanese nationalism. Chapter Four looks at nationalism from what some Japanese theorists might call

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“the bottom up.” If top down nationalism has often been erroneously attributed to the monarchy (tenno-sei), other theorists have equally erroneously imagined society as the antidote to nationalism precisely because of its affinity with the masses. In this chapter, I move from leading social theories on the relationship between concepts of society and the nation (as both approximations of “the people”) to an analysis of the development of the concept of society (shakai) in modern Japan to argue that social imaginaries are even closer to Japanese nationalism than monarchial institutions are. Chapters Five and Six, on the concepts of kokumin and minzoku, respectively, represent the heart of Japanese nationalism, as these concepts are the core of the alternative ways in which Japanese articulate nationalism (kokuminshugi, minzokushugi). These chapters analyze the history of these discourses independently, arguing that inherent in these discourses, even as they change over time, are independent concepts of what the Japanese nation was, is, or should be. Finally, in the afterword, I offer some reflections on how these key elements of Japanese nationalism come together and how they are shaping the present and future of nationalism in Japan.

CHAPTER TWO

THE PRECONDITIONS OF JAPANESE NATIONALISM Prior to 1853, there was no Japan. This may seem at first a preposterous claim, but it can only be fully understood once we have unpacked what a national concept like “Japan” really means. Certainly the claim is not that the islands which today make up the archipelago of Japan did not exist. And foreigners and even some natives did make occasional reference to a place called “Japan” even if such vague references to Japan rarely were consistent either with each other or with the territory that would later become Japan. Most importantly, “Japan,” as the national signifier we understand it to be today, was for all practical purposes irrelevant to the dominant forms of politics and to everyday life in the archipelago. Throughout the Edo period, and even into the early Meiji period, “Japan” neither referred to a single, clearly demarcated, centralized political authority, nor to a meaningful identity for those whom “Japan” would claim to represent. Without first appreciating what the absence of Japan as a national existence meant prior to the Meiji Restoration, one cannot fully comprehend the historical upheaval, contestation and sense of crisis that accompanied the Restoration and subsequent attempts to construct a modern nation-state in the early Meiji years. Nor is it easy to recognize the diverse forms of nationalism that have continued to inform political and cultural practice in Japan without first realizing that this sense of “Japaneseness” was, and is, a contingent and contested mode of identity. In order to appreciate what this absence of national identity meant, we must first guard against the temptations of anachronism. It is tempting to extract a concept from premodern texts that resembles a modern sense of nationality and then carry that concept forth into subsequent years, regardless of how well the actual existence of such “national” forms of identity is supported by other kinds of historical evidence. Some scholars have argued that this anachronistic projection backward of national identity is ingrained in the very nature of the modern discipline of history. There is no question that historians of Japan have frequently used their craft to provide

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evidence for a continuous sense of Japanese nationhood, and they often favor the “early modern” (Edo) period as the best site for this native sense of Japanese national identity. Indeed, the gradual shift among many historians from seeing the Edo period as a time of “feudalism” to an “early modern” period often relies implicitly on a theoretical and ideological effort to identify elements of an indigenous Japanese identity prior to Perry’s arrival and the cultural compromises believed to have resulted from “Westernization.” Metanarratives of historical progress, whether Marxist or nationalist, have often argued that nationalism develops only after the collapse of agrarian feudalism and the onset of bourgeois capitalism, the true harbinger of modernity. Consequently, by rejecting the appropriateness of feudalism in describing the Edo period, or by emphasizing capitalist economies prior to the Meiji Restoration, historians have constructed narratives that can easily be appropriated by others who wish to stress the nativist origins of Japanese nationalism. The full range of these dynamics is vast and complicated, involving Marxist agendas that both support nationalism as antiimperialism and denounce nationalism as capitalist “emperorsystem” ideology, as well as non-Marxist agendas that also lionize ethnicity or native cultures as anti-imperialist forces or, from a more post-Marxist perspective, envision an open-ended plurality of identities as a means of countering the supposed baneful effects of citizenship in a constitutional state. This is not the place to unravel the intricacies of these interrelated narrative strategies; to do so would, in any event, require an entirely different book. Instead, it must suffice to survey briefly some of the conceptual sources for national identity prior to the Meiji Restoration, and to simply appeal to the need to always historicize assertions of national identity.

The Bakumatsu Years and the Preconditions of National Identity Although the nation of Japan is a recent construct, the term by which we signify the Japanese nation today is of ancient origin. The earliest written record of reference to “Japan” appears in a diplomatic exchange between Prince Shtoku and the Tang Emperor in 645 A.D. Writing on behalf of the emperor, Prince Shtoku refered to the Japanese court as “the place were the sun rises” in juxtaposition to the Tang court, where “the sun sets.” More than geography influenced Shtoku’s choice of words, and the diplomatic affront encoded in his language was registered in China and back home,

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where one can imagine the popularity of this reference to “the place where the sun rises” was directly related to prestige the Yamato court felt it had gained at the expense of the powerful Tang court. In any event, this territorial reference to “Japan” was inextricably linked to the court itself, and is best understood as a reference to the monarch (tenn) on whose behalf Shtoku was writing.1 As Kano Masanao has pointed out, this seventh century reference to “Japan” in court papers “did not signify the widespread establishment among the people [at that time] of the same kind of consciousness of “Japan” or of “the Japanese” that we have today.”2 It was not a national or ethnic signifier. Kano’s caution is a good reminder that the seductive force of nationalism can make it very difficult to look backwards through time and not project modern assumptions about ethnic homogeneity, political centrality or national identity on a time when they would have held little meaning for people then living. Prior to the Meiji Restoration, the political world of “Japan” was structured around a Confucian concept of “universe” (tenka), not the nation-state. The concept of “universe” was a rather loose concept of public space and, while it was not completely open-ended, nor did it signify the clear demarcation of countries the way the modern concept of nation does. In fact, the terms “country” (kuni) or “state” (kokka), which after the Restoration would signify national units of governance (i.e.,“Japan”), referred to the local domains that constituted the primary political units of the baku-han system. Equally important for assessing the degree to which Japan was a “nation” in the early nineteenth century is the fact that the people, in the broadest sense, were constituted either as “domainal people” (rymin) or “village people” (sonmin), whereas when the term kokumin was used, it was either as a synonym for the “domainal people” or more narrowly, referred only to the samurai of a specific domain.3 To pay attention to the concepts through which national identity is expressed is not merely to parse historical discourse or to play the pedant. Historians have wasted far too much time debating, from modernist and anti-modernist biases, how much of modern Japanese nationalism can be traced back to the Edo period. Sakamoto Takao has provocatively suggested that we cease thinking of the Meiji state 1

Yoshida Takashi , Nihon no tanj (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,1997). Kano Masanao, Kindai nihon shis annai (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1999), 30. 3 Mark Ravina, Land and Lordship and Kano, Kindai nihon shis annai , 31. See the more extensive discussion of the transformation of the meaning of the idea of kokumin below in Chapter Five. 2

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building process in terms of “revolution and discontinuity” and recognize instead that the key issue was really one of “competition and unification.”4 His suggestion opens up a field in which nationbuilding in modern Japan was a far more complicated process than one of retaining “tradition” while adding (superficial) Western forms to social and political life. Appreciating the breadth of the national appeal in bakumatsu and early Meiji Japan does not necessarily lead to a discounting of tradition, but it does help restore an awareness of the political uses of tradition in a shared agenda of nation building. Contestation over nation-building then can be seen, not only in policy struggles among political elites, but also at a social level: in “how people at that time sensed and saw their world... how people placed in given political context understood their social environment.”5 Identifying the concepts that governed social and political identity during the Edo period, and recognizing their historical differences from later periods helps establish the social particularities of a world that was organized around a Confucian political ideology rather than around the modern nation-state. When challenges to that universe (tenka) begin to appear on the horizon, it is meaningful to speak of the decline of the baku-han order, or the period of bakumatsu. But we need not approach this historical process from a general assumption about discontinuity and loss, or from its functional equivalent-assumptions of the perfect durability of tradition as a supposed anchor in a revolutionary period. Positing too sharp a break between the Edo and Meiji periods has often led to a kind of magical modernist narrative which sees all historical change, especially the move towards a national identity, as coming from outside and “top down.” In reality, a new social imagination began to take hold among samurai and merchant scholars nearly a hundred years before the Meiji Restoration, and it laid the foundations for subsequent broader notions of the people as the legitimate agents in a national body politic. Scholars of nativism (kokugaku) played an important role in undermining the dominant Confucian symbolic order, following Motoori Norinaga’s distinction in his “Commentaries on the Kojiki” (1764) between “the august land of the emperor”(mikuni) and “the (foreign) land of China” (karakuni). Motoori’s innovation was to challenge the legitimacy of theories derived from foreign countries to represent Japanese ways of life, but 4

Sakamoto Takao, Meiji kokka no kensetsu, 23. Yamamuro Shin’ichi, Kindai nihon no chi to seiji: Inoue Kowashi kara taishü engei made (Tokyo: Bokutakusha, 1985), 148-9. 5

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he stopped short of articulating a political concept of national governance or an explicit model of the Japanese people as constituting a nation. His theory of identity was a historicist one that looked to the past for the sources of a more authentic identity. But within a few decades, his historicist nativism would soon gain support from another approach that drew on boundary consciousness in reflecting a more explict sense of political nationalism. What transformed an emerging theory of cultural distinctiveness into the beginnings of nationalist ideology was the discovery of the West. In Kano Masanao’s elegant formula, “the discovery of the West also produced the discovery of Japan.”6 The arrival of Western ships off the coasts of the Japanese archipelago in the late eighteenth century both directly challenged the legitimacy of the “barbarian subduing” shogunate and gave rise to a sense of common fate and a need for common defense among growing numbers of the samurai across the land. One of the earliest articulations of this new sense of boundary difference came from Hayashi Shihei whose Kaikoku Heidan (1786) expressed a new sense of “Japan” as a single entity defined by its structural opposition to “foreign countries.” Moreover, Hayashi appealed to a need to bar the door to possible invasions by these foreign countries. Drawing on this discovery of the West and the urgency of protecting Japan as a single unit, Shizuki Tadao translated sections from Engelbert Kaempfer’s An Account of Japan as Sakokuron in 1801, providing the first instance in Japanese discourse of this term sakoku, which both signified the need to close Japan to Western ships as well as a recognition that something called “Japan” was defined by sharing a common external threat. Mito scholars promoted this sense of Japan as a common land under a single ruler, especially after Aizawa Seishisai’s Shinron (New Thesis, 1825) drew on this call to close the country, protect Japan from foreigners, and support the emperor. Aizawa’s “discovery of the West” was more than metaphoric: he had interviewed the crew of an English fishing vessel that had come ashore in his domain. His experience had drawn his attention, not only to the need to drive off the foreigners, but to clarify how the various countries of the bakuhan system should constitute a single body, and he sought to explain this through the concept of kokutai.7 For Aizawa, kokutai was 6

Kano, Kindai nihon shis annai, 30. Kano, Kindai nihon shis annai, 30-32. Although kokutai is often referred to simply as the “body politic,” a rendering that exposes a certain bias towards political representations of national identity like the state, the very debate over the kokutai that began with Aizawa and, as we shall see, escalates throughout subsequent 7

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conceived within a neo-Confucian traditional debate over how to decide who the rightful ruler was. He used kokutai to highlight the emperor as the rightful ruler, and his definition of the “divine land” as “the place where the sun rises” meant his concept of a unified realm was limited to asserting the national scope of the emperor’s legitimacy; the people remained “the people of the imperial land” (kkoku no tami) rather than the foundation of a truly national body.8 In short, Aizawa drew from the ancient meaning of “Japan” as signifying the imperial court in contrast to foreign countries, but his views did not yet constitute a truly national vision of Japan. And most importantly, the people whom he sought to signify as the nation had yet to embrace in large numbers this national vision of his. As H.D. Harootunian has demonstrated, other nativists developed an agrarian sense of the collective people juxtaposed in a vertical relationship to the political authority in the castle towns.9 The legacy of such agrarianism would remain to influence Japanese conceptions of society, particularly after the Meiji Restoration when society emerged as a political counterweight to the authoritarian state that had resulted and the agrarian village seemed a repository of the utopian hopes that had been crushed by the harsh realities of the new industrial economy. In order to fully appreciate how these influential modes of imagining society and state in modern Japan took shape, it is important first to recognize that the political visions of nativist activists who had grounded their visions of society in agrarian communitarianism contributed to the diminished possibility of civil society in Meiji Japan, in spite of (because of?) their harsh criticism of those working for a modern Japanese state. By the mid-nineteenth century, cultural and political articulations of native identity were growing among certain segments of the populations, but these discourses neither found a means of synthesis nor had they grown strong enough to transform the de-centralized structure of the bakuhan political system into a centralized modern national state. The arrival of Commodore Perry’s fleet in 1853 brought domestic nativism and the foreign political crisis together in a complex series Japanese history, suggests that the concept went deeper to the very essence of what made Japan a “nation,” a problem that has not been easy to resolve. Yet the political bias in interpreting kokutai itself is derived from Aizawa’s own orientation toward political solutions to unification through the emperor. 8 See Sakamoto Takao’s reading of Shinron in Meiji kokka no kensetsu, nihon no kindai 2, (Tokyo: Ch Kron, 1999), 36-39. 9 H.D. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 242-72.

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of events that would eventually establish the contours of a truly national state and bring forth calls for a national people. Earlier attempts, largely by the samurai, to articulate “Japaneseness” soon became caught up in specifically modern responses to the problem of how to mediate the claims of individual and collective wills, and these responses in turn shaped and were shaped by the fall of the bakufu and the rise of the centralized Meiji state. In a sense, then, the initial solution to these problems in the form of the Meiji Restoration can be seen as a political solution that was both less than and far more than the initial problem created by the arrival of Perry’s ships. Less, because it could not solve the problem of expelling foreigners–particularly foreign influences that would permeate Japanese culture–but also more, because the Meiji Restoration and the modern state that resulted would radically transform the social landscape, giving legitimacy to the ideal of a united Japanese national people, while in the process establishing new, modern forms of political resistance to the state. In this sense, It Yahiko’s description of Perry’s “Black Ships” as a “liquifying phenomenon” that dissolved the pre-existing political world and provided an opening to the “populist activists” (sm no shishi) is an apt one.10 By no means did Perry’s arrival inject a principle of historical change to a stagnant world, as some historians have claimed. But it did contribute to the dissolution of the old baku-han system and its ascriptive social order which had prevented the development of the national society envisioned by nativists and others. For nativist scholars, Perry’s arrival and the problems it caused for the bakufu were both cause for concern and hope. They did not welcome the incursion of foreigners into the divine land, but they could also hope that this would be the latest “divine wind” to rescue the emperor from obscurity and return him to the political center. The arrival of the Black Ships galvanized the nativist movement and directed it towards a greater emphasis on the emperor and political conceptions of “Japan.” Nativism was not inevitably or originally an ideology of nationalism or emperor worship. For centuries, nativism had encompassed both a particularistic theology that emphasized the ancestral gods of the emperor (kso kami: Amaterasu mikami; Jinmu tenn) as well as a universalistic cosmogony focussed on creator gods (zka kami), and the two traditions were frequently intertwined. Throughout most of the Edo period, the emphasis on Amaterasu as a metaphysical diety that transcended both politics and 10

It Yahiko, Ishin to jinshin (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1999), 2.

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“Japan” was dominant.11 But Hirata Atsutane’s emphasis on Amenominakanushi-no-kami (Creator-god), Musubi-no-kami, and the kuninushi-no-kami nativism that would emerge after Perry’s arrival acquired a new force and newly acquired sense of purpose. In contrast to the threats posed by earlier foreign ships arriving off Japanese coasts, Perry’s arrival had a more profound impact on Japanese national formation. The timing of his arrival in the midst of a difficult domestic political situation was a factor, but so was his unprecedented insistance on signing a binding, formal agreement with Japanese authorities. Unlike other foreign visitors, Perry announced he was not going to go away without major concessions from the bakufu. This intransigent imposition of foreignness on the Japanese body politic planted the seeds of a truly modern form of nationalism in Japan by heightening a sense of boundary consciousness first imposed by the arrival of Perry along the coast and then by the incessant pressure brought to bear by foreign diplomats on the governing bakufu in the decade and a half subsequent to Perry’s arrival. As Tanaka Akira has argued, The foreign pressure of the bakumatsu years forced a consciousness first of “nation” [kokumin] on the people [hitobito] and then of the “state” [kokka]. But, at that time, this consciousness of “nation” was still in incipient form and thus it is usually called the early stage of nationalism. Thus for this reason, I will call it “nationalism” in parenthesis.”12

Tanaka’s argument that the arrival of Perry encouraged Japanese people to begin to think of themselves as a united nation rather than as members of diverse regions and occupational strata helps explain the broad range of pressures that brought down the bakufu. But it is important not to read too much into this early stage of nationalism. The nation was, as Tanaka admits, still in incipient form, and few ordinary Japanese people thought of themselves as a nation in the modern sense of the concept. 11 Katsurajima Nobuhiro, Bakumatsu minsh shis no kenky: bakumatsu kokugaku tominsh shky (Kyoto: Bunrikaku, 1992), 20-24. 12 Tanaka Akira, “Bakumatsu no shakai to shis,” 236-258 in Bakumatsu ishinshi no kenky (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kbunkan, 1996): 237. To support this view, Tanaka cites from Takekoshi Yosabur’s 1891-92 Shin nihonshi. In Takekoshi’s words, the arrival of the American warships in Uraga Bay meant that “the sense of mutual suspicion and enmity among the various domains quickly and easily disappeared and the three hundred domains became brothers, the numberless people all discovered that they were one nation (ichi kokumin naru o hakkenshi) and from here the idea of the Japanese state (nihon kokka naru shis) gushed forth.” Takekoshi, Shin nihonshi; cited in Tanaka, 237.

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Yet, the effects of Perry’s arrival in transforming peasants into Japanese were profound. Even in the remote countryside, far from the treaty ports, Japanese peasants were affected by this sense of boundary consciousness and some were beginning to give expression to this sense of collective Japanese identity.13 For example, Sugano Hachir, a farmer in the distant northeast region who led an 1866 uprising in the country of Iwashiro found a way in his spare time to write a journal called “Dreams from a Rainy Night.” In it, he outlined a map of the world (with Japan in the center) and noted that “rumors fly all around Japan, and everyone is so nervous they can hardly keep body and soul together.” Takekoshi Yosabur credits this line as a frank expression of an early consciousness of Japanese nationalism.14 Such sentiments were shaped by economic changes that were affecting the entire nation, transforming Japan in sudden and shocking ways into a single national market. The treaties that opened Japan to foreign trade in the late 1850s wreaked considerable havoc on the Japanese markets and the delicate system of allocated trade that the bakufu had established. The gap between those few who were able to benefit from trade in the ports and the rest of the country that generally suffered from the inflationary effects of this trade, particularly on the price of agricultural products, only made this early sense of nationalism more attractive, not only to those within the circle of political elites, but also and for different reasons commoners who had never participated before in political affairs.15 These developments were slow and largely imperceptible changes, however, that often are best appreciated as nationalism only from the hindsight of a historian. It would be a mistake to argue that popular nationalism among the peasants and commoners was the driving force behind the political changes that led to either the Meiji Restoration or the construction of a modern Japanese state. Historians have often appealed to such populist narratives to suggest that the modern Japanese state was, or should have been, a national state. In actuality, the historical record is a far more complicated one. Burgeoning nationalist sentiment, coupled with traditional antibakufu and anti-Confucian ideologies, mingled with internal political 13

Tanaka Akira, Bakumatsu ishinshi no kenky, 238. Takegoshi Yosabur, Shin Nihonshi; cited in Tanaka, Bakumatsu ishinshi no kenky, 237-38. 15 Tanaka, Bakumatsu ishinshi no kenky, 238. See also Shimazaki Tson, Before the Dawn , trans. William Naff, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987.) 14

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struggles within various domains and in the bakufu along with growing tensions between the bakufu and the court, all of which was capped off by the unprecedented problem of Perry and the West. The upshot of all this was not a cystallization of nationalism around a state that would defend Japan against the West but a complicated series of events that built the foundation of modern Japanese nationalism into what it still remains today: a contested field of competing nationalist claims that include assertions of ethnicity, loyalty to the emperor, allegiance to the political state, Asian traditionalism, pro-Western individualism, and so forth. In emphasizing the complexity of modern Japanese nationalism, I do not mean to suggest that it cannot be comprehended. Just the opposite. Japanese nationalism can only be understood properly once we recognize that theoretical attempts to grasp Japanese nationalism as a singular thing often fail to grasp the true range of its historical forms, particularly when they are too heavily invested in one or another of these elements of Japanese nationalism. Japanese nationalism was not constructed solely by the state, by capitalism, by the West, by the emperor, or even by the “people. Japanese nationalism was the result of a specific series of historical and political events that created a plurality of agents in a contested arena, where each sought to expel, expunge or appropriate the others in the name of the true Japanese nation. As nationalism, however, this discourse has its defining limits around the question of the “people”: who are they, where are they, and over whom/under whom do they have sovereignty, identity and meaning?

Creating a Public and Building a State in Early Meiji The foundation for this new context in which nationalism would rise as a debate over political, social and cultural identity may be found in the emergence of a new concept of “the public” during the bakumatsu and early Meiji years. As with any historically significant concept, one can find antecedents for “public consultation” from earlier Japanese history. Historians have located elements of public consultation in the deliberations of kugy in the Dajkan government of the Heian period, in the tradition of “shinzen no ggi” in medieval uprisings, and in the Edo period, in the village “yoriai” and even the ggi of senior councillors in the bakufu.16 But these arguments for 16

Mitani Hiroshi, Meiji ishin to nashonarizumu (Tokyo: Yamakawa shuppansha, 1997).

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ancient Japanese forms of proto-democratic practices, while aimed at Eurocentric views that would discount Japanese experience, do not by themselves explain the revolutionary impact that even traditionalist inspired appeals to public consultation had in the highly charged atmosphere of the bakumatsu years. It may seem rather trite to point out once again that tradition was recontextualized for new purposes in bakumatsu and early Meiji Japan, as we are all increasingly made aware of how modern societies are constructed not on the erasure of tradition but through the recontextualizing, and thus reinvention, of traditional practices. That is precisely what happened to this earlier “tradition” of public consultation during the social and political maelstrom of Japan during the 1860s. A close reading of the history of “public consultation” in the years surrounding the Meiji Restoration reveals some surprising results. In contrast to earlier forms of public consultation, “consulting public opinion” (kgi yoron) during and after the 1860s became enmeshed with another discourse on “rewarding talent” (jinsai ty) and incorporated new models of constitutional politics from Western countries. Public consultation was not simply the expression of an indigenous form of democracy, but was equally useful at repressing democratic aspirations. Along with “rewarding talent,” the concept of “consulting public opinion” became one of the key sites where the new political elite sought to control the people’s minds.17 Thus, this emerging rhetoric about “consulting the public” was not merely a continuation of traditional forces of consultation, but one of the major factors in the disruption of prevailing political institutions. Such rhetoric served as a catalyst towards a revolutionary view of social and individual worth. But of course, it is important to recognize that it was not the language of these concepts itself that determined the historical use of “public consultation,” but the historical mobilization of this rhetoric that determined what the language of the “public” would mean in modern Japan. The loosening of this discourse on “consulting the public” from its traditional moorings began soon after the arrival of Perry’s ships. When the bakufu took the unprecedented step of consulting with the daimyo over the question of opening the country, it inaugurated a subtle but fateful change in political ideology. Until that point, governance was the “private” right of the bakufu, but in consulting with the daimy (who previously had no right to speak on matters of governance outside their domains), the bakufu had implicitly 17

It Yahiko, Ishin to jinshin, 43.

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recognized the legitimacy of the daimyo to speak on politics as a “public” matter. From that moment on, “consulting the public” became a useful tool for those forces that sought to be included in the political center.18 In this way, the first modern incarnation of the discourse on “consulting the public” became intertwined with a broader debate that might be rendered as “opening up discourse” (genro dkai). This broader claim for “opening up discourse” captured a sense that prevailing social and political institutions were preventing new ideas from being heard and thus, from discovering new solutions to the new challenges that faced the bakufu and “Japan.” Of course, these arguments had broad appeal, but it was mainly the lower samurai—men like kubo Toshimichi, Saig Takamori, and Kido Takayoshi–who promoted “opening up discourse” as a means of identifying and “rewarding new talent.”19 Eventually, their use of the discourse on “consulting the public” would challenge the entire social status system of the Edo period, as well as the bakufu’s politics, and bring them into conflict with the daimyo, for whom “consulting the public” was not meant to signify a radical new social order. The origins of this modern form of public consultation lay in a plan by members within the restoration coalition, especially samurai from Tosa, to promote the influence of their domains against the bakufu. Tosa was a weak partner in the restoration, lacking the numbers of retainers that Satsuma could deliver and the courage in battle evidenced by Chsh. In light of these disadvantages, restorationists in Tosa were particularly quick to recognize the power of ideas, and men from Tosa played on this strength in political ideas throughout and after the Restoration. They began to advocate “public consultation” in the aftermath of the bakufu’s move towards a “unification of court and camp” (kbu gattai) that reached a highpoint in 1862 with the marriage of Princess Kazunomiya to the shogun, Iemochi. For Tosa, the domain’s fortunes were wedded to the success or failure of this policy on “public consultation.” After driving the restorationist forces out of Kyoto in 1863, the “court and camp” alliance held a conference that explored a method of expanding the participation in government of daimyo like Yamanouchi Toyoshige of Tosa and even Shimazu Hisamitsu of Satsuma who had not yet thrown his weight behind the anti-bakufu movement. In short, the bakufu saw this proposal for “public 18 19

Sakamoto, Meiji kokka no kensetsu, 29-30. Sakamoto, Meiji kokka no kensetsu, 30-31.

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consultation” as an opportunity to divide the forces that were hostile to it. At the conference, a plan emerged for a new political system based on government through a conference of domainal lords (kgi seitairon) modeled on the American bicameral legislature. The concept had been sketched out earlier in Sakamoto Ryma’s Sench Hassaku, but it was Got Shjir of Tosa who best understood the potential of this system of “public consultation” for realizing a new national political system. Got convinced his daimyo, Yamanouchi, of the merits of this new scheme, which Yamanouchi then took to the shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu. Yamanouchi pointed out the advantages of a new political system based on “public consultation” including the chance for avoiding a bloody war between the antibakufu and bakufu armies. He also stressed that such a system held out the probability that the Tokugawa house would still be required to play an important role in the new political system. Indeed, there was every reason at the time to believe not only that this strategy would work but that it was the only remaining hope for the survival of the Tokugawa house. Yoshinobu finally concurred and announced the end of the bakufu by “returning government” to the court on 13 October 1867. Yoshinobu may have had another reason for quickly returning government to the Court. At that very moment, the anti-bakufu forces were working with the Court to declare the Tokugawa enemies of the Court. Yoshinobu’s voluntary return of government to the Court greatly frustrated that plan by demonstrating Tokugawa loyalty to the emperor. In any event, the shogun was willing to gamble on this new scheme, as he announced to his retainers in Kyoto on 12 October, “I will return government to the Court, and devote myself to public consultation [kgi] throughout the realm.”20 Although it might appear that promoting “public consultation” was merely a cynical ploy to undermine the bakufu, the demand for public consultation only grew stronger after the Restoration and it challenged courtiers like Prince Arisugawa Taruhito and Sanj Sanetomi who tried to establish a new government based solely on an appeal to tradition and the prestige of the emperor. But the Court had no military and little political power of its own (in spite of Prince Arisugawa’s own success on the battlefield), and it needed the support of a wide array of domains if the new government were to

20

Cited in Sakamoto, Meiji kokka no kensetsu, 29.

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succeed. Hence, even the Court found some utility in the new scheme of “consulting the public.”21 This discourse on public discussion eventually gave rise to a new concept of “the public,” and along with this new concept of the public came trenchant criticisms of any political arrangement that did not reflect this new sense of a public. Consequently, in early 1868, with the Boshin War just underway, the new political leaders undertook a major reorganization of the fledgling government that reflected a greater need to incorporate these growing demands for “consulting the public.” As commanding officer of the forces that attacked the Tokugawa and their supporters in the east, Prince Arisugawa had seized the moment to establish himself at the top of an awkward governmental system designed to shore up the influence of his fellow courtiers. This governmental structure was first organized into the Three Offices (sanshoku) of ssai, gij and san’yo; a month later the latter two Offices were organized into first the “Seven Departments” (17 January-3 February 1868) and then into the “Eight Bureaus” (3 February-21 April 1868). The key characteristic, however, of this first attempt at forming a government in modern Japan was that it placed nobles at the head of all the major Departments or Bureaus. Prince Arisugawa also co-headed (along with fellow nobles Nakayama Tadayasu and Shirakawa Sukenori) the Department of Rites, the immediate predecessor of the Office of Rites which under the Dajkan became the Ministry of Rites, before ceding that position under the Eight Offices to Shirakawa.22 Almost immediately, criticism of this archaic, court-led government arose among the younger samurai activists who had initiated the antibakufu movement. To them, Prince Arisugawa’s government appeared just as elitist and restrictive–if not more so–than the old bakufu had been. It too failed to reflect their convictions that a new 21 Such considerations have led Eiko Ikegami to see the Meiji debate on kgi yoron as merely an insincere strategy by the new government to hold together the anti-bakufu forces. See her chapter, “Citizenship and National Identity in Early Meiji Japan, 1868-1889,” in Charles Tilly, ed., Citizenship, Identity and Social History, International Review of Social History Supplement 3, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 185-221. 22 On the history of the “Division/Office/Ministry of Rites,” see James E. Ketellar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), esp., 8, 66-7. There is scant consistency in English translations of early Meiji political institutions such as the “Seven Departments and the Eight Offices” (Shichika, Hakkyoku). Ketelaaar, for example, prefers the “Seven Divisions and Eight Offices.” I have followed the terms used in the Kdansha Encyclopedia of Japan (Tokyo & New York: Kdansha, 1983).

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system was needed, not merely to enshrine the emperor, but to enable “new talent” to rise to the fore from within a broader concept of the “public.” With the proclamation of the Charter Oath on 06 April, the principle of public consultation received the full authority of the emperor himself. The first of the five articles in the Oath stated that “deliberative assemblies shall be widely established and all matters decided by public discussion.”23 The Charter Oath was of course designed in part to allay concerns of the Western Powers that the new government might not be “enlightened” and might condone the spate of attacks on foreigners in Japan that had escalated through the 1860s under the cry of sonn ji. But domestic affairs were even more pressing on the restoration leaders’ minds, and the Charter Oath was also meant to curry favor with the daimyo, by suggesting that, on the eve of a full-scale military attack on Edo castle, the new government would be open to them. In this fluid period of crisis, the leaders of the new government could scarcely afford to alienate powerful military centers like the daimyo.24 The phrase “public discussion” (kron) was added to the Charter Oath by Fukuoka Takachika (Ktei) of Tosa, who incorporating the Tosa plan for “public consultation” into his draft. The Oath had a difficult balancing act to perform: satisfying not only the Western Powers and potentially dangerous daimyo, but also reassuring the court nobles who had grown concerned—not unreasonably—that this emphasis on “public consultation” was directed against them as a check on their newly acquired power. The difficult task of reconciling these differences was left to Kido, who simply added the diplomatically ambiguous phrase “conferences would be held widely” (hiroku kaigi o okoshi) without specifying which groups would be included or excluded when these conferences were held.25 Backed by the authority of the Charter Oath, influential samurai and their court allies sought a solution to these emerging political tensions in a broader concept of government that would reflect this new understanding of “the public.” The idea for a different political 23

“The Charter Oath,” in Rysaku Tsunoda, Wm. Theodore De Bary, and Donald Keene, eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition volume II, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 136-7. 24. Yamazaki Yk, “‘Kgi’ yshutsu kik no keisei to hkai: kgisho to shgiin,” in It Takashi, ed., Nihon kindaishi no sai-kchiku (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1993): 49-76, at 55. 25 Sakamoto, Meiji kokka no kensetsu, 55-60.

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system, the Dajkan (“Grand Council of State”), originated with Fukuoka and Soejima Taneomi (Hizen) who sought to expand the influence of non-nobles in the government. Soejima and Fukuoka envisioned a Western inspired “three branches of government” divided between the legislative, executive and judiciary branches, and this vision was incorporated into the Seitaisho (“the Constitution of 1868”) which was made public by the government on 21 April as the outline for their re-organization under the Dajkan that went into effect on 27 April. The Seitaisho opened by restating the Charter Oath, re-emphasizing what appeared to be the emperor’s own commitment to this new notion of “public consultation.” In keeping with this principle of broader political inclusion, power was much more diffused under the Dajkan than it had been under the initial post-Restoration settlement. Although often called a “constitution” in English, the Seitaisho is best considered a working memorandum for several competing groups with de facto power over how their authority would be allocated in the immediate future. Japan was still far from having a state, and the Seitaisho did not carry anything like the legal or public authority of a modern national constitution. But even in name, the document itself echoed the “debates over a government based on public consultation” (kgi seitai ron), and indeed it tried to incorporate these arguments for a broader “public” form of government than what had been accomplished under Prince Arisugawa’s first political structure. The Seitaisho moved government closer towards a pluralistic political system than the earlier system of “Departments and Offices.” It invested this pluralism in the Dajkan, the political structure that would survive as the governing apparatus of Japan until 1885, when It Hirobumi’s “cabinet” system prepared the way for the constitutional Meiji state. The Seitaisho reflected a growing consensus among those who held power that modern Japan could not survive as a government of courtiers who served only the Court, and it even secured imperial legitimacy for the demands to open the corridors of power to new talent outside traditional channels of authority and hierarchy. In this limited sense, the Seitaisho worked as a solution to the national tensions opened up by the Restoration. The most salient characteristic in the Dajkan was the rise in political influence of the young samurai and the relative marginalization of the conservatives, courtiers and their daimyo supporters who had tried to control the first incarnation of the new government. The executive branch was represented by the Gyseikan, which was headed by two co-equal

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imperial “advisors,” Sanj and Iwakura Tomomi. This division of executive authority between two offices was a direct repudiation of Prince Arisugawa and his attempt to act as the sole executive of the government. Prince Arisugawa, in fact, was denied a major position of responsibility in the first Dajkan. Ironically, the principle of “public consultation,” which had emerged as a criticism of the bakufu, had outlived the bakufu only to challenge the influence of anti-bakufu conservatives like Prince Arisugawa in the new government. The official rationale for the reform of the executive branch was that only the emperor himself could claim the position of sole head of the government, but the real purpose was to open government to more participants, especially from outside the court. Although courtiers themselves, Sanj and Iwakura had worked closely with the leaders of the Satsuma and Chsh activists and enjoyed their trust. But they were also respected by conservative forces in the court, who were confident that Sanj could control the more radical calls for opening the country to the influence of the West and introducing a more “public” centered form of government. Thus, they played a valuable role in keeping the anti-bakufu coalition of court and daimyo together during the crucial early days of the new government, even while they used their influence to bring more of the restorationist samurai to positions of influence in the Dajkan. It was mainly through the legislative branch (Giseikan) that samurai influence found access to power in the new government. The legislative branch was bicameral. The Upper House (Jkyoku) was composed of members (gij) appointed from the nobility and the daimyo as well as counselors (sanyo) appointed from nobles, daimyo, elites, samurai and commoners. The Lower House (Gekyoku) was composed of members (kshi) sent from the various domains as their representatives. The design was a marked improvement in the direction of expanding public consultation in the new government. This tenuous balance of power envisioned in Soejima and Fukuoka’s plan did not last long, however, as the legislative branch was abolished by 1 August (a brief attempt to resurrect it in the following April quickly failed) and some gij and sanyo began to infiltrate the executive branch. By then, the legislative branch had served its purpose. While it fell short of a true, elected legislature, it had provided a means of distancing conservative daimyo from the policy centers of the Dajkan. Real power lay with Sanj and Iwakura in the Gyseikan, and with their assistance, Soejima, Got, Maebara Issei and later kubo, Kido, It Hirobumi and kuma Shigenobu were able to rise to positions of influence. In its short life, the Giseikan

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provided a useful mechanism through which to identify talented men with a new vision for Japan who were then placed in positions of responsibility for the ministries and many of the main functions of the new government. Historians often describe the Giseikan as “feudal” and attribute its failure to this allegedly “feudal” nature. What such allegations reflect is the predominance of conservatives in the Giseikan, especially in the upper house where the interests of the daimyo and conservative courtiers were concentrated. But the Giseikan was no feudal institution: it was inspired by American political institutions and functioned ironically to support the more progressive leaders of the Restoration by providing a relatively inconsequential place to house defenders of the old decentralized order while the Dajkan’s executive branch moved forward in a new direction. Yet, while this ploy kept hopes for a truly national Japanese state safe from the forces of decentralization, it did so at a considerable cost. This cynical manipulation of Japan’s first deliberative assembly left a negative legacy which compromised the effective function of legislatures later in Japanese history, as the function of a legislature was seen from its very inception to be to house radicals and critics, but not to serve as the repository of a responsible government. From this discourse on “consulting the public,” government leaders came to expect the legislature to serve merely as the representatives of public opinion and not to play a key role in drafting laws or forming governments. This diminished expectation was internalized by many legislators themselves, beginning with the disillusioned daimyo and conservative courtiers in the Giseikan, who saw their mission as chastising the government in the name of “public opinion” rather than working with the government to resolve public issues. Their grounds for dissatisfaction with the new government were many, but it soon became clear that the Giseikan was providing a centralized place where their opposition to the government was becoming unified. The government responded by ordering the first legislative body in Japanese history to be closed down. With the closing of the Giseikan, supporters of “kgi seitai” petitioned the government for the re-opening of an assembly, emphasizing that the government needed a broader base of support to survive at this critical transitional time. Akizuki Tanetatsu, who had been the President of the Lower House before it was closed, submitted a petition on 10 September 1868 beseeching the government to recognize the value of the Lower House. His petition was supported by san’yo ki Takat, who added that the government

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should restore the assembly since “public deliberation was indispensable…and we should establish a true assembly which would serve as the foundation for the state.”26 Influenced by these arguments, the government decided to reopen the assembly on 21 September. Support for the idea of a government responsive to the public, or at least support for an assembly where public opinion would be debated and expressed, was widespread among members of the government, although various factions had their own reasons, and degree of support, for such an assembly.27 Consequently, the government also established the Giji Taisai Torishirabesho on 19 November to ensure that the new assembly would function in a manner supportive of the government’s course of action. What they got instead was the most powerful concentration of the kgi seitai ron faction yet seen, along with a growing consensus against the Westernization policies of the new government, which were seen as elitist and contrary to the interests of the “public.” The President of the Giji Taisai Torishirabesho was gij Yamanouchi Toyoshige, the head of the kgi taisei movement, and his VicePresident was his close friend Akizuki Tanetatsu. They were joined by san’yo Fukuoka, who had inserted the “public deliberation” clause in the Charter Oath, and ki Takato, Mori Arinori, Kat Hiroyuki, Tsuda Mamichi, and Kanda Khei. Together, they were able to pass the Kgisho hsokuan, Japan’s first law establishing a national legislature. Under the authority of this law, the Kgisho building was completed on 6 December 1868 and the assembly opened session on 01 April of the following year, with 227 representatives (kginin) selected from the various domains.

26 “ki Takat monjo,” Kokuritsu kokkai toshokan kensei shiryshitsu z, cited in Yamazaki, 60. 27 Yamazaki Yk offers a nuanced analysis of the different groups in early Meiji politics and their reasons for supporting some form of “public consultation.” He divides the political support for “kgi” into seven groups: (1) those for whom it meant an assembly of daimyo to push through rapid Westernization (Yamanouchi, Akizuki, Kat_ Hiroyuki); (2) those committed to an assembly of daimyo, but who favored gradual Westernization (Fukuoka); (3) those seriously committed to a broader concept of the public who favored rapid Westernization (It Hirobumi, kuma Shigenobu, Inoue Kaoru); (4) those committed to this broader concept of the public, but who favored gradual Westernization (Kido Takayoshi, ki Takat); (5) those whose support for “public consultation” was superficial and who were antiWesternization (Iwakura, Sanj, Fukushima); (6) those whose support for “public consultation was also superficial, but who favored gradual Westernization (kubo); (7) those for whom it meant an assembly of daimyo and who were anti-Western (staff of the Kgisho). See Yamazaki, “‘Kgi’ yshutsu kik no keisei to hkai,” 66.

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Drawing on a mixture of Dutch, English and American models, the Kgisho was an eclectic assembly to which representatives were selected from each domain for four year terms, with half the membership up for election every two years. Yamanouchi and Akizuki may have been favorably disposed towards opening the country to the West and towards the general direction of Westernization, but the majority of the representatives in the Kgisho were of an altogether different frame of mind. Among the bills rejected by the representatives was a law on establishing trading relations with foreign countries; strong opinions were voiced against allowing foreigners to serve in the new government; and a resolution in favor of persecuting Christianity was passed with overwhelming support.28 These sentiments suggest the depth of nativist sentiment in early Meiji society, but also that this nativism was something the government could neither easily control nor overlook. Since members of the Kgisho were elected as representatives of their domains, the Kgisho tended to function as an institutionalized expression of domainal interests within the new government. Rather than expressing the will of the people conceived as a national body, samurai sent from their domain to serve in the Kgisho adopted a variety of strategies that frustrated the new government’s efforts at establishing a centralized approach to political or social reform. These domainal representatives were not simply functioning as local representatives in a healthy democratic national legislature. They were in fact trying to assert their traditional domainal interests over and above national, and certainly popular, interests. One of the most important of their strategies in the Kgisho involved a debate over the very existence of domains in the nation’s emerging new political system. This debate was sparked in the early days of the Kgisho, when on 06 April Mori Arinori presented a memorandum to Akizuki on “Four Problems in Understanding the National Polity.” Essentially, Mori’s memorandum raised the question of whether Japan should adopt a federalist (hken) or centralized (gunken) system of government, with the implication that the Kgisho representatives had to cooperate by convincing their domainal leaders that political centralization was the only realistic option for Japan. Akizuki presented the issue in the form of a draft bill, and discussion on the bill proceeded for the next month. Opinions ranged widely, and surprisingly there appeared to be a large measure of support for 28

Yamazaki, “‘Kgi’ yshutsu kik no keisei to hkai,” 68.

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the centralized system of government: of the 212 domains represented in the Kgisho, 102 domains supported, in one fashion or another, this proposal for a centralized government that would at the very least compromise the wide-ranging local authority that domainal leaders had become accustomed to enjoy. Closer analysis, however, reveals that the domains were merely searching for a means of survival within what were clearly prevailing winds blowing against local autonomy or even federalism. As Katsuta Masaharu’s careful analysis reveals, those 102 domains that spoke in favor of gunken can be divided into two groups. Only forty domains strongly supported the proposal, including its provisions for public confiscation of their private lands, to have “governors” (chifuji, chikenji) appointed and to move the former daimyo to Tokyo. But even these most supportive domains insisted on a compromise clause that, for the time being, the governors would remain the former daimyo or their representatives. Although this group comprised only forty of the 102 domains in support of centralization, three large domains (Kanazawa, Wakayama and Hiroshima) were included, suggesting that their support was a compromise measure designed to seek access to political influence in the emerging new government. The remaining sixty domains adopted a position Katsuta calls “formalistic” support of centralization, since they tried to limit the impact of gunken to a name change: large domains would be called fu and smaller domains would be called ken, but the land and position of governor would remain the hereditary property of the daimyogovernors.29 In short, there were–as one would expect–actually few domainal representatives in the Kgisho who were in favor of the Dajkan’s proposal to move towards a centralized national state. Nonetheless, Mori’s proposal and the subsequent debate over gunken in the Kgisho were instrumental in preparing the ground for the eventual abolishment of the domains and a re-configuring of what “public” would mean in modern Japan. The final defeat of supporters of “public consultation” began to unfold in mid-1869 and reached a crescendo in late 1870. Given the kind of bills that were and were not being passed in the Kgisho, leaders in the Dajkan resolved to take effective measures to ensure that their nation-state building project would not be undermined. Sanj was the first to raise the issue. In a letter to Iwakura Tomomi he pressed for a reform of the legislature, noting that “what has men 29

Katsuta Masaharu, Haikan chiken: “Meiji kokka” ga umareta hi (Tokyo: Kdansha, 2000), 68-70.

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with a sense of purpose today in an uproar is when those of position become enamored with Western things and, falling victim to Western vices, lose themselves in wine, women and luxury.”30 Sanj’s attempt to paint his political opponents as cosmopolitan fops and therefore less nationalistic than those who supported centralization would seem, at first glance, to support the conclusions of those historians who portray the government reforms that followed as conservative counterattacks on the liberal, Westernized members of the legislature.31 But this interpretation, shaped by later conservative attacks on the Imperial Diet in the early twentieth century, does not do justice to the complicated situation facing the Dajkan during the first years of the Meiji period. As we have seen, members of the Kgisho were, if anything, even more anti-Western than Sanj and Iwakura were. The reorganization of government that followed on July 8 did indeed remove the current President of the Kgisho Kanda Khei and Vice-President Mori Arinori and replace them with courtiers hara Shigetoku and Anno Kinzane. But it also changed the name of legislature from the Kgisho (Place of Public Debate) to the Shgiin (Institute for Collective Debate), thus rendering null any explicit connection between the legislature and the Charter Oath’s promise to “consult the public”. This change in name was not trivial: it was clearly an attack on members of the kgi seitairon faction who, led by Yamanouchi, had tried to turn the legislature into their own political base for challenging the Dajkan and its efforts at building a centralized state. Even this reform was not sufficient, however, to convert their opposition to one loyal to the new centralizing government, and the Shgiin was forced to close on 10 September 1870. At stake was both principle and political interest. The differences between Yamanouchi’s “consult the public” faction and Iwakura’s faction were less over the principle that the new government should be responsive to the public than they were over what this sense of “public” (k) signified. Iwakura was more inclined toward this new concept of the public being served best by a central government responsive to national public opinion while Yamanouchi’s was a faction of assorted domainal interests who merely used this concept 30 “Iwakura Tomomi monjo,” Kokuritsu kokkai toshokan kensei shiryshitsu z; cited in Yamazaki, 70. 31 Cf. Kasahara Hidehiko, Meiji kokka to kanrysei (Tokyo: Asahi Shob, 1991).

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of “public” both to keep the Dajkan off balance and to reassert the traditional role of daimyo as the only “public” that mattered.32 For Yamanouchi’s faction, “‘kron’ really signified the will of the domains, and the Kgisho was the institutionalization of that will [not the people’s will].”33 At the very least, Iwakura and kubo sought to implement a new national form of politics, while Yamanouchi’s faction represented more conservative forces that still held out hope for some sort of daimyo federation, if not for a direct restoration of ancient monarchy. But kubo and Iwakura were also aware that Yamanouchi’s faction had a powerful weapon in this political struggle against them: they had a strong claim, through their tradition of supporting the principle of kgi seitai, to having removed the bakufu and to being the true representatives of “the people.” Moreover, kubo and Iwakura knew that Yamanouchi was not averse to using this ideological weapon against the Dajkan’s move toward creating a centralized state. In spite of promises that opening up public debate was linked to selecting “talent”, Yamanouchi’s faction represented a kind of “talent” that had little value to the Dajkan, as it sought to build a modern nation-state that would necessarily, in some fashion, incorporate the nationalist principle that all politics ultimately was about “the people.” Simply abolishing the Shgiin certainly could not settle the issue. Participation in these earlier assemblies had exposed representatives of the domains to a wider range of political concepts and strategies, and they had begun to forge new alliances that would be useful in their continued attacks on the Dajkan. Even as the domains, through their representatives in the Kgisho, sought to monopolize the discourse on “consulting the public” as a critique of the Dajkan, they found themselves wrapped up in the complications of actual public deliberations that brought to the fore differing interests among the domains. Larger domains sought strategies of self-preservation that were designed to maintain their relative advantages over smaller domains, while trying to check the power of Satsuma and Chsh in the Dajkan; smaller domains in turn looked to Dajkan policies in 32 Yamazaki Yk, “‘Kgi’ yshutsu kik no keisei to hkai: kgisho to shgiin,” 54. Indeed, kubo and Iwakura had been committed to a more revolutionary approach to Japanese politics from the beginning of the Meiji Restoration, when Yamanouchi and Got Shjir were still trying to mute the revolutionary impact of the Restoration by keeping the Tokugawa Shogunate centrally involved in the political reform. See Katsuta Masaharu, Haihan chiken, esp., 20-22. 33 Katsuta, Haihan chiken, 66.

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their efforts to find leverage against the larger domains. The politics behind the abolishment of the domains was a far more complicated affair than binary oppositions between pro- and anti-government struggles or simplistic assertions that the movement to abolish the domains was the result of a spontaneous social movement.34 New ideologies of nationalism and social equality played influential roles, as did the new context of a national public space where these ideas now circulated. Yet, ideas in early Meiji, as always, proved difficult to control, and often resulted in unforeseen consequences. One example of these unforeseen consequences is the way that ideas of social equality, public deliberation, and national government (which were mobilized by the larger domains that sought to contest the hegemony of Satsuma and Chsh) were eventually employed by the Dajkan in order to abolish all the domains. But first these ideas had to travel a rather circuitous path. One might pick up the trail in April 1871, when a group of six large domains (Kumamoto, Tokushima, Hikone, Fukui, Yonezawa and Tosa) came together under Itagaki Taisuke’s leadership to promote domainal reform. This “Tosa Federation” was the result of discussions between Miyajima Seiichir of Yonezawa and Itagaki and was an attempt to replace the forum daimyo recently had enjoyed in the Kgisho and Shgiin. Miyajima had been impressed by Tosa’s own internal reforms, and he filed a request in the fifth month of 1871 with the Dajkan for advice on adopting a law on commuting samurai stipends to bonds, as Tosa had already done. In his request, he made an explicit connection to the principle of “the equality of the four peoples” (shimin heikin). Similarly, Itagaki led the Tosa Federation in calling for a return to formal deliberations among domainal representatives as a means of public debate throughout the land (tenka kron). He added that such public deliberations would undermine attempts by domains like Satsuma to assert that governance was their own private right. Finally, Tokugawa Yoshikatsu, governor of Nagoya domain, submitted a memorandum to the Dajkan that outlined five policies needed for national unification of the political system: unification of the school system, selection of talented personnel (jinsai ty), consolidation of military authority, a system of one governor for each state, and equalization of the nobility’s stipends. The proposal even 34

For two examples of recent historical studies that have, in different ways, located the haihan movement as an internal struggle within the government, see Sakamoto, Meiji kokka no kensetsu, 74-109 and Katsuta, Haihan chiken, esp. 5-14.

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went so far as to suggest that the very existence of the domains fractured both the people and political systems, and it therefore encouraged the adoption of a state system (shsei) as a means of implementing a truly national (popular) government.35 Political opponents of centralization were, in effect, cynically employing the ideas of the new nationalizing government against itself. Kido had been advocating abolishing the domains as early as 1868, and he was able to convince his own daimyo, Mri Takachika of Chsh, to take the first step in returning his domainal register by pointing out the advantages of abolishing the domains as political units. Kido’s main argument was that so long as the domains existed the Court would be able to control national politics by playing off Satsuma and Chsh against each other.36 In contrast, Itagaki, as leader of a federation of anti-government domains that was now advocating abolishing domains, had spearheaded reforms in his own domain of Tosa, including a reluctant agreement to disband the samurai as a class, only in order to preserve the existence of the domain.37 It was by no means certain that Itagaki’s Tosa Federation actually intended to abolish all domains (including themselves), and there were good reasons for Dajkan officials to regard these calls to abolish the domains as an invitation to political disaster. But the invitation was a double-edged sword. Once these domains had committed themselves publicly to a policy of abolishing the domains, they would find it nearly impossible to withdraw that commitment later. The Dajkan’s immediate response was tempered. Iwakura had kuma draft an official reply that signaled the Dajkan’s agreement with the proposal for domainal abolishment put forth by the large domains, while reinforcing the point that it was the central government’s responsibility to formulate national political reforms and the domain’s duty to carryout governmental plans. But beyond that statement, the Dajkan showed little inclination to rashly accept this invitation to court immediate disaster by quickly attempting to abolish the domains.38 Such a move would have been risky indeed, since the Dajkan had no direct command over any armed force to backup its policies. The first order of business then was to put substance behind the government, and this was done in February 1871 through the formation of an Imperial Guard formed by 35

Katsuta, Haihan chiken, 122-4. Sakamoto, Meiji kokka no kensetsu, 81-83. 37 Katsuta, Haihan chiken, 110. 38 Katsuta, Haihan chiken, 125-6. 36

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volunteers from the troops in Kagoshima, Yamaguchi and Kchi. With these 8,000 samurai, under the direct control of the Dajkan and stationed in Tokyo, proponents for centralization now had some muscle behind their policies.39 The Dajkan began to act more assertively against the domains after a July meeting between Yamagata, Torio Koyata and Nomura Yasushi of Chsh. Torio and Nomura successfully pressed Yamagata to agree to move towards gunken, or centralized government. Subsequently, Yamagata persuaded Saig Takamori to support the plan, while Nomura and Torio worked on Kido Takayoshi through the intervention of Inoue Kaoru, who had been persuaded through a threat against his life.40 With Kido, Saig and Okub’s support, Sanj went to the Court and received an imperial rescript which he read on 14 July to fifty six daimyo, informing them that they were to surrender their registers of land and people to the Court. With this act, the vestiges of the old decentralized political system were swept away, and the foundations for the new system of weak prefectures and a strong central government were quickly laid. But, as Katsuta Masaharu has described it, this was a governmental re-structuring that was carried out through “force”, and one which no longer needed to pay any heed to the domains under the pretext of “public discussion.”41 As we have seen, the dissolution of the baku-han system was possible only because both the pro-baku-han system and the antibakufu restorationists shared a commitment to the principle of a more expansive concept of “the public” as the source of political legitimacy. But even as the new government sought to restructure a government that would reflect that broad commitment to “public deliberations,” differences among the anti-bakufu forces emerged and were not easily reconciled. Ultimately, the new government began to take shape through measures designed to move forward towards a centralized state. Yet, it was the heavy-handed way in which this 39 Katsuta, Haihan chiken, 127-40; Kat Yk, Chhei-sei to kindai Nihon. (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kbunkan, 1996). Kat, however, argues that the rise of the Imperial Guards should be seen as a substitution of mura Masajir’s plan that sought to establish, with the support of the Shgiin and the Hybush, a conscript army as part of a true, nationalizing reform of the social estates into a single kokumin. _mura’s assassination by conservative samurai in 1869 abrogated that plan, however, conservative samurai influence dominated in the Imperial Guard that Yamagata implemented instead of mura’s conscript army (40-41). 40 Katsuta, Haihan chiken, 152. 41 Katsuta, Haihan chiken, 156.

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course was followed that alienated many of the former restorationists and drove many of those committed to “public deliberations” from the new government order. The most immediate consequences were spectacular. Within a few years, senior members of the government, often those who had advocated “consulting the public, “began to leave the government and in some cases took up arms in rebellion. Et Shimpei, who in 1874 had joined with Itagaki in presenting a petition to the Sa-in calling for a legislature elected by the people, led samurai back in Saga in armed revolt. Two years later, Maebara Issei led a similar group of disguntled samurai in revolt in Hagi. And in the most serious of these revolts, Saig himself was persuaded to lead an army of 25,000 samurai in a vain effort to resist the new government. Various causes have been ascribed to these revolts: erosions of the samurai class, the emergence of a new conscript army, and especially the rejection of plans to invade Korea. All these factors played a role. But we must not lose sight of the fact that many of these rebels were embroiled in the movement that intoned the mantra, “consult the public”, by which of course they meant themselves. They lost that debate with the new government, but the effects of that debate continued to shape the contours of what the modern Japanese nation would look like, long before the state was codified by a constitution at the end of the 1880s. Intellectuals and political activists of this period, men as diverse as Et Shimpei, Mitsukuri Rinsh, Nakae Chmin, i Kentar, and Miyazaki Mury, were often motivated by a sense that the Meiji government was betraying their own nationalist aspirations. Many of them were associated with the Tosa domain, the source of much of the public theory during bakumatsu and early Meiji and, especially after 1874, a hotbed of “people’s rights” activities against the Meiji government. Some turned to French political theory, because they saw it as espousing a particular form of Republican nationalism that seemed to provide the necessary framework for strengthening the “consult the public” discourse which had been rejected by the government. The impact of French political theory in early Meiji Japan was not univocal, however, but applied in a variety of ways to suit different national objectives. Building a Japanese Nation through French Political Theory The years from 1874 to the Meiji Constitution of 1889 provide a wonderfully rich milieu for exploring the range of possibilities for how the modern Japanese nation might take shape. Tetsuo Najita has

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emphazed the political rather than ideological conflict during the 1870s, arguing that it was the decade of the 1880s when political conflict turned ideological, especially in disputes over the shape of the impending constitution.42 As a general outline, and especially as an explanation of how revolutionary sentiment was quelled in the early Meiji years, his analysis is quite compelling. Yet, beginning in the 1870s, a variety of new political theories were presented and contested, and by the middle of the 1880s some already had emerged dominant while others had been pushed to the margins. This period of experimentation reached a watershed with the Meiji Constitution of 1889, which found an initial and powerful resolution of the question of the “public” in Prussian theories of constitutional monarchy which codified citizens as subjects and which reduced the challenges of the public to a matter of public law taking priority over civil law. As the result of two decades of sometimes violent clashes over the form the new society should take, the Meiji Constitution should be kept in mind when exploring the various aspects of civil society in the early Meiji period–the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, journalists’ critiques of the government, political party formations, etc. Rather than seeing the first two decades of Meiji as two distinct stages–the political and military struggles of the 1870s giving way to the constitutional struggles of the 1880s--we might also see the entire period prior to the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution as a continuous struggle over which theoretical models would be used to resolve the challenges of “public consultation” and thus the question whether, in the new political order, the nation would take precedence over the state. The 1870s was a time when the goal of Japan emerging as a true nation seemed most attainable and when the hopes for building a democratic national society were most palpable. Hanging in the balance was the question of how much autonomy society would have from the state, and how strongly democratic values would be supported by the new social order. The question of society raised during these first two decades of Meiji Japan was an extremely serious one, since until the constitutional question was settled and the modern state took form with the Imperial Diet and other institutional appendages, concepts of society could and at times did function as

42 Tetsuo Najita, Japan: The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Japanese Politics, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), 78.

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replacements and supplements for concepts of the nation.43 Social definitions were often inextricable from national definitions in this period when nation and state in Japan were still open questions. Further, how these concepts eventually were resolved must be understood in the context of the social, intellectual and political developments of the entire pre-constitutional period. Following Fukuzawa Yukichi, one might even suggest that until 1889, Meiji Japan was at best a society with an fledgling government, but not yet a state or even a nation. Two translators of French theory in the 1870s reveal how the effects of this effort to understand the meaning of society led to different kinds of nationalist visions, even among those who shared an oppositional stance to the new government. The first, Mitsukuri Rinsh (1846-97), was a member of what Yamamuro Shin’ichi has called the “legal bureaucrats” and has even been called the Montesquieu of Japan.44 He worked on translating French legal codes, particularly in the area of civil law. The second, Miyazaki Mury (1855-1889), was a translator, journalist, and writer of “political novels,” and was connected with the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. In short, each represents one of the major groups of Meiji public intellectuals, legal bureaucrats and journalists, whom we are often told played active roles in fostering the values of civil society in Meiji Japan.45 A comparison of their use of French social and political theories not only will demonstrate certain common tendencies within the French faction, but also should allow us to test the impact of Montesquieu’s approach to civil society in Meiji Japanese nation building.

43 John Breuilly’s clarification of how the state-society relationship is addressed by nationalist theories is especially relevant here. See his Nationalism and the State 2nd Edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994): 54-71. 44 Yokose Fumihiko, Hyron shimbun, no. 40; cited by Yamamuro Shin’ichi, “Mitsukuri Rinsh to Kawazu Sukeyuki,” 297-314 in Hsei daigaku daigaku shiry iindai,ed., Hritsugaku no yoake to hsei daigaku (Tokyo: Hsei Daigaku, 1992): 302. 45 On “legal bureaucrats” in the formation of civil society, see Yamamuro Shin’ichi, Hsei kanry no jidai: kokka no sekkei to chi no rekitei (Tokyo: Bokutakusha, 1984). On journalists as the main advocates of civil society, Igarashi Akio, Meiji ishin no shis (Tokyo: Seori Shob, 1996): 226-242. Kyu-hyun Kim, in “The State, Civil Society and Public Discourse in Early Meiji Japan: Parliamentarianism in Ascendancy, 1868-1884” (Harvard Ph.D. diss., 1996), argues that journalists and legal bureaucrats were joined by defense lawyers as the main forces for civil society in Meiji Japan (100-106).

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It is important to bear in mind that the categorization of Japanese social thought into such distinct national “factions” (eg., “German” “French”) can merely obscure common patterns that these various “factions” shared, and which can be attributed not to national distinctiveness in Western approaches to social theory, but to the specific nationalist needs of post-Restoration Japanese society. Here, the central issue is not the theoretical question of the possibility of translation itself-establishing the equivalance or nonequivalence of different national languages or cultures–or in the nuances between “translation”and “translingual practices.” Unquestionably, we must remember that these translations of “society” were always shaped by domestic considerations within Japan, and not merely questions of the technical ability of early Meiji Japanese to “get it right” when it came to understanding Western social theories, or the problem of nations and democracy. The results of this bold engagement with Western theories of society and social structure tell us less about a general theory of cultural translation than they do about the social and political divisions that surrounded the construction of nation and society in early Meiji Japan. And, as I will argue, the value of a theory of civil society in thinking about Meiji Japan is intricately interwoven with our understanding of the social and political context of that time period. To focus on civil society as a method of inquiry into the conditions of democratic life opens up ways of thinking beyond essential “singularities” and towards the specific practices that determine the ethical and democratic nature of societies, and hence nations. I. Mitsukuri Rinsh and the Legal Theory of “Minken” Mitsukuri Rinsh represents an important example of how social and legal theory combined in the early Meiji years to present a strong case for a republican nationalism along the lines suggested by Montesquieu. His attempt to define Meiji society through translations of French civil codes, and his belief that a civil code was at least as important as the public law of the constitution, can be seen as powerful attempts to shape the newly emerging nation in the direction of citizenship and popular democracy. That his views eventually did not prevail is less important than how his voice mingled with others in laying the foundation for a sharp division in modern Japanese political discourse between “the people” and “the state.” His contribution went well beyond his translation of legal codes to influence many populist critics of the Meiji state, even after

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Mitsukuri himself had thrown his lot in with the new state. To uncover his significance in the emergence of modern Japanese nationalism, and the unintended consequences of his contribution to legal theory, we need to pay close attention to his social world, as well as to his intellectual work. Unlike many others involved in French social theory in early Meiji Japan, Mitsukuri was not from Saga domain. Born in Edo in the Tsuyama yashiki in 1846, he followed his grandfather Genbo, a cartographer and scholar of Dutch Studies in the bakufu’s Institute on Barbarian Studies. Interest in civil law grew out of these Dutch Studies specialists, and the first serious attempt to translate European civil codes was begun by Tsuda Mamichi (1829-1903), a student of Genbo, who went to the University of Leiden in 1862 where “he discovered the existence of private or civil law-law concerned with citizens’ rights over and against each other and the state.”46 It was Tsuda who coined the term minp, which became the standard translation for “civil code” in Japanese.47 The turn from Dutch to French civil codes began in March 1867, when Mitsukuri was ordered to join Tokugawa Akitake (1853-1910) on a Friendship Mission to the West, including to the Paris World Exhibition. Akitake (1853-1910) was not only the younger brother of the Shogun Keiki; he was also vice-minister of the Minbu, or the “Department of the People.”48 Akitake’s mission resulted in an increased interest in French Civil Code, largely through the influence of Kurimoto Joun (1822-97), the Japanese ambassador to France and a strong advocate of the Code Napoléon.49 When the mission returned to Japan in February 1868, Mitsukuri (not to mention Tokugawa Akitake) found a new government awaiting him in Tokyo. The Meiji government, perhaps not trusting this former bakufu retainer with a close tie to the Tokugawa elite, sent him off to Osaka as an official translator. While in Osaka, Mitsukuri found time on the side to teach at a Western studies school (the Ygaku denshj), while taking in several private students as well. Among his students were many important luminaries in the People’s Rights Movement, including i Kentar and Nakae Chmin. Their enthusiasm for the French 46

Robert Epp, “The Challenge from Tradition: Attempts to Compile a Civil Code in Japan, 1866-78,” Monumenta Nipponica, 22:1 (1967): 15-48, at 17. 47 Epp, 18. Also, Richard H. Mitchell, Janus-Faced Justice: Political Criminals in Imperial Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992), 7. 48 Yoshii Tamio, “Kindai hgaku no Mitsukuri Rinsh” in Kindai nihon no kokka keisei to h (Nihon Hyronsha, 1996): 379-381. 49 Epp, 18-19.

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language surely was part of a general expectation that the French concept of a post-revolutionary, republican government, with an equal citizenry defined and protected by law, might be adopted by the new Meiji government. Such hopes may appear today as utopian, but during the early years of the Meiji government, they were a distinct possibility. As Yamamuro Shin’ichi has noted, during the first years of the new government, when power was centralized in the Dajkan in accordance with the April 1868 Seitaisho, the concept of the nation and of separation of powers employed by the new government resembled that of Abbe Sieyés who held that the nation is “a body of associates living under common laws and represented by the same legislative assembly.”50 At this early state, before even the constitutional sense of national identity (kokumin) was defined, let alone a sense of the Japanese people as an “ethnic nation” (minzoku), such a legally defined sense of the Japanese as a constitutional, democratic nation was still possible, and French civil codes seemed a promising avenue for exploring that enfranchisement of the ordinary people into the new, egalitarian nation. Such hopes were soon dashed. On 26 May 1869 Soejima Taneomi (1828-1905), member of the Dajkan, ordered Mitsukuri to begin rendering the French Penal Code into Japanese and the following year, the Code Napoléon.51 Mitsukuri was employed in the Bureau of Institutions, along with Soejima, Tsuda, Kat Hiroyuki, and Mori Arinori, and from then on he played a leading role in the translation of the Napoleonic Code and in advocating a civil code for the new Japanese nation. Apparently his work was not progressing quickly enough for the Dajkan. The following year, Et Shimpei was put in charge of the Civil Code compilation committee, and he brought with him his reputation for getting things done. Et was most concerned with the need for a civil code as part of Japan’s attempt, through fukoku kyhei, to achieve equality with the Western powers. Pushing along the project, Et reportedly ordered Mitsukuri, “Don’t bother about mistranslations, just translate it quickly!”52 Et needed something to show at the Dajkan’s 1870 Civil Code Conference 50 Yamamuro Shin’ichi, “Meiji kokka no seido to rinen,” 115-148 in Iwanami kza nihon tsshi vol. 17: kindai 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994): 127-8. I have taken Sieyès’s quote from his “What is the Third Estate?” in Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay, eds., The Nationalism Reader (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995): 35-37, at 37. 51 Mitchell, Janus-Faced Justice, 7-8. 52 Et Shimpei, quoted in Matano Hansuke, Et Nampaku (Tokyo, 1914), II: 107; cited in Epp, p.25, n.36.

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which he was to chair. At the conference, members of the Dajkan took issue with Mitsukuri’s translation of the French droit civil as minken (“the people’s rights”). “What rights do the people have?” retorted an incensed Dajkan member to Et. Et tried to convince the members of the Dajkan that the translation was not final, and that Mitsukuri meant no threat to the public order.53 Here it is apparent that the issue at hand was not Mitsukuri’s accuracy in translating French into Japanese, or even his grasp of the intricacies of French civil law. Rather, Mitsukuri had, perhaps unintentionally, articulated a key issue–that of minken or people’s rights–that would emerge in subsequent years in struggles over the shape of the new nation.54 He had also tested the outer limits of permissible definitions of society and nation in post-revolutionary Japan. Even as Mitsukuri himself returned to the technical problems of translating civil codes, he had articulated a concept of social inclusion and legal rights that would inform activists throughout the pre-constitutional Meiji period, from samurai rebels, to parliamentary movements, to advocates of “Freedom and People’s Rights.” Reaction from the Dajkan was swift. Mitsukuri was sent abroad for further study in civil law codes. In 1871, the Bureau of Institutions (seido kyoku) that had overseen the project of compiling a civil code was dismantled and incorporated into the Left Chamber (Sa’in). In April 1872, the civil code complitation project was placed under the immediate supervison of the Ministry of Justice (Law), headed by Et Shinpei. Under Et’s initiative, the codification of civil code progressed rapidly, yielding a nine volume, 1,185 article “Provisional Civil Code of the Imperial Government” by July 1872. In November 1873, however, advocates for a civil code were dealt a setback when Kido Takayoshi supported their adversaries who insisted that a constitution must precede the civil code, since civil codes “are the offspring of the constitution, for the constitution is the root of every part of the system of government and there is none which does not take its rise from this.”55 Mitsukuri joined the Meiji Six Society, whose members generally agreed that society was at 53 tsuki, Mitsukuri Rinsh kunden (Tokyo: Maruzen Kabushiki Kaisha, 1907), p. 89; Yoshii Tamio, “Kindai hgaku no Mitsukuri Rinsh,” 384. 54 Mitchell, 8. Mitchell also points out that Mitsukuri coined the term kenri (rights), and he shows the impact this had on subsequent protest movements and on legal thought. 55

Kido Takayoshi, quoted in McLaren, Japanese Government Documents; cited in Epp, p. 27.

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least as important to the health of the nation as the state was. Et reacted more strongly: he left the government and joined the Saga uprising, after which he was tried and executed. While many historians have emphasized the debate over invading Korea (seikanron) in the 1873 crisis and in the Saga uprising, we should not forget that Et was deeply involved in the civil code project, and that his participation in the Saga uprising also stemmed from his despair over establishing a legal foundation for “the people“ in the emerging new state. After the Saga Uprising, the civil code project was placed under the supervision of ki Takat, chief of the Justice Department. Gustave Emile Boissonade (1825-1910) was brought in as a technical advisor, and Mitsukuri continued on as compiler. But with the decision already made in favor of public law over civil law, the project of compiling a civil code had lost much of its promise for social change, as it was now clear that the compilation of a civil code would not carry the potential for inscribing strong legal rights for the people over against the state. Mitsukuri remained with the government (in spite of Fukuzawa Yukichi’s advice), and continued his work on the civil codes, completing his Draft of Civil Code (the “Mitsukuri Civil Code Draft”) in 1878. His timing could not have been worse. The government, having just survived the Satsuma Rebellion, had little money or inclination to support the codification of a civil code before public law (the constitution) was established, so Mitsukuri’s Draft was never acted upon. With the establishment in 1880 of the Civil Code Compilation bureau in the Senate, the job of compiling a civil code passed from the Ministry of Justice to the Senate, and Mitsukuri became an official (gikan) of the Senate.56 Mitsukuri’s official position within the Senate further undermined any residual hope for a civil code that would enshrine private rights against the state. In 1886 the Civil Code Compilation Bureau was abolished and, following Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru’s failure to revise the unequal treaties, the Civil Code Compilation task was transfered to the Foreign Ministry. Mitsukuri was still on the committee in charge of the civil code. But his Civil Code was approved and implemented only on 1 January 1893, well after the constitution was securely in place, and after Mitsukuri himself had been made a member of the House of Peers. Any hopes that the Napoleonic Code or Montesquieu’s “spirit of law” might underwrite 56

Yoshii, 385.

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a republican form of nationalism in Meiji Japan had been betrayed by the primacy placed on a Prussian approach to constitutional monarchy that had absorbed civil codes within the state and had substituted for citizenship the emperor as transcendent of the social and legal restrictions that Montesquieu had argued were necessary to make monarchy compatible with democracy. Mitsukuri’s efforts in articulating “droit civil” as minken had not ended all efforts at republican nationalism in Meiji Japan, but he had revealed the limitations of Montesquieu’s legal approach to defining the nation within the new order. Following the 1873 repudiation of the civil code by Kido Takayoshi, proponents of “people’s rights” began to turn from legal theories to political activism. In 1874 a Memorial on Establishing a Popularly Elected Assembly was submitted by members of the Tosa-based Patriots Society (Aikokusha) to the Left Chamber and, perhaps more importantly, was published in Nisshin Shinjishi newspaper, a newspaper whose critical views of the Meiji government were tolerated only because its editor, the Australian J.R. Black, was protected by extraterritoriality. Torio Koyata spoke for many conservatives who were outraged by this new concept of popular rights: Using the two characters min and ken [“people” and “rights”], these people want to destroy the country’s order, violate political laws, and form parties and classes. Torio was certain that “this idea of minken will be used to justify the mob violence of later ages.”57

Along with this movement for popular empowerment through an elected assembly of the people came an increasing tendency to conceive of society in more populist, and totalizing, ways. While the Tosa activists, many of whom were inspired by Mitsukuri’s translations from French, argued for the inclusion of society through a popularly elected (minsen) assembly, others drew similar lines of opposition between society and the government in their efforts to cast the society in national terms. One important instance was Murota Mitsuyoshi’s 1875 translation of M. François Guizot’s A History of Civilization in Europe, where Murota translated Guizot’s concept of “society” as minzoku, (  , often rendered today as “folk, or “ethnos”).
This was the earliest 57

Torio, Tokuan zensho I:585, cited in Yukihiko Motoyama, “Meirokusha Thinkers and Early Meiji Enlightenment Thought,” trans. George M. Wilson, in Motoyama, (Elisonas and Rubinger, eds.,) Proliferating Talent: Essays on Politics, Thought and Education in the Meiji Era (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997) p. 249.

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appearance of this word to appear in modern Japanese.58 Murota’s translation of society as minzoku (with overtones of ethnicity or nationality) was an influential one, and can be detected a few years later in Taguchi Ukichi’s A Brief History of the Japanese Enlightenment (1877). During the 1870s, as Haga Noboru has noted, “there was a strong interest in the “folk” [minzoku; ] in the sense of a group of people that mingled together, and this provided the foundation for nurturing a disposition that respected the common world and vulgarity.”59 Like other translated political concepts in early Meiji Japan, that of minzoku was in considerable flux. But it belonged to a specific political discourse that sought to articulate a sense of the nation as a people increasingly defined by its opposition to (and by) the government in Tokyo. This emerging structure of opposition between the “people“ (nation) and the government (later, “the state“) is evident in Nishi Amane’s concern that those involved in French political theory drew from Rousseau to embrace radical forms of utopian politics.60 The government took seriously these concerns about advocates for “people’s rights”, and on 28 June 1875 passed a new Libel Law and Press Ordinance for “regulating radical populist ideas.”61 The foundations for modern Japanese nationalism’s bifurcated structure of opposition, its uneasy relationship between nation and state, were beginning to take shape. II. Miyazaki Mury and the Concept of “Minzoku” The first decade after the Restoration was a period of considerable open experimentation in translating and reformulating the problem of society in Japan. But after the Political Crisis of 1881, French legal theories were largely pushed aside in favor of the Germanic statecentered theories of Stein, Bluntschli, and Bismark, as public discourse moved toward settling the form of the new constitution.62 The heavy statist tendency in this Germanic social-political theory, 58

Haga, Meiji kokka no keisei, 236. Haga, Meiji kokka no keisei, 236. 60 Nishi Amane, “Refuting the Joint Statement by the Former Ministers,” 40-43 in Meiroku Zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment, trans. William R. Braisted (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1976). See also Mori Arinori, “Criticism of the Memorial on Establishing a Popularly Elected Assembly,” 32-34. 61 Motoyama, 250. 62 Yamamuro Shin’ichi, “Mitsukuri Rinsh to Kawazu Sukeyuki: futari no shodai kch,” 297. 59

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supported by It Hirobumi, Kat Hiroyuki and others close to the reins of power, exacerbated the growing tensions between state and society in Japanese political discourse. Increasingly, social theorists saw the state as the enemy of society, and those in power often returned the favor, seeing society only as a threat that had to be contained by the state. This chronology of increasing antagonism between state and society in Japan during the 1880s was only further exacerbated by those in social movements who drew from France in their critiques of the increasingly Prussian-styled Meiji state. Events in France converge with events in Japan to suggest the limited value of French social theories for the Meiji state-builders. During the 1870s, the French monarchists had appeared firmly in control of the new Third Republic, and hence Japanese authorities at the time saw little reason to fear that French social theory posed an inherent threat to the imperial principle of the Meiji state. On the contrary, the Third Republic offered evidence that populism and monarchy were, if not completely compatible, then certainly capable of working out a modus vivendi, and French oriented Japanese social theorists were not necessary guilty of lese majeste for their views. But when the French republicans gained a majority in the Parliament and the monarchist president Mac-Mahon had to step down in 1879, the threat from French social theory to the Japanese monarchy seemed more real, both from the perspective of the state and from those who protested the new Meiji state in the name of society. As It and the statists moved clearly toward Prussian transcendental statism centered on the emperor, people’s rights advocates began to refine their use of French social theory away from Montesquieu’s “spirit of laws” and more towards a populist nationalism centered on the opposition between the people and the newly emerging, elitist state. This general shift was supported by developments in France, where the victory of the republicans meant that the political right turned toward nationalism, which in the hands of men like Maurice Barrés and Charles Maurras stressed the distinction between the “legal country” (which they had lost) and the “real nation” (which they claimed). For Japanese minken advocates working closely in French, the choice seemed a similar one between the legalistic, bureaucratic state and a revolutionary concept of the nation as founded in the people. To appreciate this discursive shift and its implications for civil society in Japan, we must recall that the early 1880s was the period when the “Freedom and People’s Rights Movement” was at its height, and this movement reinvigorated the claims of natural rights of the

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people against the state. Even Fukuzawa Yukichi, a well-known critic of the state, protested the increasingly strident tone adopted at the time by those pursing “people’s rights”. In an 1881 letter to kuma Shigenobu, Fukuzawa wrote, “The Minken Ron (Advocacy of People’s Rights) seems to be more and more favoring direct action. If it goes in that direction, the antagonism between the government and the people will become increasingly embittered, and in the end I fear it will mean unfortunate bloodshed.”63 In the same year, Chiba Takusabur drafted his own “Constitution of the Empire of Japan” in which he wrote that the Japanese nation (kokumin) had inalienable rights and freedoms that public law (kokuh) must protect. Shortly afterwards, however, Ueki Emori wrote in his draft constitution, “Outline of the Constitution of the Japan” that the Japanese nation had a right to armed revolution when state bureaucrats violated their rights.64 These protest constitutions may have been conceived as attempts to influence It Hirobumi to accept Itagaki’s more parliamentarian model in their discussions over the Greater Japan Imperial Constitution. But with Itagaki’s ouster in 1882 and the decision in favor of a Prussian transcendental state constitution already made, such attempts to secure a civic form of the nation became increasingly marginalized and radical. As lines between state and society hardened, the French Revolution emerged as a powerful symbolic battlefield in determining the fate of the people in post-revolutionary Japan. Translations and studies on the French Revolution proliferated in Japan during the 1870s and early 1880s, both by those who saw the Revolution as an essential expression of modern democracy and from those who feared its totalitarian, populist aspects. Kawazu Sukeyuki’s translation of F.M. Mignet’s 1824 Histoire de la Révolution Française played an important role in introducing the French Revolution into Japanese political debate during those years. But Kawazu also reminds us of the variety of reading strategies that were employed in determining the signficance of the French Revolution for Meiji Japan. Kawazu worked as a prosecutor for the Senate and, although he was transferred to Osaka during the 1881 political crisis (he was affiliated with kuma Shigenobu’s Rikken Kaishint), he was a critic of the French Revolution and not, as is often thought, an advocate of social revolution in Japan following the 63

Letter of Fukuzawa to kuma Shigenobu, dated October 1, 1881; cited by E.H. Norman, in Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State; reprinted in John W. Dower,ed., Origins of the Modern Japanese State, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975): 288. 64 Yamamuro, “Meiji kokka no seido to rinen,” 128-9.

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model of the French Revolution. In fact, Kawazu had supported Prussian gradualism before Inoue Kowashi and others in the government came out in favor of it. His pro-statist inclinations are evident in that fact that by 1886 Kawazu had returned to office in the Ministry of Justice and held a variety of governmental posts before his death from illness in 1894.65 Kawazu’s negative assessment of the French Revolution was contested by Miyazaki Mury. At issue were not merely textual or historical debates, but shifting lines within the opposition to the Meiji government and the role of the people in that opposition. Whereas Kawazu wrote for kuma’s Rikken Seit newspaper, Miyazaki presented his work on the French Revolution in the rival Jiy Shimbun, which was associated with Itagaki Taisuke. This institutionized rivalry helps to understand the rift between those in the increasingly populist and radicalized “People’s Rights” Movement who associated with the Jiy Shimbun, and Kawazu and his more moderate colleagues in the “constitutional party” movement. Miyazaki was a journalist, political novelist, and activist in the People’s Rights Movement who had come from Tosa (“the Gironde of Japan”) to Tokyo in 1882 and immediately began publishing his serialized translation of Alexandre Dumas’s Ange Pitou in the Jiy Shimbun. Like many other political novels of the day, Miyazaki’s was as much a rewriting as a translation: he took considerable liberties with Dumas’ text, abridging, summarizing and offering commentaries along with his translations. Here, the key point is not how accurately he rendered Dumas’s novel into Japanese (or how accurately Dumas reflected the history of the French Revolution!), but the ways in which Miyazaki’s literary work engaged the broader social and intellectual context of Japan during the early 1880s, especially with regard to the people’s rights movement. Some of this reworking of Dumas’ novel can be seen even from Miyazaki’s title. Whereas Dumas called the work Ange Pitou, after the country bumpkin hero of the novel, Miyazaki called his translation, Notes on the French Revolution: The Battle Cry of Liberty. In so doing, Miyazaki foregrounded one of the key concepts in the People’s Rights Movement, “liberty” (jiy). But his understanding of “liberty” is best grasped through Miyazaki’s own explanation of why he undertook the translation of Dumas’s Ange Pitou. Miyazaki wrote that Dumas was most interested in the “taking of the Bastille,” a theme 65

Yamamuro, “Mitsukuri Rinsh to Kawazu Sukeyuki”, 307-312.

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introduced earlier by his colleague at the Jiy Shimbun, Sakurada Momoe (1859-1883) in his partial translation of Dumas’ The Memoirs of a Physician.66 Illness had forced Sakurada to withdraw, and Miyazaki took up the task, emphasizing again their common understanding of the storming of the Bastille as a key metaphor for liberty from the state and its repressive acts against its political critics. Miyazaki and Sakurada shared a common concern with “liberty,” and they both expressed that liberty through the historical agency of the “people.” But how they represented the people differed, and it is on this point that Miyazaki made his most original contribution. The problem of how “the people” were conceived was a central one, not only for those in the “People’s Rights” Movement, but also for those in the Meiji government who were trying to resolve difficult questions of sovereignty, national identity and popular enfranchisement. The considerable fluidity in conceptions of the Japanese people that flowed from the abolishment of the shi-n-k-sh structure and its replacement by a new system of “commoners” (heimin) during the early 1870s was giving way by the early 1880s to a more rigid imposition of social and political hierarchy.67 Although the concept of the Japanese people as “subjects” (shimmin) along with that of “nation” (kokumin) had been used as early as 1871 in the House Registration Law (Kosekih), the first formal use of the concept of the people as “subjects” was in the October 1881 Imperial Instructions (chokuyu) on establishing the National Diet.68 This attempt by the Meiji state to displace earlier terms used to refer to the people (okuch, shsh, ssei, banmin, jimmin) and to establish a concept of the people as imperial subjects provides that backdrop to Miyazaki’s interest in Dumas’s work on the French Revolution as offering a more people-centered vision of nation. Miyazaki’s translation of Dumas’s Ange Pitou was so closely related to the “Freedom [jiy; liberty] and People’s Rights” Movement that the sentence of the defendents handed down in the Fukushima Incident referred to a “Pitou”, the hero of Dumas’ story.69 Miyazaki’s 66

Miyazaki Mury, “Furansu kakumeiki: Jiy no kachidoki,” in Meiji bungaku zensh 5: meiji seiji shsetsu sh (Chikuma Shob, 1966): 29-67. Sakurada’s translation is available in the same collection as “Fukoku kakumei kigen: nishi no umi chishio no saarashi,” 11-28. 67 See the chart on “Shimin gainen no hensan to haikei” in Kobayashi Masaaki, “Nihon” in Furusawa Tomokichi and Sanada Naoshi, eds., Gendai shimin shakai zensh 1: shimin shakai no kiso genri, 93-132, at 99. 68 Yamamuro Shin’ichi, “Meiji kokka no seido to rinen,” 129-130. 69 Yanagita Izumi, “Kaidai,” 435-441 in Meiji bungaku zensh 5: Meiji seiji shsetsu sh (1) (Tokyo Chikuma Shob, 1966): 437. Yanagita notes that the name

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translation appeared in the Jiy Shimbun from 12 August 1882 to 8 February 1883, and therefore his interest in the post-revolutionary national assembly in France likely took place at the same time or shortly after this shift in Imperial discourse away from the nation toward redefining the Japanese people as merely the “subjects” of the Emperor. Miyazaki’s innovation was genuine and powerful. While Miyazaki, like Sakurada, often employed the more neutral jimmin (read as tami) for people,70 he went beyond this general concept of the people to make an original and important contribution to nationalist discourse in translating Dumas’ “assemblée nationale” as minzoku kaigi (). This is the earliest known instance of this sense of minzoku as nation, and it deserves further analysis.71 Since this concept of the Japanese people as a minzoku () was to play an important role in early twentieth century political discourse, especially by advocates of fascism, we need to know what Miyazaki meant when he introduced this term into the post-revolutionary movement as a translation of the elected national assembly. Miyazaki’s choice of the word minzoku to translate “national” may seem odd given the usual connection in Japanese discourse between minzoku and Germanic concepts of the Volk, both of which are usually contrasted with a French emphasis on the civic nation that is better translated as kokumin. It is unlikely that he meant the kind of Volkisch definition of the nation that stems from Herder and German Romanticism and which would later be expressed through this concept of minzoku. To understand what he meant we must be sensitive both to the thematic issues at play in his translation of Dumas and to the social and political climate in Japan during which he translated Dumas’s work on the French Revolution. For an understanding of the possibilities of civil society in Meiji Japan, Miyazaki’s interpretation and employment of the themes he found in Dumas are more important than how French scholars have was mis-printed as “Hit” and the mystery remained unsolved until Sugiyama Kenji, son of defendent Sugiyama Shigeyoshi, approached him and Yanagita was able to make the connection to “Pitou.” 70 Cf. Sakurada “Fukoku kakumei kigen: nishi no umi chishio no saarashi,” 13, 15, 25. See especially the passage where Sakurada described the relations between the government and the people in revolutionary France in the following terms, “seifu no yatsura ga jimmin (tami) o gyaku suru ysu o yosonagara…” (25). 71 Miyazaki Mury, “Furansu kakumeiki: jiy no kachidoki,” 29-67 in Meiji bungaku zensh 5: Meiji seiji shsetsu sh 1 (Chikuma Shob, 1966): 43. Cf. Alexandre Dumas, Ange Pitou (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, Éditeurs, 1860): p. 149.

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subsequently read Dumas’s own purpose and politics in this text. Dumas’s Ange Pitou is a remarkable, entertaining, and ambiguous text–it can be read as pro-monarchical, anti-monarchical, republican or pro-revolutionary, or even as a testimony to the chaos that ensues when a mob take politics into their own hands. What is clear from Miyazaki’s own selective abridgement and summary of Dumas is that Miyazaki chose to read this text as a powerful statement on how the Revolution liberated the French people, a kind of heroic history that was useful in pursing claims by the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement for an elected assemby (minsen) against the defenders of the Meiji emperor and the Prussian monarchical constitution. Let
us now see how these themes emerge in Miyazaki’s translation. As mentioned above, Miyazaki’s Battle Cry of Liberty was not only a summary that was highly selective, but it was a considerable abridgement of Dumas’s Ange Pitou. Battle Cry of Liberty only covered the first twenty one chapters of Dumas’s first of two volumes, and left the second volume (a total of forty nine more chapters) untouched. Miyazaki’s approach to the text reveals his overriding interest in the political issues of national formation, and he shows much less interest in the pathetic figure of Pitou and his awkward atttempts at heroics and romance. Miyazaki leaves the story off with a debate between Necker and Dr. Gilbert over the differences between France and the United States, with Necker insisting the peace in post-Revolutionary France would be restored by the monarch and the aristocracy and Dr. Gilbert warning Necker of a rising new nationalism that will overthrow the aristocracy and their privileges.72 With this general concern in mind, let us now take a close look at the passage where Miyazaki introduces this new concept of the nation as a minzoku: War and peace immediate change the lay of the land, and prosperity and decline choose their own places. Those voices that yesterday had hailed the king’s procession to Notre Dame, crying “long live the king, long live the queen,” the very next day turned to advocating liberty and rights. Seeing how the situation in the Parliament had suddenly taken an extreme turn, the representatives of the people (jimmin) took the majority of seats and overwhelmed those selected from the clergy and nobility and were crushing their power. Finally, when the king heard that they had even changed the name of the Parliament to the National Assembly (minzoku kaigi; ), he was angry but, while regretting this detestable natural course of events in the world, had no proper 72

Miyazaki Mury, “Furansu kakumeiki: jiy no kachidoki,” 66-67.

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means of addressing it. Even so, it was not hard to see that, if left alone, these events would soon become a matter of grave importance. At any rate, the king decided to suspend and dissolve the assembly….73

A comparison with the original French text reveals significant changes that Miyazaki made. Most noticeable is the lack of mention of Sieyès, whose concept of the nation as a legally defined community had framed the early Meiji approach to national identity. In Dumas’ original, it is Sieyès who enters the parliament, finds the clergy and nobility absent and is told that the Third Estate alone cannot form the States General. To which Sieyès responds, “all the better, it [the Third Estate] will form the National Assembly.”74 To the French readers of Dumas, Sieyès role here is hardly incidental. Abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès had in fact become known as an important theoretician of national identity through his 1789 pamphlet “What is the Third Estate?” that offered a legal definition of the nation consistent with democratic theories of civil society and in sharp contrast to the German romantic notion of the nation as a cultural, organic Volk. Why did Miyazaki leave Sieyès out of his story? Perhaps he was simply unfamiliar with Sieyès. But it is equally likely that he was not interested in a legal definition of the nation, since the failure of Mitsukuri’s attempts to institute a civil code that would ensure a French legal codification of the nation that would protect the Japanese people from the arbitrary authority of the state. Certainly, his text underplays the role of the Third Estate in Dumas as contesting over parliamentary power and he emphasizes instead the clear lines of opposition between the people and the monarch (and his representatives in the clergy and aristocracy). In recognizing these differences, we begin to see, not how Miyazaki mistranslated Dumas, but how he used Dumas’s text for local purposes in the Japanese Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. Miyazaki’s interest in the national assembly, and his reasons for coining this new term minzoku for the nation, must also be understood in the context of social reforms taking place in Japan during that time. Whereas Dumas was describing the call for an assembly of the national people who would replace the social hierarchy built around the First, Second and Third Estates, Miyazaki’s concept of the nation as minzoku might best be seen in opposition to the new class of Peers, or kazoku, that were being 73

Miyazaki Mury, “Furansu kakumeiki,” 42-43. Cf. Alexandre Dumas, Ange Pitou, 148-149. 74 Alexandre Dumas, Ange Pitou, 149.

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institutionalized in the early 1880s when he wrote Battle Cry of Liberty.75 Although the term kazoku had an ancient lineage itself, after 1869 it found new service as an umbella term that encompassed all court nobles (kuge) and former daimyo, both of whom increasingly were concentrated in Tokyo after the Restoration. Noticeably excluded were the samurai, who as shizoku were left somewhere in between the new Peers (kazoku) and the new class of commoners (heimin). Between 1873 and 1883, the very period when Miyazaki was working on his translation of Dumas, Kido Takayoshi and other former samurai in the higher levels of government led a movement to include all samurai in the Peerage (kazoku), which they largely accomplished with the 1884 Peerage Law. However, the vast majority of samurai who made it into the Peerage were from Satsuma and Chsh not from Hizen or Tosa, which remained a hotbed of populist sentiment.76 Miyazaki was one of those populists from Tosa who stood little chance of becoming Peers. Given the general social debates of the day on this newly expanded Peerage, I believe that Miyazaki sought to frame a concept of the national people as minzoku (—) in opposition to the Peerage (ka-zoku
—), and he found this concept in Dumas’ Third Estate. That is, while it is safe to say that Miyazaki did not have the German concept of Volk in mind when he coined the term minzoku for the nation, this does not mean that he completely avoided the same kind of romantic, totalization of the people in his conception of the popular nation. As Hannah Arendt has shown, the French Revolution also gave rise to a totalitarian concept of le peuple, a new foundation for the nation that “had carried, from its beginning, the connotation of a multiheaded monster, a mass that moves as one body and acts as though possessed by one will…. [but whose] manyness can in fact assume the guise of oneness, that suffering indeed breeds moods and emotions and attitudes that resemble solidarity to the point of confusion.” 77 And just as Arendt points out the connection between this post-Revolutionary concept of le peuple and “the social question” that ensued in France, Miyazaki’s concept of the Japanese people as a unitary minzoku laid the grounds 75 Similarly, Peter Duus argued that Tokutomo Soh’s 1886 definition of Japan as a “popular society” (heiminteki na shakai) was conceived in opposition to “aristocratic society” (kizokuteki na shakai). See Duus, “Whig History, Japanese Style: The Min’ysha Historians and the Meiji Restoration,” Journal of Asian Studies vol. XXXIII, no. 3 (May 1974):420-1. 76 Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Above the Clouds: Status Culture of the Modern Japanese Nobility (University of California Press, 1993): 46-53. 77 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: The Viking Press, 1963): 89-90

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for the social question (shakai mondai) of the 1890s.78 But it also had helped foreclose the possibility of modern Japanese national identity framed around principles that might have encouraged civil society and democracy. As Jean Bethke Elshtain has pointed out, this postRevolutionary French concept of the will of the people was not the condition for democratic politics or civil society, but for the kind of totalitarian “take no prisoners” politics that would characterize much of the twentieth century.79 Miyazaki’s concept of the nation as a unitary minzoku performed a similar function, and it thus laid troubling foundations for a populist “democratic“ tradition of oppositional politics in modern Japan. III. Mitsukuri, Miyazaki and Japanese Nationalist Discourse What do Mitsukuri Rinsh and Miyazaki Mury tell us about the social and intellectual conditions of nationalism in early Meiji Japan? First, we should not succumb to facile conclusions that either nationalism “already existed“ or “was completely lacking“ at this early period. Nor should evidence of tensions with the emerging government be taken as signs of a healthy, civil society that would underwrite democracy in modern Japan. Shades of democratic politics, elements of civic nationalism, were certainly present in Meiji Japan, as they are in relative degrees in all modern societies. Rather, the question of civic nationalism in early Meiji Japan asks whether there was a preponderance of the characteristics of civil society in Japan, and whether those characteristics were strong enough to provide the conditions for democratic politics. When framed carefully, the question of civil society is a useful means of assessing the possibilities of democratic values in Japan, without reducing the question of democracy to formal political structures. Certainly, one can find something like a “public sphere” in Meiji Japan, in which “public discourse” over political issues took place with some degree of freedom from state interference. Yet, while Meiji Japanese society witnessed a good deal of public debate (kgi yron), much of that debate was restricted to elites (mainly former 78

On the “social question” in Japan during the 1890s, see Sheldon Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987): 23-29; in Japanese, Ishida Takeshi, “‘Shakai’ no ishikika to shakai seisaku gakkai” in Nihon no shakai kagaku (Tokuo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1984): 45-71. I discuss the topic in the context of nation-building below in chapter four. 79 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 119-120.

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samurai) and was always under the threat of interference from the government. The divisions that began to emerge during this initial stage of national formation may have informed subsequent democratic aspirations; but they may also have informed antidemocratic forms of populism and fascism. Mitsukuri’s efforts in translating and compiling a civil code to protect the rights of individuals or even of society from the state provide us with reasons to hesitate before applying a formalistic approach to the problem of civil society in Meiji Japan. Moreover, as Carol Gluck has demonstrated, Meiji public discourse interwove positions of the officials (kan) with those of the people (min) to effect a powerful nationalist myth in which the people and the state found themselves distinct, yet intertangled.80 And, as Yamamuro Shin’ichi has noted, those with expertise in Western political and legal knowledge were few, so even those in the political opposition were closely tied to those in government through a fluid network of personal ties, and they tended to move from opposition to government position with surprising ease.81 This was certainly true of Mitsukuri, who nonetheless provided one of the strongest cases for a legal foundation for civil society in modern Japan through his attempts to ensure that the rights of the people (minken) would be protected in a civil code. His failure to win approval of those rights in a civil code equal to or independent of the Meiji Constitution suggests the limitations of civil society as a theory for conceptualizing the nationalism of Meiji Japan. The question of civil society requires more than institutional or formulistic considerations, such as whether there existed political opposition or public debate in Meiji Japan: beyond ensuring procedures of free speech, civil society invokes certain values and attitudes that support democratic concepts of the national community. Consequently, any analysis of civil society in Meiji Japan must also be able to account for the subsequent development of the radical nationalism or “fascism“ of the 1930s and 40s, and for the political values of postwar Japan as well. While it would seem inaccurate, under these considerations, to describe the values of civil society as dominant in Meiji Japan, it would be equally inaccurate to suggest that Meiji Japan lacked any tradition of civil society, either due to the power of traditional culture or to the influence of authoritarian or 80

Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths,: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 60-67. 81 Yamamuro Shin’ichi, “Mitsukuri Rinsh to Kawazu Sukeyuki,” 313.

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totalitarian ideologies. Mitsukuri Rinsh and Miyazaki Mury’s translations from French legal and social theories testify both to their efforts to establish civil society and democratic values in Meiji Japan, and to the specific historical conditions that prevented the widespread adoption of those values. As Mitsukuri’s efforts to codify civil rights that might contest the state were absorbed into and made dependent on the state, losing their potential for legally protecting the functions of civil society, Miyazaki and others in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement turned to Mitsukuri’s concept of “people’s rights” (minken) while increasingly seeing the interests of society and those of the state as irreconcilable. During the 1880s, as the emerging state employed force and law to suppress the People’s Rights Movement, this concept of a totalized, populist society positioned in radical opposition to the state continued on in a variety of forms. This radicalization of the people was encouraged when the Meiji rulers rejected the concept of a sovereign civic nation by replacing Inoue Kowashi’s proposal of a political nation (kokumin) in the August 1887 draft of the constitution with the concept of the Japanese people as “subjects” (shimmin) instead. As Yamamuro Shin’ichi has pointed out, this move completed a reversal of Abbe Sieyès’s argument that national development moves from subject to a civic nation.82 With the Meiji constitution thus foreclosing any place for a sovereign nation or even an autonomous role for society, this radicalized sense of the people re-emerged in the debate over the “social problem” of the 1890s that focussed on poverty and ultimately gave rise to class consciousness and the birth of modern Japan’s socialist movement, merging later in the twentieth century with populist nationalism in the form of a minzokushugi that would once again contest the Meiji state for the people’s allegiance. The legacy for Japanese nationalism of this initial post-Restoration settlement was not, however, a stronger, consolidation of Japanese nationalism. Rather, the lines of opposition between various conceptions of “the people“ and “the state“ etched the outlines of a nationalism that would constantly seek to reconcile the people with a state, even while often adopting a hostile attitude toward the existing institutions of political authority.

82

Yamamuro Shin’ichi, “Meiji kokka no seido to rinen,” 129.

CHAPTER THREE

TENN It might seem paradoxical to include a discussion on monarchy in a history of nationalism. Monarchy is frequently depicted as a form of governance systematically and historically opposed to nationalism. The French Revolution, often heralded as the origin of nationalism, provides the prototype for this argument that nationalism, the principle of the people as the true bearer of political sovereignty, is a republican movement to repossess, often from a monarch, the institutions of government “of, by and for” the people. The antimonarchical nature of nationalism is one of the very few points that most theorists of nationalism agree on, even those who, like Anthony Smith, assert that nationalism has pre-modern, even primordial origins. Yet, Japanese nationalism is often characterized as intimately connected with the tenn (the monarch, “the emperor”) and with claims to the “unbroken 2,600 year lineage of the emperor” as constituting the core of what supposedly makes the Japanese nation culturally unique. Paradoxical or not, arguments about the tenn do figure prominently in debates over Japanese nationalism. One can point to at least two reasons for this tendency to foreground the problem of the monarchy in Japanese nationalism. The most influential factor is the politics surrounding the memory and representations of Japan’s actions during the Second World War. In this vein, theories of nationalism that emphasize the centrality of war in the making of nations have lent themselves, more often implicitly than explicitly, to shaping approaches to Japanese nationalism that rely heavily on wartime political forms and practices, including the prominent role of the monarch during the war. The second factor for this emphasis on monarchical nationalism stems, ironically, from the very weakness of true nationalism in modern Japan (cf. Chapter Two). The post-revolutionary resolution of social and political disorder in the late nineteenth century yielded a state that rejected republican nationalism in favor of the monarchy as the only legitimate principle for unifying the Japanese people. The result of this elevation of the monarch to legal, political and cultural authority did not mean,

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however, that truly nationalist aspirations were extinguished, or that they ceased to be important factors in subsequent Japanese political history. Rather, what resulted from the triumph of constitutional monarchy was a continuation of a contestation over nationalist forms and methods, a contestation that also included debates over the role and significance of the monarchy. A complete understanding of the role of the monarchy in modern Japanese nationalism cannot suffice with simplistic reductions of nationalism to the emperor or to the “emperor-system”, but requires a familiarity with the wide-ranging debates over the relationship of the emperor to nationalism that still inform nationalist ideals and practices today. The Monarch as Liberator of the Japanese People The monarchy became an important political factor in modern Japan due to a growing sense throughout the nineteenth century that only the monarch could save Japan from its host of social, economic and political troubles. In contrast to the monarchy during the revolutionary period in France, the monarch was not a major figure in the political landscape, but a remote, symbolic presence that was open to varied interpretations by men with a range of interests. Consequently, he could be, and was, represented as the savior of the nation, the one person who could overthrow the existing military government and usher in a true era of harmony, peace and prosperity throughout the land. These moral activists had as their Bibles Aizawa Seishisai’s Shinron (1825) and Tekiihen (1833). Both books argued that Japan could no longer survive by merely “tinkering” with strategic reforms (although reforms were called for). Fundamentally, a lasting solution to Japan’s plight would require Japan to protect its kokutai. What was this kokutai? Various arguments were made: the fundamental spirit which has not been corrupted by Confucianism; that which defines the country from the beginning; the form (tai) that pulls the country (koku) together; that which synthesizes the various elements within the realm into a single unity. This last point is interesting because the synthesizing function of the kokutai meant what was most Japanese always presumed influences from outside cultures that the kokutai would synthesize into a particularly Japanese culture. For these monarchical (sonn) activists, only the tenn enjoyed these synthesizing powers. Continuity in Japan was secured, unlike in China, through the monarch. Japan, they insisted, never had a revolutionary overthrow of the tenn. But theirs was no mere political monarchical movement: it was deeply moral in vision, and

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they imagined “Japan” as a place where seizen no rinri (a moral sense of the importance of this world) required taking politics seriously.1 These monarchical activists were not only promoting a particular moral vision of politics; they were also revising history to yield the political theory they desired. The concept of kokutai had a long history, but it was a history that was not immediately usable for this moral vision. As Joseph Pittau pointed out, kokutai was originally a Chinese concept that had little to do with monarchy but merely referred to ‘the organ of the state’ or ‘organization of the state.’ In Japan this term was used first by Kitabatake Chikafusa (1293-1354), the author of Jinn Shtki (“Record of the Legitimate Succession of Divine Emperors”). Kitabatake had as his aim giving as much support as possible to the claims of the Southern Court. He wanted not only to show that the Southern Court’s claims on the throne were legitimate…. he [also] placed special emphasis on the idea that a very close relation existed between the emperor and the people; this relation he called kokutai.2

It was this sense of kokutai that the monarchical activists emphasized in their writings, as they turned to the past for a vision of the monarch as united with his people, the monarch as savior of the nation. This view of the monarchy was deeply infused with moral dimensions. While emphasizing the monarchy as the source of continuity in Japanese cultural and political life, and juxtaposing this system to the foreign Chinese culture in which dynastic revolutions were a constant feature throughout history, the Mito writers presented a theological-political system in which loyalty to the emperor was not merely an obligation of rulers, but also an emblem of Japanese identity. This system of monarchical culture was also conceived in opposition to an understanding of the legacy of fifteenth century Kirishitan (Catholics) as merely a front (kakure mino) for European political conquest of Japan.3 With the advent of Russian and then other Western ships on Japan’s coasts in the early nineteenth century, these fears of Western cultural invasion were resurrected in the form of anxieties about the potential collapse of the theory of saisei itchi,

1

Ishikawa Itsuo, “Bakumatsu ishin ni okeru kokka no arikata o meguru rons,” 296-312 in Imai Jun and Ozawa Tomio, eds., Nihon shis ronsshi (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1979), 298-300. 2 Joseph Pittau, Political Thought in early Meiji Japan, 1868-1889 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1967) 215. 3 Ishikawa, 301.

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or the unity of the moral and the political realms in the person of the tenn. Maruyama Masao has analyzed the historical transformation that led to a new relationship of the tenn to nationalism in the following terms: During the first half of the nineteenth century…the country was under the dual rule of the Mikado (tenn), who was the spiritual sovereign, and the Tycoon (Shogun), who held actual power. After the Restoration, unity was achieved by removing all authority from the latter, and from other representatives of feudal control, and by concentrating it in the person of the former. In this process…prestige and power were brought together in the institution of the Emperor. And in Japan there was no ecclesiastical force to assert the supremacy of any ‘internal’ world over this new combined, unitary power.4

Maruyama provides an important synopsis of this complicated process of positioning tenn and nation in Meiji Japan. But it is important to recognize that the process was not as smooth or predictable as his retrospective view might make it seem. Before the tenn could be reconfigured as both spiritual and political sovereign, a complicated process of negotiating political, legal, moral and cultural implications of the new world of Meiji Japan had to take place. In this process, a new relationship of kokutai, tenn and the political state had to be forged. It is important to recognize that It Hirobumi and other architects of the Meiji state did not set out with any preconception that the monarch would be the supreme commander and sole locus of sovereignty in the new state. Of course, there could be no question that, as the principle (if not principal) of the successful anti-bakufu movement, the fifteen year old tenn would have to play an important role in the post-Tokugawa Japanese political order. But there were many possible roles, including a continuation of the divided system of Mikado and Tycoon, a return to the role of the tenn under the ancient Heian system of government, a new role as the pre-eminent spiritual head of the Japanese, or the eventual result: a transcendent and sovereign monarch within a constitutional order The ultimate decision to rest sovereignty in the emperor was the result of a series of negotiations, both internally among competing centers of power in the emerging state and externally with forces like the Freedom and 4 Maruyama Masao, “Theory and Psychology of Ultra- Nationalism,” (1946), translated and reprinted in Ivan Morris, ed., Maruyama Masao, Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics (Oxford University Press, 1963), 4.

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People’s Rights Movement that sought to wrestle legitimacy and even authority away from the newly established political elite. This ultimate solution to the role of the Meiji tenn was not preordained by the anti-bakufu movement or the events that surrounded the Meiji Ishin. It was, rather, a contingent result of post Ishin political struggles and negotiations that reflected both domestic and global political realities. Kimura Junji has captured this dynamic well: Certainly, the idea of respect for the monarch (sonn shis), stemming from Hirata’s school of Nativism and the Mito school, held broad influence over the late bakufu ideological circles, but once the Ishin had established a monarchical government, the restorationist theories gradually ebbed in influence. The major political debates of the early Meiji years did not focus much on the tenn. Rather, they were primarily concerned with what the relationship of state authority (kokken) and popular sovereignty (minken) should be under the Meiji administration which had already placed the monarch at its head…. Thus, when they used the term kokutai they were trying to express the form of the country, the national character….Since the Mito Studies of the late bakufu years, the term was often used, especially by the advocates of cultural particularism (kokusuishugi) to summon up concretely the superiority of the Japanese as an ethnic group that had preserved a long imperial lineage that had never suffered a dynastic break.5

As Kimura suggests, the resolution of the monarchical question by the Meiji elites had implications for the meaning of kokutai. After the restoration of the monarchy, the pre-Meiji understanding of this term needed to be revised in keeping with the needs of the new society, a society that required a theory of national identity and unity. Fukuzawa Yukichi was one of the earliest, and most important, of these modernizers of the theory of kokutai. In his Outline of a Theory of Civilization (1875), he made his new understanding of kokutai explicit, glossing the ancient term with the English pronunciation “nationality.” While Fukuzawa’s approach to the concept of kokutai was not completely different from Aizawa’s, he emphasized its independence from the monarch and he offered an interpretation of the traditional concept in light of contemporary Western political theory. For this, he was criticized by nativists who had hoped the Ishin would bring about a spiritual and political reunification of the nation in the person of the tenn. Yoshioka Tokumei was one such 5

[Kimura Junji], Kindai nihon shis kenkykai, eds., “Tenn ron no keifu,” in Tenn ron o yomu, 207.

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nativist critic who, in his Kaika honron (1879), ridiculed those like Fukuzawa who would translate kokutai into Western terms instead of recognizing kokutai as an essentially Japanese concept that referred to Japan’s unique tradition of an unbroken lineage of tenn throughout time. It was not to be translated, either linguistically or conceptually. The nativists were not, however, in positions of power in Meiji Japan. Those who were shaping the new state held a view of the nation closer to Fukuzawa’s modernist one than to the “archaicism” of the nativists.6 It Hirobumi, the first Prime Minister and architect of the Meiji Constitution, did not give the problem of kokutai a great deal of attention. At best, he considered the kokutai to be Japan’s “national organization” and as such something amenable to the forces of time and change (kahen teki na mono). Like many of these theorists of the nation, his conclusions reflected broader concerns, in this case, with shaping a new government and new constitution for post Ishin Japan. Kaneko Kentar rejected that sweeping characterization of kokutai in order to make a more nuanced argument that recognized the need for change and continuity in national formation. He drew from Fujita Tko’s Kdkan kijutsugi to argue that only the government (seitai) was mutable, not the kokutai, which he accepted as referring to the unbroken lineage of monarchs. Kaneko had made an astute political compromise between the modernizers’ emphasis on the need to change political forms and the traditionalists’ insistence on cultural continuity. In the face of Kaneko’s argument, It abandoned his earlier view, thereafter adopting Kaneko’s belief that the kokutai and the form of government (seitai) were separate and distinct. Fukuzawa’s effort at outlining a republican nation through kokutai was rejected, and Kaneko’s binary theory quickly became the orthodox interpretation of kokutai. A further refinement of Kaneko’s theory, one that sought to incorporate Fukuzawa’s ideas, was offered by It Miyoji, a member of Hirobumi’s “brain trust.” Miyoji defined the kokutai as “that which the unbroken lineage of monarchs has governed over”, and noted that the new government called for by the monarch’s sanctioned constitution would have to fit with Japan’s kokutai and its popular sentiments (minj). Here, it is clear that Miyoji did not consider the kokutai to be identical to the emperor or even to the imperial household or lineage. Rather, he understood it within the same 6

See H.D. Harootunian, “The Consciousness of Archaic Form in the New Realism of Kokugaku,” chapter in Tetsuo Najita and Irwin Scheiner, eds., Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period: Methods and Metaphors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 63-104.

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republican framework as Fukuzawa, to refer to the immutable characteristics of the Japanese people, the nation itself, which was not the same as the monarchy or other forms of government—although it could co-exist with a monarchical government. Nor did Miyoji consider the kokutai to be the same as the political sense of nation (kokumin) that could be constructed through laws and constitutions. As Haga Noboru has noted, for Miyoji, the kokutai was not merely a legal concept. Miyoji went so far as to encourage Hirobumi to imitate foreign countries “for the security of the state” and to adopt a republican form of government based on contemporary German theories. In contrast to the nativists, he did not believe that such modern, Western governmental forms in any way compromised this cultural foundation of the nation, the kokutai.7 This view was offered as a challenge to Iwakura Tomomi who tried to promote a policy of uniting people and monarch (kunmin dchi) as a means of preventing change in the kokutai. He made it clear to Miyoji that the Japanese constitution should not be considered a national contract like the French constitution.8 As Bernard Silberman has demonstrated, the most important task facing the revolutionary Meiji government was to stem the forces of revolution, to consolidate authority and legitimacy in itself and to undermine the theoretical appeals of others (especially the nativists) who might take recourse to the same monarchist strategies that the Restorationists had used earlier to gain power, this time to overthrow the new government.9 Given the special role of the monarchy as a revolutionary principle in restorationist ideologies ranging from Mito Confucianism to Shinto nativism, and expressed in calls such as sonn ji and ikkun banmin, the monarch quickly became a testing ground for whether the new government could construct a sense of public that would serve the interests of political stability and the privileged positions of those already in power. By 1881, the governing elite recognized this task required “the construction of a formal legal structure of the state” in which

7

Haga Noboru. Meiji kokka no keisei, 166-7. Haga Noboru. Meiji kokka no keisei, 168. 9 See Bernard Silberman, “The Bureaucratic State in Japan: The problem of authority and legitimacy,” chapter in Tetsuo Najita and J. Victor Koschmann, eds., Conflict in Modern Japan: The Neglected Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982): pp. 226-57; also Cages of Reason : The rise of the rational state in France, Japan, the United States and Great Britain (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp., 193-8. 8

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the integrated nature of state and society rested on the public character of the emperor—“the axis of the nation.” Beyond this, it was necessary that the leadership establish that the public character of the bureaucracy was not derived solely from the appeal to higher authority—the emperor. Rather it had to show that the bureaucracy and, therefore, its leadership partially derived its public character from its autonomous capacity to determine and represent the public interest.10

As Silberman points out, the monarch’s processions around the country were scaled back in 1881 in order to elevate the monarch above political partisanship, as the nation became engulfed in debates over which constitutional model would be best for the new nation.11 This scaling back of monarchical processions coincided with an important watershed in political debates over the monarchy and the future of the nation. Known as the 1881 Political Crisis, this struggle pitted It Hirobumi and advocates for a sovereign monarch against kuma Shigenobu and those who clamored for a sovereign nation represented by political parties. kuma did not rule out a role for the constitutional monarch, but he envisioned the Meiji monarch’s role to be similar to that of the British monarchy. The main point of his proposal was that “the essence of constitutional government is government by political parties” and that “careful consideration should be given to state clearly where power is vested and what are the rights of the people.”12 This language about the rights of the people (minken), along with Okuma’s priority on constitutional parties, was regarded nonetheless as a threat by It Hirobumi and Iwakura Tomomi to their efforts to secure a transcendental, sovereign monarch. Okuma’s proposal was rejected and he left the government, taking with him fifteen senior officials. The immediate result of the 1881 Political Crisis was that the government was now firmly in the hands of members of the former domains of Satsuma and Chsh (the Sat-Ch clique), and planning for a constitution could proceed within certain limits. The 10

Silberman, Cages of Reason, 193. Silberman, Cages of Reason, 194. Michio Umegaki makes a similar point on the basis of evidence of the constitutional composition: “the writing of the Constitution of 1889, which was to define explicitly the role of the emperor and his prerogatives, also indicated implicitly the ways in which the emperor’s exposure could be minimized. In other words, the Constitution was designed so as not to impede the insulation of the emperor from political responsibility.” After the Restoration: The Beginning of Japan’s Modern State (New York and London: New York University Press, 1988), 216-7. 12 Okuma Shigenobu, cited in Joseph Pittau, S.J., Political Thought in Early Meiji Japan, 1868-1889, 85. 11

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promulgation of the Constitution of the Great Japanese Empire on 11 February 1889 (put into effect on 29 November 1890) settled the relationship of sovereignty, monarchy and the nation, at least in legal terms, for the next 55 years. Deftly sidestepping the raging controversy about whether national sovereignty lay in the people (minken) or the state (kokken), the constitution noted that sovereignty rested with the monarch, and expressed this concept of sovereignty in a term that might better be rendered as “the right to rule” (tchiken).13 The sovereignty of the monarch was legally recognized, but the constitution excluded any consideration of a sovereign nation, either defined as the people themselves or as a political state. The Japanese people were rendered “subjects” (shimmin) of the sovereign, and the state was merely a collection of imperially appointed ministers, supported by a bureaucracy, whose tasks were to advise the monarch. From the early days of the Meiji Constitution there were critics like Minister of Education Mori Arinori who argued that since the constitution defined the people as “subjects,” a term that referred simply to their relationship to the emperor, it was not appropriate for the constitution to also discuss their “rights and duties.” It would have been enough for the constitution to simply stipulate the people’s social standing as subjects of the emperor. Mori, in turn, was criticized by Miyoji as suffering from “anti-constitutional thinking”.14 A sense of who actually held power can be gleaned from the list of those who signed the Imperial Rescript that accompanied the promulgation of the constitution. Also issued on 11 February 1889 and formally under the emperor’s name, the Rescript was signed by Prime Minister Kuroda Kiyotaka and his cabinet. In addition to Count Kuroda (Satsuma), these men included counts It Hirobumi (Chsh), kuma Shigenobu (Saga), Saig Tsugumichi (Satsuma), Inoue Kaoru (Chsh), Yamada Akiyoshi (Chsh), Matsukata Masayoshi (Satsuma), and yama Iwao (Satsuma), along with viscounts Mori Arinori (Satsuma) and Enomoto Takeaki (former bakufu retainer). Two points emerge from a cursory glance at this list. First, all the signatories were high ranking members of the new aristocracy. As such, their social positions and political interests were wedded to the monarchical system that the constitution enshrined. Second, all except for kuma and Enomoto were from the two domains of Satsuma and 13 Dai nihon teikoku kenp, reprinted in Nihonkoku kenp (Tokyo: Kdansha, 1985), 66-77, at 66. 14 Haga Noboru, Meiji kokka no keisei, 170.

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Chsh. The first exception, kuma, requires explanation. He was given the position of Minister of Foreign Affairs because he had distinguished himself earlier in handling complaints from Western nations over the persecution of Japanese Christians. But he was also brought into the cabinet in the hopes of silencing criticism of the government from the people’s rights activists who looked to kuma for leadership. It was not a completely successful scheme, as kuma himself was the victim of a terrorist attack later that year that cost him his leg. Enomoto held the relatively insignificant post of Minister of Communications. The more important positions (Ministers of Army, Navy, Finance) were all occupied by Sat-Ch men, especially the position of President of the Privy Council, which was occupied by It Hirobumi. Monarchy and the Moral Nation Given the prominence of Sat-Ch men in the government, and especially their adoption of aristocratic titles, hopes for reconciliation between democratic nationalism and the monarchy became even more remote after the promulgation of the constitution. In spite of this new political reality, or perhaps precisely because of it, a new debate over the role and significance of the monarch broke out in Japanese discourse. While the question of constitutional monarchy had been debated throughout the 1880s in elite political circles (and among some populist groups, too),15 the tenor and breadth of the debate changed in the wake of the constitution and its accompanying imperial rescripts. Matsumoto Sannosuke recognized this significant discursive shift when he noted that “the first moment in modernity when theories about the monarch were directly debated was after the 1880s.”16 Support for the monarchy was increasingly framed as supporting “despotism.” This angry denunciation of the monarchy stemmed in part from the perception that the monarchy had become a a puppet firmly in the hands of the Sat-Ch elites. Those who denounced the constitutional monarchy as “despotic” were generally responding to this perception, as is apparent in the term they used for 15

Irokawa Daikichi uncovered a vigorous debate over constitutional forms and the monarchy among rural people in the Tama region during the early 1880s. See his The Culture of the Meiji Period, (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1985), especially pp. 76-122. 16 Matsumoto Sannosuke, “Meiji kokka no keisei to tennsei ks,” 12-54 in Tomisaka Kirisutoky sent, ed., Kindai tennsei no keisei to kirisutoky (Shinky Shuppansha, 1996).

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“despotic government” (sensei seifu), which literally meant “monopoly government.” Their complaint was that this system of “monarchy” deprived the monarch from his people, and left the people outside of the government. Yet, another criticism of the monarchy came from those who felt that certain political elites were not merely trying to represent the monarch as the principle of political unity but were in fact imbuing the monarch with a new moral claim on the Japanese people. Article 28 of the constitution guaranteed Japanese subjects freedom of religion “so long as it did not betray their obligations as subjects or disturb the peace and order.” This limited right to religious freedom under the Meiji Constitution co-existed with increasing claims that the monarch was not merely a political sovereign but was invested with unique moral status that no Japanese could ignore. Two sources of this claim were the 1889 Imperial Rescript on the Promulgation of the Constitution and the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education. The former stressed that the tenn was more than a mere constitutional monarch established through modern laws and procedures designed to address contingent political issues. Rather, the language of the Rescript emphasized that (1) the Meiji tenn’s authority was derived from his ancestral lineage (chin ga sosh ni ukuru no taiken ni yori), (2) this ancestral lineage was “sacred” (shinsei naru), and (3) the Japanese subjects were descendents of good and loyal subjects of this lineage.17 The moral tone of this Rescript implied that disloyalty to the emperor was a betrayal of all one’s ancestors and an immoral act as well. Even more influential on debates over nationalism and the monarchy than the Rescript that accompanied the constitution was the Imperial Rescript on Education, which became the source of efforts to establish the tenn as the moral head of the Japanese nation. The Rescript itself was not explicitly religious in nature, although it expressed a heavily Confucian sense of social relations and tried to apply those ethical principles to the relationship between the monarch and his subjects. Maruyama Masao, reflecting on the significance of the Rescript after the calamity of World War II, offered what has 17

Kenp happu chokugo, reprinted in Nihonkoku kenp, 62-3. It should be noted that the Buddhist religious flavor of this passage (eg., the tenn as a merciful, benevolent savior of his people) is also intimated through the use of specific language. For example, the characters for taiken (authority, sovereignty—the Meiji alternative to kokken or minken, the sovereignty of the state or people, respectively), can also be read daigon, a term of respect for the Buddha who takes on various forms to save people.

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become a classic statement on the significance of the Rescript in Japanese nationalist ideology: The Japanese State never came to the point of drawing a distinction between the external and internal spheres and of recognizing that its authority was valid only for the former. In this respect it is noteworthy that the Imperial Rescript on Education should have been proclaimed just before the summoning of the First Imperial Diet. This was an open declaration of the fact that the Japanese State, being a moral entity, monopolized the right to determine values. . . . It is hardly surprising that the clash between Christianity and the policy of national education . . . should have taken the form of a heated controversy about this Imperial Rescript. Significantly it was at about this period that the word étatisme came into frequent use.18

Maruyama’s revelation that the debate over education and religion gave rise to the beginnings of a discourse on statism (kokkashugi) is an important one. It suggests that statism as an element in modern Japanese nationalism was not part of the early Meiji political agenda, but rather developed in light of the cultural changes (eg.,the Enlightenment, religious and academic pluralism, etc.) ushered in after the Restoration. In light of the protests raised particularly by Japanese Christian intellectuals (who were a more serious challenge to this moral nationalism than the foreign Christian missionaries), statism appeared as a useful ideology for containing morals and politics within one and the same framework. And to these statists, the Imperial Rescript on Education was the fundamental text used to support their view that modern Japanese political loyalties and religious faith had to be conjoined around the monarch. The Imperial Rescript on Education is short enough, and the debates over what it said about the relationship of the monarch and the nation are important enough, to justify reproducing it here in its entirety: Know ye, Our subjects: Our Royal Ancestors have founded Our country on a basis broad and everlasting, and have deeply and firmly implanted virtue; Our subjects ever united in loyalty and filial piety have from generation to generation illustrated the beauty thereof. This is the glory of Our nationality [waga kokutai no seika], and herein also is to be found the source of Our education. Ye, Our subjects, be filial to your parents, affectionate to your brothers and sisters; as husbands and wives be harmonious, as friends true; bear yourselves in modesty and moderation; extend your benevolence to all; pursue learning and 18

Maruyama Masao, “Theory and Psychology of Ultra- Nationalism,” (1946), 5.

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cultivate arts, and thereby develop intellectual faculties and perfect moral powers; furthermore, advance public good and promote common interests; always respect the Constitution and follow the laws of the country; should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously in service to the public; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of the Throne coeval with heaven and earth. So shall ye not only be Our good and faithful servants, but render illustrious the best traditions of your forefathers. The Way here set forth is indeed the teaching bequeathed by Our Royal Ancestors, to be observed alike by Their Descendants and the subjects, infallible for all ages and true in all places. It is Our wish to lay it to heart in all reverence, in common with you, Our subjects, that we may all attain to the same virtue. (30 October 1890)19

The Rescript did not define the Emperor as the kokutai, but only noted that “the glory of our kokutai” was to be found in the unity in filial piety and loyalty of the Japanese people, or “subjects.” The Rescript thus appealed to a sense of nationalism, a unity of the Japanese people, but it defined this nationalism in heavily Confucian terms, and it distinguished the tenn from the claims of nationalism, placing him squarely at the head of these familial relations of Confucian filial piety. There was no mention of the “state” (kokka) or “statism” (kokkashugi), although the Rescript did refer to the “country” (kuni), its laws and constitution. In light of later allegations about the function of the Rescript in propping up State Shintoism and in marginalizing any moral system independent of the state, it is ironic that the first draft of the Rescript was composed by a Christian, Nakamura Masanao. This is the same Nakamura who, shortly after his conversion, had argued that Christianity should be the national religion of Japan and that, to accomplish this goal, the emperor himself should convert to Christianity.20 What makes the historical fact of Nakamura’s authorship of the Rescript important is that the Rescript soon became the center of a vigorous debate between traditional moralists, who supported the Rescript, and Christians who criticized it as radical revision of the role of the emperor that threatened the freedom of religion guaranteed under the Meiji Constitution. The story of how this Rescript went from Christian authorship to an object of Christian 19

My translation is based on “The Imperial Rescript on Education,” in Sources of Japanese Tradition, volume II: 139-40, in consultation with the original, as reprinted in Sakamoto Takao, Meiji kokka no kensetsu, 372. 20 Irwin Scheiner, Christian Converts and Social Protest in Meiji Japan, reprint Michigan Classics in Japanese Studies, (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002), 61.

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critique is an intriguing and important one for understanding the subsequent efforts to present the monarch as a religious figurehead for the nation, even a “god incarnate” (arahitogami). To understand the debate over the monarchy that revolved around the Rescript on Education, one must begin with earlier efforts by Motoda Nagazane (Eifu) in the late 1870s to propagate a concept of the tenn as a Confucian patriarch. During the framing of the Meiji Constitution, Motoda’s concept of the monarch as moral figurehead was rejected by It and Inoue Kowashi whose modernist sense discounted the importance of religion, seeking instead to convert the tenn into a constitutional monarch who would serve as the political lynchpin of the new centralized state. After the constitution was promulgated, Motoda and his followers found a new opportunity to realize their goals: this time through the back door, by calling for a national religion (kokky) as a means of exhorting the nation’s loyalty to the monarch. This Confucianist strategy was distinct from, and in competition with, efforts of bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education who were trying to construct a policy of moral suasion of the nation (kokumin kyka) by systematizing native Shinto beliefs into a religion. As Sakamoto Takao’s nuanced commentary reveals, Motoda himself was “relatively cool” to these Shintoist efforts, as his Confucianist “national religion was founded on the tenn as a virtuous monarch who manifested standards of moral behavior,” not on the claims of ethnic tribalism.21 But what re-animated their mission of establishing a moral monarch was the revision of Nakamura’s draft by Inoue. Nakamura believed that Christianity was a logical extension of Confucian ethics, and he had mixed the two systems in his draft. Inoue deleted Nakamura’s argument that “loyalty and filial piety derived from a religious attitude of respect for the teachings of the Lord of Heaven [tenshu, i.e, the Judeo-Christian God].”22 When Inoue removed this Christian reference from Nakamura’s draft, he opened the door to Motoda and the Confucian interpretation of the tenn as a source of (Confucian) virtue and ethics for the nation. Motoda and Inoue in fact exchanged drafts of the Rescript several times before settling on the final version, a compromise between Inoue’s preference for a secular sense of national ethics open to all religious traditions, and Motoda’s

21

Sakamoto Takao, Meiji kokka no kensetsu, 368. Nakamura, quoted in Joseph Pittau, S.J., “Inoue Kowashi, 1843-1895, and the Formation of Modern Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica, vol. XX, nos. 3-4, p. 274; cited in Scheiner, p. 186. 22

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Confucianist sense of a deep connection between national ethics and imperial virtue.23 Only a few months after its promulgation, the Imperial Rescript on Education became the center of a prominent debate known as “the clash between education and religion.” The controversy began in January 1891, when Uchimura Kanz, a teacher at the Imperial First Higher School and a Christian, refused to show reverence to an Imperial portrait that was sent to the school with the Rescript. Uchimura, it is important to note, did not object to any of the substance of the Rescript or to the emperor, but simply refused to engage in what he considered idolatry by worshipping images.24 His refusal to show respect for the imperial portrait caused a ruckus within the school. Yet, as it became more widely known that Uchimura was a Christian, the debate became public and the newspapers reported on the “incident of fukei” (lèse majesté; treason; blasphemy). Writers referred to Uchimura as “blasphemous,” “an outrageous teacher,” “a rude lout,” “a disloyal subject,” “a disloyal lout enslaved to foreign teachings” and more. Incidents of persecution of Christians as disloyal Japanese spread around the country, as discussion of Christianity in public schools was prohibited.25 Five Protestants, led by Oshikawa Masayoshi (1849-1928), Uemura Masahisa (1858-1925), and Iwamoto Yoshiharu (1863-1942), came to Uchimura’s defense and published a joint declaration of support in the Yomiuri and other newspapers. They argued that to call the emperor “a god” (kami) and to force Japanese to worship him would violate Article 28 of the Meiji Constitution, which guaranteed freedom of religion, and they declared their willingness to “fight to the death”, if necessary, to contest such interpretations.26 Motoda died in 1891, so the Confucianist case was taken up by the philosopher Inoue Tetsujir, who already had earned a reputation as a powerful opponent of Christianity. Against those who celebrated the freedom of religion guaranteed by Article 28 of the Constitution, Inoue emphasized that the constitution allowed such freedom only “to the extent that [it] did not disturb the peace and order of the realm or 23 For the details concerning the negotiations between Inoue, Motoda and Nakamura over the drafts of the Imperial Rescript on Education, see Sakamoto, 370-4. 24 Sakamoto, 374. 25 Gonoi Takashi, Nihon kirisutoky-shi (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kbunkan, 1990), 282. 26 “Aete yo no shikisha ni kokuhaku su,” cited in Unuma Hiroko, “Dai yonsetsu: kokumin dtokuron o meguru rons,” 356-79 in Imai Jun and Ozawa Tomio, eds., Nihon shis rons shi (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1979), at 358-9.

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undermine [one’s] duties as an imperial subject.”27 In November 1892, he published “Mr. Inoue Tetsujir’s Remarks on the Relationship Between Religion and Education” (later re-titled, “The Clash Between Education and Religion”). As Oguma Eiji has noted, Inoue contrasted the Imperial Rescript on Education that “put into writing Japan’s unique morals” with Christians “who make no distinctions of race or state, taking all people to be children of God.” Inoue then asserted that “Christianity was harmful to the state, because it was incompatible with the spirit of the Imperial Rescript.”28 He tried to leverage the Uchimura lèse majesté incident through his own narrow interpretation of the Imperial Rescript on Education in order to eradicate, or at least de-legitimate, Christianity as a religious option for modern Japanese. Christianity itself, Inoue concluded, was incompatible with the duties of a loyal subject of the Emperor. Christians did not remain silent in the face of this attack on their patriotism. Christian dissent from Inoue’s position was prominent over the next decade, and some, especially Protestants, simply rejected the Imperial Rescript, and on occasion even the monarchy itself, as incompatible with their faith.29 But a more moderate position was expressed by two Catholic priests who did not accept the argument (shared, ironically, by Inoue and some of his later Protestant critics) that Christianity was incompatible with the Imperial Rescript or with the monarchy itself. This Catholic position must not be overlooked in assessing the significance of the “clash between religion and education” or the more general question of whether one could be a loyal subject of the monarch and a Christian. Shortly after Inoue’s article appeared, François A.D. Linguel (a French Catholic priest) and Maeda Chta (the first Japanese ordained a priest in the Tokyo diocese) co-wrote Religion and the State (1893), which presented a refutation of Inoue’s thesis from a Catholic perspective.30 Maeda and Linguel challenged Inoue’s argument that there was a “clash between religion and education” through a close 27

Nihonkoku kenp, 69. Oguma Eiji, Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen, (Tokyo: Shin’y, 1995), 56. I have translated this section myself, since David Askew’s translation (A Genealogy of ‘Japanese’ Self-Images, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2002), is not accurate here. For instance, he renders the reference to distinctions of jinshu (race) and kokka (state) in this passage as a distinction between “nations and states,” (Genealogy, 38). 29 Kashiwagi Gien (1860-1938), a follower of Niijima J‘s brand of Protestant Christianity, was an implacable foe of the “emperor system“ and all wars who was attracted to socialism. See Katano Masako, Kofun no hito Kashiwagi Gien: tenn-sei to kirisuto-ky (Tokyo: Shinky Shuppansha, 1993). 30 Gonoi Takashi, Nihon kirisutoky shi, 282. 28

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reading of Inoue’s text that parsed it into fifty-one specific points, addressing each in detail. Throughout, they insisted that support for the state, the monarch and the Imperial Rescript was in no way incompatible with Catholicism. In response to Inoue’s argument that Uchimura’s actions revealed how Christians could never be loyal subjects of the emperor since they were subjects only of Jesus, Maeda and Linguel cited in Latin Jesus’s own command: “Reddite qué sunt Césaris, Césari; et qué sunt Dei, Deo” (render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s, but render to God that which is God’s.)31 Against Inoue’s allegation that Christians like Uchimura showed disrespect for the Emperor, Maeda and Linguel countered that “disrespect” (fukei) was contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church. As evidence, they offered Matthew 18:10 (“See that you despise not one of these little ones”) and noted that even “the Protestant Guizot” had recognized that the Catholic Church was the greatest school of respect in the world (“L’Eglise Catholique est la plus grande école de respect qu’il y ait au monde”). For a Church that taught respect for even little children, Maeda and Linguel concluded, respect and honor for His Majesty, the head of state, was beyond question.32 Maeda and Linguel’s critique exposed the fact that Inoue was seeking to change the significance of the monarch from what the framers of the constitution had intended, and that his interpretation of the Rescript was, at best, a novel or idiosyncratic one. Although presented as a Catholic position, theirs was neither a parochial nor a foreign one (Linguel’s co-authorship clearly served to add the authority of the West to the argument; Maeda’s revealed that these views were shared by loyal Japanese: hence, both Linguel and Maeda’s authorship had important and complementary roles in establishing the legitimacy of this challenge to Inoue’s religious bigotry). Their Catholic defense against Inoue’s attack on Christians as disloyal subjects of the monarch was completely consistent with the original interpretation of the monarch put forth by It Hirobumi 31 Maeda Chta and François A.D. Lignuel, Shky to kokka (Tokyo: Maeda Chta, 1893), reprinted in Suzuki Norihisa, ed., Kindai nihon kirisutoky meicho sensh, dai IV-ki kirisutoky to shakai, kokka hen (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Sent, 2004), 1-217, at 43, 74-75. While the work was self-published by Maeda, it was distributed by prominent Tokyo bookstores (Maruzen, Meihd, Hakubunsha and Fukysha) until it was censored by the government. Thus, the text should not be seen as highly influential in Meiji public debates over morality and the monarch. But it is very valuable for demonstrating the range of views among Christians on the monarchy and morality in the early 1890s. 32 Maeda and Lignuel, 43-44.

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that the tenn was merely a constitutional monarch and that civic loyalty to him did not conflict with the constitutional right enjoyed by his subjects to practice the faith of their choosing. Their carefully constructed counter-arguments revealed that it was not Christians who were in violation of Japan’s modern political tradition, but Inoue himself. Inoue, they revealed, was trying to change the significance of the tenn from being simply the constitutional head of state to being the head of a national religion, an incarnate god (arahitogami) for the Japanese people. Although Maeda and Linguel argued strenuously against Inoue, and with reason, ironically, they had more in common with Inoue than they did with It Hirobumi and his vision of a secular, monarchical state. Inoue and the Catholic priests shared a belief that no state could survive without a foundation in morality. Maeda and Linguel did not object to Inoue’s concept of a religiously founded state (recall that it was a Christian, Nakamura Masanao, who had initially drafted the Imperial Rescript on Education). Their objection was that Inoue sought to establish his religious state on a false god, the human emperor, rather than on the one true God. Maeda and Linguel asserted that no educated person of the day really believed that Amateratsu kami was truly a supreme god, and they even questioned whether Inoue himself believed that the monarch was such a supreme god.33 As had Nakamura, they welcomed the idea of a modern Japan founded on Christianity, but of course they did not seriously attempt to establish Japan as a Christian state. Rather, their point was that morality was intrinsically connected to the political and social well-being of a nation, and they did not reject monarchy as a system of governance that could, potentially, lead to such an ethically formed national people. But in their arguments, the monarch and the nation were distinctive elements, and ultimately morality was revealed through the actions of the people who constituted the nation rather than being something that was vested solely in the person of the monarch. The Catholic political theory sketched by Maeda and Linguel had considerable potential for establishing a working compromise between the constitutional monarchy and rising concerns about the moral characteristics of the new nation. That potential, however, was compromised when the government prohibited the publication of Religion and the State almost immediately after its release. The 33

Maeda and Lignuel, 39-40.

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precise reasons for this measure are not clear, but timing suggests it was a victim of a reaction against increasing challenges from intellectuals to Shinto’s religious stature. Just a year earlier, in 1892, Professor Kume Kunitake had been removed from his chair in history at the Imperial University of Tokyo for writing in the Shigakkai zasshi, the historical journal of record, that “Shinto is merely old customs for worshipping the sky.” Kume’s denial that Shinto was a religion rankled the emerging religious nationalists, but his rational positivism was actually quite close to the pragmatic utilitarianism of the framers of the Meiji Constitution. The fact that Kume was now in trouble for expressing this secularist sentiment reveals how much things had changed for Japanese nationalism from the time of the Restoration to the postConstitutional years. Yet, in spite of these efforts to question the patriotism of Christian Japanese, most Christians, Protestant and Catholic, supported the Sino-Japanese war in 1894 as a good opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty to the emperor.34 That support began to wither immediately after the war. The decade of the 1890s was an important watershed for Japanese nationalism, as it marked the rise of a new, populist nationalism that brandished concepts of the people (kokumin, minzoku) against the government and even against the monarch. I treat this populist nationalism in more depth elsewhere in this volume. Here it will suffice to note its connection with Christianity and its emergence from the debates over morality, the monarch and the nation. Tokutomi Soh is one important link. In 1876, he had joined the Kumamoto Band of Christians, associated with Niijima J, and evidenced both socialist and nationalist tendencies in his thinking. His journal Friend of the Nation, founded in 1887, was one of the main mouthpieces for this populist nationalism. Tokutomi, however, did not move against the state or the monarch, and his nationalism became prominent particularly after the Russo-Japanese war (which he, unlike most Christians, did support). Others of this Kumamoto Band moved more decisively toward populist nationalism as a force against the monarchy. For example, Kashiwagi Gien (1860-1930) rejected Inoue’s argument that Christians could not be loyal subjects, but he mixed socialism, pacifism, and anti-monarchial sentiments, ultimately offering in the early Taisho period a contrast between the

34

Gonoi, 286.

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Christian vision of “man as the end” with the ideology of “man as the means” which he associated with the “emperor system” (tenn-sei).35 The introduction of “Liberal Theology”, especially by Unitarian and Universalists shifted Christian thought even further from institutions, authority and in some cases, even away from support for the monarch. The influence of Liberal Theology over Japanese Christians was not long lasting, but its political and social impact was considerable. Its anti-institutional influence can be seen in the Society for the Study of Socialism, founded in 1898 almost entirely by Christians (the lone exception was Ktoku Shsui). Ktoku is an important link between the late nineteenth century “clash between education and religion,” led by Christians, and more radical forms of anti-monarchical nationalism that began to emerge in the early twentieth century. Although many Christians continued to assert the compatibility of their faith with patriotism, some Protestants had began to withdraw their support for the imperial government around the time of the Russo-Japanese War. Most would not go as far as anarchists like Ktoku did, advocating an overthrow of the monarchy itself. However, the tensions that had emerged by the end of the century between a constitutional monarchy (which most Christians had initially welcomed) and a new moral, even religious, interpretation of the tenn revealed that the modern Japanese monarchy had not resolved the problem of national legitimacy so much as it had drawn important lines around the debate over national identity. The Monarch as Emperor (Ktei) After the Russo-Japanese war, and particularly after the 1905 Hibiya Riots that followed the announcement of the disappointing terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth, the fissures in Japanese nationalism that had been growing wider during the 1890s became deep and sometimes violent. Emerging populist critiques of the state as oppressing the Japanese people spilled over into critiques of imperialism and consequently of the “emperor” himself. As a world power, Japan was now very much a player in the region, and its actions were increasingly criticized as imperialist both at home and abroad. Anti-imperialist movements were strongest, of course, in China and Korea (which had fallen under Japanese dominance after

35

Katano, Kofun no hito Kashiwagi, 2.

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the war and would be annexed into the empire in 1910). But domestic critiques of imperialism were also gaining strength, and they raised arguments not only about territorial expansion in Asia, but also about the suppression of democracy at home. In this context, an “empire” (teikoku) required an “emperor” (ktei), so the monarch was represented as an emperor both by imperialists and later by those who advocated an imperial nationalism led by His Majesty. Throughout these debates and the turbulent years of war that followed, the Meiji Constitution, which was designed originally not for expansive imperialism but for centralized monarchical government, remained in force. Yet, as with the Imperial Rescript, what mattered more than the constitution itself was the political debate over the meaning of the text. And the battle over the meaning of the monarchy was assuredly the most important of legal and constitutional debates. The century opened with grave concerns about the violent forms political criticism was taking. In 1906, Ktoku announced his turn toward radicalism, outlining a new emphasis on “direct action” against the state. Many within the Socialist Party left the parliamentary wing of the Party headed by the moderate Christian socialist Katayama Sen, seduced by Ktoku’s call for direct action through strikes, marches, and violent confrontation with the authorities. Having radicalized the socialist movement, Ktoku led many of his colleagues through the streets of Tokyo in 1908, calling for an overthrow of the capitalist government and engaging the police in street brawls. He was arrested in 1910 as the ringleader of a group of anarchists who had plotted to assassinate the emperor (the “High Treason Incident”) and was executed, along with eleven others, in 1911. By then, socialism already had emerged as a powerful ideological and political force that adopted the most extreme position against the emperor and imperialism. Yet, not all socialists accepted Ktoku’s radicalism, nor did all socialist ideas lead to leftist politics. In 1906, the same year that Ktoku was announcing his radical approach, Kita Ikki published his influential book, A Theory of Nationality and Pure Socialism. In it, he outlined an argument that would shake up the socialist world. Rather than seeing the state as the tool of the capitalist class, as Ktoku did, Kita argued that the state was really society itself, and thus the Diet is merely the representation of the people. Consequently, he proposed that the monarch was actually subordinate to the people who are represented in the “citizen state” (kmin kokka): The emperor of Japan is an organ who began and continues to exist for purposes of the survival and evolution of the state….It is clear that…

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when the emperor acts as chief administrative official or commands the army and navy, he does so as an organ.36

As George Wilson notes, this argument seems to resemble the “organ theory” developed later by Minobe Tatsukichi, except that Kita does not accept the idea that the emperor is the highest organ of the state; rather, in Kita’s mind, the emperor is merely one part of the state along with the more important part, “the people.”37 In essence, Kita was trying to do for socialism what the Christian intellectuals earlier had tried to do for their faith: show that it was not incompatible with either the kokutai or monarchical government. If the issues that had informed the Meiji debates over the monarch were those of legitimation, centralization, implementation and loyalty, the issues that shaped debates over the monarchy in the Taisho period added to this mixture concerns with succession and institutional stability. By “succession” I do not mean the more limited question of who the next monarch would be, after the passing of Emperor Meiji. There was no question that his son, Yoshimutsu, would succeed to the throne. A deeper concern was over systematic change and continuity: whether the institutional solutions to the political problems of the mid-nineteenth century would be able to withstand the challenges of a mature powerful state, and if not, to what degree revisions would be needed or permitted. This new debate over the emperor did not take place in a vacuum. As the new century unfolded, few of the original men who guided the formation of the Meiji imperial state were still alive. A broader “sense of ending” and a more focused political crisis followed in the wake of the Emperor Meiji’s death in 1912. The “sense of ending” encapsulated broadly felt misgivings about whether the new generation of Japanese was prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to ensure Japan’s security and prosperity into the future. These anxieties seemed justified by the political crisis that took shape in the form of the “protect the constitution movement” (goken und) of late 1912-early 1913. The movement began when, after the fall of the second Saionji cabinet, a conference on “protecting the constitution” was held by journalists and party politicians such as Ozaki Yukio of the Seiykai and Inukai Tsuyoshi of the National Party (Kokumint). Ignoring the conference, the genr simply appointed Home Minister Katsura Tar the next prime minister, as 36 Kita Ikki (Terujir), Kokutairon oyobi junsui shakaishugi, Kita Ikki chosakush, I: 425, 231; translated and cited by George M. Wilson, Radical Nationalist in Japan, Kita Ikki, 1883-1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 28. 37 Wilson, 28-31.

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recommended by the leaders of the Sat-Ch coalition. In response, tens of thousands of protesters surrounded the Imperial Diet on 10 February 1913, demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Katsura. He and his cabinet resigned the following day. To historians who see the Taisho period as one of “Taisho democracy,” this movement to protect the constitution is a key moment in Japan’s experiment with indigenous democracy. Yet, there was both more and less than democracy on display in this moment. At one level, this pro-constitution movement was merely a return to the political struggle between the government and those anti-government groups that had earlier identified with the “Freedom and People’s Rights Movement.” It was, in a sense, power politics between opposing factions of modern Japan’s elite. At the same time, it expressed a new force in this political struggle: the role of “the people” that saw itself as the legitimate source of sovereignty in Japan, as in any modern nation. This appeal to “the people” was most striking in the mob that surrounded the Imperial Diet, but it also was captured in the convening of a conference to “protect the constitution,” and in the very name of Inukai’s political party, the National (i.e, the “people”) Party. At the same time, the claims made on behalf of the “people” inevitably brought the question of the monarchy to the fore, since after all it was the monarch who had bestowed upon the people this very constitution that they were now claiming only to “protect.” Advocates of “protecting the constitution” found a surprising opponent in the ghost of Fukuzawa Yukichi. Fukuzawa had died in 1901, but his ideas were resurrected against the populists in the constitutional movement by the government, through the re-printing of his On the Imperial Household (1882-1911, 1931). Ironically, Fukuzawa has long been viewed sympathetically by those critical of the government (in spite of his siding with the government after 1881), for he had taught, famously, that a good scholar should remain outside of government service. Fukuzawa’s independent spirit has appealed greatly to journalists, intellectuals, and others critical of the state. But in fact, he shared much with Inoue Tetsujir, including his hatred of Christianity and his support for the government, especially after 1881. As early as 1875, when Christianity was still quite weak in Japan, Fukuzawa wrote the following: In essence the Christian religion takes eternity as its end, an eternity of everlasting bliss and comfort or of everlasting suffering and affliction. It fears punishment in the next world more than in this, considers future

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Judgment more important than judgement [sic] in the present…if the world is one family and all men on the face of the earth are like brothers, then love should be meted out equally to all men…to divide the globe into sections…and worst of all, to take up weapons and murder one’s brothers within other boundaries, to take their land from them, and to contend with them for business profit—this cannot by any means be the aim of religion. In view of these abuses it seems that we should set aside for a while consideration of eternal punishment in the afterlife and say that punishment in the present life is still inadequate. And the offenders [deserving of punishment] are the Christians.38

Fukuzawa’s antipathy to Christianity was not merely abstract. He became involved in the “Catholic Funeral Affair,” in which a Japanese Catholic had his deceased wife buried in the local Buddhist cemetery after holding a Mass of Christian burial for her. When the Buddhist priests protested and sued in court to have her remains removed from the cemetery, Fukuzawa filed a brief in support of the Buddhists, sought to pressure the judges through his influential political friends, and mobilized his students in the anti-Christian movement.39 As Yonehara Ken has demonstrated, Fukuzawa’s antipathy to Christianity influenced his theory of the monarch beginning around the early 1880s, as he was moving toward a theory of Japanese nationality that emphasized the centrality of the Imperial House. In this sense, Yonehara may be quite justified in noting that Fukuzawa had begun to reconsider his earlier arguments against ethnicity as “an empty fiction intoxicated with vainglory.” 40 The later Fukuzawa appears to have been a rare example of an implicit “ethnic nationalist” who, while refraining from explicitly invoking the concept of minzoku (ethnic nationality) in favor of the concept of a politically constituted nation (kokumin), nonetheless believed that a good Japanese could not embrace the Christian faith. As we have seen, in his earlier days, Fukuzawa had experimented with a liberal or republican theory of nationalism, in which the difference between kokutai (“nationality”) and the monarchy was emphasized in order to stress the role of the people in forming a strong national unity. He had stressed the distinction between nationality (kokutai), legitimation (seit), and the blood lineage of the monarchy. Why, he asked, was Japan able to change its political 38 Fukuzawa Yukichi, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, trans. by David A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst, (Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1973), 177. 39 Yonehara Ken, Kindai nihon no aidenteitei to seiji (Tokyo: Mineruva Shob, 2002), 53-4, n. 13. 40 Yonehara, 18.

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forms over the centuries without loss of its nationality and hence sovereignty? “Because,” he answered, “Japan was governed by Japanese sharing a common heritage of language and customs.”41 At this point in his thinking, Fukuzawa believed that a shared sense of history was more important than ethnicity or blood in the determination of a people’s nationality. Most importantly, Fukuzawa did not appeal to some putative transcendental value of the imperial household itself. He argued that the kokutai and the monarchical lineage were not synonymous, and he emphasized the theoretical possibility that kokutai could change, as it had in many European countries. Nor was a single kokutai a condition for a necessarily united nation-state, and as an example he pointed out that “the various German states are virtually independent, but because their language and literature are the same and they share a common legacy of the past the Germans have till this day preserved a German nationality which distinguishes them from other people.”42 Rather, he argued that what value the imperial household had was due to its value as a source of national unity. He was most impressed with how this unity was displayed after the Satsuma Rebellion when samurai who had served in the war returned home with no material reward for their service but a word of thanks from His Majesty.43 The key argument Fukuzawa presents about the institution of the monarchy (the “imperial household”) is that it must always remain outside of politics (teishitsu wa seijisha-gai no mono nari).44 Here, we can glimpse the significance of this argument for party politicians and others in the “protect the constitution” movement, as well as for those who would follow Kita Ikki’s radical call for a closer embrace between the nation and the monarch (kokumin no tenn). Yet, we must also keep in mind the historical context that surrounded the composition of Fukuzawa’s theory on the imperial household. It was 41

Fukuzawa, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, 26. Fukuzawa, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, 23-24. The citation is from Dilworth and Hurst’s translation, except I have substituted Fukuzawa’s own rendering of kokutai as “nationality” for Dilworth and Hurst’s “national polity.” See Fukuzawa Yukichi, Bummeiron no gairyaku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1931), 37. 43 Kimura Junji, “Teishitsuron: Fukuzawa Yukichi,” in Tennron o yomu, 15. 44 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Teishitsuron (1882-1911, 1931), reprinted in Sakamoto Takao, ed., Fukuzawa Yukichi chosakush (Tokyo: Kei Gijiku Daigaku Shuppankai, 2002), 9:163-217, at 171. In 1937 the Ministry of Education declared Fukuzawa’s Teishitsuron as “inappropriate” for use in university, so the university he founded, Keio University, excised it from the reprinted edition of Fukuzawa’s Selected Writings. It was returned to the collection published by Kei University only in the 2002 edition cited above. 42

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written the year following, and in relation to, the 1881 political crisis that pitted the people’s rights parties against the parties that stood for the power of the officials. Fukuzawa was deeply concerned that the nation might devolve into civil war and, failing to maintain unity, fall victim to the colonizing ambitions of the Western Powers. Thus, his solution, which Sakamoto Takao notes foreshadowed the postwar “symbolic emperor,” was to elevate the emperor above politics, to present the emperor in English monarchical theory as one who “reigns but does not rule.”45 Fukuzawa’s view of the emperor went a bit beyond this passive formulation, however, as he saw the role of the emperor as not merely a passive symbol of national unity, but as the active unifying force of the nation in spiritual terms. This was, in a sense, a reversal of Kita Ikki’s concept of the monarch as belonging to the nation. The emperor was to remain above politics, but should devote himself “centrally to the task of winning over the Japanese people’s spirit.”46 In so doing, Fukuzawa made the monarch the lynchpin of ethnic nationalism by transforming the monarch from a constitutional monarchy designed for political unity to a cultural figurehead who embodied Shintoist beliefs as the core of a native Japanese spiritual sensibility.47 This “spiritual” task was left rather ambiguous: it might entail cultural activities such as the collection of traditional arts and crafts as much as conferring honors on individuals and establishing schools and encouraging the people to study. But the role of the emperor was to unify the nation and the state, to heal the rift between those who extolled the rights of the people (or civil rights) and those who placed a primacy on the authority of the government. The ambiguity in Fukuzawa’s approach to the Imperial Household was key to its broad appeal. His argument encapsulated the two main directions in which emperor-theory would subsequently develop: toward a political approach that elevated the emperor beyond civilian control, and toward a spiritual approach that, while also elevating the emperor beyond the state, did so only to emphasize the emperor’s centrality to cultural nationalism. 45 Cf. “Teishitsu wa banki o suburu mono de ari, ataru mono dewa nai.” Fukuzawa, Teishitsuron, 171 also cited in Kimura, Tennron o yomu, 12. Sakamoto Takao calls this view of the Emperor a precursor to the postwar constitutional emperor as a “symbol of the nation.” See Sakamoto, “Kaisetsu,” Fukuzawa Yukichi chosakush, 9: 309. 46 Fukuzawa, Teishitsuron, cited in Kimura Junji, “Teishitsuron: Fukuzawa Yukichi,” in Tennron o yomu, 13. 47 Yonehara Ken, Kindai nihon no aidenteitei to seiji, 17-24.

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Fukuzawa’s theory of the imperial household gained support from Kat Hiroyuki who, like Fukuzawa, had come to detest both Christianity and the power of the people during the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement of the early 1880s. He outlined the two major positions held by scholars of constitutional law on the monarchy and provided his own, separate view. The first was the “Monarchical Organ Theory” (kunshu kikan setsu) that held that the monarch was an organ of the state and that sovereignty rested in the state, not the monarchy. This theory was advocated by Minobe Tatsukichi and Ichimura Mitsue. The second was the “Monarchical Subject Theory” (kunshu shutai setsu) that held that state sovereignty does not inhere in the state itself, but rather is a particular property of the monarch. This theory was advocated by Hozumi Yatsuka, Shimizu Tru, Uesugi Shin’kichi, and Inoue Mitsu. Kat found fault with both theories: the organ theory presumed the state was artificial and the people were natural, which Kat argued precisely turned reality upside down; and the subject theory unduly emphasized the uniqueness of Japan’s monarchy when, as Kat noted, sovereignty vested in a monarch rather than in the state was a principle and practice derived from European monarchical theories.48 Kat’s objective was to identify the right theory of monarchical rule that would be compatible with Japan’s expanding empire. He explicitly noted how Japan’s acquisition of Taiwan and Korea forced the issue of multi-ethnic nationality to the foreground, and he realized this required a theory of the sovereign that was neither too narrowly ethnic (thus, incompatible with imperial expansion) nor too multiethnic (to the point of the Japanese people losing their privileged position). He also sought to legitimate the monarch on universal, secular terms, avoiding the kind of mystical religious theories that tried to claim the monarch as a Shinto god. His solution—imperial sovereignty instead of national sovereignty or a tenn conceived as an ethnic tribal chieftain—certainly never won universal acceptance. But it was a powerful statement of where the tensions were in debates over the monarchy, as Japan increasingly took on the realities of a multi-ethnic, imperial state. It is well-known that Minobe Tatsukichi was persecuted during the early 1930s for his organ theory and ultimately was forced to give up his seat in the parliament in 1935. However, the fact that the organ theorists were persecuted does not mean that the theory of ethnic 48

Kat Hiroyuki, Kokka no tchiken, (Tokyo: Jitsugy no Nihonsha, 1913), reprinted in Kat Hiroyuki no bunsho (Kyoto: Dhosha Shuppan), 3:629-661, at 630.

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monarchical sovereignty was accepted as orthodox. Rather, throughout the 1920s and especially in the 1930s, advocates for the theory of the monarch as ethnic chieftain grew vociferous even as their cries went largely unheeded. One of their sacred texts was Orikuchi Shinobu’s “The True Meaning of the Great Enthronement Ritual” (Dajsai no hongi), which was composed just before the Showa Emperor’s enthronement in 1928. In contrast to Fukuzawa and Kat, Orikuchi saw the emperor very much as a religious figure. It was not so much the actual monarch himself who embodied this spiritual power, but the entire lineage of monarchs who had gone before. Orikuchi and his supporters embraced a theology of continuity of this lineage that placed importance on the incarnation of this spirit in the enthronement ceremony. His theory of the origins of the expression mikotomochi held that mikoto referred to the words of the gods, and that he who transmitted this “word of the gods” was the one who had the mikoto, the mikotomochi. The emperor, known as the sumera no mikoto, was the most supreme (sumera) holder of this “word of the gods”.49 In this sense his theory “relativized the absolute nature of the monarch, while at the same time it emphasized the absolute authority of the gods.”50 The power and dignity of the monarch was not derived from his constitutional position as supreme sovereign, nor from his symbolic power as the cultural unifying principle of the Japanese nation. Rather, the source of his majesty and authority came from the physical incarnation of this spirit of the gods that takes place in the divine enthronement ceremony of the Dajsai. Orikuchi’s theology of the monarch as the tribal chieftain of the Japanese ethnic people joined a growing chorus of dissident voices that rejected the official ideology of the emperor as the sovereign head of a multi-ethnic state. By the middle of the 1930s, a diverse group of nationalist scholars, including Takamura Itsue and Yasuda Yojr, were challenging this idea of the tenn as a modern emperor and offering instead a passionate neo-nativist vision of the tenn as the religious leader of an ancient Yamato people. This ethnic nationalism was of course a serious challenge to the legitimacy of the empire, and it was not merely a theoretical threat. Acts of terrorism and political assassination had been on the rise during the 1930s, and much of it was fired by nationalist resentments against the multiethnic constitutional system. 49 50

Cf.“Shinto ni arawareta minzoku ronri,” in Zensh 3—Ch Kron. Kimura Junji, “Dajsai no hongi: Orikuchi Shinobu,” Tennron o yomu, 20-21.

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To extreme nationalists like Minoda Muneki (Kyki), traditional constitutional theories that accepted the emperor as head of a multiethnic empire were simply intolerable. He found an easy target in Minobe Tatsukichi’s “organ theory” and, along with Diet member Kikuchi Takeo, hounded him from his legislative seat in 1935. Minobe’s “organ theory” had become a cause célèbre for those convinced that the emperor was being taken away from the Japanese people in the service of a multi-ethnic empire. Their response was a clamor to “clarify the kokutai”, and the government responded in 1937 with the publication and wide-scale distribution of a new tract, The True Meaning of the Kokutai. Yet, this document never achieved that status of being the definitive statement on Japanese nationalism that many have claimed for it. Rather than speaking clearly on the issue, it reflected the diverse views of its multiple authors. It certainly pushed the concept of kokutai to the forefront of debates on Japanese national identity, but it left open what exactly kokutai meant in terms of nationality. The True Meaning of the Kokutai argued forcefully against individualism and other liberal Western ideologies. And it certainly repudiated the “organ theory” of the emperor, emphasizing that the kokutai was synonymous with Japan’s unique, unbroken line of emperors. Yet, the tract was unable to establish a consistent argument on the status of the people in relationship to the emperor, at times opting for the constitutional (multi-ethnic) structure, where the people were defined as “subjects”, at other times, referring to the nation (kokumin) and rarely to an ethnic definition of the nation (minzoku).51 A careful reading of the document suggests that the purpose of issuing this official statement on the kokutai was to co-opt the monoethnic nationalist threat to the empire as far as possible without 51

The predominant reference in Kokutai no hongi is to the people as the (multiethnic) nation (kokumin), but there are scattered references to the ethnic nation. Unfortunately, in Gauntlett’s translation, the minzoku references are either rendered as “race” or inexplicably omitted. Cf. in rendering a citation in the text from the Imperial Rescript on the Promotion of National Spirit, Gauntlett drops the reference to the ethnic nation in the passage that describes the duties of the subject as “kokka no kry to minzoku no an’ei, shakai no fukushi to wo hakaru beshi [give heed to the flourishing of the State, the peace and prosperity of the ethnic nation, and the welfare of the society] as “give heed to the welfare, peace, and prosperity of the State, and to social well-being”. John Owen Gauntlett, trans., Robert King Hall, ed., Kokutai no Hongi: Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of Japan (Newton, MA: Crofton Publishing Corporation, 1974), 87. I have relied on the on-line version of Kokutai no hongi, http://j-texts.com/showa/kokutaiah.html#sec0403.

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compromising the multi-ethnic nature of Meiji political order. Consequently, it was not very successful in resolving this tension over the meaning of the nation. It was considerably more successful, however, as a re-statement of the sacredness of the emperor as the spiritual center of the empire and of the duty of loyalty owed the emperor (tenn) by all His subjects. In the end, the document was concerned with maintaining order under the imperial constitutional system, and for that very reason it was limited in its ability to incorporate the rising challenge to the imperial structure from populist nationalism. But the forces behind the composition of The True Meaning of the Kokutai were able to directly impact the legal representation of the monarchy in international affairs. When Emperor Hirohito signed the declaration of war against the United States and England in 1941, he broke with the modern tradition of officially referring to the monarch of Japan as a ktei and referred to himself instead in the language of the 1937 tract as the tenn. The contrast with precedent is striking. His grandfather, Mutsuhito (“the Emperor Meiji”) had referred to himself as ktei when he signed the declarations of war against China (1894) and Russia (1904). And his father Yoshihito (“the Emperor Taisho”) had used to term ktei in 1914, when he signed the declaration of war against Germany and its allies. As Miwa Kimitaka has noted, the difference is truly significant, because Ktei was common noun used in East Asia to designate the emperors of China and even at times Korean kings. Even monarchs of European empires from ancient times down to the contemporary period…were all referred to as Ktei. But Tenn was totally different. It had been used once by the Chinese in ancient times and then was discarded. But as far as the Japanese were concerned, this word simply signified the Japanese emperor and nobody else. In 1894, 1904 and 1914, wars were declared in the name of Ktei and the Japanese fought them as a modern Western-type nation, meticulously abiding by international law. Japan then was just one of many similar nation-states [sic]. But in 1941 Japan declared war on two major Western nations in the name of a monarch who was not only distinct in designation but represented a whole set of distinctly different values.52

52 Miwa Kimitada, “Neither East nor West but All Alone,” in Harry Wray and Hilary Conroy, eds., Japan Examined: Perspectives on Modern Japanese History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983): 384-9, at 389.

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Miwa concludes that these distinctively different values meant that “by 1941 Japan had become ethnocentric in idea.”53 It may be going too far to suggest that all Japanese had become ethnocentric. Japan remained a multi-ethnic empire, with Koreans and other non-ethnic Japanese living alongside ethnic Japanese and fighting alongside them in the imperial armed forces. But certainly this shift in terminology represented a last ditch effort to reconcile imperial monarchy with nationalism in the interests of national unity in a time of war. The effort was “too little, too late” to have much impact during the remainder of the war, but the forces it unleashed were to substantially affect the development of the monarchy in the years to come. The Tenn as Symbol of the Nation Kokutai no hongi and other official efforts to define nationalism through the emperor could not successfully arrest the inherent tensions between nationalism and empire, between the claims of national self-determination and popular sovereignty on the one hand, and the people’s status as multi-ethnic imperial subjects and their sovereign emperor on the other. But defeat and foreign occupation provided a new opportunity to reconsider the relationship between nationalism and the emperor in a post-imperial Japan. The postwar effort to reconstitute the relationship of the emperor and nationalism was shaped by the immediate concern over how to assess responsibility for defeat in the war. This effort began on 5 September 1945, when Ashida Hitoshi submitted a memorandum in the first postwar Diet on “The Cause and Responsibility for the Unfavorable Result of the Greater East Asian War.” Over the next several months, many claims and counter-claims of war responsibility were made, but the focus was mainly on whether the “bureaucrats” or “the military” were responsible for the war. Significantly, exempted from responsibility for the war were the nation (kokumin) and the emperor.54 One group was not shy about blaming the emperor for the war. On 10 October 1945, Tokuda Kyichi, Miyamoto Kenji, Shiga Yoshio and other leaders of Japan’s Communist Party were released from Fuch Prison. They too exempted the nation from war responsibility, and in their “Appeal to the People” (jimmin ni utau) outlined their 53

Miwa, 389. Oguma Eiji, <Minshu> to : sengo nihon no nashonarizumu to kkysei (Tokyo: Shin’ysha, 2002), 104-5. 54

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agenda of abolishing the monarchy and establishing a “people’s republic.” The debate over war responsibility then became a tool for the accomplishment of their long-sought objective: abolishing the monarchy. In November Shiga Yoshio made the harshest indictment of the emperor to date in the Communist Party newspaper Akahata, arguing that “the Emperor is the worst war criminal.” It is important to recognize, as Oguma Eiji has pointed out, that even the communists who were against the emperor were not against nationalism per se but were appealing to a different kind of nationalism.55 Their choice of Marxist terms like “a people’s republic” may be misleading, however, if one infers from this language that they were seeking to build a republican nationalism in postwar Japan. Marxist Japanese nationalism, particularly in its critique of the Meiji imperial system, rested on a concept of the nation as a single ethnic group. This vision is revealed in Miyamoto’s argument that the imperial system was the “corruption of the ethnic nation” (minzoku no oshoku) and that history should be studied to find the true “pride of the ethnic nation” (minzoku no hokori).56 Of course, in one sense, the Communists were simply continuing a prewar rejection of the emperor that stemmed from their 1922 Draft Program and reached strongest formulation in support of the May 1932 Theses calling for the overthrow of the emperor system.57 What was new was the historical and political context, one in which the Communist Party enjoyed full political freedom and where the debates over war responsibility and the urgent need to rebuild the nation converged to renew their hopes for a nationalism that would dispense with the monarchy. This local effort must be placed in its regional and global context of the early postwar years, when Marxists around the world were supporting ethnic nationalism as a legitimate tool against capitalist imperialism. Japanese communists saw this global agenda as an opportunity to construct a new, postwar nationalism in Japan that was not centered on the monarch but on ethnicity. This agenda, if realized, would be a true overthrow of the Meiji constitutional order,

55

Oguma, 122. Miyamoto Kenji, “Tenn sei hihan ni tsuite”, Zen’ei (February 1946), cited in Oguma, 123. 57 On prewar Marxist critiques of the emperor, see Germaine A. Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), especially, 60-75. 56

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a political system in which the multi-ethnic social base of the empire was held together by the monarch as the sole source of sovereignty. The revolutionary potential of this Marxist assault on the emperor was recognized and challenged. After Hirohito was compelled by General Douglas MacArthur to renounce his divinity in his famous “Declaration of Humanity” (ningen sengen) in January 1946, a surprising group of liberals came to the defense of this downsized monarchy. Led by Tsuda Skichi and Watsuji Tetsur they were considered during the war to be dangerous thinkers opposed to the kokutai, so it might seem strange to find them defending the monarchical system [in the postwar]. But they shared a basic understanding of the emperor’s position as outlined in Minobe’s emperor organ theory and thus did not consider monarchy to be incompatible with parliamentary politics or democracy.58

What made possible their support for the postwar monarchy was the institutional and cultural transformation of both the monarch (tenn) and of the nation (kokumin). The “emperor” now lacked not only an empire but even a clear, political role in the postwar nation, as the Imperial Constitution was no longer valid and a new one had yet to be drafted. In the interregnum, Hirohito, who during the war had renounced the title ktei in favor of tenn, was less an “emperor” than ever before. But even as a “monarch,” his fate and function was uncertain. He was, in a sense, monarch without portfolio. What was the Japanese monarchy? Who was the monarch in relation to the newly sovereign nation (kokumin)? If Hirohito himself had moved the conception of the monarchy towards an ethnic chieftain (tenn) and away from the universal, legal sense of ktei, would the new, post-imperial conditions of a defeated Japan require a return to the concept of ktei that had served a more international Japan in the past? An early answer to these questions came in March 1946, only two months after Hirohito’s “Declaration of Humanity,” when a draft of the new constitution was published in the major Japanese newspapers, introducing the principle of the monarch as both tenn and as the “symbol of national [kokumin] unity.”59 This was the first, and most important step in what Yonetani Masafumi has

58

Kimura Junji, “Tennron no keif,” Tennron o yomu, 215. On the development of the “symbol emperor system” from prewar currents, both foreign and domestic, see Masanori Nakamura, The Japanese Monarchy: Ambassador Grew and the Making of the ‘Symbol Emperor Sytem,” 1931-1991, trans. by Herbert Bix, Jonathan Baker-Bates and Derek Bowen, (Armonk,NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992). 59

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called “the nationalization [kokuminka] of the emperor system.”60 It was an innovative, if not quite revolutionary, shift in Japanese monarchical theory, one that sought to reconcile claims of the monarch as unique to Japan with a constitution premised on universal rights and national sovereignty. Only one month later, in April 1946, Tsuda published an article on “The Circumstances of the Founding of our Country and the Ideology of Unbroken Imperial Lineage” in the journal Sekai. Tsuda argued that history showed that the modern emperor system was an aberration in the long history of the Japanese monarchy. Throughout history, the Japanese monarchy had largely been a symbolic institution, and the monarch had rarely been the head of an actual monarchical system of government. This defense of the monarchy startled many who recalled that only three years earlier Tsuda had been charged with lèse majesté for concluding that the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki recorded, not historical facts, but fictions designed to shore up monarchical claims to power. Yet, this postwar argument should not have surprised anyone. Tsuda consistently adopted a liberal position that saw myths as human fictions and he rejected efforts to make the monarch into more than he actually was, whether as sovereign head of state or as a living god. Watsuji, Tsuda’s colleague in this effort to rehabilitate the postwar monarch as symbol of the nation, had a different history and a different argument about the symbolic monarchy. But he too challenged an excessively theological understanding of the monarch. Watsuji had argued at the height of the war that the monarch’s “divinity” did not imply any transcendental power as Creator of nature or mankind; he drew a sharp distinction between the sense of divinity attributed to the Japanese monarch and the sense of divinity “that Jews and Christians attribute to Yahweh and Deus.”61 While he conceded that a kind of divinity inhered in the ancient imperial ancestors, his main point converged with Tsuda’s thesis that the role of the living monarch was not an active political one. Rather, the monarch’s traditional role had been the expression of the collective will of the nation (kokumin no si), and since the formation of a nation’s collective will is an essential step in establishing national 60

Yonetani Masafumi, “Tsuda Skichi Watsuji Tetsur no tennron: shch tennsei ron,” 23-56 in Amino Yoshihiko et al., eds., Tenn to ken o kangaeru dai ikkan: Jinrui shakai no naka no tenn to ken (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002): 23. 61 Watsuji Tetsur, Sonn shis to sono dent (Iwanami Shoten, 1943); cited in Kimura Junji, “Sonn shis to sono dent: Watsuji Tetsur,” in Tennron o yomu, 43-44.

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sovereignty (kokumin shuken), the monarchy, he concluded, could not be excluded from the formation of a democratic nation.62 Watsuji accepted, even emphasized, the ethicality associated with the imperial lineage. But in making a distinction between the lineage of imperial ancestors (kso) and the existing monarch (tenn), he created an opening for others to support the monarch as a symbol of national unity, without conceding the theological question of the personal divinity of the monarch. Watsuji has been criticized for interpreting the monarchy through the lens of Shintoism and thus limiting his postwar concept of the nation to a theocratic one.63 Yet, regardless of whether one finds that argument about Watsuji’s theory of the monarch persuasive, it does not provide a comprehensive explanation of the early postwar support for the monarchy from the “old liberal” group. Tanaka Ktar was one of the “old liberals” who supported the postwar monarchy, and he was both a professor of law and a devout Catholic. His defense of the postwar monarch has been discounted as merely reflecting a “fear of anarchy and despotism” and a “scorn for the masses.”64 But it ran much deeper than that, and stemmed from his understanding of the causes of wartime fascism. Tanaka understood that the political forces that had threatened Japan during the 1930s and early 1940s came from extremist movements on the right and the left, populist movements that were guided by two distinct ideologies: a cultural nationalism (kokusuishugi) that rejected any universal value and a radical libertarianism (jiyshugi) that claimed freedom from any moral restraint.65 With defeat in the war, he knew that rightist nationalism was no longer a serious danger to the new social order. But the discrediting of rightwing nationalism left a void that was being filled in the immediate postwar years by individualistic hedonism. Tanaka was deeply concerned by this rejection of moral 62 Watsuji Tetsur, “Kokumin zentaisei no hygensha,” (July 1948) reprinted in Watsuji, Kokumin tg no shch (Tokyo: Keis Shob, 1948); cited in Kimura, “Tennron no keif,” in Tennron o yomu, 216-7. 63 See Yonetani Masafumi, “Tsuda Skichi Watsuji Tetsur no tennron,” 47-8. However, Watsuji does not appear to have been so intolerant of other religions in Japan. He helped the Catholic philosopher Yoshimitsu Yoshihiko get a position teaching ethics at Tokyo Imperial University in 1935 and appears to have supported his career in many other ways. On Watsuji’s relationship to Yoshimitsu, see Hanzawa Takaro, Kindai nihon no katorishizumu (Tokyo: Misuzu Shob, 1993), 32. 64 Oguma, <Minshu> to , 133, 846, n. 58. 65 Tanaka Ktar, “Katorishizumu to kokusuishugi to jiyshugi: Tosaka Jun-shi ni kotau,” Yomiuri Shimbun, June 1, 1935, reprinted in Tanaka, Kyy to bunka no kiso (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1937), 563-4.

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values, for he had argued even during the war that moral values were crucial to the health of a society. He saw no reason that the old liberals’ argument that the monarchy, now constitutionally framed around a sovereign nation (kokumin), could not effectively express the social values of a postwar, pacifist nation. His voice in support of the constitutional symbol-monarch was important, especially since he offered this support openly as a Christian, not as a Shintoist. As a Catholic and a liberal democrat, Tanaka combined Fukuzawa Yukichi’s idea of the monarch as a symbol of national values with Maeda and Lignuel’s defense of Catholicism as a legitimate faith for patriotic Japanese who were loyal to their monarch. Tanaka’s support for the monarchy, as a liberal Christian Japanese, was neither novel nor exceptional: he drew from a tradition that was almost as old as the constitutional monarchy itself. These debates over whether the monarchy would survive and what form and function it might have in the postwar era were brought to an end, in one sense, on 3 May 1952, when the new Constitution of Japan went into effect. Chapter One, Article One of the new constitution spelled out the emperor’s role and his relationship to the newly sovereign nation: Article One. The position of the Emperor, the sovereign nation (kokumin shuken). The Emperor is a symbol of the Japanese State (nihon koku no shch) and a symbol of the unity of the Japanese nation (nihon kokumin tg), and this position is founded in the general will of the Japanese nation (nihon kokumin) which is sovereign.66

The new constitution enshrined in the highest law of the land the position of the “old liberals” that the emperor was “a symbol of the nation” and that this function was derived from the “general will” of the Japanese nation. Tanaka’s support for the postwar revision of the emperor system as a liberal, democratic form of monarchy was public and undeniable. As Minister of Education in Yoshida Shigeru’s cabinet, his name appeared in the official preamble to the constitution when it was announced on 3 November 1946. This support for the postwar monarchy by a prominent, liberal, Catholic jurist is important to recall when, in later years, critiques would be leveled that the constitution merely gave a new lease on life for State Shintoism in 66 Nihon koku kemp, Kdansha gakujutsu bunko 678, (Tokyo: Kdansha, 1985), 12. I have retranslated the original to emphasize the nationalism explicit in the Japanese. Here is the official translation, from the same source: “Article 1. The Emperor shall be the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people, deriving his position from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power” (116).

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postwar Japan. Certainly, as a Christian, Tanaka did not worship the Japanese monarch as a living god. The constitution settled the question of whether the monarchy would survive and established its role as subordinate to the legal and political oversight of the Diet. But the constitution and its legal settlement of the monarchy’s role in the new nation did not end all debates over the monarchy. Rather, in Kimura Junji’s succinct phrasing, it merely “shifted [the debate] from the direct engagement over abolishment or defense [of the monarchy] to an effort to get a new, objective handle on the emperor system.”67 In short, after 1952, the question of the monarchy became an academic one, where issues of values, moral consciousness and cultural identity played larger roles than sovereignty, law and political structure. The constitutional settlement did not address the question of whether the monarch should be considered the chieftain of the Japanese ethnic nation any more effectively than the Meiji Constitution had. Nor did it clarify whether the “symbolic” status of the monarch gave him symbolic religious value as the chief priest of Shintoism. Consequently, academics and others have continued to debate, and thus to establish, the meaning of this “symbol emperor” through the postwar period. The most influential of these postwar academics was Maruyama Masao and those such as Matsumoto Sannosuke, Fujita Shz, and Kamishima Jir who drew from his ideas to frame a particular approach to understanding the monarchy. This group has often been called the “Maruyama School,” or even the “Modernization School,” because they shared Maruyama’s belief that a premodern form of communal identity was retained and subtly incorporated into the modern monarchy and that the ideology of monarchy in modern Japan functioned to perpetuate this sense of premodern communal identity. Perhaps the most interesting member of the Maruyama School was Hashikawa Bunz. Hashikawa suggested that it was not easy to distinguish modern and premodern forms of thought from within the modern episteme and he raised questions about how well Maruyama could analyze in objective, social scientific terms the ideological structure that he himself inhabited. Hashikawa turned his attention to Yasuda Yojr and the Japan Romantic School to understand how aesthetic nationalism functioned during the war at a non-intellectual level.68

67 68

Kimura Junji, “Tennron no keif,” 219. Kimura, 219-20.

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Historians also have raised persistent questions about the continuity of the monarchical house based on research into its earliest history. Mizuno Hiroshi, influenced by the historical positivism of Tsuda Skichi, rejected the notion of an unbroken monarchical line going back to the age of the gods. He argued in his 1952 Introduction to a Historical Theory of the Ancient Japanese Monarchy that there were three distinct dynasties in the ancient period, each with their own blood lines. In more recent years, Amino Yoshihiko has built on Mizuno’s approach, extending his argument into medieval Japanese history with creative results. Amino attacked the notion of the Japanese as an agrarian nation and the monarch as the chief planter in this rice culture. His key argument was that a transformation of the monarchy had occurred in the late medieval period. According to Amino, Emperor Godaigo (1288-1339) spearheaded this transformation when he sought support for a restoration of the monarchy from anyone who would be useful in challenging the power of local authorities. This included especially mobilizing artisans, craftsmen, fishers and even social outcastes and criminals—precisely those who were alienated from the agrarian social order.69 In the medieval period, it was largely the “non-agrarian people” who turned to the emperor for their hopes of liberation. Godaigo’s effort at imperial restoration failed, at least in terms of his own short-term objective of gaining power. But Amino suggests that Godaigo’s failed restorationist bid had a deeper, long-lasting influence on the meaning of the monarchy for subsequent Japanese history: it created the tradition of the monarchy as a idealized space of freedom for those oppressed by local authorities, a tradition that would not only shape the Meiji Restoration, but subsequent efforts at “restoration” ever since. If historians have explored the meaning of the symbol emperor through temporal analysis, social scientists, inspired by the anthropological methods of Yamaguchi Masao, have applied spatial and cultural analyses with rich results. Yamaguchi introduced a structuralist method based on the juxtaposition of concepts of center and periphery, everyday and non-everyday, order and disorder to situate Japan’s monarch in a general anthropological theory of kingship. In such works as Portraits of the Mikado (1986) and The Mikado and Fin du siècle: The Logic of Kingship (1987) Yamaguchi 69 Amino Yoshihiko, Ikei no ken, Nihon chsei no hi-ngymin to tenn, cited in Kimura, 220-22.

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located the Japanese monarchy in a general theory of kinship, which explored the meaning of the Japanese monarch in a context far removed from the kind of cultural particularism that had informed the wartime theory of kokutai.70 Yamaguchi’s structuralist approach has been quite influential on academic discourse on the monarchy and it deserves credit for trying to locate the Japanese monarchy in a universal structure of analysis. In this sense, it can be placed alongside efforts by the “old liberals” like Tanaka Ktar who sought to locate the Japanese monarchy in a universal scope of natural law. A key difference, however, lies in Yamaguchi’s academic language and audience that rendered his analysis of the monarchy in such abstract theoretical terms that it often seemed remote from the problem of nationalism. Yamaguchi’s abstracting of the monarchy from its concrete historical setting may well have been strategic. During the 1970s and 1980s, as Marxist theories increasingly began to lose their appeal among the Japanese public, the main concern of the liberals who supported the symbolic monarchy was the rise of rightist nationalism and renewed arguments for a restoration of imperial rule. While they certainly did not ignore cultural aspects of the monarchy, these rightwing nationalists emphasized its political significance, especially its importance to nationalism. For them, Japanese nationalism simply could not permit a continuation of the postwar symbolic monarchy which they saw as imposed on Japan by a foreign conquering army. Mishima Yukio’s dramatic suicide (after his failed call for a revolution of the postwar order) may be taken as a watershed in this neo-rightist discourse on the emperor. It was followed by Hayashi Fusao’s publication of A Thesis on Jimmu Tenn as Really Existing (Jimmu tenn jitsuzai ron, 1971; republished as Tenn no kigen, 1988; reprinted together as Tenn no kigen, 2002). Hayashi was one of the key members of the wartime Japan Romantic School that Mishima had idolized, and he certainly was an advocate of the ethnic nationalism that Miwa argues attended the conceptualization of the monarchy as a tenn. Hayashi’s argument was, at least, an interesting one. Rather than accept the premise that Tsuda’s views were identical with those of the “self-styled Tsuda School” (i.e., Hani Gor, Inoue Kiyoshi, Wakamori Tar, Ienaga Sabur), he cited Tsuda’s own writings to show that Tsuda himself never went as far as his postwar epigones did in denying the historical reality of the early emperors. 70

Kimura, 222-3.

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He pointed out that while Tsuda did say that the narratives about the earlier emperors were unreliable, he did not say that, therefore, the early emperors were not historical persons. This nuance was lost on the postwar “Tsuda School” that read more into Tsuda than Tsuda’s own texts allowed, as Hayashi enjoyed pointing out. Second, while Tsuda recognized that the early myths depicted the origins of ethnic groups with close connections to the monarchy, he never asserted that they were narratives on ethnic national identity, nor did he indicate a positive or negative assessment of that fact. Yet, the “Tsuda School,” animated by the post-imperial embrace of ethnicity, drew the conclusion that since “the Myths ignored the ethnic nation [minzoku], they were ‘works of political deception and oppression” that were against the people [han-jimmin-teki].71 Hayashi himself was deeply sympathetic to ethnic nationalism, but what concerned him most were these leftist ethnic nationalists that conceived their ethnic nationalism in opposition to the monarchy. Hayashi’s ideas had resonance long after his death in 1975. From the 1970s through the 1980s, a host of right wing nationalist groups had begun to form alliances over a variety of strategic issues (eg., the non-proliferation treaty, anti-communism, opposition to the YaltaPotsdam, or YP, system). When Emperor Hirohito fell gravely ill in September 1988 and the mainstream media began prematurely predicting his death, reaching a feverish pitch between 20 September and 15 October, both old conservative and neo-conservative groups rallied to protest what they felt was disrespectful reporting on the monarch. They hoped that the new monarch would take the opportunity to sweep away the postwar order (“the YP system”), call for a revision of the constitution and establish a direct, monarchical rule. They were dealt a blow on 9 January 1989, when the new emperor spoke at his first press conference in the Matsu-no-Ma room of the Imperial Palace. His views, addressed to the Japanese nation, were expressed clearly and directly: I will not cease working with you to protect the Constitution of Japan and I pledge to fulfill my constitutional duties, never ceasing in my

71

Hayashi Fusao, Jimmu tenn jitsuzai ron (Tokyo: Mitsubunsha, 1971) reprinted as Tenn no kigen (Tokyo: Natsume Shob, 2002), 375-6.

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hopes for the nation’s prosperity and an increase in world peace and the welfare of humanity.72

Since the ultimate goal of the right-wing ethnic nationalists was the return of direct monarchy, the support of the new monarch for the postwar constitution came as “profound shock.”73 Emperor Akihito’s statement posed a crisis for the conservative nationalists, since now they could not support direct monarchy without contradicting the monarch’s own expressed wishes. Their only solution was to argue that the monarch’s words were supplied by the government and that the Japanese monarch, unlike Western royalty, is not accustomed to divulging his true opinions in public. One rightwing leader called for the overthrow of the Takeshita cabinet for its role in orchestrating the Matsu-no-Ma declaration, and on 5 March two extremists were arrested after crashing a truck filled with gasoline into the Prime Minister’s residence. The date was significant: it was also on 5 March (1932) when the Ketsumeidan activist Hishinuma Gor took the life of Baron Dan Takuma.74 The message was clear: these rightwing extremists felt that, once again, the emperor was being held hostage by elite political and financial groups and was unable to serve the nation. The monarchical succession of Akihito brought to the fore the question of how the monarchy and the people should be understood in the context of newly energized debates over Japanese nationalism. Most broadly, there was a sense among supporters and detractors of the monarchy that with the passing of Hirohito there was an opportunity to gain a new start in the way the people and the monarch were related. Hopes were high on the left that, with a new monarchy, there might be a chance to return to the debate over war responsibility of the immediate postwar period, this time with a more satisfactory conclusion. Hopes were high on the right that Akihito still might respond in some way to their long-cherished goal of direct rule of the monarch. In the meantime, moderates caught in the middle continued to watch these developments with caution, hoping that postwar Japan’s experiment with democratic, constitutional monarchy would not be undermined from either extreme. Nobody seemed interested in

72

Emperor Akihito, “Matsu-no-ma address,” 9 January 1989, Imperial Palace; cited in Ino Kenji, “Heisei shin-jidai to uyoku sho-chry no dk,” in Ino et al., eds., Uyoku minokuha sran (Tokyo: Nijseiki Shoin, 1991) 42. 73 Ino, 42-43. 74 Ino, 44-45.

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replacing the term tenn with the more universal, if now somewhat antiquated, concept of the monarch as a ktei. Some significant changes had developed over the final decades of Hirohito’s reign. On 17 October 1978, Yasukuni Shinto Shrine officially enshrined the souls of fourteen “Class A” war criminals from World War II, along with thousands of other who died in service of their country. Around that time, Emperor Hirohito suspended his annual visits to the Shrine. But in 1984, Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, as part of his pronounced effort to encourage a sense of nationalism among the Japanese people, made the first official visit by a Japanese prime minister to the Shrine since the inclusion of the fourteen war criminals. But he too suspended official visits to the Shrine due to protests, mainly coming from China. Consequently, it was Prime Minister Hashimoto Rytar’s official visit to Yasukuni in 1996 that raised concern over whether the practice was here to stay. But, like Nakasone, Hashimoto also discontinued his visit in the face of protests. When in 2001 Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichir announced his decision to visit Yasukuni Shrine in an official capacity, the protests from many of Japanese Asian neighbors and even from some Japanese people grew vociferous. Much had changed since 1978 and even since Nakasone’s visit to Yasukuni in 1984. Japanese military participation in the War on Terror in Iraq mobilized Japanese troops outside of Asia for the first time in the postwar era, a growing number of Japanese, especially younger Japanese, called for a revision of the postwar constitution that formally seemed to prevent such non-defensive mobilization of troops, and a group of historical revisionists called The Liberal School of History submitted a new middle school textbook for government approval that emphasized the function of historical education in creating civic consciousness.75 For neo-nationalists, these trends gave reason for optimism that the postwar, indeed modern, alienation of the people from the state was being overcome through a renewed national pride. For the left, there was considerable anxiety, even panic, that the monarchy was becoming the lynchpin of this new, unapologetic nationalism. One of the most influential critics of the monarchy from the left is Takahashi Tetsuya, who has done more than perhaps any other person in Japan to bring back the war responsibility debate of the early 75 On this change of atmosphere in nationalist debate at the close of the last millennium, see Rikki Kersten’s important article, “Neo-nationalism and the ‘Liberal School of History’,” Japan Forum, 11 (2) 1999: 191-203.

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postwar years. In a series of influential books and articles and on television programs, Takahashi has contested the Liberal School of History, maintaining that far from being a victim of his advisors, Emperor Hirohito had considerable personal responsibility for the war, a responsibility which was never satisfactorily acknowledged. As Rikki Kersten has pointed out in her superb assessment of Takahashi’s views, “Takahashi argues that the severance of democracy and accountability has been preserved and institutionalized in the post-war symbol emperor system.”76 In essence, Takahashi has taken the liberal argument on the “symbolic monarchy” and turned it upside down. As we have seen, liberals from Fukuzawa to Minobe to Tanaka have argued that, precisely because the emperor was removed from a direct role in politics, there was an opening for constitutional democratic forces (“the people”) to engage in the public realm. By elevating the emperor to a “symbolic” or “organic” role, the prewar and postwar constitutional monarchy provided for various degrees of democratic input. Conversely, Takahashi maintains that the abstraction of the monarch as a “symbol” of the people’s unity has served as a barrier to democracy because the monarchy (and Hirohito in particular) was allowed to continue to function in the postwar period, without ever fully accounting for its role in leading the nation to war. The effect of this symbolic monarchy, according to Takahashi, has been to co-join the emperor and the people in a “system of irresponsibility” that is the hallmark of postwar Japanese nationalism. While Takahashi’s intent is to conjure up a trans-national (especially pan-Asian) subjectivity, the terms of his analysis ironically suggest a rather cohesive nationalism through this bond between the emperor and the people as collaborators in this postwar “system of irresponsibility;” more so than in fact may be warranted. From the beginnings of modern Japanese political history, the monarchy has played an important role. But it is not accurate to say, as some cultural exceptionalists have, that monarchy (either as tenno, “emperor-system” or however else expressed) is the essence of Japanese nationalism, or that Japanese nationalism cannot be understood apart from the monarchy. It would be more accurate to say the monarchy cannot be understood unless it is first conceived apart from nationalism. Nationalism, in Japan as elsewhere, is always a question of how the people are conceived as a unit and then 76

Rikki Kersten, “Revisionism, reaction and the ‘symbol emperor’ in post-war Japan,” Japan Forum 15 (1) 2003: 15-31, at 20.

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represented as possessing a common sentiment of solidarity. The monarchy has had a long history of appealing to many in Japan who have sought to overturn existing political arrangements, and with the construction of the Meiji state around the rhetoric of monarchical restoration, the monarch has loomed large in all efforts, whether “top down” or “bottom up,” to approximate a more perfect national unity. Thus, even before 1946, the Japanese monarchy had served as a symbol for many groups and for many political agendas. Whether the monarchy does or will serve as a nationalist symbol, and whether that nationalist symbol can augment democratic values within the nation, are not questions that can be answered through conceptual or historical analysis of the monarchy itself but will always need to be assessed on the basis of values and contexts that exist outside of the monarchy itself.

CHAPTER FOUR

SHAKAI This chapter explores the permeations on Japanese collective consciousness of a concept and reality that we now recognize as “society” (shakai). Even more so than with the previous chapter, some explanation may be warranted as to why the concept of society figures so prominently in an intellectual history of nationalism. This is especially the case when many historians of Japan, particularly since the end of World War II, write as though “society” were not merely an entirely different matter than nationalism but even a prophylactic against the infectious spread of nationalism. Society–and building on that concept, socialism–is supposed to provide an alternative to the hierarchical, oppressive ideology which they associate with “nationalism”: the more of one, the less of the other, or so we are told. In most cases, this argument is not so much wrong as it is ambiguous, or at least under-articulated. To conclude that “society” and “the nation” are at loggerheads depends greatly on how both concepts of society and nation are conceived and understood. Usually, the claim that society and nation are at odds rests on an implicit understanding of “nation” as interchangeable with the state (kokka) and society as a rather undifferentiated mass of “the people” conceived in opposition to the state. When understood in these terms, the argument about “state versus society” has more than a certain ring of veracity to it. But at the same time, to the extent that “society” refers to the Japanese people as a whole, it is deeply entrenched in the appeal of nationalism as an ideology that upholds the people as the sole legitimate subject of politics. Consequently, while society may be mobilized at times against the state, it may also act in parallel with the nation (e.g., “the nation against the state”) to the point that society and nation can become all but indistinguishable. For that reason, at the very least, a sustained look at the manner in which society was represented and mobilized in modern Japanese history is necessary when delineating the contours of nationalism and its effort to place the people in modern political arrangements.

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Before turning to the historical details of how society (shakai) came to be conceived in modern Japan, it is useful to get a broader view of the relationship of society and the nation as a generic problem of modernity. Most social theorists agree that society is a distinctively modern phenomenon and one that is reproduced in the modernity of sociology, the discipline that takes society as its object of study. Anthony Giddens is no exception, and his analysis of the relationship of society and nation is good place to start: Authors who regard sociology as the study of ‘societies’ have in mind the societies associated with modernity. Now, understood in this way, ‘societies’ are plainly nation-states. Yet, although a sociologist speaking of a particular society might casually employ instead the terms ‘nation,’ or ‘country,’ the character of the nation-state is rarely directly theorized. In explicating the nature of modern societies, we have to capture the specific characteristics of the nation-state–a type of social community which contrasts in a radical way with pre-modern states.1

Because Giddens’s primary concern is not with the nation per se, but with what he calls a “post-modernity” that evokes new, more globalized arrangements of power, his failure to distinguish the particular features of nation-states from nations and states need not detain us here. Rather, what is important is his indication of how sociologists often refer to the nation as a functional equivalent of society, and how this national society is distinct from earlier kinds of societies. Giddens accepts the interchangeability of society and nation (even if he generalizes all nations as “nation-states”), arguing that “modern societies (nation-states), in some respects at any rate, have a clearly defined boundedness.”2 This emphasis on “boundedness” gives Giddens the opening to correlate nation with state, and thus to equate modern societies with this bounded “nation-state.” But even for specialists in political theory who generally recognize a distinction between nation and state, society is often both new to the modern era and deeply enmeshed in the logic of the nation. Ernest Gellner is perhaps the most influential theorist in this regard, having proposed his famous theorem that nations are the products of a shift from agrarian to industrial society. In contrast to Giddens, Gellner’s theory is not so much a spatially determined one as an internal, procedural one: nations result from internal changes (educational, 1 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 13. 2 Giddens, 14.

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cultural, economic, etc.) within societies that increase homogeneity and yield a new concept of the people as a nation. Bounded states are both a prior reality and an effect of this social transformation towards nations.3 Gellner takes us further in recognizing that modern societies are “nations” rather than “nation-states,” but it is Liah Greenfeld who provides the most definitive statement on the relationship of society to nation. Greenfeld emphasizes that nations are not so much the fruit of geographical or economic expansion as they are the result of conceptual transformations: National identity is one among many possible, and often coexisting and overlapping, identities–such as religious, estate, occupational, tribal, linguistic, territorial, class, gender, and more. In the modern world, national identity represents what may be called the ‘fundamental identity,’ the one that is believed to define the very essence of the individual, which the other identities may modify but slightly, and to which they are considered secondary. Modern societies are ‘nations’ by definition.4

In short, Greenfeld takes us even further to the heart of the matter than Giddens or Gellner by pointing out that “nationalism, not industrialization [or the bounded state] lies at the basis of modern society and represents its constitutive element.”5 If Greenfeld is right that nationalism is the constitutive element of modern society (and I think she is), then the conceptualization of society is at once a conceptualization of the nation. And an intellectual history of the idea of shakai, its contestations, alternatives, and assertions, are all central to any history of Japanese nationalism. Coming to Terms with Society in Meiji Japan The term shakai, which is used today in Japanese to refer to the concept of society, can be traced back to the Song period, where it appears in volume nine of the twelfth century Chinese text, Jinsi lu, in a comment that “when people of the communities formed an organization (shakai), he drew up regulations for them that made clear and distinguished between good and evil so the people might be encouraged to do good and be ashamed to do evil.”6 The earliest 3

Cf. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 39-52. 4 Liah Greenfeld, “Nationalism and Modernity,” Social Research vol. 63, issue 1, 3-40 (Spring 1996): 10. 5 Greenfeld, 8. 6 Morohashi Tetsuji, Dai kanwa jiten (Tokyo: Daishkan Shoten, 1959), 8: 416417. Although this reference to a twelfth century text is often cited by Japanese

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instance in Japanese, according to the renowned scholar of lexographical development, Sait Tsuyoshi, dates from the Edo period, but the term was a translation of the Dutch word for “cloistered monasteries” (Kloofters).7 For the roots of the modern Japanese concept of society, lexographical form is of less help than conceptual history. We must consider a wide variety of terms that were used in the late Edo and early Meiji dictionaries as equivalents of European terms for society: majiwaru (to associate), atsumaru (to assemble), ryohan, nakama, kumi, rench (companions), kai (association), kaisha (company), ksai (intercourse), yoriai, shkai (meeting), and shach (troupe).8 Early on, three terms emerged as favored translations for society: kaisha, ksai and setai (the way of the world). Of course, the English glosses provided above (and also below) are problematic: these Japanese terms have their own histories of lexical development that need to be followed independently to understand how they came to acquire the contemporary meanings with which I have glossed them here. These English “definitions” at best can only provide a sense of the range of possible nuance in the terms employed to capture this illusive sense of “society.” While all the glosses alert us to certain aspects of the modern concept of “society,” it is also evident that these early translation terms fell short of capturing the full meaning of the concept of society. Indeed, the very plurality of the terms employed suggests that a vigorous debate was still raging in the early Meiji years over how best to come to terms with this new concept of society. The conceptual ambiguity, even chaos, that underlay this terminological variation, can be seen in the struggles of early Meiji scholars to arrive at a definition of “society.” In his 1868 Conditions in the West, Fukuzawa Yukichi had yet to settle on a single translation for society, employing various terms such as ningen ksai (“human intercourse”), ksai (“intercourse”), majiu (“mingle”), kuni (“the scholars as the earliest instance of this compound shakai in China, it may have been preceded by earlier instamces, including a reference to an agrarian temple festival that is dated to the Jin Dynasty (265-420 A.D.). My thanks to my colleague Philip Kafalas for finding these references and translating them for me. 7 Sait Tsuyoshi, Meiji no kotoba: higashi kara nishi e no kakebashi (Tokyo: Kdansha, 1977), 192-4. 8 Sat Masayuki, “’Kojin no shgtai to shite no shakai’ to iu kangaekata no teichaku ni hatashita shoki shakaika no yakuwari” [“Society as Collective Individuality: The Introduction of Social Sciences in the Post War Japanese Curriculum”] Nihon Shakaika Kyiku Gakkai, ed., Shakaika kyiku kenky, no. 68 (June 20, 1993): 18-29, at 23.

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country”), and sejin (“the people”). Seven years later, in An Outline of Theory of Civilization, he added as translations for society kazoku no ksai (“intercourse between families”) and kunshin no ksai (“intercourse between lords and servants”). But most telling is his association of civilization with both country and society: Bummei is what is called in English “civilization.” That is, the word derives from the Latin civitas and means the country [kuni]. Thus, Civilization [bummei] is a word that describes the state of human society [ningen ksai] as it has reached a stage of improvement. It describes a unified state [ikkoku] that stands in opposition to the isolation of lawless barbarism.9

Here, we have evidence of a remarkable convergence of concepts and terms in an effort to approximate a social unity that simultaneously signaled the historical novelty of the sought-after unity. For Fukuzawa, civilization was connected to the country (kuni), which in turn could represent “society” and reach its final stage in national unification (ikkoku). As he understood it, this was an unprecedented effort to conceive and structure something that the Japanese people had yet to experience: not only a unified independent state, but an egalitarian society that would provide the foundation of that national state. Similarly, when Nakamura Masanao (Keiu) translated John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty as Jiy no ri (1872), he also used a wide variety of terms to render Mill’s concept of society. As Douglas Howland has noted, “the most striking idiosyncrasy in Jiy no ri is that Nakamura does not consistently differentiate between ‘society’ and ‘government.’ Nakamura’s reproduction of Mill’s text in Japanese is persistently simplified by the interchangeability of seifu (‘government’ or ‘administration’) and a host of translation terms for society.”10 These terms included seifu (government), nakama rench (“social group”), sezoku (the ways of the world), nakama (“by which I mean seifu”), jimmin no kaisha (“which means seifu”), kaisha, and smotojin (the whole people). As does Fukuzawa, Nakamura reveals in his translations an effort to locate a national totality through an engagement with this new concept of a “society.” And like Fukuzawa’s translations, Nakamura’s terms for society locate that 9 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Bummeiron no gairyaku, (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1931), 51; the translation is Dilworth and Hurst’s , 35. 10 Douglas Howland, Personal Liberty and Public Good: The Introduction of John Stuart Mill to Japan and China (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 64.

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totality in an uneasy relationship with the government, even though not completely absorbed by it. Although it is shocking to some scholars that Nakamura (and Fukuzawa) did not draw as sharp a distinction between state and society as we might expect today, we should not leap too quickly to a conclusion about the significance of their “failure” to distinguish state and society. The sharp line in Japanese political discourse between state and society was drawn as a result of later historical events, and we must be careful not to fall into anachronistic projections onto this time period. A better understanding of the development of the concept of society comes from a sensitivity to the historical developments that eventually made state and society seem as if they were essentially (rather than only contingently) in opposition. This opposition of state to society was not a salient feature of the early Meiji engagement with shakai, for the overriding concern of that time was to built a social whole, a nation or a state–or both–that could unite the Japanese people in the face of the challenges coming from the outside. Of course, this overriding concern with social integration does not mean that social conflict was unknown to the early Meiji social thinkers. But as Nishi Amane made clear, social tensions were not seen as ingredients of positive or “progressive” movements that ought to be encouraged, but as potentially anarchic forces that could threaten the peace and security of the people’s livelihood. In the process of articulating these concerns, Nishi introduced a term that seems to invoke a contemporary understanding of shakai as society (a misleading interpretation encouraged by William Reynolds Braisted’s anachronistic translation of Nishi’s shakai as “society”). In a February 1874 criticism of Fukuzawa, Nishi wrote [As for] Fukuzawa’s comparison of government to the life force within the human body and the people to an external stimulus…. I am obliged to take issue with his point… It is, then, very fine when the public spirit is strong and when society [sic., shakai] is upright. But it is most unfortunate when disturbances ultimately erupt after the emergence of factionalism…. What will be the end if factions successively proliferate one after another? There will be no limit to dissent and disruption in society [sic., shakai] brought on by these boastful braggarts who need not look far to learn the consequences of their behavior.11 11

Nishi Amane, “Higakusha shokubun ron,” in Meiroku Zasshi (issue, no. 2, 1874); English translation as “Criticism of the Essay on the Role of Scholars” in William Reynolds Braisted, trans., Meiroku Zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 25-29 at 27-28.

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Braisted’s translation of Nishi’s concept of shakai as society is understandable, as Nishi appears to conceive of shakai as an autonomous force that cannot be entirely controlled by the government (or “the state”), something quite close to the contemporary understanding of society held by most social theorists. Moreover, Nishi seems to intuit that political order is a function of the stability of this shakai, not the other way around. Nonetheless, Sait Tsuyoshi’s study has demonstrated that Nishi did not intend shakai as a translation for society; at the time, he still used other terms like sha or “aiseiy no michi” for direct translations of “society.”12 Whatever Nishi meant by “shakai” (social mores? morals?) it clearly had causal priority over, and autonomy from, the government. Nishi’s use of shakai makes Fukuchi Gen’ichir’s use of the same term (with phonetic script alongside the compound to read “society”) in his editorial in the 14 January 1875 issue of the Tokyo Nichi-Nichi newspaper all the more fascinating.13 Although Fukuchi had worked with Nakae Chmin, by 1874 he upheld the theory of monarchical sovereignty against the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. Thus, one might have expected him also to disagree with Nishi that the construction of shakai had priority over the reform of political institutions. But in fact, Fukuchi was very much a proponent of constructing a new society around the concept of heimin (commoners) and in abolishing the social privileges of the samurai. In fact, he hung a large sign in front of his home that read “Commoner Fukuchi Gen’ichir of Tokyo.”14 His firm understanding of the importance of building a new society is clear from the fact that, unlike Nishi’s use of the term shakai, Fukuchi’s was a direct translation of the concept of society. Moreover, because it appeared in a major newspaper editorial, it spread the term as a translation of society to a broader reading public. Thereafter the term grew in popularity: Mitsukuri Rinsh used shakai, again with phonetic marks for society, in his translation of Caspar Hopkins’s 1875 A Manual of American Ideas; Mori Arinori employed shakai for society in his speech published in the Meiroku

12

Sait, Meiji no kotoba, 184. While Fukuchi’s published editorial precedes Nishi’s article in the journal Meiroku Zasshi by a few weeks, that does not necessarily mean that his usages of shakai was prior or influential on Nishi. It was, however, the most influential on the Japanese public, due to its medium. For the unresolved debate over whose usage of shakai was “truly” the first, see Sait, Meiji no kotoba, 183-8. 14 Sakamoto Takao, Kindai nihon seishin shiron, Kdansha gakujutsu bunko 1246 (Tokyo: Kdansha, 1996), 251. 13

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Zasshi that year, and Fukuzawa himself used shakai in his journal Katei sdan, which he began publishing in September 1875.15 From this brief summary, we may conclude that from about 1875, the Japanese term shakai was clearly being accepted as the translation of the Western concept of society. But how did these translators understand shakai (or “society”)? The convergence in usage of the term shakai as a translation for society does not necessarily mean there was clear or uniform understanding of what society meant. Sat Masayuki has explored this question by analyzing the English dictionary that Fukuzawa, Nishi, and Nakamura used. That dictionary, Webster’s 2nd Edition (1864), provided two definitions for society: (1) A number of persons associated for any temporary or permanent objects; an association for mutual profit, pleasure, or usefulness; a social union; a partnership. (2) The persons, collectively considered, who live in any region or at any period; any community of individuals who are united together by any common bond of nearness or intercourse.16

Japanese of that time thought of the country, the old domain, or perhaps the extended “house” (ie) as fulfilling the second definition. This concept of society then was seen as a thoroughly privatized realm, rather than as a realm where public and private interests intersected in the construction of a social or national whole. The reason for the uncertainty and experimentation in translating the concept of society in early Meiji Japan is that there was no prior experience with society in this sense before Meiji Japanese began trying to translate it into Japanese. As Sat notes, “the society expressed through the application of the word shakai that was not in common parlance at the time did not sufficiently convey during the Meiji period the sense of society as a collective body of individuals”.17 Translation and social theory were as much acts of intervention oriented toward the construction of a social whole as they were mere objective renderings of that concept into the Japanese language. Indeed, the effort to establish a concept of society as a collective body of individuals did not prevent the unleashing of certain demons into the political discourse. We saw above in Chapter Two that 15

Sait Tsuyoshi, Meiji no kotoba,206-9. Webster’s 2nd Edition (1864); cited in Sat Masayuki, “’Kojin no shgtai to shite no shakai’ to iu kangaekata no teichaku ni hatashita shoki shakaika no yakuwari,” Shakai kagaku kyiku kenky, no. 68 (June 1993), 24. 17 Sat Masayuki, 25. 16

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Murota Mitsuyoshi translated Guizot’s concept of “society” as minzoku, (
), the earliest known instance of that Japanese word,18 and it is striking that it appeared first as a translation of “society.” Although Murota’s translation of society as minzoku did not last long in translations of Guizot (Nagamine Hideki replaced it with shakai the following year)19 it was an influential intervention in broader intellectual discourse, and its effects on understandings of society can be discerned in Taguchi Ukichi’s 1877 A Brief History of the Japanese Enlightenment. But most importantly, it revealed the underlying links between efforts to conceive of society and rising nationalist aspirations. In the middle of the 1870s, when the concept and reality of society were still largely undetermined, this translation of society as minzoku added to the confusion about what society meant, even as it pushed that discourse closer to the growing populist nationalist discourse of the day (which I take up in detail in Chapter Six). In any event, it provides clear linguistic evidence of the general point Greenfeld makes in social theory about the close relationship between “society“ and “nation“ and particularly the intimations of ethnic nationalism that often lie behind certain incantations of “society“ in modern Japan. Constructing Society, Conceiving of Shakai These efforts to translate Western ideas about society did not occur in a vacuum. To understand their significance, it is important to place them alongside efforts at social reform, or more accurately, the project of “building a society” in the early Meiji period. In the heady days following the Meiji Restoration, there were serious efforts by leading activists, intellectuals and bureaucrats to construct a new, more egalitarian social order. Almost immediately, social categories were re-organized in a gradual process that eventually led to the disestablishment of the privileged samurai class. This social reform was known as shimin bydo (“equalizing the four categories of the people”), and while of course inequalities inevitably re-emerged, it is most important for understanding the connection between society and nationalism to recognize the appeal of this broad effort by government and non-government leaders to encourage a more egalitarian society in law and in attitude.

18 19

Haga, Meiji kokka no keisei, 236. Sait Tsuyoshi, Meiji no kotoba, 209.

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The most striking example of this radical effort to build an egalitarian society was the effort by Kat Hiroyuki and e Taku20 and the “enlightened bureaucrats” (kaimeiha kanry) to outlaw discrimination against the historically persecuted outcaste people. Significantly, these people were referred to as “the filthy” (eta) or even “non-people” (hinin). Efforts to end this discrimination were nothing less than efforts to include these people within the category of “the people” that would constitute the foundation of a new national body. This anti-discrimination effort should not be misconstrued as an attempt to outlaw all social distinctions; after all, the categories of “aristocrat” (kazoku) and “former samurai” (shizoku) were left unchallenged, as was the position of the monarchy and the circle of monarchical family members (kzoku) that enjoyed the highest social position. Rather, the objective was to include all commoners in some fashion within the conceptual and legal contours of “society” or “the people.” In August 1871 these efforts were rewarded with the issuance of the “Ordinance Liberating the Outcastes” (Senmin Kaih Rei) which officially abolished the use of discriminatory language in reference to members of the outcaste and established their formal legal equality with commoners. Henceforth, they were to be known officially as “New Commoners.” The goal of this law was to remove one of the greatest barriers to constructing a social whole. The connection between the rising nationalism and this effort to outlaw social discrimination is noted by e Shinobu (even as his language betrays the statist bias mentioned above): The abolition of the status of despised people (eta, hinin) was considered a necessity by the new unified state. As Kat Hiroyuki insisted, for the new government that was seeking equality with the

20 e Taku (1847-1921) was a politician and entrepreneur from Kchi who had joined the anti-bakufu side in the Restoration. In addition to submitting the petition to abolish the Eta class in 1871, he was later jailed for thinking about raising an army to help Saig; in 1887 he founded the Daid Danketsu to heal divisions in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. He was elected to Diet in 1890, and as chair of the Budget Committee tried to work out a compromise between advocates for the government and of the people. Failing to win re-election in 1892, he then worked in railroad and anti-buraku discrimination movements. Later, he founded Teikoku Kdkai and became a Buddhist priest.

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Western Powers, the caste system not only contravened the laws of Heaven, but was a “national shame” (gokokujoku).21

There were limits to what a fiat from above could do to eradicate discriminatory attitudes and behaviors that had settled deeply into Japanese life. Even the use of the moniker “New Commoners” (shin heimin), whether in everyday life and parlance or in official documents like the family registers, undermined the intent of the law against social discrimination. Everyone knew that the “New Commoners” until recently had been the outcastes, and the issuance of an ukase did not easily overturn historically ingrained attitudes toward those people. In the late 1890s, the name “New Commoners” was replaced by an even more odious term, “Special Hamlet People” (tokushu burakumin) with equally limited success. This flawed effort to redress social inequalities–essentially, to construct a true nation–is a valuable reminder that nation building and social reform were advocated not only by populists who may have been antagonistic toward the new government but also by members of the government, along lines that cut across the government/people divide.22 The lesson of these efforts to outlaw social discrimination, the imposition of a conscription law in 1873 and many other laws that sought to reform society is not simply that they failed in certain respects. To expect laws to immediately transform a society and its traditional customs is to expect too much. Rather, the legal, political, social, economic and other areas of social reform that flooded Japan during the 1870s are important reminders that society itself was in flux even as journalists, intellectuals, and officials tried to understand and codify what “society” meant. It is important to try to glimpse this transformation as more than technical linguistic or legal reform, but as the inter-dynamic process it was. Concepts of society were put forth that both shaped and reflected certain understandings of society, and social reforms were implemented that both were influenced by and influenced social theories and translations. Two salient characteristics may be noted in of all these efforts to reshape society: a highly self-conscious sense that society needed to be, and could be, reshaped and improved; and a belief that models from other traditions, especially from the West, were appropriate sources for guidance. These convictions were emboldened by the realization that Japan still 21

e Shinobu, “Ka-shi-zokusei to ‘shin heimin,” 48-49 in Fujiwara Akira, Imai Seiichi and e Shinobu, eds., Kindai nihonshi no kiso chishiki (Tokyo: Yhikaku Bukkusu, 1979): 48-49. 22 Yamamuro Shin’ichi, Kindai nihon no chi to seiji, 157.

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lacked a political constitution that would define the nation in legal terms. Prior to, and in anticipation of, the establishment of such a constitution, social theories became a key place for the articulation of national imaginaries. Without doubt, the most important model for such national imaginaries was the French Revolution. It is well known that Nakae Chmin and his “French School” of translators were deeply affected by the French Revolution as a model for understanding the revolutionary impact of the Meiji Restoration on the new Japanese society. But it is too simplistic to think that there was a “French” school promoting the model of the French Revolution and an English and German school of translators opposed to it. In fact, during the 1870s, French and English social theories were the most dominant among Japanese translators of Western social theory; German theories came later. And in practice, there often was little distinction between French and English “schools,” with some “French” translators actually working through English translations of French texts. Nor was “France” exclusively a symbol of a republican ideology opposed to either a British or Prussian model of monarchical government, as is often thought. The Meiji (monarchical) government authorized its own translations from French political theory, and many government and anti-government scholars working in the “French” tradition (including Nakae) were critical of the extremism of the French Revolution.23 To grasp the role of France as a factor in Japanese social theory during the pre-constitutional years, it is helpful to begin with a general note on the differences between the French Revolution, the counter-Revolution in Germany, and the Meiji Restoration. The French Revolution unleashed populist forces that saw in the revolution hopes for liberation by overthrowing the Frankish ancien regime in the name of liberty and by scorning, under the banner of universal reason, religious institutions and practices as mere superstitions. But the French Revolution was not universally acclaimed even in France: it was bitterly opposed by powerful elements who retained considerable influence even after the Revolution. They welcomed the counter-revolution that German poets and writers inaugurated in the early nineteenth century by extolling ancient myths and local superstitions against the invasion of new universal ideals, and these conservative counter-revolutionists 23

Yamamuro Shin’ichi, “Mitsukuri Rinsh to Kawazu Sukeyuki: futari no shodai kch,” 312.

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sometimes turned toward a romantic, cultural view of the people as an ethnically defined Volk who would be led by elites such as themselves against the foreign enemy. Whether conceived as “society” or “Volk,” this idea of the nation as the people themselves rose to the fore as a result of the French Revolution and its attack on monarchy as the sovereign subject of national politics. The translation and uses of French and German social theory in Japan reflected the ambiguous nature of the Meiji Restoration, which captured aspects of both the progressive French Revolution and the German romantic movement’s cultural conservatism, along with its goal of constructing the national people as an organic social totality. Beyond these differences and prior to them lay an earlier political tradition in Japan that distinguished between the officials of government (kan) and the people (min) over whom they ruled. This traditional distinction between the people and the government allowed for a considerable range of options in incorporating modern social and national theories from Europe, even while sometimes reinforcing those social theories that drew a sharp distinction between state and society. Yet, throughout these debates, there was one strong difference between how the Meiji Restoration was received in Japan and how the French Revolution was received in France: The narratives that informed the various movements and people who played active roles in the Meiji period had some slight differences from each other, but one cannot overlook the fact that there was a kind of common core to them all. Almost everyone involved in the events had some kind of positive appraisal of the significance of the Meiji Restoration as reform (henkaku).24

For the most part, contestation over the significance of the Meiji Restoration was guided by a shared sense that it was an opportunity to make things better, and where it had failed to do so, the failure was a result of an “incomplete” Restoration, a corruption of the original goals of the Restoration, or a lack of resolve in implementing the full agenda of the Restoration. This belief remained strong throughout subsequent Japanese history, as witnessed in later calls for “a Taisho Restoration,” “a Showa Restoration,” and even most recently, “a Heisei Restoration.” Within this shared narrative of social progress through the Restoration, two important differences in strategy emerged that influenced the basic political structure of Meiji Japan and shaped the 24

Sakamoto, Meiji kokka no kensetsu, 16.

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development of debates over the role of the people and government thereafter. One arose in the continuing debate over whether the role of the government could be contained within the Edo ideal of “benevolent government” (jinsei) or whether a more revolutionary form of “enlightened” (bummei kaika) policy, with an active national citizenry, was required. These were not clearly divided schools of thought in the sense that partisans of each were consistently and clearly identifiable across the tumultuous changes of early Meiji politics. Rather, they were intellectual signposts around which shifting political allegiances and re-alignments often took place. Consequently, they are difficult to discern within traditional political or social histories of the era. But when seen within the intellectual history of the Meiji period, some underlying trajectories of this debate are discernable, and they impacted the conception of society and its political significance in different, but important, ways. Advocates of “benevolent rule” included elements within the fledging new government, such as kubo Toshimichi and Et Shimpei, as well as former daimyo like Shimizu Hisamitsu, Hirata school nativists, and local officials who sought to protect their traditional privileges from kubo’s centralizing policies. Although they employed different strategies, all shared an elitist view that “the people” were incapable of participating in government and would require benevolent leadership from an elite corps of rulers. Thus, while they could at times seem nationalist in their culturally exclusivist ideologies, they were not nationalist in the social sense, as they retained a traditionalist belief in political and social hierarchy and a dim view of the potentiality of the people as sovereign agents. A more radical view was put forward within the government by Kido Kin (Takayoshi) and Inoue Kaoru, by intermediaries like Shibusawa Eiichi, and outside the government by publicists like Fukuzawa Yukichi. Fukuzawa argued that “benevolent government” was simply a re-incarnation of the traditional “feudal” attitude of condescension toward the people. These modernizers called for a thorough transformation, not only of political institutions, but also of social mores and values as a condition for a responsible citizenry capable of self-government. Within the government, this position was most closely associated with the Ministry of Finance, especially in the early years when it was under the control of Inoue Kaoru. After Et Shimpei’s reorganization of the Dajkan during the Iwakura Mission, Inoue and Shibusawa resigned. But they submitted a petition that drew a sharp distinction between “political enlightenment” (seiri j no kaimei) and “popular [social] enlightenment” (minryoku j no

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kaimei) and argued that Et’s new cabinet had failed to take into account Japan’s current “social strength” (minryoku). Throughout his long career, Inoue never stopped criticizing Prussian constitutional law for its over-emphasis on the priority of the government and its lack of appreciation of the people’s will (min’i).25 Of course, Inoue’s point was in part a justification of his own policies of financial retrenchment (and thus tax relief) that had caused great friction with other ministries, particularly with Et’s Ministry of Justice. When Sasaki Takayuki returned from the Iwakura Mission, he responded to Inoue’s petition with great finesse, showing sympathy for Inoue’s difficult plight, but also insisting that “benevolent government” was completely compatible with Inoue’s emphasis on thrift.26 In short, Sasaki tried to retain political control by incorporating into the new government the appeal that “benevolent government” had for traditionalists, many of whom were not entirely reconciled to the revolutionary, new government. It was an entirely successful solution. These arguments for “benevolent government,” and the division it presumed between the people (“society”) and the government, may create the impression that there was continuity of tradition in the Meiji political and social order. It would be a mistake, however, to overemphasize continuity in the Meiji social order. Some historians of modern Japan have criticized modernization theory rightly for its overemphasis on the revolutionary nature of the Meiji Restoration, preferring to see instead a transitional period in which traditional cultural practices heroically resisted a cultural invasion from the West, as Japanese creatively adapted and indigenized Western culture beneath slogans that extolled the universal ways of modern, enlightened societies. Such revisionist arguments are of course as much indebted to the German counter-revolutionary theories of society as primoridal Volk as they are objective assessments of the ability of Western social theories to reshape Japanese society in the early Meiji period. It is important not to forget that the Meiji Restoration was, like the French Revolution, experienced in its own day as a revolutionary overthrow of existing social relations. As Kaji Ryichi reminds us, the problem of “society” in Meiji Japan cannot be understood without first recognizing these early revolutionary changes, including the abolishment of the shi-n-k-sh social castes in favor of equality of commoners; the abolishment of the samurai right to carry a sword; 25 26

Haga, 226-7. Sakamoto Takao, Meiji kokka no kensetsu, 99-102, 148-164.

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the abolishment of the tonsure and official concubines; and the abolishment of institutionalized discrimination against outcastes. While Kaji concedes that conservative ideas remained in some sectors of society, he emphasizes that “overall, [society] was permeated by foreign thought to the degree that it was almost a complete translation [of culture and society].”27 Perhaps one way beyond the morass of traditional culture versus modern politics is to shift our emphasis from cultural determinism to a greater appreciation of social change and the individual transformations that took place within it. Recognizing the influence of Western social theory is one way to understand the revolutionary impact of the Meiji Restoration on Japanese society. It also alerts us to the fact that social transformation was a distinct problem separate from, but interrelated with, the transformation of the political order and the rise of a modern state. By paying careful attention to the process of selective translations and adaptation of those Western theories into Japanese language to meet the needs of Japanese society, we can better appreciate the relevance and limitations of this social revolution that accompanied the process of building a modern nation during the Meiji period. One cannot overemphasize the seriousness of the question of society that was raised during the first two decades of the Meiji period. Until the constitutional form of the new government was settled and the modern state took form with the Imperial Diet and other political structures after 1890, concepts of society could and at times did function as equivalents for ideas of the nation. And the distinction between the nation and the state (or “the government”) was being developed at the very same time. Social definitions were often inextricable from national definitions in this period when nation and state in Japan were still open questions. Further, how these concepts eventually were resolved must be understood in the context of the social, intellectual and political requirements of the entire preconstitutional period. In the absence of a constitution that formally defined the state (and by defining the monarch as sovereign, defined away the possibility of national sovereignty), much was still up for grabs. Thus, one could say, to paraphrase Fukuzawa Yukichi, that until 1889, Meiji Japan had, at best, a fledgling government with an incipient society, but not yet a state or even a nation. At least, efforts to form the Japanese people into a nation were as much focused on social theory as they were on political and legal notions of what constituted a nation. And after the constitutional foreclosure of 27

Kaji Ryichi, Meiji no shakai mondai, 20.

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national sovereignty, theories of society functioned as surrogates for aspirations to nationhood. Society as a Problem During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, society was increasing articulated as a “problem” in Japanese political action and debate. Indeed, the sociologist Ishida Takeshi has suggested that “we might well consider shakai itself to have been established from the very start [in Japan] as a ‘problematic’ (mondai-teki) thing.”28 This problematizing of society can be traced to deepening tensions between self-appointed spokesmen for society (often activists with the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement) and government officials and police in the major cities, particularly in Tokyo. But it also resulted from the introduction of concepts of society that raised expectations for political empowerment that often seemed undercut by the political and economic developments of the 1880s. The decade of the 1880s was a fervent period of political debate which mainly focused on influencing the outcome of constitutional deliberations. But as the decade unfolded, high level government officials grew wary of the challenges raised in the name of the “people” and turned toward a renewed defense of monarchical prerogatives in its political structures and “benevolent rule” in its fiscal policies. As a result, nationalist expectations and resentments often exploded in various “social forms.” The social historian Makihara Norio has pointed out that the major issue in the newspapers of the early 1880s was the price of rice and the outbreak of suspicious fire in the cities, and he believes the two issues were related. The most destructive fire began on 26 December 1879, in and around the Nihombashi-Kyobashi neighborhood of Tokyo. It raged from noon until after seven at night, burning down 10,613 houses and killing 24 people. That fire was apparently apolitical in origin, caused by carelessness in extinguishing a charcoal cooking fire. But the ones that followed in 1880 were of a different nature. According to Home Ministry statistics, in 1880 44 percent of the 514 cases of fires in Tokyo were arson; in 1881, 58 percent of 495 cases were arson. When suspected arsons are included, the figures are 51 percent for 1880 and 62 percent for 1882. These patterns were true for other urban centers besides Tokyo, but what is striking is that none of the newspapers at the time seemed inclined to criticize those

28

Ishida Takeshi, Nihon no shakai kagaku, 47.

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who were setting the fires.29 The newspapers drew a clear connection between the sudden rise in the price of rice and acts of theft and arson. The reasons for theft are easy enough to surmise, but why arson? Makihara’s explanation is simple: if you were burned out, you would receive aid money and rice from the government.30 This was a case of “benevolent rule” meeting society. At a time when, in Makihara’s terms, Japan was in a transitional period between treating the people as objects of domainal authority (kyakubun) and nationals (kokumin), the very idea of society was mobilized to assert certain rights of the people against the government. No longer satisfied with passive status and not yet recognized as a sovereign nation, some people were acting on the notion that their status as “society” gave them certain rights vis à vis the government. This emerging antagonism between society and the government can be seen in efforts to reshape social consciousness by revising the very concept of society. Kat Hiroyuki, who for the last ten years had been an advocate of the People’s Rights Movement and–as we just saw–a leading figure in the effort to eradicate social discrimination, was starting to grow cautious in his attitude toward these social movements. In his 1880 translation of Bluntschli’s The Theory of the State, he used kaisha, the word that today means a company or large business, to render the concept of society. His rather eccentric choice of kaisha for “society” requires explanation, as it appears five years after shakai had been broadly accepted as the standard translation term for “society.” He was not implying that society is equivalent to a business or corporation. Rather, it seems his goal was to encourage a sense of society as a “coming together,” an integration of political and cultural forces with the state. Throughout the 1880s, as Kat moved away from the People’s Rights Movement toward a closer embrace of the state, he strategically coined neologisms by inverting the order of compounds to counter the more revolutionary concepts bandied about by anti-statist forces (see the discussion below in Chapter Six on Kat’s 1887 neologism of zokumin for nationality, instead of the more commonly accepted term, minzoku). This practice of yomigae (restatement) was popular among both people’s rights advocates and “rightists and cultural nationalists”31 and Kat was one of those unique Meiji intellectuals who could claim membership in both groups. If his kaisha was a restatement of shakai in this sense—an 29

Makihara, 22-25. Makihara, 23. 31 Irokawa, Culture of the Meiji Period, 106-7. 30

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effort to redefine society in terms that would encourage social consensus and cooperation with the government—it helps to explain why he proposed this unusual translation term so long after others had accepted shakai as the standard term for society. But Kat’s intervention was, in any event, too late. In 1881, Tokyo Imperial University began using shakai instead of setai in translating society. By 1885, its Department of Sociology was now referred to as the department of shakaigaku, rather than the department of setaigaku, the neologism coined by Inoue Tetsujir to render the concept of sociology.32 It was Inoue who, as we saw above in Chapter Three, precipitated a clash with Japanese Christians in the early 1890s. The two facts are not unrelated. There is no question that by the 1880s, Christians were playing a key role in highlighting problems in society, and their preferred term was shakai. Moreover, their understanding of society was often premised on the belief that society rested on certain universal norms and a moral autonomy that could not be reduced to politics or the government’s decrees. Inoue believed that the Christians, armed with their concept of shakai (which, recall, had its historical origins in religious groups in ancient China) were a potential threat to the state. Consider that the first organization with the name shakai in it was Tarui Tkichi’s Ty Shakait (Oriental Society Party)33 founded in 1882 in Shimabara, Nagasaki, the very site of a famous Christian uprising in 1637 that led to the outlawing of Christianity in Japan for the next 234 years. Tarui advocated social equality and was imprisoned in 1883 for his political activities. Historians generally hold that, while the term shakai as an equivalent for the modern concept of society emerged among intellectuals in the 1870s, the concept of shakai as society “did not come into common use until the 1890s.”34 Moreover, the broad familiarity with the concept of society is generally explained as a post Sino-Japanese war phenomenon, when the media regularly reported on something called the “social problem” (shakai mondai).35 For example, Kano Masanao argues that “the social problem came to the 32 On Inoue Tetsujir as the originator of the term seitaigaku, see “setaigaku,” in Shimmura Izuru, ed., Kjien (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1955), 1244 33 Kano Masanao, Kindai nihon shis annai, 232. 34 Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, p. 320, n. 37; attributed to Sait Tsuyoshi, Meiji no kotoba, 175-228. 35 The phrase shakai mondai is often rendered into English in the plural (“social problems”), a rendering which the Japanese language’s lack of specific singular/plural inflections permits, but one that erases the broader sense that it was society itself that was a problem, or in Ishida’s words, that society was “a problematic thing.”

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public’s attention after the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, when the term kas shakai appeared in the media as a means of describing the social effects of the Matsukata deflationary policies.”36 The problem with this analysis is that it is not easy to separate these historical assertions about the late nineteenth century from subsequent twentieth century events that influenced Kano’s analysis. In short, the rise of a socialist party in the early 1900s that saw society primarily through economic terms was a precondition for this historical analysis that, retrospectively, attributes the emergence of society in popular consciousness to economic causes. Undoubtedly, there is some truth to the economic-social nexus, and I will turn to that problem below. But this economic explanation remains partial. Just as the nation cannot be reduced to economic causes, so too was there more involved in the emergence of social consciousness–even society as a problem (shakai mondai)–than economics. For example, more attention needs to be given to Tarui and the Oriental Society Party’s role in events leading up to the Sino-Japanese War. When Tarui assisted the Korean enlightenment activist Kim Gyokukin (18511894) in the failed Kshin coup in 1884, the political turmoil brought the Japanese army into Korean domestic politics and set the stage for the Sino-Japanese War ten years later. Tarui was but one example of the “continental adventurers” (tairiku rnin) who turned to Asia in the late nineteenth century to enact social and national agendas that they felt could no longer succeed at home. It is also apparent that the Oriental Society Party was expressing and acting on a concept of society that functioned for some Japanese and Koreans as the equivalent of an unbounded concept of the nation, and like nationalism, motivated them to great personal sacrifice in their efforts to redress political (=social) grievances. Domestic economic issues of course also played a role in motivating people to take action in the name of “society.” The most notorious of these domestic issues was the Ashio Copper Mine Incident. During the late 1880s, the Watarase River in Ibaraki became polluted from runoff of the Ashio Copper Mine and this affected agricultural land along the riverbanks. Residents of the area repeatedly petitioned the government to stop the pollution and provide redress for the damage, but to no avail. In 1891 Tanaka Shz, a former activist in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, brought the issue national public attention when he raised 36

Kano Masanao, Kindai nihon shis annai, 232.

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the matter in the Diet, but the only concrete result was renewed government suppression of local protests against the pollution. Even the eruption of the Sino-Japanese war did not end the matter, and in 1897 a large group of farmers from the area descended on Tokyo and clashed with police. In 1901, they made a direct petition to the emperor for relief, which went unheeded. Around this time public opinion was inflamed by their sufferings, and socialists and intellectuals pressed the case. In 1902, the government established a Copper Pollution Investigative Committee, but the committee’s charge was limited to flood control matters. As the public’s attention shifted to the Russo-Japanese war, various construction projects began to improve conditions around the Watarase River, and finally with the death of Tanaka in 1913, the issue of the Ashio Copper Mine pollution no longer captured headlines. But the “social problem,” which the Ashio Copper Mine pollution incident had brought to the forefront of national attention, was now a major political issue that reshaped relations between the people and the government. Ishida argues that uneven modernization left a time lag between urban and rural areas in late nineteenth century Japan, so that the government was able to control the unrest in Watarase River region, where a consciousness of society was weak. But, he adds, the incident contributed to the “political socialization” of intellectuals like Uchimura Kanz, Kinoshita Naoe, and Sakai Toshihiko.37 Notably, these intellectuals were overwhelmingly Christian, as were the majority of those men who founded the Association for Research into the Social Problem in 1897, which the following year became the Society for the Study of Socialism. This Society laid the foundation of Japan’s socialist movement, which crystalized with the establishment of the “Social Democratic Party” by Abe Is, Katayama Sen, Kinoshita, Nishikawa Kjir, Kawakami Kiyoshi, and Ktoku Shusui–all Christians except Ktoku. The Party declared its commitment to “true socialism,” to the abolishment of the House of Lords, and its support of direct popular elections (it was immediately declared illegal and shut down). One result of all this was a general confusion in the public’s mind between “socialism” and “society.” Contributing to that confusion was the common association of the new concept of shakai, the “shakai mondai” of the Ashio Copper Mine pollution, and the socialists’ championing of the victims of the latter. Moreover, even the name of the new Party was not, strictly speaking, the socialist party, but “the Society-People-Sovereign [ie., 37

Ishida Takeshi, Nihon no shakai kagaku, 47, 50-51.

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“Social Democratic”] Party” (Shakai Minshu T). Consequently, as Ishida points out, the very concept of “society” began to be associated with idea of social misfits or “miscellany” (zatsu).38 Significantly, it was in 1899, at the height of the “social problem” that what it meant to be Japanese was first legally defined by the Nationality Act. At its core was a concept of the Japanese people, not as constitutionally defined “subjects,” but as a quasi-ethnic people. Specifically, the Act stipulated that those born to a Japanese father would be “Japanese people” (Nihonjin)-not the term Japanese subjects (Nihon shimmin) employed in the 1889 Constitution. As Yoon Keun-cha suggests, “the ethnic concept here of “the Japanese” was used as an unprecedented synonym for the legal concept of the Japanese subjects” (Nihon shimmin).39 Nonetheless, the Act did little to clarify who was a Japanese. At best, it expressed a tacit understanding that everyone who lived on the Japanese archipelago prior to the establishment of the Nationality Act was “Japanese”, completely sidestepping the question of Ainu or Okinawan identity. If this was an ethnic conception of national identity, it also was indifferent to Ainu and Ryukyuan ethnic claims of distinctiveness; alternatively, one could argue that it was a trans or quasi- ethnic identity; a claim to national identity that drew from ius sanguinus without restricting that “blood” to a clearly demarcated ethnic tradition. It left many questions unanswered. As Yoon has asked, how could one prove one’s father was Japanese, when the definition of Japanese identity merely rested on the tautological assertion that being Japanese meant having a Japanese father? At its most ridiculous, the Nationality Act was based on patrimonial lineage, but it was insufficient for proving even that Amaterasu mikami, the supposed ancestor of the emperor, was a Japanese!40 What is clear, however, is that this was not an explicit legal definition of the Japanese people as an ethnic nation, but a quasiethnic approach to national identity that is comparable to the mixed ethnic-civic nationality of Wilhelminian Germany. The Nationality Act was roughly simultaneously with the surge in ethnic national discourse in Japan (see Chapter Six below). But it was more an attempt to co-opt the appeal of ethnic nationalism within a legal framework than it was an effort by the imperial state to promote ethnic nationalism. Close attention to the language of the Act is 38

Ishida, 47. Yoon Keun-cha, Nihon kokumin ron, 99. 40 Yoon, 99. 39

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revealing: this official definition of the Japanese people by the government avoided the use of the term minzoku which was quickly becoming the favored term for representing Japanese nationality by critics of the government, whether on the far right or the left of the political spectrum. At any rate, it is generally accepted that while the concept of minzoku was at best only sporadically employed during the early years of the Meiji period, there was a dramatic shift towards acceptance and propagation of this concept of the ethnic nation by anti-state political activists during the last decade of the Meiji period, or around the beginning of the twentieth century.41 In this context, what the beginning of the twentieth century represented in terms of efforts to “place the people” in modern Japanese politics was a deepening divide between the elitist state and broad social and political critiques that increasingly turned to various incantations of “the people.” Taisho Sociology and the Problem of the “People” The Taisho period began, as the Meiji period had, with a crisis. Unfortunately, the “Taisho Political Crisis” is often neglected in histories of modern Japan or passed over as yet another intrigue that remained narrowly confined to internecine battles within elite political circles and thus at best of marginal significance to social history. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ishida Takeshi has argued that it was Katsura Tar’s inability to recognize the challenge posed by the new concept of society that ultimately caused the downfall of his cabinet.42 Similarly, Ikimatsu Keiz sees in these events clear evidence that the concept of the people (minsh) had gained enough strength to bring down a government.43 Katsura was prime minister first between 1901-06, from the beginnings of the socialist movement to the 1906 strikes against Tokyo streetcar price increases. Katsura’s second cabinet was from 1908 to 1911, culminating in Ktoku’s High Treason Case, his execution, and the beginning of the “winter” of the socialist movement. Katsura’s third and final cabinet fell in 1913, as a result of the Taisho Crisis. According to Ishida, Katsura’s tendency to draw a sharp distinction between matters that were political (seiji) and those merely social (shakai) was his political Achilles’ heel. Katsura, like other 41

Nishikawa Nagao, Kokumin kokka ron no shatei, 86. Ishida, Nihon no shakai kagaku, 47. 43 Ikimatsu Keiz, Gendai nihon shisshi 4 Taishki no shis to bunka (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1971), 30-45. 42

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politicians who saw themselves as servants of the state, had failed to comprehend this new concept of society that had come into general use between 1899 and 1910 and especially its significance for redefining nationalism. Rather than grasping the potential of this concept of society as a new concrete political subjectivity, these statists could only see “society” as a force for disorder and anarchy. This proved a fatal blow to Katsura’s career, as Ishida notes, for this new nationalist principle “was first expressed in the term minsh that emerged in the ‘protect the constitution’ movement of the Taisho Political Crisis.”44 Socialism emerged from its “winter period” in 1918, and, with its return, brought the politics of shakai back into play. The Japan Communist Party was established in 1922, but the communist insistence on atheism left the Christians who had been among the earliest and most ardent promoters of the new concept of society out in the cold. Abe Is and Katayama Tetsu thus founded the Social Masses Party (Shakai Minsh T) in 1926 to continue their work on behalf of society while adhering to their religious beliefs. In the context of this return of shakai, the incipient discipline of sociology was reformed in an effort to bridge the gap between politics and society that Katsura Tar had left in his wake. The most important theorist of this new sociology was Takata Yasuma. Takata coined a new phrase, “total society” (zentai shakai), in his 1919 Principles of Sociology as a means of establishing a new relationship between society, the state and other organizations of socio-political life.45 Reasserting the power of society against those who saw it merely as “marginal” or “miscellany,” Takata argued that society was in fact the primary force in modern life, the foundational unity on which political institutions like the state were premised. By the end of the 1920s, Takada had begun to emphasize harmony between competing elements of the social order, a shift H.D. Harootunian has nicely captured as a move from a gesellschaft understanding of society to a gemeinschaft one.46 In seeking a conceptual framework for this sense of society as a harmonic whole, Takata eventually arrived at the 44

Ishida, Nihon no shakai kagaku, 47, 73. Daid Yasujir, Takada shakaigaku, 143; see also H.D. Harootunian, “Disciplining Native Knowledge and Producing Place: Yanagita Kunio, Origuchi Shinobu, Takata Yasuma” and Nozomu Kawamura, “Sociology and Socialism in the Interwar Period” in J. Thomas Rimer, ed., Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals During the Interwar Years, esp., 71-73 and 122-124. 46 H.D. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism, 430. 45

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concept of the people as an ethnic group (minzoku), thus returning to one of the historical origins of the concept of shakai: a sense of the people as a national unity that was prior to, and independent of, the political definition of Japanese as subjects (shimmin) or even as defined through legal nationhood (kokuseki). Takata’s sociology was not the only social theory during the 1920s that foreground ethnicity as the foundation of the social unity. In 1923, the socialist yama Ikuo published his Social Foundations of Politics in which he agreed that the foundation of society was ethnic national identity (minzoku).47 But yama’s point was to present ethnic national identity as a replacement both for society (which he saw as a bourgeois structure of individualism) and the state (which he reduced to an instrument of capitalist exploitation of the people). Takata’s sociology, in contrast, emphasized the complexity and growth of modern society, and the need to contextualize minzoku in relationship to a state. In essence, if yama found minzoku to be an appealing substitute for shakai, it was to recapture the opposition to the state found in the early history of the concept of shakai but to update this social theory on the basis of the new concept of ethnic nationality that after World War I offered the most promise of a powerful weapon against the capitalist, imperialist state. For Takata, the whole point of sociology was to show how historical development in modern societies made possible a reconciliation between society and the state through the mediation of the national identity of minzoku. The real issue that animated much of subsequent sociology until the end of the war was how to discern what the precise conditions were for this social development and whether those conditions could–or should–be replicated in various societies under Japanese colonial rule. At this critical juncture in Japanese history, this new sociology was foregrounding the relationship of society and nation by turning to new concepts of ethnic national identity that the First World War had unleashed.48 The annals of the 1934 meeting of the Japanese Sociology Association provide a remarkable record of how society and nation had become intertwined. Usui Jish’s contribution was a long essay on “The Concept of Nation (kokumin)” in which he posited 47

See my discussion of yama’s social theory in “What is a Nation and Who Belongs?: National Narratives and the Ethnic Imagination in Twentieth-Century Japan,” The American Historical Review, vol. 102, no. 2 (April 1997): pp. 282-309. 48 See my discussion of “the sociology of ethnicity” in “Nakano Seiichi and Colonial Ethnicity Studies,” in Akitoshi Shimizu and Jan van Bremen, eds., Wartime Japanese Anthropology in Asia and the Pacific, Senri Ethnological Studies no. 65 (2003): pp. 109-129, esp., 111-116.

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the idea of nation in analogous terms to what society (shakai) had meant earlier: a community of people as distinct from, but not necessarily incompatible with, a political state. For Usui, the concept of nation (kokumin) was distinct from both state (kokka) and Volk (minzoku) in the sense of it being a community of culture (not blood). While Usui was more interested in the modern cultural possibilities of kokumin than the blood claims of minzoku, his overall argument was quite in keeping with Takata’s new sociology: the consciousness of being a community of national culture was a sociological phenomenon, not something dependent on the indoctrination efforts of a state.49 But Usui’s belief that minzoku was determined by blood and his turn instead to kokumin was not shared by most of the new sociologists. Instead, they were drawn to new “liberal” interpretations of ethnic identity as consciousness, and this opened up the possibility of exploring parallels between the concept of society and that of minzoku. Watanuki Tetsuo in a good example. His contribution was an essay nearly as long as Usui’s on “Ethnicity” (minzokusei) that drew from William McDougall’s The Group Mind to emphasize that even the nation as minzoku is a subjective matter of consciousness. Watanuki did not rest his case on theory, but illustrated the theory with historical examples of how Nagasaki and Tosa domains had their own historical forms of social consciousness throughout Japanese history. Watanuki’s point was that Japan was already a multi-cultural society, even prior to imperial expansion, and the historical development of this multi-cultural social consciousness was an openended, dynamic one. There was no theoretical reason to limit membership in Japanese society (or the Japanese nation) to those historical domains that constituted the core society.50 A better historical application of Takata’s sociological theories would be hard to find. Other sociologists in the 1934 annals also focused on the concept of nation, but it was Seki Eikichi’s article on “Ethnic Nationality as Basic Society” that best exemplified the direction of interwar sociology. Seki argued that previously certain sociologists (Takata?) had identified something called “total society” (zentai shakai) which they generally treated as an synonym for “community.” But Seki wanted to get closer to the true meaning of “total society”, which he found not in quantitative totality (merely adding up the various 49

Usui Jish, “Kokumin no gainen,” 46. Watanuki Tetsuo, “Minzokusei,” Nihon shakaigakka nenp, Shakaigaku, daini sh, 99-150 at 138-150. 50

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subunits of a society), but in the qualitative essence of Japanese society that made it distinctive from all other societies. Seki reported that most ordinary Japanese and even some scholars held the mistaken belief that this basic society or community in Japan was provided by the state (kokka). His job was to prove them (and any Marxist who held that class was the basic social form) wrong. The basic society of Japan, he maintained, was ethnic nationality (minzoku).51 Like most ethnic nationalists of his day, Seki quickly added that he recognized the historic presence of other ethnic groups in Japan (mainly Chinese), but that over the centuries, they had fully assimilated. Thus, Japan “had no need” to treat its assimilated Chinese the way Germany dealt with its Jews (who were like “a large cancer eating at the nest” of European ethnicities).52 Capitalism in Japan was ethnic capitalism, class was subordinated to ethnic nationality, and the world was nothing more than a space where ethnic nations vied with one another. Japan’s basic society, its ethnic identity, lay in its spirit, its “Yamato kokoro.”53 This ethnic spirit had been obscured by so much emphasis on the international forms which Japan had adopted from the West, but “right now this ethnic consciousness has moved out in the open from the subconsciousness to overt consciousness.”54 Seki was correct about one thing. Ethnic national consciousness (minzoku ishiki) was on the rise in the mid 1930s. Sociologists, including Koyama Eiz who had contributed to the 1934 annals of the association, played a key role in creating the modern discipline of ethnology. Official ethnology in Japan began in 1934, when Uno Enk and Ishida Kannosuke joined Koyama on the planning committee to oversee the establishment of the Japanese Society of Ethnology. The Society of Ethnology was founded on 10 November 1934 and began publishing The Japanese Journal of Ethnology in 1935. The Journal provided clear evidence in its pages of this conceptual emphasis on ethnicity as the basic component of social identity, as it drew its readers’ attentions to various Asian ethnicities outside of Japan. These developments reached a benchmark on 18 January 1943 when the Ethnic Research Institute was established under the direct control of the Ministry of Education. Its director was

51 Seki Eikichi, “Kiso shakai to shite no minzoku,” Nihon shakaigakka nenp, Shakaigaku, daini sh, 217-241, at 217-8. 52 Seki Eikichi, “Kiso shakai to shite no minzoku,” 233. 53 Seki Eikichi, “Kiso shakai to shite no minzoku,”236-7. 54 Seki Eikichi, “Kiso shakai to shite no minzoku,”237.

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Takada Yasuma.55 These institutional and disciplinary changes are stark evidence of how far this ethnic national consciousness had gone in substituting for social consciousness; or another way of putting it is that during the 1930s and 1940s, sociologists had sought in the idea of minzoku a means of reconnecting to the national imaginary that shakai had been founded in from its inception. Postwar Japan and Shakai If wartime sociologists had tried to place the people in the category of ethnic nationality as a final resolution to modern Japan’s long struggle with nation building, postwar sociologists turned to the concept of “society” (shakai) to achieve similar results. This elevation of shakai as the preferred surrogate for national identity was promoted by the Occupation as a safe, international, de-militarized and de-politicized mode of conceiving of the Japanese people. It was also explicitly a reversal of Takada’s shift from gesellschaft to gemeinschaft. Sat Masayuki writes that the indoctrination of Japanese children with this idea that “society is an assembly of individuals” was the primary objective of the Occupation.56 Immediately after the Occupation ended, one of the most influential of the wartime ethno-sociologists, Yanagita Kunio, reflected that this concept of shakai was a completely new idea for Japanese: As far as we could tell, this word shakai was a new word. When we were young, there was something called the shakai policy research association, and there was a time when it was mistaken for a bunch of socialists, so we felt that once again wouldn’t people start getting the wrong idea about this thing called shakai?…Among foreigners [Americans] there probably wasn’t anyone unfamiliar with the word “social.” But in Japan, I think there are quite a few grandmas who may have heard the word shakai but don’t grasp the concept.57

What could Yanagita have been thinking? We have already seen that historical research has established that the concept of shakai was already familiar to most Japanese by the 1890s (those “grandmas” of 1953 would have been young modern girls right when the concept 55

See my, “Building National Identity through Ethnicity: Ethnology in Wartime Japan and After.” The Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 27, no.1 (2001): pp. 1-39. 56 Sat Masayuki, “‘Kojin no shgtai to shite no shakai’ to iu kangaekata no teichaku ni hatashita shoki shakaika no yakuwari”, 26. 57 Yanagita Kunio, in Seij kyiku kenkyjo, ed., Shakaika no shin-kz (Tokyo: Jitsugy no Nihonsha, 1953); cited in Sat Masayuki, “‘Kojin no shgtai to shite no shakai’,” 25-6.

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was most prevalent in the media). To grasp the significance of Yanagita’s disavowal of shakai, it is essential to recognize that he was an advocate even in the postwar years of an ethnic theory of Japanese identity (see the discussion in Chapter Six of Yanagita’s rejection of a distinction between “folk” and “ethnic nation.”). In short, his comment reveals the contested nature of this postwar effort to redefine the Japanese people, not as an ethnic nation, but as a society of individuals. As laudatory as this effort to enhance individualism in Occupation Japan might seem, postwar educational and social reforms had the unintended consequence of furthering the divide between society and state, while inflaming a radical populist nationalism associated with shakai, but more frequently with minzoku. It did so by weakening–even extinguishing–political citizenship during the Occupation period when, in the absence of a Japanese state, “society” or “ethnic identity” were the most likely remaining forms through which the Japanese people could be conceived and expressed as a national whole. Until the new constitution came into effect in 1947, the Japanese were still not kokumin (and even after the constitution went into effect, until 1952 there was no koku, no Japanese independent state to which these min could be effectively incorporated). Yet, with the surrender on 2 September 1945 and the end of Imperial Japan, the Japanese people were no longer imperial subjects (shimmin). What were they? One suggestion came from 3,000 communists who were released from prison on 10 October 1945: their leaders, Tokuda Kyichi and Shiga Yoshio, appealed to “the people” (jimmin). This concept of the Japanese as jimmin was not only a functional replacement for “society,” but it was also a politically loaded one. Of course, it referred to the Japanese as the starving mass of physical humanity that they had been reduced to by war and poverty. But it also referred back to wartime Communist Party propaganda, specifically placing the Japanese people in a hostile relationship to the state. It was an ironic kind of anti-statist ideology since, as Ishida Takeshi has noted, what remained of the state was hardly something strong enough to be worthy of this kind of sustained anti-statism attack.58 As detailed below in Chapter Six, during this vacuum when there simply did not exist an independent Japanese state, there was a continuation and indeed enhancement of the wartime ethnic national (minzoku) theory of the people not only among the political right, but 58

Ishida Takeshi, Nihon no shakai kagaku, 161-7.

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especially among Marxists and the left. A turning point came in early 1948. Building on antipathy toward the American Occupation following General MacArthur’s suspension of the planned 1 February 1947 General Strike, the Communist Party had begun to consider the Americans their enemy rather than their friend. This attitude hardened as Mao’s communist forces began to emerge victorious, and the US began to mobilize for war against communism in Korea. In February 1948, in the midst of these developments, the Japanese Communist Party announced its support for “ethnic national fronts” and began to emphasize the idea of minzoku (ethnic nation) as its preferred way of referring to “the people” or “society.” This minzoku discourse was not censored, largely because SCAP did not recognize the role played by ethnic nationalism in wartime propaganda, and the turn to minzoku social theory by communists seemed to support the conclusion that it was not a reactionary ideology. In any event, the Occupation’s attention was concentrated on the more apparent dangers of institutional and militarist expressions of nationalism, which generally were located in relation to statism, not ethnic nationalism or social theory. While the Occupation did try to promote a new consciousness of society premised on individualism, it was much less concerned with backlash from ethnic pride or cultural nationalism. Like the Japanese police during the Imperial period, they simply did not believe that such ideas could pose a threat to the order and stability of the public realm. It was a momentous oversight, for it allowed a virulent nationalism to fester beneath the radar screen as a mere form of “social theory.” The Occupation’s new individualist concept of society was supported by progressive intellectuals who believed that a new society could be built without too much concern over the dregs of wartime ethno-sociology. These intellectuals were called the “Civil Society School” (shimin shakaiha) and included such luminaries as Maruyama Masao in political science and tsuka Hisao in economic history. While most had been influenced by, and were sympathetic in some ways, to Marxism, they were willing to pursue their social agendas within the framework of the American Occupation. This required finesse. Generally favorably predisposed toward modernization, they viewed the Occupation as an unprecedented opportunity to complete the unfinished project of modernity in Japan by shaping a true nation (kokumin) through reform of consciousness and social structures. These intellectuals upheld the principle of universality against the increasing particularism and ethnic nationalism of the Marxists. Maruyama found universalism in “a

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modern way of thinking” that could not be simply equated with the West; similarly, tsuka located the grounding of universal values in Christianity which he understood was more than a mode of Western culture.59 Yet, even as the progressive intellectuals tried to reshape society through reforming social consciousness, society itself was shifting toward a materialistic, consumerist society that Ishida identifies as “taish shakai.”60 He traces this social change to the 1955 economic recovery spurred by the supply of munitions for the Korean War and through the “high growth economics” of the 1960s. It was a complete reversal of the jimmin society of the 1950s: then, Japan was a nation of hungry, needy people; now, it was a nation of affluent consumers. This “economic animal” theory of Japanese society has lasted at least 40 years. But even during its incipient period, sensitive minds recognized its dangers and struggled to provide an alternative. One of the most important of these alternative voices was that of Shimizu Ikutar. Trained in social science in the prewar at Tokyo Imperial University, Shimizu was one of the most influential, and most interesting, social theorists in modern Japan. In 1946 he was appointed President of the Twentieth Century Research Institute, a group that included most of the postwar progressive intellectuals such as Maruyama, Tsuru Shigeto, Minami Hiroshi, Mashita Shin’ichi, Takashima Zen’ya and Hayashi Kentar. If there was one characteristic this disparate group of contentious intellectuals had in common, it was a general aversion to ideology and a pragmatic bent of mind.61 This was certainly true of Shimizu, who worked in, but never was completely possessed by, any of the major intellectual currents of modern Japan. Shimizu recognized that during this unprecedented period of change in Japan, the most important element in a reform of society was the reformation of values that might bring the Japanese people together in a common cause and give meaning back to their lives. Rikki Kersten has articulated Shimizu’s contribution to postwar social theory so well it is best to yield to her: While many intellectuals saw the lesson of war as the need to distance society from the State, Shimizu turned his critical gaze towards his fellow thinkers, and more importantly, towards society-at-large. Shimizu argued at the time that for him, defeat was not so much a

59

Ishida Takeshi, Nihon no shakai kagaku, 189. Ishida Takeshi, Nihon no shakai kagaku, 172-3. 61 Ishida Takeshi, Nihon no shakai kagaku, 176. 60

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change in value orientation on the part of society, as it was a wholesale collapse of values: this is not a turning point, rather it is a time of destruction or collapse, or at least it contains the danger of becoming so’. Moreover, it was an act of self-deception to believe that defeat per se could be invested with meaning. Shimizu stands apart from his peers immediately following the war in that he showed more concern for the development of society than he did hostility towards the State…. Whereas colleagues such as Maruyama saw defeat as a great liberation, Shimizu saw mainly disconcerting continuity: We know that from the outbreak of war through to its prosecution and then onto the contemporary trend in democracy, people who have no sense of independence at all are casting a long shadow.’ For the most part, this kind of undesirable continuity could be seen in society at large. Shimizu’s formula for postwar society was very similar to his formula for the imperfect wartime society…. The implementation of a completely new system of social organization could only be achieved by changing people’s attitudes, and having them act in concert. Merely imposing a system externally would achieve nothing. In postwar the greatest impediment to this kind of actualisation of democracy was not the State, it was society itself.”62

The remaining question was what kind of values should be promoted in order that people might change their attitudes in a democratic direction. It was not merely a matter of coming up with the correct definition of the people–although that was very important. Shimizu himself preferred a conception of the Japanese people as the shomin, the common man. This concept had the advantage of connecting to Japanese tradition without relying on any explicitly racial or ethnic assumption. It conceived of the people in a manner that created an opening between the people and the government. It carried none of the essential anti-statism of minzoku, nor was it necessarily invested in the state as was kokumin. Consequently, Shimizu found in this idea of the people as shomin the foundations on which to build the values of civil society. Again, let us turn to Kersten’s words to guide us in understanding Shimizu’s theory of civil society: In 1940, Shimizu had defined the modern manifestation of society, civil society, as something that emerged in a process of opposition and resistance to the State: ‘[civil society] should represent a modern society that is established in opposition to an absolutist State and through liberating itself from that State’…. Because of the war experience, the State appeared in postwar as ‘at once more powerful 62

Rikki Kersten, “Shimizu Ikutar: Prophet of the Common Man 1931–1951,” 3233, in Shimizu Ikutar: The Heart of a Chameleon (forthcoming).

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and more fundamental’ than society. If creative self-conceptualisation on the part of society was to be achieved after 1945, Shimizu believed that the ghosts of the wartime State needed to be exorcised from the collective mentality. Thanks to the situation of crisis and enmity between the Japanese State and the rest of the world between 19311945, Japanese had been unable to develop the notion of civil society in a universal context. Civil society had by necessity been particularistic in its formulation. As a result, ‘society became something that belonged to Japan alone’.63

Shimizu’s point was that changing historical conditions required a changed assessment of the possibilities of the State and the right attitude of the people toward it. With the eventual end of the Occupation in sight, Shimizu turned toward raising a consciousness of patriotism among the Japanese people, as he understood patriotism as a valuation by the Japanese people of their own political agency, an essential first step toward the realization of Japan as an independent democratic state. His book Patriotism, published in 1950 and again in 1973, sought to provide the theoretical underpinning of this patriotic spirit required by civil society. It did so by explicitly relegating “ethnocentrism” (his translation of minzoku chshinshugi) to the past, and offering instead a broader sense of society that was framed by the institutions of modern life in a political, territorial state.64 For many among the “Civil Society School” theorists, the 1960 protests over the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty (“Anpo”) represented the greatest hope for civil society in postwar Japan. They saw in the broad movement that, in the aftermath of the Kishi government’s forceful passage of the revised Security Treaty, extended from left-wing and right-wing activists to include students, housewives and ordinary citizens, real evidence of the engaged citizenry that democratic society required. Ishida is only one of many social historians who found in Anpo the rise of the shimin.65 For some, this meant the emergence of powerful “people’s movements”, for others, a true “citizens’ movement,” and yet others wondered if these protests in the streets did not herald the beginning of an authentic civil society (shimin shakai).66 Yet, in the end, what emerged during 63

Kersten, 46. Shimizu Ikutar, Aikokushin (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1950), 23-34, 60-61. 65 Ishida Takeshi, Nihon no shakai kagaku, 195-207. 66 See, for example, Shirotsuka Noboru, “’Shimin shakai’ no imji to genjitsu,” Shis no.6 (June, 1966):1-15; Takabatake Michitoshi, “Shimin und no soshiki genri,” trans. by James L. Huffman as “Citizens’ Movements: Organizing the Spontaneous,” in J. Victor Koschmann, ed., Authority and the Individual in Japan: Citizen Protest in Historical Perspective (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1978): 64

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this decade of fractious protests was less civil society than a protest culture that grew increasingly remote from democratic engagement and more a matter of self-expression and anti-statism. Looking back at the start of the next decade, Inoue Shun summarized the results of the 1960s in terms of what he identified as “the anti-statism of the young people.”67 Indeed, the deepening antagonism with the state, not only among the young, but on the part of Japanese society itself, did not bode well for prospects of a democratic civil society since, as Jean Bethke Elshtain has noted, “the state, properly chastened, plays a vital role in a democratic society.”68 Shimizu was trying to say much the same thing as Elshtain, but this nuanced approach to the state was largely drowned out during the 1960s and 1970s. As the more openly political protests against the state receded in the mid-1970s, cultural theory returned as a surrogate nation, as it generally worked through sociology and other social sciences. Known in Japanese as Nihonjinron (“the discourse on being Japanese”), this body of psuedo-scientific writing claimed, in various terms, that Japanese society was constructed as a differentia specifica, a society “uniquely unique” in the world. Nihonjinron theories rarely referred explicitly to the concept of shakai as framework for this differentia specifica.69 Much more common was a reliance on the concept of minzoku, and thus social scientists Ksaku Yoshino and Harumi Befu are quite right to see this Nihonjinron theory as an alternative theory of Japanese identity that is rooted not in the postwar state but in an enduring sense of ethnic identity.70 Nihonjinron was, 189-99; Furusawa Tomokichi and Sanada Naoshi, eds., Gendai shimin shakai zensh 1: shimin shakai no kiso genri (Tokyo: Dbunkan, 1977.): 131-132. The latter work has a fascinating, if a bit reductive, chart that lists dominant conceptions of the Japanese people in chronological order: 1868-1889: jimmin (people); 1889-1905: shimmin (subjects); 1905-1914: heimin (commoners); 1914-1923 shmin (common people); 1923-1932 jmin (“abiding folk”); 1932-1945 kokumin; 1945-1960 jimmin; 1960-1976 jmin (residents); 1976- shimin (citizens). Furusawa and Sanada, 99. While it is not without reason, this list is a curious one, particularly in the restriction of kokumin to a time when it had no legal recognition and excluding entirely the concept of the people as minzoku. 67 Inoue Shun, “Wakamonotachi no han-etatisumu,” Tenb no. 145 (January 1971): 60-67. 68 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial , 18. 69 Two notable exceptions are Nakane Chie, Tate shakai to ningen shakai (1967) and Murakami, Kumon Shumpei, Sat Seizabur, Bunmei to shite no ie shakai (1979). 70 Kosaku Yoshino, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan (London: Routledge, 1992); Harumi Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2001).

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then, a revival of the effort from the late nineteenth century to establish a national identity among the people that would be independent of, and prior to, the nationalism invested in the state. It is not surprising that it became enmeshed in minzoku, given that concept’s history of trying to articulate a national identity that was neither statist nor civic. But for those social theorists who were trying to promote democratic citizenship in postwar Japan, minzoku and Nihonjinron were the greatest conceptual challenges of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly since they were embraced by both extremes of the political spectrum. Under those circumstances, it was quite difficult to articulate and propagate a sense of civil society that would provide a modern, democratic nationalism that neither worshipped the state nor rejected it out of hand. Nihonjinron survived into the 1980s, but it had come under heavy criticism, especially as the Japanese economy became increasingly global and cultural particularism seemed too quaint and parochial for the needs of an international society. But criticism of the cultural collectivism of Nihonjiron did not necessarily benefit the cause of civil society. Instead, social fragmentation and radical individualism followed the logic of consumer choice in the unprecedented affluence of the age. On the one hand, all forms of social theory were tainted as collectivism and “nationalistic”; on the other new social theories built on the exceptionalism and anti-individualism of Nihonjinron while rejecting its national framework. The most influential of these new social theories was Fujioka Wakao’s idea of a new Japanese society structured on “micromasses.”71 This idea may have seemed novel and exciting to young affluent consumers who found in it a legitimation of their behavior of “spending their way to freedom.” But it was merely an expression of what Ishida Takeshi had worried about earlier: a fragmentation and “de-moralization” of society. In Fujioka’s “micromass” society, the anti-statism of the earlier “mass society” (taish shakai) combined with radical individualism to yield a sense of collective identity that allowed for any moral choice, so long as you could afford to participate with a few like-mind consumers of that pleasure. Fujioka’s micromass” theory of society was the highpoint of a social and national theory of the postwar Japanese as “economic animals,” as a people that needed no political or moral expression, but

71 Fujioka Wakao, “Futatabi ‘sayonara taish,’” Voice (January 1986): 206-29; abridged and translated as “The Rise of the Micromasses,” Japan Echo volume 13, no. 1 (1986): 31-8.

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merely affluence to be happy. It was of course still an exceptionalist, Nihonjinron, social theory. Even during the height of the consumer culture of the 1980s, some social theorists offered an alternative to cultural exceptionalism and group consumerism. In 1985 Koyanagi Kimihiro and Katsuragi Kenji brought together half a dozen academics with connections to Kyushu University in a volume that explored in depth the theory and practice of civil society, at home and abroad. If Fujioka’s “micromass” theory was a promotion of capitalist consumerism, Koyanagi’s group was an effort to promote socialism. As he wrote in the introduction to the volume, Our motivation in publishing this collection of essays in intellectual history is rooted in the shared, and very reasonable, perception that the image of society that Japan will need in the future is that of a socialist civil society.72

In retrospect, it is fair to say that this project failed. Several reasons for its failure can be offered. First, in contrast to Fujioka’s writings, this “civil society” theory was written by and for a specialized academic audience. (In that sense, it contributed, ironically, to the fragmentation of society that Ishida warned against). Second, a theory of civil society linked to socialism has limited appeal among Japanese, and not only for ideological reasons. In the history of concepts of society in modern Japan, shimin shakai had been too narrowly conceived as an urban phenomenon: this was, indeed, one of the main reasons that the “rise of the shimin” during the Anpo demonstrations failed to lead to a new social order, as many had hoped. Shimin (“city people”) too easily connoted the privileged urban residents, especially of Tokyo, and left out many other Japanese in small towns and in the countryside. Finally, with the decline in popularity of socialism in Japan during the 1990s, any effort to rebuild democratic civil society from a socialist agenda was bound to fail. To some, the decline of socialism means the decline of society itself and a reduced chance for a healthy sense of national cohesiveness when addressing national problems. Certainly, one finds fewer efforts to address national problems by trying to establish the right concept of society than in the past. But this should not be taken as a sign that the fundamental problem that social theory has addressed for over a hundred years in Japan has been resolved. There 72 Koyanagi Kimihiro, “Josh: Shimin shakai ron o megutte,” 1-8 in Koyanagai and Katsuragi Kenji, eds., Shimin shakai no shis to und (Kyoto: Mineruba Shob, 1985), 1.

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are still significant tensions between the nation as the people and the state as the governing power. Nor should we conclude that the political decline of socialism means a decline of interest in society or social issues (this equating of society and socialism was one of the key misunderstandings that plagued sociology in Japan from its late nineteenth century beginnings). On the contrary, recent years may provide the best grounds for optimism that democratic practice is stronger than ever in Japan, and that the underlying issues that “society” served as a cover for may be, indeed are being, addressed openly by a larger number of people. What once had been limited to a narrow circle of intellectuals and political activists is now being taken up by journalists, popular writers, media figures and even national politicians. Throughout much of modern Japanese history, “society” served as a codeword for “the nation,” and it did so for historical reasons. Until 1952, there was no legally recognized nation, and this legal fact left the field of national debate open to select from a variety of terms and understandings of what the nation was or should be. Shakai emerged early on in this debate as an effort to grasp the national people as a whole that was distinct from the imperial state. Debates over “society” and “the science of society” (shakaigaku/shakai kagaku) were in fact debates over the meaning, scope, and political significance of “the nation.” But when nationalism was debated under the cover of the concept of society, the result often was a disassociation of the nation (society) from the state. What we find in recent years is an open discussion of the relationship of the nation and the state, in Japan and in other countries around the world, and the return of the concept of society from a kind of covert nationalism to its proper role in mediating the relationship of nation and state is a healthy development for Japanese democracy. However, it also means that to understand the continuation of this long debate over “the people” and their relationship to the state, we need to pay attention to the concepts used to represent the nation. It is to those concepts of nation (kokumin, minzoku) that we turn next.

CHAPTER FIVE

KOKUMIN In this chapter, I trace the emergence of the concept of a civic or political sense of nation (kokumin), first in context of efforts to protect the rights of samurai against the Sat-Ch clique government; then as a broadening movement that aspired to national sovereignty in the constitution; then after 1890, as a final, desperate hope for a cultural national sovereignty that would be exercised through the Diet, before becoming overwhelmed by the Constitutional rejection of national sovereignty and the rise of a rival minzoku discourse that abandoned political nation-building for the compensations of cultural identity (this minzoku discourse is outlined below in Chapter Six). During World War II, kokumin discourse re-emerged, both as a bulwark against Marxist ethnic nationalism and as a logic of assimilation (or at least integration) of the various ethnic nationalities that composed the Japanese Empire. After World War II, the new constitution enshrined kokumin as the official Japanese sovereign nation, although it was frequently overwhelmed and undermined by the tradition of a cultural minzoku national identity that was conceived in opposition to the state. In spite of the Occupation and the Constitution’s role in asserting this kokumin national identity, minzoku national discourse continued to flourish, albeit contested by and at times intertwined with kokumin nationalism. Since the 1990s, kokumin nationalism has been enjoying its strongest rebirth in Japanese history. The reasons for this renaissance of civic nationalism are many: the global rise of civic nationalism in theory and practice after the fall of Marxism; the increasingly multi-ethnic composition of Japanese society; and the explicit use (and occasional abuse) of kokumin nationalism by many Japanese intellectuals, journalists and politicians who seek a resolution to the structural imbalance of postwar Japan’s political institutions. Such a broad conceptual history of the idea of kokumin is essential, if we are to fully appreciate the nature of early Meiji nation building in either comparative context or in its own particular historical setting. It is important to comprehend the full significance of the famous

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statement by Hans Kohn, one of the twentieth century’s most authoritative voices on nationalism: “nationalism is a state of mind.”1 Kohn’s insight captures much of the distinctiveness of a nation conceived as a civic nation (kokumin). In this understanding of the nation, a nation is not a natural expression of an ancient, organic being, but a mode of consciousness that exists socially only as a representation of a specific kind of contingent and created collectivity. Thus the concept chosen to express the nation (eg., whether the nation is represented as kokumin or minzoku) is more than a matter of linguistic form; it bears significantly on the meaning of nationalism, both for the one who makes a conceptual preference and for those who hear and reproduce these concepts. Given the significance of the conceptual expression of the nation, it is striking that, during the first decades of the Meiji period, there was no consensus on the conceptual or linguistic modes for expressing the idea of “nation.” In fact there were few terms for “nation” in general use in the political discourse of those years. Not until the 1880s do we begin to see the emergence of the two commonly used terms today for nation, kokumin and minzoku. And it was not the concept of minzoku (“ethnic nation”) that emerged first in political discourse, but the concept of the political or civic nation (kokumin). This historical fact challenges the claims of many advocates of ethnic nationalism that the ethnic national identity of the Japanese people predates their consciousness of nationalism as a civic force. Ethnic national consciousness did not precede political nationalism, but stemmed from the frustrations of advocates for popular nationalism who could not realize their hopes in the debates leading up to the Meiji Constitution. Its own primordial claims were simply projected backwards in time as fact in order to cover up its recently constructed origins. Consequently, we must first understand the history of the effort to establish a political or civic sense of the nation in Meiji Japan before we can properly consider the reaction of ethnic nationalism.

1

Hans Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (Princeton, NJ, 1965; reprinted by Robert E. Krieger Publishing, Co., Inc, Malabar, Florida, 1982): 9. The understanding of nations as modes of consciousness can be traced to Ernest Renan’s “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” (1882) which opposed the Germanic belief in objective ethnic roots of national identity with the theory of the nation as a “daily plebiscite.” This theory of the nation as a mode of consciousness became very influential around the First World War, and is generally understood as a “liberal theory of nationalism” versus the “conservative theory” of the ethnic determination of nations.

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As we will see below, some scholars have traced this modern concept of kokumin back to 1871, but it is not entirely clear that this usage captured fully what is usually meant by “a nation.” The term itself, kokumin, was not a neologism, but carried with it earlier denotative and connotative meanings from the Edo period. For centuries, it had been used to refer to the samurai of a given domain and generally excluded all others, most notably the peasants who formed the majority of the people.2 Consequently, within the area we today think of as “Japan,” there were hundreds of different kokumin groups, just as there were hundreds of domains. Whether at this point the Dajkan meant to imbue all the Japanese people with full national rights, or whether it was merely attempting to replace the bakufu as a single feudal domain under the sovereign monarch, is open to question. In any event, Fukuzawa Yukichi did not believe a nation existed in Japan by 1875, when he famously declared that “while there is a government in Japan, there is no nation (kokumin).”3 He was familiar enough with the concept to recognize the absence of the thing. Prior to the 1880s, the concept and reality of a Japanese nation as a unification of the entire people in the realm, based on a consciousness of shared membership in the nation, was nebulous at best. What is most remarkable is the emergence of this concept, and how it contested with entrenched forces that were unwilling to permit the realization of civic nationalism in modern Japan. Who promoted kokumin nationalism in early Meiji Japan? Who were its opponents? Arano Yasunori has argued that the foundations of modern Japanese national identity lie in the anti-Christian prejudices of the Edo period, as well as in efforts to assimilate the various ethnic groups into standard Japanese mores and customs 2

Tyama Shigeki, Meiji no shis to nashonarizumu, Tyama Shigeki chosakush vol. 5 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1992): 297; Luke Roberts, Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 4-5; Mark Ravina, Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999): 30-31. Ravina and Tyama differ on whether the kokumin referred mainly to the commoners or exclusively to the samurai, but they agree with Roberts in that kokumin was limited in reference to the domain. 3 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Bummeiron no gairyaku, 192. See also the translation by David A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst, Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Outline of a Theory of Civilization, 144. It should be noted that Fukuzawa supplied the phonetic notes to read the term kokumin as “nation,” just as he glossed kokutai as “nationality.” These glosses are important clues to the meaning of these key terms of political discourse and should be consulted by all who study the meaning of nationalism, kokutai, or kokumin in modern Japan.

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under baku-han authority.4 Arano’s argument about the anti-Christian roots of Japanese nationalism is offered in the context of a larger purpose, which is to explain the rise of nativist sentiment, perhaps even a proto-ethnic sense of Japaneseness, that emerged in contestation with Sinitic culture and thought in the Edo period. But to shoehorn this broad intellectual movement for cultural distinctiveness into the modern theory of kokumin would require excessive force. By the time kokumin nationalism was explicitly debated in the 1870s and 1880s, it was not anti-Christians, but Christians themselves who played a leading role in advocating this particular kind of nationalism. Arano’s argument that anti-Christian sentiment shaped the basis of modern Japanese nationalism notwithstanding, Notto Thelle notes that early in the 1880s it was Japanese Christians like Kozaki Hiromichi who promoted kokuminshugi in order to emphasize a nationalism grounded in the people (kokumin) rather than the state. Buddhist nationalists, on the other hand, primarily identified their nationalism (kokkashugi) with the state, and modern Buddhism eventually came to regard itself as “state Buddhism” (kokka-teki Bukky, or kokka Bukky). As Thelle concludes, Christian nationalism “identified itself neither with the past nor with the state, as Buddhist nationalism had tended to do, but rather with the future and with the people.”5 Here, it is worth recalling, as we saw above in Chapter Three, that the first draft of the Imperial Rescript on Education was composed by a Christian, Nakamura Masanao, who shared the futuristic, individualistic, and populist orientation of Christian nationalism. For Christian Japanese, consciousness was always a significant element to social identity. To reconcile Arano and Thelle’s apparently contradictory claims on the relationship of Christianity to Japanese nationalism, one must first pay careful attention to chronology: the differences between the Edo and early Meiji period, when Christian Japanese were not represented among the intellectuals but severely persecuted, and the middle to late Meiji period, when Christian Japanese began to play a disproportionate role in political and social thought. At the same time, it is important to recognize that there was no consistent understanding during the early and mid-Meiji period of what nationalism is, its 4

Arano Yasunori, “Nihon-gata ka-i chitsujo no keisei,” in Amino Yoshihiko, ed., Nihon no shakaishi vol. 1: Retto naigai no kotsu to kokka (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1987). 5 Notto R. Thelle, Buddhism and Christianity in Japan: From Conflict to Dialogue, 1854-1899 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987): 164-5.

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significance, and what its relationship to the government should be. Certainly anti-Christians, notably Shinto activists, saw Christianity (especially foreign missionaries) as incompatible with their vision of Japanese national identity. But not all anti-Christian nationalists favored kokumin as the theoretical place for the people in the new order. Shintoists tended toward an ethnic or tribal concept of the nation as a natural, organic category. But most government elites followed Inoue Tetsujir in rejecting nationalism entirely in favor of a concept of the people as subjects of the emperor. In this context, it is quite true that during the mid-1880s, most Japanese Christians were very much advocates of kokuminshugi, a nationalism that is best understood in term of a civic, multi-ethnic community in which the people as such were sovereign. Of course, Christians were not the only advocates of kokumin nationalism. But they certainly figured large even in the group of intellectuals associated with Tokutomi Soh’s journal Friends of the Nation (Kokumin no tomo). That group included Taguchi Ukichi, Nakae Chmin, Nitobe Inaz, Ueki Emori, Ozaki Yukio, Kanai En, Shimada Sabur, Yokoyama Gennosuke, Katayama Sen, Uchimura Kanz, Ukita Kazutami, Abe Is, Nijima J and others. Of course, the appeal of a kokumin centered polity was not limited to Christians, although undoubtedly Christian belief in the dignity of the individual influenced the rise of this more individualistic nationalism. Igarashi Akio has tried to identify who the bearers of the values of civil society were during the Meiji period by focusing on three groups: journalists, Christians, and “technicians” (bureaucrats, artists, etc). What was common to these groups was that the majority of them had been retainers of the bakufu before the Restoration. Thus, he argues, they carried into the new society a different “spirit,” one forged in the experience of defeat and alienation from the victorious government It is an enticing theory, and one that helps to identify the alternative value system in the early Meiji period that often appealed to universal values like civil society. Igarashi’s argument is derived from Yamaji Aizan, who in turn took his theory that Christians were largely drawn from the losing side of the Restoration from Fukuzawa Yukichi whose theory clearly reflected his low regard for Christianity.6 But the theory is not completely persuasive, since many influential

6 Cf. Yamaji Aizan, Essays on the Modern Japanese Church, translated by Graham Squires, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 1999), 68.

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Protestants, like Kozaki Hiromichi (who was from Kumamoto) were not former bakufu retainers.

Civilization and Nationalism, 1868-1890 From the earliest years of the Meiji period, there was every reason to believe that the new government would take the form of a nation-state (kokumin kokka). “Civilization and enlightenment” (bunmei kaiki) was the catch-phrase of the day and, as the historian Nishikawa Nagao has noted, civilization and culture have specific valences when combined with the concept of the nation. In contrast to Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s idea of the German nation as an Urvolk based on a long, historical culture, Nishikawa presents Ernest Renan’s concept of the French nation as founded on a notion of civilization that appeals to contract and consciousness rather than blood, origins, language and the like. As Nishikawa summarizes, while this polarization in nationalism theory between the German Fichte and the French Renan left the English discourse on nation rather ambiguous, in Japanese the distinction was much clearer than in English: As for the term minzoku, this is a Japanese neologism that combined two terms min [people] and zoku [tribe; clan] (it is not originally a Chinese term). It may be a bit difficult to align it with a European term but it is closest to the German term Volk. And then, we would have to say that what best approximates the term nation from a civilizational perspective is the term kokumin, and when approached culturally, minzoku.7

To grasp the politics of early Meiji kokumin nationalism, it helps to understand that the modern concept of civilization first emerged in eighteenth century France as a critique of despotic monarchy by advocates for a nation founded on civil society. Civilization was not contained within the nation, but carried with it a sense of universal development: that all nations would inevitably follow the French model of a civilized national development. Thus at its inception, civic nationalism was caught in the paradox that in order to be truly civilized, one had to be French, and to be a truly French nation, the French had to extend their influence and treasure beyond their national boundaries. As Liah Greenfeld succinctly captured this 7

79.

Nishikawa Nagao, Kokumin kokka ron no shatei (Tokyo Kashiwa Shob, 1998),

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development, “La Grande Nation was the reincarnation of le roi trés chrétien ...she carried and spread the gospel of Nationality–liberty and equality–with fire and sword. The crusading nation succeeded the crusading king.”8 One of the fundamental political challenges, if not the essential challenge, facing the new Meiji government after the Restoration was whether and how this civilizational nationalism might be reconciled with monarchy, and France presented an excellent source for exploring this possibility. To be sure, considerations of culture or ethnicity were not entirely absent from the Meiji efforts to construct the nation as a kokumin, as Yoon Keun-Cha insists in his ethnologically determined reading of Meiji Japanese nationalism.9 Neither were they completely absent from the French discourse on the nation.10 But during the first two decades of the Meiji period, ethnic and cultural issues were secondary considerations: the overriding ones were civilization, universal development, participation in the international system, and along with it the development of legal codes to determine the conditions and practices of citizenship and governance in the new Meiji state. Discourse on culture was overwhelmed by the obsession with civilization to the degree that even the use of the Japanese word that today is recognized to mean “culture” (bunka), during the early Meiji years connoted “civilization”: it was a contraction of the phrase “civilization and enlightenment” (bunmei kaika--> bun-ka).11 And even Yoon concedes that the word for ethnicity (minzoku) is rare in Meiji political discourse until the 1890s.12 The significance of this relative absence of ethnic and cultural forms of national representation (minzoku, bunka) in favor of civilizational and political forms of the nation (bummei, kokumin) in the early Meiji years lies in its potential for exposing a historical rupture in Japanese nationalist discourse. This absence contrasts with the marked turn toward these cultural and ethnic forms of national 8

Greenfeld, Nationalism, 188. Yoon Keun-Cha, “Minzoku gens no satetsu: ‘nihon minzoku’ to iu jiko teiji no gensetsu,” Shis no. 834 (December 1993): 4-37. 10 Liah Greenfeld notes that the French took much of their republican nationalism from England (Nationalism, 156-8); Rogers Brubaker stresses the undercurrents of ethnic nationalism within the dominant republican discourse of France in Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992): 98-102. 11 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Armonk, NY,: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 64-5. 12 Yoon, “Minzoku gens no satetsu,” 9. 9

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identity around 1890–a shift in nationalist discourse that reveals as much about the nature of nationalism in the middle of the Meiji period as its does retrospectively of the early Meiji nation-state formation. Early Meiji discourse on nation-state formation was characterized by strong aspirations for the development of the individual after the fall of the “feudal” ancient regime. This connection between the interests of the individual and the nation is most famous in Fukuzawa Yukichi’s concern with the political maturation of the individual Japanese as key to building a strong nation (which situates his position within the French enlightenment discourse on the liberating effects of the nation). This connection is also clear in the writings of Nishimura Shigeki, one of the luminaries among early Meiji intellectuals. In one of the earliest explanations of what “civilization” meant for Meiji Japan (Meiroku Zasshi, May 1875), Nishimura argued that bummei kaika is the equivalent of the English concept of “civilization,” and that in translating the concept into Japanese it is important to retain the sense that civilization means “to improve one’s character” (hitogara no yoku naru to iu koto nari). Significantly, historical research shows that an understanding of “civilization” in this individual and social context preceded the later connection of “civilization” with the state and its slogan of “wealthy nation, strong army.”13 To appreciate how and why many intellectuals and political activists invested their hopes for an individualist, civic nationalism in the new government is not an easy thing to do, especially in light of our present historical perspective, from which we can look back on the Meiji period from the vantage point of subsequent historical developments. But we can gain a more empathetic view by resisting anachronistic transferences and giving close attention to the various legal and governmental reforms as they unfolded during the early Meiji period. From their future-oriented perspective, we can understand why such hopes did not seem unrealistic or naive at the time. Early Meiji was still a revolutionary time, one that offered great promise to those who hoped that the new government–in contrast to the authoritarianism of the ancient regime–would be organized around civic, democratic principles and that “the people” would have an unprecedented access to political power. One might start at the beginning, in January 1868 when Kanda Takahira (1830-98)’s Kaigi hsoku an introduced parliamentary 13

Nishikawa Nagao, Kokumin kokka ron no shatei, 82.

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debate procedures, five years before Fukuzawa, Kohata Tokujir and Koizumi Shinkichi (translators)’s 1873 Kaigi ben sought to explain to a broader public the virtues of democratic government. Kanda’s bill was an early harbinger of institutional democracy, and one surely not widely understood by the public. But the public was increasingly being incorporated into democratic practice, especially through its growing awareness of the importance of public speech for democratic governance. Surely, the most significant moment in this growing appreciation of political speech was the 1872 publication of Fukuzawa’s Encouragement of Learning.14 It is for this reason that Norio Makihara called Fukuzawa’s Encouragement of Learning the “first real work of nationalism (kokuminshugi) in Japan.”15 Makihara is quite right to place this text within Fukuzawa’s broader effort to build a nation (kokumin) by placing the people at the center of democratic practice. Often overlooked in histories of Fukuzawa was the importance of “speeches” as a method he encouraged to reach the public. Yamamuro Shinichi has noted that 1874 was an important year in the public’s appreciation of “speeches” (enzetsu) in encouraging civic national consciousness. Fukuzawa’s An Encouragement of Learning prepared the way, but its goals were enacted by the Mita Speech Association and the various Meiji Six Society activities.16 Fukuzawa advocated public speeches as a vital part of the process of creating kokumin, as not all Japanese enjoyed the level of literacy necessary for a nationalism based on “printcapitalism.” Moreover, speech was a public act, and one that required the physical presence of a community, a group of people who were both part of and symbolic of the nation itself.17 During these early post-Restoration years, measures taken by the central government converged with popular aspirations for a true nation-state. This convergence can be seen in the 1869 abolition of regional autonomy and the replacement of the Edo period status 14

Yamamuro Shin’ichi, “Kaidai,”in Matsumoto Sannosuke and Yamamuro Shin’ichi, eds, Genron to media, nihon kindai shis taikei 11 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1990), 271. 15 Makihara Norio, Kyakubun to kokumin no aida: kindai minsh no seiji ishiki New History Modern Japan 1 (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kbunkan, 1998), 11. 16 Yamamuro, “Kaidai,” Genron to Media, 268. 17 Speech clubs were most active between late 1879 and 1883. Admission to speeches usually cost 1-3 sen, not an inconsequential amount then, but many people of limited means paid the fee. Sait Tsuyoshi argues that, to truly appreciate what these enzetsu represented, the term should be understood as the equivalent of the English word “speech” rather than “lecture.” Sait, Meiji no kotoba:higashi kara nishi e no kakebashi (Tokyo: Kdansha,1977), 386-402.

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system (shi-n-k-sh) with a new, radical declaration of the formal equality of all people, regardless of former status. Thus, Yamamuro finds in these two radical measures early steps in the direction of “nation formation” (kokumin keisei).18 This trend toward civic nationalism under the new regime was further supported by the February 1869 Newspaper Publication Regulations that removed the prohibition on private publication of newspapers set by the June 1868 Regulations. This lifting of the earlier restrictions encouraged a proliferation of newspapers and a diversity of political ideas in public discourse. Newspapers and public speeches were two complementary parts of the incipient structuring of democratic or civic nationalism in Meiji Japan: ideas that were published in newspapers were often read aloud in public speeches to those who did not, or could not, read the papers.19 Concomitant with these developments in public discourse, the government moved to establish a spatial boundary of the kuni, the geographical contours for the new concept of a kokumin. In July 1869, it established a colonial office for Ezochi and, in August, it accepted a petition by Matsuura Takeshir to change the name of Ezochi to “Hokkaido”.20 Similarly, in the home territories, the 1871 establishment of prefectures as replacements for the old domains (haihan chiken) converted the 273 old domains into mere administrative districts of the central government.21 This centralization of government invited a transfer of the domainal people’s consciousness of their domains as o-kuni (“our country”) to a new consciousness of the unified political community of Japan itself as the new kuni to which loyalty was owed. This was not always merely a subtle suggestion or 18 Yamamuro Shin’ichi, “Kokumin kokka keisei-ki no genron to media,” 477-540, Genron to media, 483. 19 Laws were enacted in Kyoto and Hiroshima (1871.7), Niigata (1872.8), and Chikuma (1873.12) to encourage buying and reading newspapers; associations (shimbun setsuwa kai; shimbun kgi kai) were formed all over the country to read and explain what was in the newspapers to those of more limited education; moreover, newspapers were made available for the public to read without charge. Further, in Tokyo and Yokohama popular rakugo storytellers helped disseminate the content of the newpapers. For example, Sanytei Ench (1839-1900) read the Chya Shinbun to his audience, while Shrin Hakuen (1832-1905) read the Ychi Hchi Shinbun to his audience. See Yamamuro, “Kokumin kokka keisei-ki no genron to media,” 487-8. 20 Matsuura (1818-1888) was a late Edo explorer and cartographer who specialized in northern Japan. He worked as an official in the Colonial Office from 1869 until he resigned in protest in 1870. 21 The best study on haihan chiken in the context of the politics of nationalism is Michio Umegaki, After the Restoration: The Beginning of Japan’s Modern State.

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invitation. The April 1871 Household Registration Law, which took effect in February 1872, required all Japanese to register, whether samurai or commoner. The logic worked both ways: all Japanese were required to register, and those who registered were considered, ipso facto, Japanese. Although it retained for a while the usage of the names of new status groups (ka shizoku heimin), it marked a significant step toward nationalism by establishing the formal equality of all Japanese nationals, regardless of social status, and by making registration by law an essential part of the process of determining who was a Japanese national. It was also the first instance of the word kokumin in an official government document.22 Needless to say, the definition of nationality was no mere conceptual game: it had real consequences, as can been seen in 1871 when the Japanese government declared to be Japanese the fishermen on Miyafuru island in the Ryukyus who were murdered by “barbarians” (seiban) in Taiwan. It then sent troops to Taiwan to avenge the slight to Japanese national honor and prevent future massacres of the Japanese people. Yet, in spite of these reforms of administration, social status, registration, and efforts to define and promote equality among the Japanese people–certainly conditions for national formation–we cannot conclude that the Japanese nation was automatically formed at that point. As Yamamuro notes, these developments merely marked “the departure on the long road toward nation formation.” While the “opening of the country” by Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853 introduced an acute consciousness of other nations to Japanese society, detailed knowledge of those nations was not yet widely disseminated among the Japanese people.23 Moreover, Yamamuro is certainly correct to point out that the emergence of a new national media did not engineer a new nation in top-down fashion, but only provided the opportunity for people to begin to imagine their identities and common fates within the context of this new media. National formation is achieved only when people become a nation through their own consciousness, and not through being led or forced into forming a nation by political elites or institutions. This consciousness, which must develop autonomously, nonetheless does

22 Yoon Keun-Cha, Nihon kokumin ron , 92; also, Nishikawa Nagao, Kokumin kokka ron no shatei, 86. 23 Yamamuro, “Kokumin kokka keisei-ki no genron to media,” 483-5.

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not develop solely by itself, but through a relationship with others, including those who are not members of the nation.24 Yamamuro’s perspective offers a fresh insight into national formation in early Meiji Japan. He invites us to look beyond more simplistic histories that focus on top-down efforts at nation-building, particularly by the government, and then declare–often prematurely–either national formation as the foundation of success in modernization, or an indictment of Japanese modernization by pointing to the emergence of a strong state-centered patriotism which excluded all hopes of true nationalism. Instead, he draws our attention to the important debates and discursive formations that happened in the years between 1868 and 1890, years of great significance for the dissemination of civic values and national identity in modern Japan. And, rather than giving us an ideological driven narrative of oppression of the people by the elites, he uncovers in this formative period a dynamic history of contestation, contradiction, and conflict that suggests efforts at a populist formation of civic nationalism. Yet, by the early 1880s, efforts at building an inclusive, civic nationalism were dealt a number of significant setbacks. The resolution of 1881 Political Crisis meant the defeat of those who had invested their hopes with kuma Shigenobu’s British constitutionalism and the victory of the monarchical statism of It Hirobumi. While the formalization of this victory in the Meiji Constitution was still nearly ten years away, the failure of this effort to create a consciousness among the people of being a kokumin was evident in the language of the Imperial Rescript on the Establishment of a Diet. Up to that point, there had been no uniformity in how government documents referred to the people. Terms such as jinmin (the people), shsho (the multitudes) and even kokumin (the nation/citizens) had been employed on occasion. But, after lengthy and passionate debate over the need to create a consciousness of kokumin among the Japanese people, the Rescript simply referred to the Japanese people as shimmin (“the monarch’s subjects”). This reference to the people as mere subjects in a Rescript announcing the 24 Yamamuro, “Kokumin kokka keisei-ki no genron to media,” 489-90. Yamamuro’s assessment that there was yet no nation (kokumin) in early 1870s Japan is shared by most historians of Japanese nationalism. Cf. Ysoon , Nihon kokumin ron, 90; Makihara Norio, Kyakubun to kokumin no aida: kindai minsh no seiji ishiki, 919; and of course, most famously, Fukuzawa Yukichi, Bummeiron no gairaku, 192. To fully appreciate the point, one should add that there was no “state” (kokka) either, at least not until 1890.

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formation of a parliament sent a strong message that national sovereignty and civic rights were not to be expected. As a result, the efforts to create a consciousness of kokumin shifted from the realm of discourse and media to political movements that sought to work through the political parties to advocate for populist causes. Consequently, partisan bickering and political self-interest soon absorbed this effort at building nationalism, rendering it at best a secondary concern of the parties that grew more focused on selfpreservation. Whatever vestiges of this kokumin movement were still smoldering within the parties at the end of the decade were further extinguished when the 1889 Constitution of the Great Empire of Japan not only defined the country as an empire (teikoku) rather than a nation-state (kokumin-kokka), but legally codified the previous announcement that the Japanese people were not a nation but merely subjects (shimmin) of their monarch. The concept of a nation (either as kokumin or minzoku) appeared nowhere in this first modern constitution of the Japanese “nation.” The kokumin movement had failed on several levels. First, and most decisive, was the rejection of the effort to codify the people as a kokumin in the Meiji Constitution. Equally serious, and related to this institutional failure, was the inability to establish a coherent sense of what nationalism is within modern Japanese political discourse and in the common parlance. Nationalism was an extremely important issue of the day, but it remained inchoate and highly contested in meaning and applicability to Japanese politics and society. As one measure of nationalism’s inchoateness, we might turn to Sait Tsuyoshi’s discovery that an 1885 English-Japanese dictionary listed the word “nationalism” in English, but provided no adequate equivalent in Japanese. Critically important was the fact that no compound with the suffix shugi (ism) was offered, neither kokuminshugi nor minzokushugi, suggesting that the Japanese language of that day did not register the essence of the concept of nationalism. Sait concluded that while some journalists were starting to use compounds with shugi around 1885-6, the usage was not widely shared or recognized.25 Hamano
Teishir and
Watanabe Osamu
offered the word hkokushugi) in
their 1885 translation of Herbert Spenser’s political philosophy.26 But this concept only exposes the official government’s interpretation of nationalism that excluded the people 25 26

Sait, Meiji no kotoba, 372. Sait, Meiji no kotoba, 384.

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as the agency of nationalism. In terminology and meaning, nationalism was still a very contested concept in the 1880s. I. Meiji Kokumin Aesthetics During the mid-1880s, advocates of civic nationalism kept it alive by developing “deep” theories that prepared the ground for subsequent efforts to restore kokuminshugi to the forefront of Japanese political theory. Culture and art were ideal fields in which to sow the seeds of national consciousness. Nakae Chmin, a leader of kokumin thought and the People’s Rights Movement, played a key role in his translation of Véron’s Aesthetics (originally, L’Esthétique Paris: C. Reinwald, 1878). His translation appeared in print between 1883-4, while he was in the employ of the Ministry of Education, thus making it an official government project. The official nature of this work is underscored by the fact that the translation was advertised in the official gazette (Kanp). Yet, this fact does not at all mean that the government unified in supporting these efforts to promote kokumin nationalism. Far from it. There were divisions within the government over the national question and, as we have just seen, the course had just been set for drafting a constitution that would reject the principle of a sovereign nation for that of a sovereign monarch. But in the early 1880s, there were still influential voices, some within the government, who called for a different path. And, to the extent that these voices were expressed in arcane cultural and aesthetic theories, they were permitted expression. Nakae’s translation of Véron’s Aesthetics provides a useful reminder that ideas on art and culture are not peripheral in the project of constructing a national consciousness. But it also provides valuable historical evidence that in pre-constitutional Meiji Japan, kokumin nationalism did not always reject the integration of the people with the newly emerging state, even if the government was beginning to reject the idea of the people as sovereign. In the early 1880s, Nakae still thought that there was room within the emerging Meiji state for a kokumin nationalism, and his optimism may have been encouraged by the fact that the 1881 Political Crisis was between advocates of British and Prussian political theories. Nakae represented a third alternative: French republican nationalism. The fact that history subsequently proved him wrong about the viability of the French option, at least under the Meiji constitution, does nothing to diminish the historical significance of his work, and the vision he and the “French School” expressed, in shaping a culture of kokumin identity in late nineteenth century Japan.

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To appreciate the reasons for Nakae’s optimistic sense that the government work was not incompatible with forming kokumin consciousness, it helps to start with some background on the Ministry of Education in the early 1880s. The head of the Ministry’s Office of Translations was Nishimura Shigeki, and under his direction the Office was focused on translating and disseminating William G. and Robert Chambers’s Information for the People (Kokumin Shuchi).27 The Japanese title, which is more accurately rendered as “Knowledge the Nation [kokumin] Must Have,” emphasizes the agenda Nishimura and his Office had: to build a modern nation as a collectivity of the people with a sense of civic responsibility forged, not only on traditional or indigenous values, but on the values of modern liberal nationalism. It can be seen as a direct response to Fukuzawa’s 1875 complaint that the Japanese people still lacked a true consciousness of themselves as a single nation (kokumin). Kokumin Shuchi was published in two volumes between 1884-5, so we may conclude that those working in the Office of Translation at the time were thinking of Véron’s Aesthetics within a similar framework of constructing a nation compatible with the culture of progress and “enlightenment” (keim). At the same time, it appears that individual translators were given considerable freedom in the selection of particular texts, and it was most likely Nakae’s own decision to include Véron’s Aesthetics in this series.28 There is further evidence that it was in fact Nakae’s purpose to promote a kokumin nationalism in Japan through this translation. Eugène Véron (1825-89) was a French journalist and writer who, as a republican nationalist, resigned his position as a professor of literature in protest of the establishment of the Second Empire (1852-70). As a private educator and journalist, he contributed to many newspapers and journals associated with the progressive, republican cause, including a position as editor of the Progrès du Lyon in 1868. As Ida Shin’ya has noted, Véron was an ardent supporter of republican nationalism whose progressive spirit deeply informed his thinking about art and aesthetics. His politics–and his cultural approach to political issues–could hardly have escaped the attention of Nakae, who spent a year in Lyon from early summer 1872, when the Third

27 Tsuchikata Teiichi, “Kaidai,” Meiji geijutsu bungaku ronsh Meiji bungaku zensh vol. 79 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shob, 1975): 398-436, at 405. 28 Asukai Masamichi, “Minken und to Uen-shi Bigaku,” chapter in Kuwabara Takeo, ed., Nakae Chmin no kenky (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1966): 116-128, at 121.

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Republic was still in its early triumphant days.29 Lyon was the epicenter of French republicanism. Then and there, republican nationalism–not monarchy–seemed the inevitable wave of the future for the world, and France was thought to be riding the crest of that wave. In 1881, only two years before Nakae’s translation of Véron began to appear in Japanese, It Hirobumi had effectively vanquished the “English School” advocates of representative democracy by driving kuma Shigenobu and his supporters out of the government. To Nakae and those in the “French School,” it seemed the future of democracy in Japan was left to them. But they had to proceed carefully, as they were a minority in the government and the “Prussian School” monarchists clearly had the upper hand. The Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 (led by a Christian convert, Saig Takamori),30 and the Crisis of 1881 had signaled the limits to open criticism of the “Prussian School” and its chief advocate It Hirobumi from within the government. The objective of this “Prussian School” was not to foster republican or any other kind of nationalism, but precisely to protect the monarchical state from the challenges of populist nationalism. In such an atmosphere, one can appreciate the decision to publish a work on aesthetics as an indirect form of political critique. Yet it is also important to recognize, as Asukai Masamichi has emphasized, that at this time, Nakae was not the antigovernment revolutionary that some historians have imagined him to become later. Although he was on the editorial board of the Liberal Party’s Jiy Shimbun, he remained an advisor within the government, where he sought to encourage policy shifts toward what he called a greater degree of “civil liberty.”31 Nakae joined others, especially in the Office of Translations, who believed that what had been foreclosed politically was not impossible to achieve culturally. For 29 Ida Shin’ya, “Uin-shi bigaku,” in Kat Shichi et al., eds., Hon’yaku shis Nihon kindai shis taikei 15 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991), 432-441, at 435-6. 30 Saig Takamori (1827-77) is an important and well-known figure in early Meiji history; it is not widely known that he was also a Christian. The identification of him as Christian was made by his near contemporary and fellow Christian, Yamaji Aizan (1864-1917). See Yamaji, Essays on the Modern Japanese Church, 69. 31 Asukai, 118, 120. Nakae’s emphasis, while working within the government, on the people’s “civil liberty” almost certainly was indebted to Voltaire’s preference for the concept of “civil liberty” to signal of importance of intellectuals and culture in shaping democratic movements in England, in contrast to Montesquieu’s stress on “political liberty.” It was also a shrewd political decision, given that “political liberty” would be a difficult concept to promote within the Japanese government in the 1880s. as it was too closely associated with the taboo topic of minken, or people’s rights. On Voltaire, Montesquieu and the debate over “civil liberty” and “political liberty,” see Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity , 156-8.

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them, a true republican nation would not come into being simply through legal fiat: it required first a change in consciousness, a greater acceptance of the values of liberal nationalism, from among the people themselves. Véron’s Aesthetics was one means to that end. In the early 1880s, the question of aesthetics, its meaning and political significance, was largely an open one, and thus Nakae found an opportunity to promote a democratic national culture that was neither completely subordinate to the state nor radically disassociated with the democratic possibilities of a civic nationalism.32 By making Véron’s Aesthetics available to the Japanese public, Nakae challenged the rising dominance of Hegelian aesthetics that stemmed from the speeches and writings of Ernest Francisco Fenollosa. Fenollosa came to Japan in 1878 as a recent graduate of Harvard University to study Japanese art. By the 1880s he was advocating a Hegelian view of art that lionized Japanese tradition as distinct from modern Western culture. Kitazawa Shji and Tsuchikata Teiichi have written that Fenollosa’s emphasis on an eternal national “Spirit,” manifested through a nation’s unique artistic forms, was intrinsically linked to ethnic nationalism (minzokushugi).33 In contrast, Stefan Tanaka has emphasized that Fenollosa’s Hegelian aesthetics glorified the state (kokka) as the site where modern Japanese national identity was located and expressed.34 These studies may seem to contradict each 32 Asukai’s point that the Hegelian academism that Véron confronted in 1870s France was not the dominant aesthetic theory in Japan at the time is beside the point. As he himself notes, Fenellosa was in fact asserting a traditionalist aesthetics in Japan during the early 1880s (Asukai, 118, 122). More to the point is Iwasaki Chikatsugu’s assessment that Nakae’s translation of Véron was introduced into a Japan where the very notion of aesthetics as a comprehensive understanding of the meaning of culture was still an unfamiliar one, and thus the situation presented Nakae with an opportunity to shape the emerging field of aesthetics. As Iwasaki notes, even the prose form of written Japanese (genbun itchi) had yet to be established. Cf. Iwasaki Chikatsuku, “Nakae Chmin to E. Véron no bigaku” in Nihon kindai shisshi josetsu: meiji zenkihen-ge (Tokyo: Shin nihon shuppansha, 2002), 173-4. 33 Two Japanese scholars who explicitly say that Fenollosa’s aesthetic theories contributed to ethnic nationalism (minzokushugi) are Kitazawa Shji (“Uin-shi bigaku to Nihon kindai bijutsu: huontanji, fuenorosa, veron,” in Ida Shinya, ed., Chmin o hiraku: meiji kindai no o motomete, (Tokyo: Kbsha, 2001): 157-181, at 164) and Tsuchikata Teiichi (“Kaidai,” Meiji bungei bungaku ronsh, 409). 34 Stefan Tanaka, “Imaging History: Inscribing Belief in the Nation,” The Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (February 1994): 24-44. Although the title of this article refers to the “nation,” it is apparent from Tanaka’s translation of the title of an 1880 series of photographs, the Kokka Yoh, as “Glories of the nation” (39) that his concept of “nation” really refers to the kokka, or the state. The question of whether

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other on the political implications of Fenollosa’s aesthetics. But on closer analysis (and making allowances for Tanaka’s translation of kokka as “nation” rather than as “state”) they converge in pointing to Fenollosa as the spokesman for an aesthetics of cultural identity that sought to associate the ideal of a collective, Japanese identity with the emerging state. Kitazawa and Tsuchikata’s use of the term minzokushugi to describe this effort is a bit anachronistic, as that term was not in general currency in the early 1880s, and certainly not by the aristocrats and government officials who welcomed Fenollosa’s Hegelian aesthetics.35 But the key point is that this Hegelian aesthetics totalized Japanese cultural identity around an ostensibly immutable essence, and it was against this organic cultural theory, and its conservative political implications, that Nakae offered his translation of Véron’s Aesthetics. In contrast to Fenollosa’s Hegelian aesthetics, Véron’s aesthetics was built on the principle of personalism. Véron called the Hegelian notion that beauty rested on a “Beau idéal” merely an “ontologie chimérique” (kyom no sonzairon) that sought to curb the passions of the contemporary youth by regulating them according to a model derived from cultural norms found in history from ancient Greece through Renaissance Italy. To Véron, Hegelian, or “academic,” aesthetics was less a philosophy of beauty than a transparent political ideology designed to protect existing structures of power from the threat of change. In contrast, he argued that “the essence of art…was that which emanated from the personnalité of the artist himself.”36 At Fenollosa’s aesthetics supported the kokka (state) or the nation (and which concept of nation–kokumin or minzoku) is an important one, if one is to reconcile Tanaka’s argument with Kitazawa and Tsuchikata’s analyses, which otherwise agree with Tanaka that Fenollosa’s Hegelian aesthetics was supportive of a conservative nationalism, not the republican nationalism of Nakae and Véron. This is all the more important since, by omitting consideration of Véron’s aesthetics, Tanaka’s article can give the impression that aesthetics was not an internally contested field, as Kitazawa and Tsuchikata’s separate analyses show so clearly. 35 Fenollasa’s most important speech on aesthetics, “Bijutsu shinsetsu,” (“The True Theory of Art”) was given at an October 1882 meeting of the Rychikai, an association Stefan Tanaka calls “an aristocratic club” (Tanaka, 30). Founded in 1879 by Sano Tsunetami, who also founded the Japanese Red Cross, and Baron Kuki Ryichi (the father of Kuki Shz), the organization was not staffed with the kind of people who would embrace minzokushugi, which at that time was begining to emerge as a populist movement against the aristocratic government. The speech is reproduced as “Bijutsu shinsetsu” in Meiji bungei bungaku ronsh, 36-48; there is a useful analysis of the speech and the Rychikai in Ibid., 408-410. 36 Nakae Chmin, trans, “Uin-shi bigaku,” [Véron’s Aesthetics], 1883 (original, Eugène Véron, L’Esthétique, Paris: C. Reinwald, 1878); reprinted in Hon’yaku shis,

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first glance, it would seem that Nakae inserted his own interpretation onto this passage, for he rendered Véron’s term personnalité as jsei, a term that can mean one’s individual temperament or nature. More so than the French term personnalité, jsei invested the concept of an artist’s own uniqueness in an emotional dimension. But this translation was not a simple misreading of Véron. Nakae understood Véron’s argument quite well: rather, Nakae had to find–and more often, create–a new vocabulary in Japanese for these concepts due to the evolving nature of the Japanese language at the time. His translation was itself an instance of Véron’s theory that a true artist does more than simply “translate” in a functionally reductive sense. In his aesthetics, Véron divided art into three types: academic art (“l’art conventionnel”) that conceived of the artist at best as a transmitter or translator (traducteur) of what had been done before; realist art (“l’art réaliste”) that saw the artist as a photographer, a reproducer of external reality; and personal art (“l’art personnel”) that holds as the highest form of art the “manifestation of individual impressions.”37 Only the last of these three could lead to true art, and Véron emphasized that true art was beautiful because it allowed the expression of the full humanity of the artist, emotions and all. Nakae was aware of this conception of emotions as constitutive of the individuality of the artist, as his translations of the French “sa personnalité” in other sections of the text demonstrate.38 But equally Nihon kindai shis taikei 15 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991), 209-229, at 209, 211. See also, Ida Shin’ya, “Uin-shi bigaku,” 432-441. 37

Nakae, “Uin-shi bigaku,” 224-9; Ida, “Uin-shi bigaku,” 438-439. Cf. Nakae’s rendering of Vérons’s “Mais ce qui constitue et détermine essentiellement l’art, c’est la personnalité de l’artiste; ce qui revient à dire que le premier devoir de l’artiste est de ne chercher à rendre que ce qui le touche et l’émeut réellement” as “Hitori dai san no hh nomi sakusha no yoroshiku ijun subeki tokoro nari…dai san no hh ni itarite wa, tett tetsubi kangai no ki o motte shishu to nasazaru nashi. Kore masa ni kokin daika no seimei o naru yuen nari (Hon’yaku no shis, 229); earlier in the text, Nakae had rendered Véron’s “emotion” as aij (225). Yet, to fully appreciate Nakae’s grasp of Véron’s nuanced argument is not an easy task. It is essential to understand that the Japanese language was, in many ways, “under construction” in the early 1880s. And it was translators like Nakae who were instrumental in developing a modern Japanese vocabulary to express new concepts from the West. At the same time, concepts they employed in this effort were not necessarily equivalent to their modern meanings. The variance and nuance in Nakai’s translation as a whole showed he was aware of Véron’s meaning. But whether his readers of his Japanese translation grasped Véron’s original meaning, or whether they filled in their own interpretation of this nuances is an open question–and certainly one that Nakae must have welcomed, given his appreciation of Véron’s argument that 38

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important was that Nakae rendered Véron’s concept of the “artiste” as sakusha, a concept that implied a broader subject than merely one who dallies in the fine arts or expresses his own emotions. Translating the “artiste” as sakusha, or “one who makes,” emphasizes the role of the individual as capable of establishing new norms, and Nakae even employs the concept of sakui that, two centuries earlier, Ogy Sorai had articulated as the human capacity to change social and political institutions.39 Véron’s valorization of the individuality (personnalité) of the artist followed the emphasis placed on liberty and equality in French republican nationalism. Personalist aesthetics liberated the artist to express his own emotions and experiences, unencumbered by cultural traditions or social status. All (true) artists were equals, with one another and with any social or political elite. But neither the French tradition of republican nationalism nor Véron’s aesthetics should be confused with individualism or libertarianism. At the core of this aesthetics was a political ideology that sought to balance the claims of individualism and collectivism, to shape individuals into Frenchmen (Japanese) without making recourse to an ethnic theory that would restrict national identity on the basis of natural ties of blood or clan.40 In his personalist aesthetics, Véron did not omit the social context of the individual artist, but in fact emphasized that all art is national art. The key distinction was that “un art national” (Nakae: ikkoku no f) is something produced by the artist’s work; it is not something that a true artist does not merely mimic what he finds in another time or place, but creates something original from within his own self. 39 Nakae, trans., “Uin-shi bigaku,” 216. It is not insignificant that Nakae uses the concept of sakui to describe the artist (sakusha)’s work in the context of its ability to change a national culture rather than to being fully determined by a nationalized aesthetics. The locus classicus for Sorai’s concept of sakui is Maruyama Masao, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, Mikiso Hane, trans., (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974): 94-95, 150. Nakae’s translation also employs other more conventional terms for “artiste” (eg., geijutsu no shi). But the term sakusha is reserved for the artist who truly understands art, who follows the method of l’art personnel and expresses his own subjective understanding of the world. Maruyama explicitly connects the Sorai School’s tradition of sakui to the Movement for Freedom and Popular Rights, although not specifically to Nakae or Véron (312-3). 40 Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, 11. See especially the section, “Republicanism and the Making of Frenchmen,” 104-110. For more on the tensions between individual and community in French nationalism, see Alain Finkielkraut, The Defeat of the Mind (New York: Columbia Press, 1995); Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism, 133-88; and Frederic Cople Jaher, The Jews and the Nation: Revolution, Emancipation, State Formation, and the Liberal Paradigm in America and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

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exists outside of art as an abstract limitation on the permissible range of artistic creativity. Here, Nakae’s translation diverges in a significant way from Véron’s original. Whereas Véron briefly summarized his argument that all art is national art, and that this national art is found in “those instinctive preferences common among the entire race (à la race tout entière), Nakae makes no reference to race, but develops an extensive commentary on how the artist, if left to pursue his own impressions without any external, political constraints, will naturally [onozukara ni] foster the development of the particular ways of a specific country (ikkoku no koy no fsh o ysei suru koto o eru).41 Nakae was perfectly capable of expressing the French concept of “race” in Japanese when he wanted to do so.42 Thus, his decision not to in this key passage must be taken seriously as his own position that the Japanese nation would develop through free cultural expression, and that such a nationalism had nothing to do with any racial or ethnic claims on one’s identity. II. Meiji Kokumin Theology As noted above, Meiji period Christians were key advocates of an individualistic nationalism that privileged the people (kokumin) against the coercive powers of “despotic” government. In their moral critique, grounded in the conviction of a universal Truth and the dignity of the individual person, we find one of the earliest and most powerful expressions of the goals of civic nationalism, or kokuminshugi. This civic nationalism sought a path for Japan’s distinctive cultural development that remained in a tense relationship with, but never completely subsumed into, the emerging state. It built on the “social criticism” that Irwin Scheiner identified as a major contribution of Meiji Christians to political discourse. This Christian criticism was not unbridled or profligate: it was carefully tied to a specific agenda and a particular target. One of the key kokumin theologians, Uemura Masahisa of the Presbyterian Church, outlined this agenda most clearly. The nation, he argued, “is designed to help perfect human nature and to help man march toward the divine.”43 As 41

Nakae, trans., “Uin-shi bigaku,” 216. Cf. Nakae’s rendering of Véron’s “race” as shuzoku (118, 120) in “Nakae Chmin hen: Uin-shi bigaku shoron,” in Meiji bungei bungaku ronsh, 112-25 43 Uemura Masahisa, quoted in Takeda Kiyoko, Ningen-kan no skoku (Tokyo, 1959), cited by Irwin Scheiner, Christian Converts and Social Protest in Meiji Japan, 183. 42

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Scheiner summarized this agenda, “National law must come into accord with the moral law. Piety, inevitably, defined patriotism.”44 These Christian patriots were not setting Church against State, but rather were outlining a political theology that approximates what Jean Bethke Elshtain called for when she noted that “the state, properly chastened, plays a vital role in a democratic society…But the citizen of a democratic civil society understands that government cannot substitute for concrete moral obligations; it can either deplete or nourish them.”45 Rather than seeing these Christian political activists as trying either to establish a theocracy or to build a wall of separation between Church and State, we would do well to explore their nuanced efforts to negotiate their faith with membership in an emerging state whose contours were not well-defined prior to 1890. The nature of this journey toward a Christian-inspired kokumin nationalism is well-illustrated in the life of the country school teacher Chiba Takusabur. Chiba even drafted his own constitution in 1881 in an effort to demonstrate how the kokumin could be made compatible with the emerging modern Japanese state. He was an eclectic thinker, and his connection to Nakae and the French School is evident in the subsequent discovery in his library storehouse of eight government translations of lectures given by Gustave Emile Boissonade, the French legal theorist who had come to Japan in 1873 as a government advisor.46 Chiba’s connection to the French School apparently was through the Catholic missionary Fr. Francis Vigroux. As Irokawa writes, “In April 1876 [Chiba] Takusabur went to study under the well known French Catholic priest Father Vigroux; he stayed with him until the beginning of the Satsuma Rebellion in February 1877…and it is likely that Takuzabur accompanied him on the proselytizing walking tours that he began in the Hachiji area in 1875 or 1876.”47 There is some evidence Chiba may have shifted to Protestant Christianity sometime after 1877 through the influence of the Methodist missionary Reverend R.S. Maclay, but his specific denominational affiliation is less important in terms of his role in kokumin nationalism than the fact that he remained a Christian at his death in 1883. His attraction to Christianity no doubt stemmed from a genuine religious conversion, but it was not irrelevant to Chiba’s political activities and writings that Christianity was associated with the rising kokumin nationalism of that day. 44

Scheiner, Christian Converts and Social Protest in Meiji Japan, 183. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial, 18-19. 46 Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period, 109. 47 Irokawa, 89-90. 45

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Influential Christian intellectuals of the 1870s and 1880s were among the most ardent supporters of a nationalism centered on the kokumin rather than on the state. Some Protestant Christians, especially those who like Kozaki Hiromichi had been with the Kumamoto Band of Captain Leroy Janes, came to the conclusion that “one could only serve the nation by being a Christian,” raising the question for some historians of whether religious faith or nationalism was the higher priority.48 Kozaki stands out among these Christian progressive nationalists. But both he and Uemura were critical of the inordinate role played by foreign missionaries in Japan, and both led independent (anti-missionary) churches, while arguing for the need to discard traditional ideas of loyalty and filial piety in order to modernize Japan. For Christian converts like Uemura, Kozaki and the members of their churches, “their success in establishing an independent, self-supporting church permitted them to argue convincingly that they were Japanese Christian nationalists, with a new vision, however, of what patriotism entailed.”49 Their “new vision” of nationalism was a defense of the people’s rights against the government that, beginning in the early 1880s, had been increasingly interfering in the lives of Christians, through such measures as enforcing Buddhist funeral rites and promoting Confucian values in the schools.50 This new vision of patriotic nationalism foregrounded the role of the people and gave Christians an appreciation of the state, not as the summit of nationalism, but merely as an instrument for meeting the people (“the nation”)’s needs. The two major texts to which Christians turned for guidance on such political and cultural questions in the social cauldron of the 1880s were Uemura’s The Christian Church (Shinri Ippan, 1884) and Kozaki’s New Thesis on Politics and Religion (Seiky Shinron, 1886).51 Uemura’s text was the less overtly political. Much of the 48

Scheiner, 93. Scheiner, 39-40. Scheiner’s view of Kosaki and Uemura as Christian nationalists requires a distinction between their nationalism, which respected individualism and was progressive and socially engaged, and the nationalism that traditionally has been ascribed to Christians only after 1890, which was more a jingoistic kind of patriotism. For the traditional interpretation of post 1890s Christian nationalists, see hata Kiyoshi and Ikado Fujio, “Christianity,” chapter in Hideo Kishimoto and John F. Howes, eds., Japanese Religion in the Meiji Era (Tokyo: bunsha, 1956): 173-309, at 264-77. 50 hata and Ikado, 228-231. 51 The title of this work, “Shinri Ippan,” is usually translated as “Common Truth.” My translation builds on the fact that in the early 1880s “for Christianity, the terms used were things like “Jesus-doctrine,” Iesu-ky, or Yaso-ky; and apparently through 49

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book focused on proofs for the existence of God and other theological questions. But Christian theology could hardly be isolated from politics in the early 1880s. In 1882, at the height of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, rumors flew through the Christian community that the government was about to suppress the faith once again.52 Uemura was concerned that the government was being pressured again by Buddhist priests to crack down on the Christian community, and he wrote that “bigoted [Buddhist] priests naturally do everything they can to prevent the progress of Christianity. But what a disgrace it is for those claiming to be scholars and politicians to paddle around after these priests doing the same thing.”53 In the context of growing attacks on Japanese Christians as unpatriotic, Uemura offered a rebuttal that appealed to an inclusive, civic concept of the nation as an indictment of elitist, state officials–and Buddhists and others who would question the loyalty of Japanese Christians. Assessing the ancient Greco-Roman notion that a citizen (kokumin) should be removed from labor (by slaves, if necessary), Uemura countered that Christ taught one to be a servant to all–and he added that Christianity was a religion of social equality that in his day was fighting against slavery, in marked contrast to the support for slavery by “the Muslims and Saracens.”54 Slavery itself was not a pressing issue in Japanese society at the time. Rather, Uemura was using history as analogy to address whether the Japanese people themselves would be liberated as sovereign citizens or rendered as functional equivalents to slaves to the state. He was also presenting the Christian belief in the dignity and rights of the individual citizen as an active member of the political community. the influence of the Rikug Zasshi, the word Kristo ky (Christianity), was standardized. Among the people on the Rikug Zasshi [which included Uemura], however, there were some who used the expression Shin no Michi (the Way of Truth), or simply Shinri (Truth) for Christianity. And in this connection it should be noted that in Uemura’s Shinri Ippan the word shinri is used in this sense.” Ksaka Masaaki, ed., Japanese Culture in the Meiji Era, volume IX: Thought, (Tokyo: Pan-Pacific Press, 1958), 180. Ippan can mean “an entire squad” (ie., church) or “spots”, as in the expression “ippan o mite zenby o bokusu” (to judge a leopard by his spots). In any event, as the older translation “common,” indicates, ippan suggests unity and wholeness, rather than pieces or spots of some large thing. 52 hata and Ikado, 230. 53 Uemura Masahisa (1882), cited in hata and Ikado, 231. These fears were not unfounded, as subsequent years would prove. 54 Uemura Masahisa, Shinri Ippan (Tokyo: Keiseisha, 1884); reprinted in Suzuki Norihisa, ed., Kindai nihon kirisutoky meicho sensh dai-ikki: kirisuto ky shishen, vol 1 Shinri ippan, seiky shinron (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Sent, 2002): 251-3.

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This egalitarian and civic understanding of what kokumin could signify was grounded in the transformative power of Christianity and its future-oriented teleology. Earlier in the same text, Uemura had argued that, as Christianity had made inroads into Rome, it called on Romans to redefine their identity through the mediation of this new religion that came from their despised Jewish subjects. Thus, Uemura concluded, when he and his fellow Japanese Christians lectured on the Bible, they never failed to emphasize how Christianity offered an opportunity to escape from “the stench of one’s native soil and its mores” (hdo jisei no shmi). Taken out of context, such a remark could lead cultural conservatives to agree with the Confucianist Inoue Tetsujir or the Buddhist nationalist Shimaji Mokurai that Japanese Christians were not loyal to their country. But Uemura’s point was a more nuanced one. Read together with his earlier discussion on what kokumin meant to a Christian (i.e., service to all), it should be understood that he was seeking a progressive, egalitarian sense of committed citizenship and social engagement. The Christian civic nationalism that Uemura had outlined was developed more explicitly by Kozaki Hiromichi two years later in his New Thesis on Politics and Religion. Kozaki’s work directly addressed the need to embrace some form of nationalism, and for two reasons: first, as a member of the Kumamoto Band, he had always brought a political agenda to his interest in Christianity; and second, the return of Christian persecutions between 1884-5 gave his political theory a greater sense of urgency.55 Christianity was locked in a battle with Confucianism over the proper relationship between Man and the state, and over whether hierarchy or egalitarianism was the best form of social order. Kozaki outlined the political differences between the two value systems by contrasting Confucian kingship (d) with the lines from the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy Kingdom come…on earth as it is in Heaven”:

55

In the famous “Mt. Hanaoka covenant,” the Kumamoto Band of Christians expressed their determination to “serve their country” through their faith. The possibility that their Christianity “might be diverted…to a kind of nationalism” was pronounced, and Kozaki himself noted that the Band “all had politics as their aim.” hata and Ikado, 208, 207. There were at least two incidents of popular persecution of Christian Japanese between 1884-5 that took place with the tacit approval of local officials. In one town, a mob made a straw effigy of Christ, impaled it on a spear and marched around the town with it. In another, Christian services were interrupted by a mob that “threw rocks, snakes and frogs” at those present, while shouting that “all Christians, to the last man, should be slain with spears.” hata and Ikado, 234.

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Confucian kingship is limited to a single government in a single country; in contrast, the Kingdom of God seeks to reach all the countries in the world. Confucian kingship as government is limited to a generation or age in the past; whereas the Kingdom of God, to the extent it can be seen as a government, exists in the future and its politics are eternal and unlimited; Confucian kingship distinguishes superiors from inferiors, noble from servile, the honored from the despised, and holds as its objective the strict maintenance of this hierarchy; in the Kingdom of God, however, there are no distinctions of superior or inferior, noble or servile, honored or despised: all stand equal before God. It obligates all men on earth to eradicate such distinctions, to regard everyone as a brother or sister, and to love one another. Confucian kingship indoctrinates in a set pattern from top down, from the country to the individual. The kingdom of God is not like that: it holds the moral order to proceed from bottom up, from the individual who can influence the entire country.56

As Irokawa has pointed out, this political theory of human equality assumes a “conception of the individual in civil society and builds a world order that begins with him and then goes on to consider state, globe, and universe. It is a powerful conception.”57 What made it even more powerful was Kozaki’s historical siting of Confucianism as a product of China’s past and vision of Christianity as the future of all humanity. His point was not to denigrate Chinese culture, but to rebuff authoritarian Japanese in his own day who were promoting Confucian monarchy and values as part of their effort to rollback civic consciousness and populist nationalism. Kozaki’s Christian faith underwrote a vision of nationalism that mediated individual and country, the particular and universal, one’s own nation and the world. It was, in fact, one of the strongest articulations of civic nationalism that Japan had seen yet. Like many 56 Kozaki Hiromichi, Seiky Shinron, reprinted in Suzuki Norihisa, ed., Kindai nihon kirisutoky meicho sensh dai-ikki,1-156, at 98-99. I have consulted Stephen Vlastos’s translation of this passage in Irokawa Daikichi, Culture of Meiji Period, 118, but made some revisions; see also Scheiner, 120. Vlastos’s translation does not make the connection of d (“the Kingly Way” or kingship) to Confucianism explicit, but Scheiner does, as does Ksaka Masaaki, in Japanese Culture in the Meiji Era volume IX Thought, 183-5. 57 Irokawa, 118-9. Irokawa goes on to discount the influence of Kozaki’s ideas “among the people.” But this dismissal is rather tendentious: Irokawa is promoting his own theory of populism, stemming from the later developments in the 1960s. And if the influence of Kozaki’s views can be dismissed, even more so can Irokawa’s champion Chiba Takusabur whose writings were completely unknown until Irokawa unearthed them in a remote farmhouse in 1968. Scheiner’s assessment, which traces this political thought from Protestant Christianity to socialist protest, captures the historical influence of these ideas better.

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contemporary theorists of civic nationalism, Kozaki drew from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in his effort to imagine a civil society “that is neither individualist nor collectivist….[that] partakes of both the “I” and the “we.”58 Kozaki understood, with de Tocqueville, that what forged the American people into a nation was to a great extent their shared moral values and their freedom to express those values in religious practice. Kozaki identified this common sense of identity as that of “the freedom of a civic nation” (kokumin no jiy) that both drew from the people’s own moral values and ensured that the state could not impose legal restrictions on the nation’s free exercise of religious belief.59 The challenge of Kozaki’s political theory was clear: the state did not create the nation; rather, a free and healthy nation (kokumin), steeped in the universal truths of Christianity, was seen as the bedrock of a healthy state. In coming to understand the primacy of nation over state, Kozaki was particularly influenced by Elisha Mulford’s Nation: the Foundations of Civil Order and Political Life in the United States (1872). Kozaki translated the title of Mulford’s book as Kokumin, and this rendering, along with the subtitle of the book, tells us everything we need to know about why Mulford’s argument appealed to Kozaki. But we need not merely infer. Kozaki cited with approval Mulford’s argument that all true, civic nations were informed by the life of Christ and that, throughout history and in his own time, there existed no civic nation outside the reach of Christian influence. Mulford’s interest was apparently in contrasting the politics of Islamic tribalism with the civic societies of Europe and America. But Mulford also cited Indian Buddhists who decried their own weak political organization and failure to form a nation, and Kozaki leapt at the chance to draw a parallel lesson for Meiji Japan. “Those advocates of preserving Japanese culture through Buddhism and those scholars who simply want to perpetuate Buddhism to maintain historical continuity with the past,” he reflected, “would learn a lot from this book.”60 What they might learn was not only about Christianity, he suggested, but also about the political and moral superiority of a free nation that was formed by a free people rather than by an authoritarian state that propped up its power by appealing to a restrictive concept of traditional morals and culture.

58

Elshtain, Democracy on Trial, 9. Kozaki, Seiky Shinron, 75. 60 Kozaki, Seiky Shinron, 79. 59

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III. Meiji Kokumin Political Theory Kozaki’s civic nationalism was of course in part an apologia of his Christian faith. But it was also offered as a defense of the Japanese people in anticipation of the establishment of the Imperial Diet. He opened his “new theory on religion and politics” by noting that the Japanese people had been promised their own national parliament in 1890, only four years away, and yet “the vast majority of the nation [kokumin] has no idea of the nature of the government of their own state.”61 His effort to outline a theory of civic nationalism was offered explicitly as an exercise in reforming the people’s minds so that they would be ready to exercise the responsibilities of citizens in a democratic nation. Yet the window of opportunity for a civic nation was already closing. In July 1884, less than a year earlier, the government had announced the kazokurei, the legal order that recovered privileges for nobility and served as a bulwark against democracy by enhancing the imperial house at the expense of nationalization of people along lines of social equality. It remained in effect until 1889 and, as Yamamuro has noted, technically, one could claim that this nobility system prevented the development of Japan as a true nation (kokumin) until the postwar constitution. Still, as Yamamuro concedes, such a strict understanding of what a nation is would exclude many European countries from “nation-state” status, and at any rate, the criterion for being a nation is not the existence of equality or the absence of social exploitation, but the belief in equality of its members and the belief that one people does constitute a nation.62 Yamamuro’s point is an important one, for it alerts us to the importance of both structure and consciousness in the process of nation-building. At no previous time in Japanese history was the issue of nation building as important as during the years between 1885 and 1889. In the intense, public and private political debates of those years, structures and consciousnesses were shaped that would last for decades and, in some ways, would inform much of subsequent Japanese political history. One key moment was in 1886 when the Home Ministry completed the process of establishing the “House” (ie) system as the basis on the modern Japanese national identity through its Koseki Hrei. Thereafter, the paternal house became the legal foundation for the Meiji civil code, stipulating that head of 61 62

Kozaki, Seiky Shinron, 4. Yamamuro Shin’ichi, “Kokumin kokka keisei-ki no genron to media,” 485.

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household and inheritance would be determined patrilineally. This was a serious blow to kokumin nationalists, as it directly undercut their hopes for equal civic rights in the new constitutional nation. The point was made even more clearly in November when, in Inoue Kowashi’s draft constitution submitted to It Hirobumi, the term shimmin (subjects) was used in place of the term jimmin (people). Inoue had argued that the term shimmin was inappropriate and should be replaced by the term kokumin, but he was overruled and in the end the decision remained in favor of defining the Japanese people in the constitution as monarchical “subjects,” not as a “nation.”63 This was a pivotal event and year, and thereafter populist nationalists grew increasingly radical, steadily moving away from Nakae’s belief that cooperation with the state could lead to the establishment of a civic nation in Meiji Japan. The next year, Nakae himself was forced to leave the capital under the Peace Regulations, passed on 27 December 1887 to deal with the increasing radicalization of the kokumin movement. The radicalization of the movement for populist nationalism had many sources, but Inoue Kaoru’s failure to secure revision of the unequal treaties in 1887 was one key factor. It signaled to many in the movement the folly of attempting to rely on an “alternative West” (i.e., France) as the grounds of political criticism of the government. Inoue’s failed attempt at treaty revision created the appearance of a humiliating concession to the West and raised a new kind of populist nationalism that was generally opposed to the Westernizing policies of the Meiji government.64 Opposition to the treaty revisions (which would have opened Japan to a wide array of rights for foreigners) came not only from conservative Japanese like Tani Kanj but also from the government’s French legal adviser. Boissonade who was also responsible for much of the civil code. As hopes for France as a symbol of civic rights and progressive nationalism began to disappear, a strong counter-force of anti-Westernism and ethnic nationalism began to rise to the fore of the populist movement. This movement was fueled by resentment against the West for perpetuating the unequal treaties and against the Japanese government for failure to secure national interests vis-à-vis the West. Inoue was forced to resign, and his successor in treaty negotiations, Okuma Shigenobu, was 63 Ineda Shji, Meiji kemp seiritsu shi vol. 2; also ibid, Meiji kenp seiritsushi no kenky; cited in Yoon, Nihon kokumin ron, 96. 64 Motoyama Yukihiko, Meiji shis no keisei (Tokyo: Fukumura Shuppan, 1969) 205-6.

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attacked in a bombing incident two years later for what were perceived as further unjust concessions to the West. He lost his leg as a result. Not all effects of this new anti-government populist nationalism were so dramatic, at least in the immediate term. But anti-government and anti-Western ideas were coalescing around a new intellectual project that is best described as ethnic nationalism. This ethnic nationalism was both a rejection of the Western concept of the nation as a political subjectivity framed around the contingency of political community (kokumin) and a rejection of the belief that this political community rested in the institutional framework of the Meiji state. It is important to grasp how both aspects played into this new radicalization of populist nationalism. While the government had already made it clear by 1887 that the new constitution would not codify the Japanese people as a kokumin but instead as imperial subjects (shimmin), the authorities were no less concerned about the rising challenge to Japanese nationalism presented in the theory of the Japanese people as a minzoku. The decision in favor of defining the people as subjects marked the government’s retreat from the field of populist nationalism, leaving the way open for minzoku nationalists to fill the void. Ethnic nationalism was not only incompatible with a broader vision of modern Japan as a multi-ethnic empire, it also ran counter to dominant strains in modern constitutional and progressive political theory that by the early 1880s had begun to emphasize, thanks largely to Ernest Renan’s influence, a consciousness of constructed citizenship over primordial claims of blood and culture. In deciding in favor of monarchical sovereignty, the government found itself in a dilemma: how to reconcile the Meiji imperial state with modern expectations of national identity without making concessions either to national sovereignty (kokumin shuken) or to ethnic nationalism? The question came to the fore in June 1887 when the Privy Council opened the Constitutional Conference and immediately debated the problem of how to achieve national integration (kokumin tg) but with the emperor as the center of the polity.65 The solution they found, and were to employ throughout the Meiji Constitutional period (18901945), was to informally employ the rhetoric of kokumin as a mechanism for ideological integration of the people into the state, while maintaining the legal and constitutional reality of monarchical 65

Motoyama, 211.

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sovereignty. Regardless of whether some government officials occasionally intoned the concept of kokumin, it enjoyed no legal, constitutional recognition or officially recognized status.

From Political to Cultural Nationalism, 1890-1945 The government’s use of the rhetoric of nationalism, even while rejecting the reality of nationalism and the rights it would bestow on the people, did not set well with the many intellectuals and activists who had pinned their hopes on a nationalist constitution. Their disappointment led to a sharpening of one of the major features of modern Japanese nationalism: deeply entrenched intellectual movements that advocated a nationalism independent of, and at times critical of, the state. The earliest instances of this movement were also among the most influential. In 1887 Tokutomi Soh established the Min’ysha (“Friends of the People”), a society of intellectuals committed to populist nationalism and critical of the government As noted above, Christians were prominent in this group, and Tokutomi himself had been baptized, although by this time he no longer practiced the faith. The following year, Tokutomi published his own alternative vision of Japan, his influential The Future Japan. As Motoyama summarizes these events, they began a ten year period, beginning around 1888, when the earlier individualistic nationalism of the People’s Rights period was increasingly engulfed by a romantic, historicist nationalism that asserted the particularity of the Japanese ethnic nation (nihon minzoku).66 This new ethnic nationalism was advocated most prominently by such intellectuals as Miyake Setsurei and Shiga Shigetaka who established the journal Nihonjin (the Japanese) in 1888, and by Kuga Katsunan who founded the newspaper Nihon (Japan) on 11 February 1889, the very day the Meiji Constitution was promulgated (Kigensetsu Day). Up to the promulgation of the constitution, Shiga had vigorously advocated a nationalism centered on the Japanese ethnic people (Yamato minzoku) against the Westernizing tendencies of Japan’s political authorities.67 But by 1890 the term had completely 66

Motoyama, 206-7. Cf. Shiga Shigetaka, “Nihonjin ga kaih suru tokoro no shugi wo kokuhaku su,” Nihonjin, no. 2 (April 1888): 1-6. It is noteworthy that while Shiga frequently refers to the “Yamato minzoku” in this article, he does not employ the term minzokushugi. Also, he provides the English term “nationality” as the equivalent for the Japanese kokusui. 67

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disappeared from his texts. Why? Motoyama thinks that it had to do with the Meiji state avoiding the “comprador behavior” of selling out Japan to the West and instead rapidly developing the Japanese economy on largely autonomous conditions.68 The development of a successful capitalist economy seems rather forced as an explanation of a change in Shiga’s thinking that happened in little over a year; however, Motoyama is surely correct to suggest that the constitution and the opening of the Diet did co-opt some of the support for Shiga’s populist nationalism and re-direct it away from criticism of the state. The 1889 Meiji Imperial Constitution was, then, not so much the genesis of modern Japanese nationalism as a key moment in the intervention in, and deflection of, it. Although it rejected the concept of the Japanese as a kokumin in favor of the definition of the people as imperial subjects (shimmin), it did stipulate that the conditions for being a Japanese subject would be determined by law. But the Nationality Law, the Kokuseki H, was not established until March 1899. Until then, the definition of what and who was a Japanese was to a large degree up for grabs, yielding a raging debate that contested the meaning of Japanese identity during the 1890s. This discourse on Japanese identity was not, as often suggested, the result of a momentary crystalization in Japanese nationalism, a simple return to tradition, or a greater concentration of Japanese national identity in the constitutional state, but quite the opposite. The debate over Japaneseness during the 1890s reflects both an awareness of the modern importance of determining national identity and a realization that the question was still to a great extent an open one. It could and would be contested in cultural, if not legal, terms. These postconstitutional cultural nationalists were not always conservative, even if they frequently invoked Japanese tradition in the criticism of the Meiji state. Their politics were not backward looking or merely a defense of existing political relations. Rather, we find in them the first important moment in modern Japanese nationalism when culture, as a code for conceptualizing the collective identity of the Japanese as a single people, was mobilized in agendas that spanned the political spectrum. There was probably no other time in modern Japanese history when both the importance of nationalism as a contemporary political issue and the open-ended nature of its political significance were so great. This shift from political nationalism to cultural nationalism can be attributed to several causes: the denial of national sovereignty and the 68

Motoyama, 222.

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rights of citizenship in the Meiji Constitution; the sense that Westernization had overridden concern for cultural continuity in the drafting of the Constitution and the practices and rituals of the Meiji state; and even the conservative attack on Christians led by Inoue Tetsujir in 1891 (see Chapter Three). Many of these populist nationalists were Christians and/or traced their origins to the People’s Rights Movement. As Christians, many would grow disillusioned with their status as subjects of the Japanese monarch, especially when conservatives like Inoue began to offer revisionist interpretations of the monarch, no longer as merely a constitutional sovereign, but as a moral principle, even a Shinto god. Some of these populist nationalists resisted this revisionism and continued to outline a sense of the Japanese people as a cultural community that remained distinct from the modern Meiji state. One key moment in this effort was the Protestant Kashiwagi Gien’s debate with Kat Hiroyuki over the effort to substitute statism (kokkashugi) for nationalism.69 Kuga Katsunan was one of the most articulate spokesmen for this new culturally-informed kokumin nationalism. The cultural emphasis of his nationalism is clear from an article he published in June 1888 in the Tokyo Denp called “The Crossroads in Japan’s Progress in Civilization.” According to Nishikawa Nagao, this article marked the first appearance of the word “culture” (bunka) in Japanese. Equally significant is that Kuga used the term as an equivalent of the Germanic concept of Kultur, a sense of culture as a collective identity that captures the nationality of a people who may not enjoy a distinctive, independent political citizenship. Although he used the term kokumin, his cultural emphasis marks a new shift toward an ethnic conception of the nation: If one desires to integrate or consolidate each of these nations, then one must integrate and consolidate cultures. But what makes culture are those elements in language, mores, blood lineage and customs that truly constitute the particular character of a nation (kokumin), along with other things like institutions and laws that are appropriate to the body of the nation (kokumin no shintai), and the difficulty in integrating and consolidating these elements is no different than trying to turn a child immediately into an old person.70

69

Katano Masao, 124. Kuga Katsunan, “Nihon bunmei shimp no kiro,” Tokyo Denp, (June 1888); cited in Nishikawa Nagao, Kokumin kokkaron no shatei; 84. 70

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Kuga grasped culture as national culture and understood nationalism as divided between the nationalism of powerful countries and that of weak countries, to be sure, but more innovative was his identification of Japan with the nationalism of weak countries. His approach to Japanese nationalism as one of the “weak nationalisms” was shaped both by his understanding of both domestic and international events. If international events (eg. Japan’s failures in treaty revision, and later the Triple Intervention) seemed to provide evidence for this distinction between the nationalism of powerful countries and that of weak or subordinate countries, domestic events (eg., suppression of the People’s Rights Movement, Matsukata’s deflationary policies, and the rejection of popular nationalism in the Meiji constitution) led Kuga, in Nishikawa’s words, to adopt “the side of those people who had been forced out of the flow of modernity.” Nishikawa concludes that even while Kuga did not explicitly articulate an ethnic nationalism (minzokushugi) as such, “his viewpoint adumbrated the ethnic nationalist cultural theories of the postwar war third world.”71 It is a tempting conclusion, made all the more so by a recognition that a nationalism of the weak, even an ethnic nationalism, does not preclude adopting an aggressive position on international affairs. In fact, Liah Greenfeld and Daniel Chirot have pointed out that it is precisely this kind of collectivistic-ethnic nationalism that is “more likely to engage in aggressive warfare than individualistic nationalism.”72 And indeed, Kuga connected his nationalism with the emperor, supported the Sino-Japanese war and approved of Japanese colonial domination. Other commentators have been even more harshly critical of Kuga’s nationalism. The anti-Christian Yoshimoto Takaaki has written that “the progressive ‘nationalism’ of such intellectuals as [Kuga] Katsunan clearly already had the form of social fascism.”73 How could progressive nationalism become a foundation for social fascism? For Yoshimoto, it was because Kuga’s nationalism “was built around the form of a schismatic unity (bunri-teki titsu) of human rights philosophy and State’s rights philosophy (jinken shis, kokken shis).”74 Whatever Yoshimoto precisely meant by such a claim, the underlying reason for his hostility to Kuga is that, by the 71

Nishikawa, 84-5. Liah Greenfeld and Daniel Chirot, “Nationalism and Agression,” Theory and Society, vol. 23, no. 1 (February 1994): 79-130, at 86. 73 Yoshimoto Taka’aki, “Kaisetsu: nihon no nashonarizumu,” 7-54 in Yoshimoto, ed., Nashonarizumu, 36. 74 Yoshimoto, 36. 72

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1960s, he had emerged as one of postwar Japan’s most influential nationalists. Yoshimoto advocated a vague sort of nationalism that was really a kind of anarchic populism that went even further than Kuga’s nationalism did in disassociating itself from the state. Yoshimoto’s critique of Kuga was really the expression of his own Oedipus complex: he was seeking to slay his intellectual father, the received modes of populist nationalism that Yoshimoto felt were too closely linked to the West. Matsuda Kichir’s more recent assessment of Kuga’s nationalism is more persuasive. Matsuda has presented a theoretically informed, close reading of Kuga’s key texts, concluding that Kuga’s importance was in trying to establish an autonomous field of political discourse that could provide a cultural foundation for democracy in modern Japan. And a key concern of Kuga’s within political discourse was in conceptualizing what “nationality” (kokuminshugi) meant in Meiji society. For Kuga, kokuminshugi was less a discourse on political nationalism than a discursive effort to clarify the meaning of who “the people” were, a question that was more a problem of culture than of constitutional or legal definitions.75 Kuga’s rise in influence in nationalist discourse came at a time when a rift was developing between kokumin nationalism and the Christianity that had played such an important role in advocating this kind of civic nationalism. Influential kokumin nationalists left the faith and shifted their nationalism towards cultural and ethnic concerns, even as the government “as a matter of policy encouraged members of the upper classes to become [Catholic] Christians….As Catholicism spread and the government learned that the Pope was the head of a secular state, the Japanese realized that Modern Catholicism did not oppose monolithic [sic; “monarchical”?] government.”76 The key development was the spread of Liberal or “Free” Theology between 1887-9 among Protestants. In 1889 Kozaki tried to defend orthodox Christian teaching against this new theology (that denied the necessity of believing Christ was the Son of God). But even the antiChristian Fukuzawa Yukichi found such a diluted form of Christianity 75 Matsuda Kichir, “’Seironsha’ Kuga Katsunan no seiritsu,” Tokyo toritsu daigaku hgakkai zasshi, vol. 28, no.1 (July 1987): 527-84; “Kinji seironk ichi: Kuga Katsunan ni okeru ‘seiron’ no hh,” Tokyo toritsu daigaku hgakkai zasshi, vol. 33, no. 1 (July 1992): 111-171; “Kinji seironk ni kan: Kuga Katsunan ni okeru ‘seiron’ no hh,” Tokyo toritsu daigaku hgakkai zasshi, vol. 33, no. 2 (December 1992): 53-95. 76 Kishimito, ed., Japanese Religion in the Meiji Period, 212.

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acceptable, and he praised it in a published newspaper article. Liberal Theology’s influence was not long lasting on Japanese Christianity, but its political and social impact was considerable. Its influence can be seen in the Society for the Study of Socialism, founded in 1898 almost entirely by Christians who were drawn to this Liberal Theology (the lone exception was Ktoku Shsui who was not a Christian).77 Under the influence of Liberal Theology, these Protestants become more interested in carrying out social work than in defending the Christian faith. In 1900, this Society was reorganized as Society for Socialism, and again Ktoku was joined by five liberal Christians: Katayama Sen, Abe Is, Kinoshita Naoe, Nishikawa Kjir, and Kawakami Kiyoshi. Although some Christians continued to assert the compatibility of their faith with patriotism, many Protestants, especially those involved in the socialist movement, had began to withdraw their support for the imperial government around the time of the Russo-Japanese War.78 After the war, Abe, Kinoshita and Ishikawa Sanshir withdrew from the socialist movement in protest of its materialism and increasing violent methods and advocated Christian humanism. But the impact on nationalist discourse was already felt and, as a result, the kokuminshugi movement that Christians had helped inspire in the late nineteenth century never completely recovered from these developments until the postwar period. Instead, social and national issues were increasingly blended with ethnic identity, a topic developed in more detail in Chapters Four and Six. In any event, by the early twentieth century, nationalists were seeking a new conceptualization of the nation to replace the Christian emphasis on personalism and the dignity of the individual that had been invested in kokuminshugi. Some turned to minzoku, others to shakai, and others yet simply abandoned the nation for an embrace of the state or the monarch. To trace the development of kokumin nationalism in the early to mid twentieth century is difficult, as a number of historical, political, social and discursive events intervened, rendering this nationalism more ambiguous that it previously had been. The key development was the incorporation of Taiwan in 1895 and Korea in 1910 as integral parts of the Japanese policy. However, with this territorial 77 The founding members of the Socialism Research Society who were Christians of this bent were Katayama Sen, Abe Is, Murai Tomonari, Kishimoto Nobuta, Kakawami Kiyoshi and Toyosaki Zennosuke. 78 hata and Ikado, 269-76.

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acquisition came the question of whether the people that resided in those territories could be incorporated into the nation (kokumin), and if so, under what conditions. There were certainly Japanese intellectuals and ordinary people who favored an expansive notion of the nation that would include other ethnic peoples. Yet, this process of expansion appeared to many Japanese as driven by the political elites, and since the Hibiya Riots of 1905, a strong sense of betrayal of the nation by its own state pervaded any discussion of integration of peoples acquired through imperialist expansion. As a result, the earlier kokuminshugi discourse often incorporated ethnic nationalist elements, expressing itself in continued criticism of (and at times opposition to) the imperial state, but also occasionally collapsing any meaningful distinction between a nationalism grounded in Japanese ethnic identity and a nationalism framed in legal and civic terms. It is important to emphasize that this was no mere conceptual or linguist game. The issue was not the instability of terminology or concepts: rather, an ethnically determined kokuminshugi was merely another instance in world history of what ethnic nationalism has always sought everywhere–a collapse of any meaningful distinction between civic membership in the country and ethnic identity. And ethnic nationalism in early twentieth century Japan was clearly in opposition to the dominant tendencies of the imperial Japanese state. The most succinct and reliable analysis of nationalism in Japan prior to and during World War II is Thomas R. H. Havens’s 1973 article on “Frontiers of Japanese Social History During World War II.”79 Havens points out that modern Japanese nationalism was structured around the tensions between kokuminshugi and kokkashugi, and he recognizes the former as a true nationalism that is centered on the people, whereas the latter is often called “statism” because it is more concerned with the authority of the state than with the nation itself: At first most. . .kokuminshugisha accepted state authority but dismissed it as peripheral to their central concern, which dealt with the essence of 79

Thomas R.H. Havens, “Frontiers of Japanese Social History During World War II,” Shakai kagaku tky vol. 18, no. 3 (March 1973): 582-538 (the pages are in reverse of the usual order, with higher numbers first). Although this is one of the most accurate analyses of prewar Japanese nationalism, it has not had a significant impact on the scholarship in the field (especially in comparison with Havens’s other, well-known works), in part because it was an English article published in a Japanese scholarly journal, and in part because the title gave little indication of its substantial focus on nationalism.

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the Japanese as a people. Later, in the 1910s and 1920s, some of them began to use their nationality sentiments to attack the state and its kokkashugi dogmas glorifying governmental power. The precis which follows outlines the dichotomy between state and nation in prewar Japanese nationalist writing.80

Havens locates a key shift in nationalism around World War I. These were the years of kokumin nationalism, such as that of Kita Ikki, that underwrote strong and sometimes violent attacks on the existing state (Havens concedes that Kita was a statist, if only in the potential future: his immediate politics attacked the existing Japanese state in the name of kokumin nationalism). Havens concludes that “by the eve of World War II Japanese nationalist thought was cleft into kokkashugi and kokuminshugi, an obvious and nearly irreparable erosion of the early Meiji consensus on national loyalties.”81 Statists emphasized the monarchy and a revisionist and rather obscure interpretation of the kokutai (“national essence”); nationalists were split among those who accepted the constitutional structure of government and those who did not. Yet, for these nationalists, “the concept of kokutai was frequently irrelevant–to many writers a harmless vestige, worthy of obeisance but not veneration.”82 This sharp dichotomy between nationalism and the state was of concern to both intellectuals and to the government. But between 1937 and 1945, the overriding concern of the state and its apologists was to close the gap between nationalism and the state, and to renew the people’s allegiance to the state at a critical moment of war. 80

Havens, 580-79. Havens glosses kokuminshugi as both “ethnic” and “cultural” nationalism, a determination that reflects both the increasing influence of ethnic nationalism in prewar Japan and the personal influences on some of his sources, most notably Ishida Takeshi. Ishida, born in 1923, came of age at the height of ethnic nationalism and his own writings on Japanese nationalism assert the position that all Japanese nationalism is essentially ethnic nationalism and that Japan is a unique case where the general distinctions between nation, state and ethnicity do not apply. See Ishida Takeshi, Nihon no seiji to kotoba-ge: ‘heiwa’ to ‘kokka’ (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1989): 158-9. To be fair, Havens accepts Ishida’s point that minzoku and kokumin are not a meaningful distinction, but he maintains the distinction between nation (kokumin) and state (kokka). 81 Havens, 578. 82 Havens, 577. Havens’s point is a long-overdue one, as too many studies of Japanese nationalism have misconstrued this obscure concept of kokutai as the determining factor in Japanese nationalism. All such arguments do is mis-interpret the problem of nationalism as one of statism. Such studies on kokutai may tell us more about state indoctrination, but at the expense of learning much at all about Japanese nationalism.

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Consequently, the April 1938 State Mobilization Law expressed this desire by implying that the country’s very future rested on a reconciliation of these divergent discourses on the nation and the state: An essential requisite for achieving the goal of victory is for the country to do its utmost to secure the livelihoods of the people [kokumin] and to harmonize those aspects of the well being of the state [kokka] which are necessary for prosecuting the war.83

This Law was preceded by a broader effort to utilize kokumin rhetoric to legitimate the state’s cultural efforts to integrate the people into its agenda. On 14 August 1937, the Konoe cabinet announced a National Spiritual Mobilization (kokumin seishin sdin) movement. Again, Havens’s assessment is superb: “Since it would hardly do to admit the statist orientation of this government sponsored program, the movement was called a [national] people’s (kokumin) campaign, and elaborate steps were taken to invite their participation.84 A wide range of intellectuals participated in the effort to integrate nationalism and the state, including Hayashi Fusao, Kamei Katsuichir and Kyoto School philosophers like Tanabe Hajime, Ksaka Masataka and Nishitani Keiji. In actuality, this intervention was less a matter of “integrating” nation and state than it was a state-driven effort to absorb populist nationalism into the state under the sign of the “nation-state” (kokumin-kokka). Nishitani expressed the rationale of this project most clearly when he explained that the state (kokka) required the nation (kokumin) to adopt a subservient yet intrinsically linked relationship to it “because of the need to strengthen, as much as possible, [the state’s] internal unity as a nation-state.”85 The effort was never completely successful, but it did achieve a momentary stabilization in the relationship of nation and state, particularly given the exigencies of war.

83 Kokka Sdin H, reprinted in Suekawa Hiroshi, ed., Sdinh taisei (Tokyo: Yhikaku, 1940); quoted in Ishida Takeshi, Hakyoku to heiwa, Nihon kindaishi taikei, VIII (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1968), 81-82; cited by Havens, 575. 84 Havens, 574-3. For a similar assessment, but one which takes into account ethnic nationalism as a distinctive discourse, see my “Nationalism as Dialectics: Ethnicity, Moralism, and the State in Early Twentieth Century Japan,” chapter in James Heisig and John C. Maraldo, eds., Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994): 174-96. 85 Nishitani Keiji, “ ‘Kindai no chkoku’ shiron,” in Takeuchi Yoshimi and Kawakami Tetsutar, eds., Kindai no chkoku (Tokyo: Fuzanb, 1979), 27.

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The Postwar Return of the Kokumin, 1945 to the Present Since the imperial state had subordinated nationalism to its priority on public order under the impetus of “wartime exigencies”, defeat in the war was thus most immediately a defeat of this state and not necessarily a repudiation of nationalism. Indeed, after the war, the nation now could be (and in fact was) represented as a victim of the state and its “elite-driven” war and thus given an even greater patina of legitimacy through the ubiquitous anti-war sentiment of victimhood. This point has often eluded those historians and political theorists for whom nationalism is simply reduced to an ideology of the state. But for others who have paid closer attention to the tensions between state and nation, between statism and nationalism as they have played out both in theory and in modern Japanese historical practice, the ironic re-legitimation of nationalism through the defeat of the state is one of the most significant, if ironic, political lessons of the postwar period. Once again, Havens’s analysis of the postwar resurgence of nationalism in the absence of a state is a good place to begin to unravel these ironies: State and nation in modern Japan have existed in dynamic and interdependent balance, both as magnets of nationalist ideology and as focuses of day to day socio-political interaction. The two have normally interacted cooperatively, but when they fell to loggerheads in World War II it was the nation which proved the more durable. In a literal sense, American bombs destroyed the Japanese state but not the nation. Metaphorically the nation swallowed up the state’s ambitions by setting limits on how successfully its dreams could be realized.86

From a different perspective, I have come to a similar conclusion that “the disestablishment of the imperial state after the war left many Japanese with a sense that the state was a thoroughly corrupt agent for social change, but it did little to temper a broader, popular sense that national cultural identity…remained untrammeled by the sins of the militarized, Westernized state.”87 There were many ways in which Japanese turned to nationalist discourse in the postwar period, and the ethnic revival is one that we survey below in Chapter Six. But above and apart from the dispute that broke out among nationalists over whether ethnic or cultural nationalism should prevail was their shared sense that the end of the imperial state marked a new lease on life for 86

Havens, 544. Emphasis in original. Kevin M. Doak, “Building National Identity through Ethnicity: Ethnology in Wartime Japan and After,” The Journal of Japanese Studies, 27:1 (1-39): 3. 87

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nationalism, a discourse that foregrounded the Japanese people themselves as agents of their common fate. The question was whether this resurgent nationalism would be a civic type that would integrate the people into a new state as kokumin, or whether it would continue the wartime discourse on the Japanese as an ethnic nation (minzoku), with an ambivalent relationship to the state. The most important element was the simple fact that from September 1945 to April 1952 there was no Japanese state. The Japanese people lived under an occupying armed force, essentially run by General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) and his subordinates in the Allied Powers General Headquarters (GHQ). Yet, even in the absence of a state, a Japanese nation (kokumin) acquired legal existence on 3 May 1947 when the postwar Constitution of Japan went into effect while Japan was still under foreign, military occupation. The much debated issue of how much contribution Japanese legal scholars had in drafting the constitution and how much of it was “forced” on the Japanese people is a side-issue: there was some input by Japanese legal scholars, and even broader acceptance by the general populace of the new constitution. But most importantly, it remains in effect today, as does its legally codified notion of what the Japanese nation is–i.e, a “kokumin.” The postwar constitution, written and implemented in the absence of a sovereign Japanese state, was issued in the name of the nation (kokumin), which it defined in simple and concise terms: Chapter III Article 10. The conditions necessary for being a member of the Japanese nation (Nihon kokumin) shall be determined by law.88

This constitutional provision marked the first time in Japanese history that the nation was made legally sovereign. But the language, even in stipulating a legal, political foundation for the nation, left open a possible interpretation that the law could thus codify the Japanese as a nation on the basis of blood or ethnic ties. That possibility was addressed in part by Article 14, which stipulated that “all members of the nation (kokumin) are equal under the law, and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin.”89 Thus, the newly established Japanese nation was constituted as a constitutional nation, 88 89

“Nihonkoku kenp,” reprinted in Nihonkoku kenp, 1-58, at 16. “Nihonkoku kenp,” 18.

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a people whose common identity and fate was determined by laws, not by race or creed. The irony remained, however, that this nation existed in a context that did not include a Japanese state and in which, only by confusing race with ethnicity, could ethnic nationalism be excluded as a legal option. This situation would present challenges for the full realization of a civic sense of nationhood, as the completion of civic nationhood requires the engagement of citizens with their own independent state and with the seductions of ethnic pride in a post-imperial context. Even though constitutionally enshrined, political nationalism (kokuminshugi) faced serious challenges in early postwar Japan. It could easily be seen as a continuation of the multi-ethnic polity of imperial Japan, and thus tarred with all the criticism of the wartime state, especially its denial of national sovereignty (to the Japanese people, as well as other peoples conceived in ethnic terms). For this very reason, mono-ethnic nationalism was quite strong in the early postwar period, as we will see below in Chapter Six. Those who sought to defend civic nationalism not only had to contend with vestiges of statism, but also with those on both extremes of the political spectrum who embraced ethnic nationalism as their only spoils from a disastrous war. One of the key objections ethnic nationalists raised to kokuminshugi was that the very concept of a nation as a kokumin was a Western one, indeed an American aberration. This argument gained strength from the joint publication of two essays by Watsuji Tetsur in the last days of the war that juxtaposed “Japan’s way of imperial subjecthood” with “America’s civic nationality” (Amerika no kokuminsei). Watsuji was really seeking to discredit the concept of a “civic nationality” by arguing that, beneath its veneer of civic values, America was really just an “Anglo-Saxon” racial nation. Yet, what may have remained in most people’s minds was merely this unfavorable association of kokumin with America precisely at a time when Japan was at war with that country. The association of the two was only strengthened by the (largely) American occupation issuing a constitution that enshrined the kokumin as the only legally recognized concept of a sovereign nation in Japan. While many of those opposed to America’s influence in postwar Japan (both die-hard rightists and Marxists) advocated the alternative of ethnic nationalism, not everyone who was re-thinking the possibilities of populist nationalism was so open in his ethnic proclivities. Watsuji offered an influential intervention in the growing

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divide between official civic nationalism and dissident ethnic nationalism. In his 1952 essay “The Issue of National Morality” (Kokumin dtoku no mondai; an earlier version was published in 1932 as Kokumin dtokuron), Watsuji presented a strong case for moral consciousness as a key element in uniting the individual with the nation. In doing so, he made two major contributions to the nationalist debate. First, he emphasized the “polysemy” of the word kokumin: not that it referred both to ethnic and civic types of nations; rather, that it could refer both to “the nation” as a collective and to an individual member of that nation.90 On the face of it, this argument simply reinforced the mutually constitutive nature of the relationship between an individual and the nation–leaving unclear whether this relationship was grounded in common ties of ethnicity or in a moral consciousness that can and needs to be taught. Watsuji’s second contribution was to wrench kokumin discourse away from its Meijiperiod foundations in Christianity. By failing to make a consistent distinction in his writing between kokumin and minzoku, and by rejecting moral systems that are universal in scope, he essentially undermined Japan’s traditional civic nationalism that had grown out of the Meiji Christian emphasis on the dignity of the individual person, substituting instead a Buddhist concept of nothingness as the ethical core of the national whole.91 Watsuji’s understanding of ethnicity (minzoku) stemmed from the 1920s liberal tradition of seeing ethnicity as a cultural, rather than a racial, community. But this cultural community was not seen as composed of individual persons who retain their personhood even after integrated into the nation. Thus, Karube Tadashi writes that for Watsuji, “to be consciously a member of the ethnic nation (minzoku) is the realization of ‘true character’ (shin no jinkaku).”92 In short, Watsuji provided the theoretical language for an implicit, ethnic dimension to a discourse that was ostensibly proffered under the rhetorical cover of kokumin nationalism. Watsuji’s effort to “ethnicize” civic nationalism in the name of a culturally specific ethical sensibility of the Japanese people did not go unchallenged. Maruyama Masao emerged from the war aghast at how ethnic nationalism had underwritten what he called the “fascist” 90 Unuma Hiroko, “Kokumin dtokuron o meguru rons,” 356-379 in Imai Jun and Ozawa Tomio, eds., Nihon shis ronsshi, 377-8. 91 Karube Tadashi, Hikari no rykoku (Tokyo: Sbunsha, 1995),185-97. 92 Karube, Hikari no rykoku, 189. For Watsuji’s rejection of individual person (jinkaku) in favor of intersubjective human community (ningen), see 117-130.

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values of the wartime. He identified the core of this anti-liberal ideology in a myth of ethnic tribalism that sought to substitute for the rights of the kokumin an irrational belief in the collectivist claims of ethnic (minzoku) identity.93 The very future of democracy, Maruyama believed, rested on returning to Fukuzawa Yukichi’s early Meiji effort to establish kokumin consciousness among the Japanese people (i.e., Meiji civic nationalism without the explicitly Christian element). Curtis Anderson Gayle has accurately described Maruyama’s project as one of raising “civic national consciousness”; Maruyama himself generally referred to it merely as a “healthy nationalism” (kenzen na kokuminshugi). In either case, it was offered in sharp contrast to the “unhealthy” nationalism premised on ethnicity (minzoku). Gayle’s analysis of Maruyama’s nationalism is helpful in understanding what was at stake: Maruyama constructed a reflexive notion of individual identity based upon the constant mediation and negotiation of individual interests in the context of citizenship and a sense of nation…. To this extent, Maruyama appears closer to…[the] notion that citizenship should be bound up with ‘the struggle to make something public’ as a ‘struggle for justice.’ This would seem to place Maruyama’s kokuminshugi not far from… [what has been] propounded as “liberal nationalism.”…[These] liberal forms of nationalism assume the nation to be a cultural construct that “defines membership in terms of participation in a common culture” that is flexible and able to accept people of various ethnicities.94

In other words, Maruyama was the most powerful advocate in the early postwar period for the individualist nationalism that Meiji intellectuals like Fukuzawa, Kozaki, Nakae and others had hoped would secure the future of a democratic modern Japan. As always, historical context matters, and Maruyama’s nationalism was also a critical reflection on the excesses of statism that he had experienced during World War II. Maruyama faced a difficult problem: the need to steer carefully between the Charybdis of the statism (kokkashugi) that during the war had denounced 93

Maruyama Masao, Nihon no shis, 106. Curtis Anderson Gayle, “Progressive Representations of the Nation: Early Postwar Japan and Beyond,” 7. The internal quotes are to Seyla Benhabib, “Models of the Public Sphere: Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jurgen Habermas,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Kai Nielsen, “Cultural Nationalism: Neither Ethnic nor Civic,” The Philosophical Forum, vol. XXVIII, nos. 1-2, (Fall/Winter, 1996): 42-52, respectively. 94

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individualism as a decadent Western ideology and the Scylla of antiliberal collectivism that now trumped individualism with class or ethnic (minzoku) consciousness (often both–see the discussion on Takashima Zen’ya below in Chapter Six). We have seen that Maruyama associated collectivist identity with the extreme antiliberalism of the wartime “fascism.” But it is also important to understand his wariness toward the state. As Rikki Kersten has suggested, “Maruyama’s positive evaluation of Fukuzawa’s ideas on national and popular sovereignty rested on one key element: Fukuzawa’s insistence on distance between the individual and the state.”95 Through his reading of Fukuzawa, Maruyama presented a highly nuanced, subtle theory that offered “not opposition to the state but a sense of social autonomy from the state.”96 This distinction–along with much of Maruyama’s own luster–frequently was lost in the aftermath of the US-Japan Security Treaty Crisis of 1960 and the radicalization of politics that followed. Even Maruyama at times appeared to agree with his erstwhile opponents on the left that the postwar state appeared hopelessly “fascist,” in the grips of the “dictatorship of the majority.”97 His politically-embedded civic nationalism was tarnished, and the momentum had shifted to those on both extremes of the political spectrum who intoned a dis-enfranchised nationalism of the “people,” especially in the form of an ethnic nationalism that would position Japan against the “West” (meaning the United States) and its lackeys in the Liberal Democratic Party’s “fascist” state. During the 1960s and 1970s, Maruyama was increasingly elevated to iconic status among elite academics, even as populist nationalism turned to “the theme of minzokushugi as a viable ethnic critique of the state and post-war democracy.”98 At the same time, beginning in the 1960s, Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato’s “income doubling plan” and high growth economic policies sought to draw the support of the majority of the Japanese people back to the postwar government, if not directly to an embrace of the state per se. By the 1970s, newly found affluence was widening the gap between collectivist nationalism and political activism, often disconnecting minzokushugi of its earlier nationalist moorings and rendering it merely as a free-floating discourse on Japanese cultural 95

Rikki Kersten, Democracy in Postwar Japan, 71. Kersten, Democracy in Postwar Japan, 66. 97 Kersten, Democracy in Postwar Japan, 212. 98 Gayle, “Progressive Representations of the Nation,” 14. 96

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identity (Nihonjinron). At times, it seemed as though there were an inverse relationship between cultural theory and the politics of the state (the more one delved into cultural theory, the less relevant political parties and the like seemed; the more one studied national politics, the less culture was of interest). Culture (ethnic nationalism) was certainly more interesting. Most of what leading intellectuals in the media and academia wrote about was given over to broad, cultural themes (even stereotypes) rather than close, dispassionate political analysis of party mechanics, voting behavior and political platforms. A key effort to reconcile culture and politics, nation and state, came in 1980 when Prime Minister hira Masayoshi’s policy research group published its report on “Economic Management in an Age of Culture.” At first glance, the report seems quite unremarkable (in spite of its use of such phrases as “an era that will overcome modernity”–which for some echoed the 1942 Symposium on Overcoming Modernity). It was mainly a dry outline of a series of policies designed to enhance the welfare of the Japanese people, by shifting the government’s economic priorities from high-growth industrial economics to de-centralized, consumer-oriented and social welfare programs. But the point of the report, and its recommended policies, was summed up in a telling phrase: In order to secure the support and understanding of the nation [kokumin] with regard to the seriousness and significance of policy determination, it will be necessary to strive as much as possible to reduce the ‘sense of disconnect’ and the ‘conditions of estrangement’ between the national people (kokumin taish) and the complex economic system.99

In short, while scrupulously avoiding any reference to the concept of minzoku,100 the report recognized that a significant gap had arisen between the people and the government. In rhetoric and policy substance, the report tried to close that gap by outlining economic and cultural policies that would demonstrate how the government would enhance the welfare of the people. 99

“Bunka no jidai no keizai un’ei,” hira sri no seisaku kenky hkokusho 7 (Tokyo: kurash Insatsu Kyoku, 1980): 166. 100 The lack of reference in the hira group report to the Japanese as a minzoku is unexpected and thus significant. In the first place, it is unexpected, given that hira himself had repeatedly referred to the Japanese as a minzoku in the 1970s. Cf. Kenneth Pyle, The Japanese Question: Power and Purpose in a New Age, 69. Also, Umesao Tadao, director of the National Ethnology Museum, was chair of one of the nine groups involved in composing the report and would have been expected to promote an ethnic concept of the Japanese people.

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While the report highlighted the concept of culture in its title, the body of the report focused on a new civic relationship between the people and the government, and it scrupulously avoided the language of ethnicity or cultural collectivism In this sense, its intellectual antecedents may be found in the 1950s debates over whether, as a pluralistic state, Japan should be a welfare or a cultural state.101 In opting for a welfare state, even one that included cultural activities under the concept of “welfare,” the hira report adopted a pluralistic theory of the state, one that ironically presumed and encouraged distance between the state and society102 (and “society,” as we saw in Chapter Four, was often a surrogate for “the nation”). In trying to reconcile nation and state, yet within a pluralistic, democratic framework, the hira report opted for a loose relationship between social and cultural identity and the state. The weakness of this proposal stemmed from the fact that much of cultural and social discourse was, at the same time, invested in the minzoku attitudes of Nihonjinron, and simply did not respond to a nationalism premised on a civic identity (kokumin) that left out this deeper sense of cultural identity. The true beginnings of a postwar kokumin nationalism that sought to reconcile nation, culture and the state are largely found during the 1980s. Often given a variety of descriptive labels, (eg. “liberal,” “healthy,” “civic,” “political), this kokuminshugi movement was spurred by Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro’s effort to revise the hira project by injecting the long-dormant political nationalism of the Democratic wing of the Liberal-Democratic Party into the Liberal wings’s economism. Kokuminshugi advocates sought, not a Sonderweg for the Japanese people (even if, especially if, Japan’s putatively unique system was described as economism), but a greater acceptance of Japan as “a normal nation,” both by the international community and by the Japanese people themselves. Nakasone’s revision of the hira group’s proposal focused on its fundamental weakness–its unintended encouragement of a greater gap between the nation and the state by not addressing the broad, social sense of Japanese identity that in the interim had all too frequently become invested in the concept of being a particular minzoku Nakasone, however, went too far in the other direction, making a series of unfortunate remarks about Japan’s ethnic homogeneity in his 101 102

Ishida Takeshi, Nihon no seiji to kotoba-ge, 225-9. Ishida, 224-6.

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misguided effort to signal that nation and state could coalesce in postwar Japan. The implication was as clear as it was unacceptable to liberals and civic nationalists: for Nakasone, reconciliation of this historical tension between nation and state in Japan could only come about through a reaffirmation of Japan as an ethnic nation-state (minzoku-kokka). These remarks were unfortunate because, as Kenneth Pyle has demonstrated, Nakasone’s ultimate objective was to strengthen a liberal nationalism that would extol Japan’s particular strengths while showing a greater appreciation for other cultures, even while moving towards closer collaboration with global institutions and networks.103 Nakasone wanted a more “international state,” but his effort to bring the Japanese people on board was mired in a prior appeal of ethnic identity, and this ethnic nationalism undercut his effectiveness among many who truly sought a more liberal nationalism in postwar Japan. With the wide-scale discrediting of Nakasone’s nationalism, a critique that drew (ironically) on a long history of minzoku nationalism that distrusted the elite state (see Chapter Six below), intellectuals again took the lead in promoting nationalism. But what was different this time was that some intellectual nationalists tried to reconcile nation and state from their positions outside the state. The most significant of these intellectual nationalists are those who associated themselves with the “Liberal School of History” which Professor Fujioka Nobukatsu founded in July 1995. The School claimed a membership of 500, and it was most active in promoting middle school textbooks that would present a more patriotic view of Japanese history. They were particularly incensed by the demands of leftist teachers that middle school students focus on the Imperial Army’s role in forcing women into prostitution at the front during World War II (the “comfort women” or jgun ianfu, issue). While Fujioka’s critics claimed he was simply trying to use history to “glorify war,” Fujioka himself declared that the Liberal School was “based on the hypothesis that Japan could have avoided the war if it had adopted other policies, [and] we wish to specifically investigate these possibilities and realities.”104 While their critics argued they were denying historical facts, Fujioka and his group countered that the real question was which facts were appropriate for a history 103

Pyle, The Japanese Question, 94-101. Fujioka Nobukatsu, “Ware o gunkokushugisha to yobonakare,” Bungei Shunj (February 1997): 292-302, at 300-1; cited in Rikki Kersten, “Neo-nationalism and the ‘Liberal School of History’, 195. 104

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curriculum that was part of a compulsory education system for adolescents. Ultimately the debate (which still smolders) revealed sharp disagreements over whether nationalism could or should be associated with the state (Fujioka’s critics were often covert nationalists themselves, but their nationalism stemmed from anti-state, even ethnic nationalism), and whether ethnic nationalism or civic nationalism should be the normative type for postwar Japan. For some opponents of the School, a belief that the wartime state had committed unpardonable sins against the Japanese people (in addition to those against other people in Asia) militated against any effort to augment loyalty to the postwar state. They were joined by others whose communist sympathies and ethnic nationalism simply rejected the capitalist state as inherently imperialist, oppressive, and illegitimate. The Liberal School, for its part, by emphasizing historical consciousness as the mode through which national identity and civic-mindedness is fostered, and in finding an acceptable place for the state within their nationalism, seemed to offer new hope for civic nationalism in Japan. Yet, many prominent members of the School (eg., Nishio Kanji, Kobayashi Yoshinori) revealed an ethnic bias in their writings which, once again, undercut the arguments being made for a civic nationalism that might realize the long-sought goal of a democratic rapprochement between nation and state: a civic nation-state (kokumin-kokka) that eschewed a view of Japan as an ethnic nation-state (minzoku-kokka). In the end, Rikki Kersten’s assessment of this on-going drama may be best: Perhaps we can take some comfort from the fact that Fujioka chose to dress his nationalism up as liberalism. Even if it is only a label, it tells us that liberalism retains its value as a legitimizing idea in contemporary Japan.105

One hastens to add that “liberalism” in Japan, whether the prewar “old liberals” or the early postwar “new old liberals” were often those intellectuals who most passionately advocated a “healthy” nationalism that might balance the interests of the citizens (as the nation) with the resources of the constitutional state. Yet, there is another dimension to this struggle over nationalism in contemporary Japan, and that is the possibility that what is taking place in these public debates over memory, war, history, ethnicity, imperialism and nationalism is both more and less than what often meets the eye. Simultaneously, and independent of the discourse on 105

Kersten, “Neo-Nationalism,” 202.

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nationalism, postwar Japan has witnessed the gradual decline of the intellectual class as the spokesmen for public values. This decline was first noted in the early postwar years, but it has sharply escalated since the 1980s. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the academic intellectuals are being supplanted by the kind of publicly engaged “civil intellectuals” that Jeffrey Goldfarb has argued are essential to a mature, functioning democracy.106 Civil intellectuals make use of the print media, but they often publish in more popular formats, including newspapers and opinion journals, and they are frequently active on the internet through web blogs and the like. One of these new, civil intellectuals is Saeki Keishi, who began his career as a typical academic intellectual, before breaking on the scene in the mid-1990s as a public intellectual with a clear message for a new postwar nationalism. In two major books published in 1996 and 1998, Saeki collected two dozen essays previously published in a wide range of popular journals in which he had condemned the postwar Japanese “liberal democracy” for its failure to address the issue of nationalism, especially for its hostility to the state.107 The fundamental failure of postwar Japanese political thought, according to Saeki, had been the attenuation of a sense of membership in the state (kokka ishiki). Saeki argues that postwar Japanese liberalism has militated against any open, legitimate sense of collective identity that could provide a foundation for loyalty to the state.108 Saeki does not call for a complete subordination of individual to the state, but rather seeks to reconcile national collective identity with the state in what he outlines as a form of “civic liberalism.” “Civic,” he emphasizes, is distinct from “civil” insofar as it not only avoids the overly privatizing tendencies of “civil” (esp., in contrast to the “military” actions of a state), but also in the sense that it relies on some notion of virtue that binds a people together.109 Consequently, Saeki believes that what Japanese democracy needs is a complete overthrow of a postwar culture rooted in selfishness and its replacement by a civic democratic spirit that finds in the constitutional state a mechanism for building a communal spirit of service to others. 106

Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Civility & Subversion: The Intellectual in Democratic Society (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 42-55. 107 Cf. Saeki Keishi, Gendai nihon no riberarizumu (Tokyo: Kdansha, 1996) and Gendai nihon no ideorog: gurbarizumu to kokka ishiki (Tokyo: Kdansha, 1998). 108 See, for example, Saeki, Gendai nihon no ideorog, 72-84. 109 Here, it should be noted, Saeki’s use of the concept of “civil” diverges from that of Goldfarb, who sees “civil society” in terms largely analogous to Saeki’s concept of “civic.” See Goldfarb, 78-102.

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Saeki’s call for a new nationalism that would radically overturn the postwar system is echoed by Matsumoto Ken’ichi, another university professor who writes for a broad public. In one of his many publications, Matsumoto took up the question of the relationship of the people to the state by exploring the controversy that erupted when a parliamentary bill was passed and went into effect on 13 August 1999, making the “Hi-no-Maru” the official Japanese flag and the “Kimi-ga-yo” the Japanese national anthem. What could be so objectionable about a democratically elected parliament passing a bill that merely gave formal recognition to what had been the informal status quo for the entire postwar period? (What other contenders were there for the Japanese national anthem or flag?) Yet, many on the left were outraged by this parliamentary act. What is surprising is that Matsumoto shared their outrage, albeit from the other end of the political spectrum. Like those on the left, Matsumoto argued that this was a “top down” and utterly unnecessary measure. But his reasons reveal much about how he understands nationalism and why he is so critical of the postwar state. For Matsumoto, the Japanese nation is really an ethnic nation (minzoku) and thus any formal effort to define it legally is gratuitous at best, and a foreign, Western cultural imposition at worst. Matsumoto begrudgingly admits that, with the rise of (Western) international law, a nation-state must have a flag. But this is mere window dressing, for “one can say that there is no other country like Japan where the Hi-no-maru was established [as the nation’s flag] not through law, but through Japan’s unique culture.”110 Matsumoto’s worry is that legal measures like the national flag and anthem bill might mislead Japanese people into thinking that theirs is a contingent nation constructed by laws rather than the ancient ethnic cultural nation that he avers it really is. Nonetheless, Matsumoto does not seriously object to a tighter embrace of nation and state in postwar Japan so long as the ethnic nation is accorded priority in the resultant minzoku-kokka (ethnic nation-state). Matsumoto shares with Saeki and many other public intellectuals a belief that a more populist nationalism is needed to secure Japanese democracy. But not all these influential public intellectuals embrace Matsumoto’s ethnic assumptions Perhaps the most interesting of these civil intellectuals is Sakurai Yoshiko, graduate of the University of Hawaii, former writer for the Christian Science Monitor, television 110

Matsumoto Ken’ichi, “Hi-no-maru, Kimi-ga-yo” no hanashi (Tokyo: PHP Kenkyjo, 1999), 193-4.

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news broadcaster, and now an independent journalist who has the ear of many important Japanese politicians. Sakurai is a good example of Goldfarb’s civil intellectual in many respects. She writes for a general educated public, and reaches many of her audience through her stimulating website. Her preferred concept of the nation is that of kokumin, and she does not restrict its meaning to an ethnic one. In fact, she largely sidesteps the old question of “mono-ethnic vs. multi-ethnic” nationalism by taking a more pragmatic approach to the challenges of nationalism in Japan today. Sakurai’s concerns range over a wide variety of topics (eg., AIDS, education, changing gender roles, political corruption, tax policies and revenue sharing between local and central government). But throughout, there is an underlying theme that the most serious obstacle to the development of democracy in Japan is not too much nationalism, but in fact a nation that is too weak.111 Sakurai is a good representative of where kokumin nationalism is going today: not by any means towards militarist or expansionist nationalism, but towards a greater civic engagement with public policy that will give the Japanese people themselves more control over their destiny.

111 Cf. “Tatakai o wasureta zeijaku na kokuminsei” chapter 21 in Sakurai Yoshiko, Nihon no kiki Shinch Bunko 41-1 (Tokyo: Shinch, 1998): 353-68.

CHAPTER SIX

MINZOKU The Great Japanese Empire is neither a state based on a homogeneous nation, nor a country based on nationalism (minzokushugi). Murofushi Takanobu, 1942.1

Nationalists, who write so much of the material on nationalism, unfortunately are not the most reliable source of information on the history of nationalism. Leftwing ethnic nationalists, like Inoue Kiyoshi, have tried to pin the origins of ethnic nationalism in Japan on the sonn ji activists who overthrew the bakufu.2 Rightwing ethnic nationalists in contemporary Japan also trace the history of their nationalism to those opponents of the bakufu’s policies of Westernization (ka) who led the movement for direct monarchy and expelling Westerners. But, as they tell the story, their nativist forefathers were betrayed by the likes of Iwakura Tomomi and kubo Toshimichi when they turned back to the same policy of Westernization after their 1871-73 journey to the West. They see the rejection of Saig Takamori’s proposed invasion of Korea as a bonding moment among early minzoku nationalists, and they lay claim to early rebellions such as the 1874 Saga Uprising, the Jimpren Incident and Hagi Uprising of 1876, and even Saig’s Satsuma Rebellion of 1877. But the most important of their predecessors is Tyama Mitsuru. What they see in Tyama is his antigovernment nationalism revealed in the legendary tale of how he approached Itagaki Taisuke, after the 1878 assassination of kubo, seeking Itagaki’s help in raising an army to overthrow the “Westernizing new Government.”3 That request, needless to say, went unheeded, but Tyama went on to form key organizations of rightwing nationalists, especially the Gen’ysha (est., 1881). The 1

Murofushi Takanobu, Monbush shakai kyiku kyoku (1942): 15; cited in Eiji Oguma, Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen, 3. 2 Hashikawa Bunz, Nihon nashonarisumu genry, reprinted in Hashikawa Bunz Chosakush vol. 2 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shob, 1985), 3-4. 3 Ino Kenji, “Uyoku minzoku-ha und o tenb suru,” in Ino Kenji, ed., Uyoku minzoku-ha sran, 71-72.

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Gen’ysha spawned a good many other rightwing nationalist groups until it was finally disbanded in 1946, the most important of which was undoubtedly the Kokurykai, founded in 1901 by Uchida Ryhei with Tyama as its chief advisor. This history, so replete with facts, seems quite compelling. But this self-narration by postwar ethnic nationalists of their own historical origins is flawed, and it ought to be a cautionary tale to anyone who blithely projects certain concepts back onto the past. The problem, simply put, is that it loads a heavy argument on flimsy historical evidence. Inoue could not convince even his fellow leftwing ethnic nationalist Tyama Shigeki, who called the anti-bakufu activism nothing more than a reactionary feudal movement against foreigners. Like Inoue, Ino Kenji, albeit from the other end of the political spectrum, tried to establish the origins of what he called the “right-wing ethnic nation school movement” (uyoku minzoku-ha und) at a time when the evidence for the existence of the key concept of “ethnic nation” is questionable at best. It may be useful to begin with a review of the early origins of the concept of minzoku. The earliest known instance of the concept in modern Japanese discourse was in 1875, when Murota Mitsuyoshi’s translation of Guizot’s A History of Civilization in Europe appeared. But Murota used different kanji than the usual ones for “nation” to render the homonym word minzoku and indeed his reference is not to the nation per se, but quite clearly refers to Guizot’s concept of society.4 The earliest use of the concept of minzoku as “nation” (with the same kanji used today in the word for nationalism, minzokushugi) was Miyazaki Mury’s 1882 translation of Dumas’s concept of “assemblée nationale” as minzoku kaigi.5 Yet, as we saw above in Chapter Two, this concept was conceived as a means of juxtaposing the people to the aristocracy in revolutionary France. Whether it carried the same relationship to ethnic nationalism that Ino associates with his postwar nationalist group is quite dubious. And while Miyazaki was affiliated with the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, the concept of minzoku was incidental to his text, just as it was marginal in two other texts of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement during the 1880s. These nearly simultaneous appearances of the concept include the 1882 translation of Mirabeau’s “On the 4

Haga Noboru. Meiji kokka no keisei, 236. Yasuda Hiroshi, “Kindai nihon ni okeru ‘minzoku’ kannnen no keisei: kokumin, shimmin, minzoku,” 61-72 Shis to gendai 31 (September 1992): 62. 5

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Abuses of Despotic Government” (the translator is unnamed, but was probably Nakae Chmin) which introduced the homologous term minzoku in Nakae’s Seiri sdan (the Seiri sdan instances used different kanji than Miyazaki, returning to the kanji used in Murota’s translation of Guizot.). The exact concept referred to by this term is not self-evident, but it was not “society,” as the text used shakai for that concept.6 It seems to refer to something like national mores or customs, but it could even refer to the people as “the nation,” as we find it used in that context in the same issue of the journal in the translation by a pseudonymous “Kya Sei” of an article by “Oujean Ballot” that criticized the centralized government’s destruction of national culture. In what was clearly a case of political criticism of the Meiji government by metaphor, ”Oujean” argued that centralized governments like Imperial Rome harm the “national people” (kokuf minzoku).7 States do not always enhance national identity. In any event, in these early years, there is little, if any, record of the extension of this concept of minzoku (which at the time could mean anything from “people,” “folk,” “society,” “nation” and even “race”) to the term minzokushugi, or nationalism. The term minzokushugi (nationalism, in the ethnic sense) arises much later in Japanese discourse and appears to have emerged around the First World War. One sourcebook on Japanese social thought concludes that minzokushugi did not enter public discourse until after that war.8 This view gains additional weight from the reminiscenes of an active participant in the minzoku discourse, Kamei Kan’ichir, who wrote in 1941 that “the word minzoku first appeared in print in actual world politics after the Versailles Treaty.”9 Since it is quite clear that the word minzoku was used in printed debates about world affairs quite a bit earlier than the Versailles Treaty (1919), it appears that Kamei must have meant the word minzokushugi.10 Sait Tsuyoshi’s linguistic study of how the suffix shugi got applied to words in modern Japanese in general also raises some intriguing questions about the 6

Mirabeau, [Nakae Chmin, trans.?], “Sensei seiji no shukuhei o ron su (zoku)” Seiri sdan no. 6 (May 10, 1882): 233-9, at 233. 7 Oujean Ballot, (Kya Sei, pseud., trans.), “Ch shuken no sei wa kokka no fzoku o jhai su” Seiri sdan, no. 7 (May 25, 1882): 5-13, at 5. 8 Habu Nagaho and Kawai Tsuneo, “Minzokushugi shis,” 326-346 in Tamura Hideo and Tanaka Hiroshi, eds., Shakai shis jiten (Tokyo: Ch Daigaku Shuppanbu, 1982), 330-3. 9 Kamei Kan’ichiro, Dai ta minzoku no michi. (Tokyo: Seiki Shob, 1941), 301. 10 One instance of minzokushugi in political discourse that well-predates the Versailles Treaty is Tanaka Suiichir’s article on "Minzokushugi no kenky,” in Mita gakkai zasshi (1916) 10: 1-22.

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relationship of minzoku discourse to minzokushugi. Sait notes that Inoue Tetsujir pointed out that the practice of adding shugi (C: zhugi) as a suffix to words was a common linguistic pattern in Chinese long before it was adopted in Japanese. But this suffix did not necesssarily render the composite word an “ism“ as in modern concepts like individualism (kojinshugi) or socialism (shakaishugi). Rather, in this practice, the meaning is that the concept so inflected “is the main principle.“ Sait concludes that the Japanese may have coined the use of shugi for modern “isms“ and reimported it back to China.11 This may be a more useful way to understand the earliest expressions of minzokushugi, i.e., to assert that it is minzoku that is the main principle of the nation (not the kokka, kokutai, tenn, etc). But it also raises the question of whether Japanese discourse derived the word minzokushugi from Chinese, since Sun Yatsen had been propagating the concept of minzokushugi in Chinese between 1904 and 1924. But which way the linguistic influence flowed remains shrouded in mist, as Sun himself was also closely advised by Japanese who were deeply involved in the minzoku movement back home. What does seem clear is that minzoku emerged as a concept before minzokushugi, and the meaning of both must be understood historically, through close attention to both intra-discursive developments and to international and domestic events that shaped the rise of nationalism at that time.

Minzoku and Empire As with the emergence of the concept of minzokushugi, exactly when the concept of minzoku became an important factor in modern Japanese nationalism is a contested issue. Hashimoto Mitsuru argues that it was not until the Shwa era, 1928 to be exact, that “Japan started seriously asserting an image of itself as a particular minzoku.”12 But most scholarship on the question concludes that minzoku discourse originates much earlier, even as far back as the late nineteeth century. Yasuda Hiroshi has concluded that there are few instances of the word minzoku in Meiji discourse prior to 1890, but thereafter it exploded across the pages of the journal Nihonjin and the newspaper Nihon, as journalists like Shiga Shigetaka and Kuga 11

Sait Tsuyoshi, Meiji no kotoba, 370. Hashimoto Mitsuru, “Minzoku: nihon kindaika wo tg suru chikara,” Senjika nihon shakai kenkykai, ed., Senjika no nihon, 6. 12

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Katsunan tried to clarify the meaning of the national essence (kokusui).13 Yamamuro Shin’ichi agrees that the beginnings of ethnic nationalism are to be found in the 1880s, and he points to Shiga Shigetaka’s use of the concept of minzoku to mean that which constitutes the essence of our nation is accepting the influence of all sorts of foreign things in our country and mixing appropriately with them like a chemical reaction, thereby planting, giving birth, and developing them, while at the same time continuing to preserve for the current era what has been transmitted and purified among the Yamato minzoku since ancient time.14

Nonetheless, Yoon Keun-Cha argues that “in the first half of the Meiji period [i.e., until 1890], there was an absence of collective or group consciousness as a single ethnic nation, which is to say that ‘the ethnic nation’ did not exist or at least was still not fully formed, and in reality, one can hardly find any actual instances of the word minzoku then, and certainly not in the late bakufu or Restoration years.”15 Clearly the word (and with it, the concept) of minzoku grew increasingly prominent in nationalist discourse in post-constitutional Meiji Japan. But even then, one has to be cautious about assigning a single, fixed meaning to the concept at this early date. Yonehara Ken has demonstrated that in Tokutomi Soh’s writings around that time, the concept of minzoku was used interchangeably with class, but to refer to Tokutomi’s ideal of the “country gentleman.“16 What is clear is that the concept was neither introduced nor promoted by Kat Hiroyuki, as is sometimes thought to be the case. As late as 1887, Kat was still employing a now obsolete term, zokumin, to render this sense of nationality, the nation as a popular body, and his point was to deny its legitimacy as a real form of the nation.17 Given the historical point of erupture of this discourse, and the arguments it spawned, it does seem plausible that minzoku emerged as a challenge to the Imperial Constitution’s denial of legal nationhood and its substitution 13

Yasuda Hiroshi, 66. Shiga Shigetaka, cited in Yamamuro Shin’ichi, Shis kadai to shite no Ajia: kijiku rensa tki (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2001), at 110. 15 Yoon Keun-Cha, “Minzoku gens no satetsu,” 9. 16 Yonehara Ken, Tokutomi Soh: Nihon nashonarizumu no kiseki, Chk Shinsho 1711 (Tokyo: Ch Kronsha, 2003), 74-75. 17 Kat’s term zokumin was his translation of Bluntschli’s Nationalität, presented in his 1887 translation of Allgemeine Staatslehre. Cf. Kat Hiroyuki, “Zokuminteki no kenkoku narabi ni zokuminshugi,” Doitsugaku kykai zasshi vol. 40, no.41 (January 1887); reprinted in Tanaka Akira and Miyachi Masato, eds., Nihon kindai shis taikei: rekishi ninshiki (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991): 432-441. 14

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of the status of imperial subject (shimmin). It was trying to assert that this principle (minzoku) was the heart and soul of what the nation truly is, or at least should be. Yet, other historians who accept the general time frame of late nineteenth century as the point of departure nonetheless look to other sources of the discourse. Oguma Eiji, for example, traces the beginnings of minzoku discourse to a debate among anthropologists over the origins of the Japanese people. Western anthropologists who, like Edward S. Morse, Erwin von Bälz and Heinrich Philipp von Siebold (Philipp Franz’s son), came to Japan during the 1870s brought with them their Orientalist and imperialist assumptions about peoples and cultures, and they applied these assumptions to the quest for the origins of the Japanese people. In looking for enduring patterns of ethnological identity among the Japanese, these Western academics promoted a “composite nation“ theory that held that the Japanese people were the result of mixtures among several distinct lineages. Oguma notes that while most mainstream Japanese anthropologists adopted the “composite nation“ theory of their Western teachers, a few such as Kurokawa Mayori and Nait Chis were offended by the notion that not all the Japanese were members of the same group who had descended from the gods. Characteristic of their work is their reliance on the concepts and methods of ninetheenth century physical anthropology, and thus the resulting confusion of the concepts of race and ethnicity. The result of this anthropological inquiry was not so much distinctive theories about race and ethnology, but competing conceptions of the Japanese people that were informed by “two forms of nationalism.“18 In short, while the anthropological search for physical traces of the Japanese people’s early origins left a racial ring to some forms of minzoku discourse, it was not free from the same divisions that marked the broader political discourse over whether the nation was the people or the Imperial State. The question of Japan’s ethnic origins, particularly whether the Japanese were originally the same or different from other peoples in East Asia, became an increasingly urgent matter as the century closed. The 1870s saw the incorporation of Okinawa within Japan, and in the 1880s Hokkaid became part of the territorial realm, even before Japan itself had established its own legal contours of identity as a state through a constitution. But it was the acquisition of Taiwan in 18

Oguma Eiji, Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen, 27-32.

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1895 that most acutely brought forth the question of who the Japanese people were, are, and should be. Prior to the 1890s, even “integral“ units of Japan proper found their administrative incorporation into the new imperial state far from a natural transition. But with a constituion in place, a constitution that by design refused to answer the question of who was a Japanese national and instead referred to all residents of the empire as “imperial subjects,“ further incorporation of other peoples raised the question of how far the boundaries of “Japan“ could be extended. This was particularly true when the new members of the realm had a distinctive culture, were located far from the center, and spoke an entirely different language. Moreover, just as Taiwan was added to the empire (as the result of a war fought with China over Korea), another war was heating up with Russia, once again over Korea. So, as the century ended, ethnicity and race intermingled over the issue of whether the Japanese nation was a nation for the Japanese ethnic people, and how far the definition of “the Japanese ethnic people” could be pushed. The interwar period of 1895-1905 proved to be a formative moment in the emerging minzoku discourse. Having defeated China, Japan was experiencing a surge of nationalism that at first seemed to legitimize the direction that the Westernizers and architects of the imperial state had set. The sacrifices of the last two decades had yielded real results, it seemed, in demonstrating that Japan was superior to China. In 1897 Kimura Takatar captured this feeling in an article he called “The Japanese Are a Superior Minzoku.“19 Here, the concept of minzoku performed two roles. First, it separated the Japanese from the Chinese in ways that appeals to a common Asian race could not have done, while at the same time not excluding the theoretical possibility of assimilating the Taiwanese through this concept of national identity that relied on a culturalist and assimilationist notion of who was Japanese. Second, it located the motive force for military victory in the cultural essence of the Japanese people themselves, rather than in the machinations of military and civil bureaucrats who guided the state. Minzoku was being wedded to a cultural ideology that would disappoint state officials who had hoped victory in the Sino-Japanese war would unite the nation behind His Majesty’s government.

19 Kimura Takatar, “Nipponjin wa yshteki minzoku nari,” Nipponshugi, no. 3 (1897); cited in Oguma, 63.

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In May 1897, Kimura had joined with Inoue Tetsujir and Takayama Chogy in forming the Great Japan Society and espousing a brand of cultural nationalism they called Japanism (Nipponshugi). This nationalism looked to the core of Japanese culture and argued that unless that core identity was purified and strengthened, Japan could not continue to achieve victories like that of the Sino-Japanese war. And with the humiliation of the Triple Intervention by Russia, Germany and France still stinging, and a general recognition that war with Russia was around the corner, the Japanists began to regard Western culture in Japan, not as the reasons for Japan’s victory over China, but as a fifth columnist influence that had to be rooted out. Inoue, as we have seen in Chapter Three, was already embroiled in the “clash between religion and education“ and this “clash“ indicated where the influence of Western culture was most dangerous: Christianity. From the very first article of its founding charter, the Great Japan Society declared that “we worship the founder of our country“ and their journal Nipponshugi took the lead in publishing attacks on Christianity. It was a popular position to take: as Oguma notes, “the intellectuals of that age joined the Great Japan Society one after another.”20 Christian intellectuals quickly responded to this attack on their loyalty to the nation, just as they had five years earlier during the attack on their loyalty to the emperor in the aftermath of the Uchimura lèse majesté affair. Many Japanese Christians in the late nineteenth century had an affinity with the minzoku movement and shared social and political roots with activists in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement To them, especially after the elevation of the monarch and the rise of State Shintoism, conceiving of the true nation as the minzoku rather that the now Shintoist State was an essential means of asserting the compatibility between their national identity and their faith. Watase Tsunekichi’s rebuttal of the Japanist attack on Christians is illustrative of this effort. Watase did not reject the concept of minzoku or its importance to national identity. But he countered that it was too narrow a concept for the kind of civic consciousness required by a cosmopolitan, modern government with the dynamic and democratic aspirations he attributed to Japan. He rejected the narrow ethnic nationalism of Kimura and Inoue, arguing that the founding spirit of modern Japan was one that was open to peoples of various races or ethnicities.21 Watase and other Christians 20 21

Constitution of the Great Japan Society (1897); cited in Oguma, 57. Oguma, 57-8.

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quickly sensed that the victims of such an exclusivist ethnic nationalism were not only Taiwanese and Koreans, but also themselves and anyone else who professed a faith that did not permit the worshipping of the monarch as a Shinto god. They did not reject the claim minzoku made on individual identity; rather, they merely sought to subordinate it to the universal transcendence of their Christian faith. That was not enough for the Japanists; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it was too much. They found their best spokesman in Takayama Chogy who developed a wide-ranging theory of cultural nationalism between 1897 and 1902 that mixed minzoku and race, nationality and Asianism, all the while drawing heavily on Western theorists in order to denounce the deleterious effects of Western culture on Japan. Takayama understood Japan’s growing tensions with Russia as part of a broader idea of global “racial war” that Ludwig Gumplowics had sketched in Der Rassenkampf (1883). From this racial lens, Takayama was certain that the Triple Intervention, Russian designs on Korea, and even the 1875-78 war between Russia and Turkey and the 1897 war between Greece and Turkey (Takayama believed Turkey was part of the East, or “the Turanian race”) were indicative of a “600 year old racial war between the Aryan race and the Turanian race.”22 Against Watase’s argument that a modern state was able to withstand the challenges of a multiethnic populace, Takayama drew from Max Müller and Henry George to argue that a state cannot simply be a territorial administrative unit, but must be built on, with, and through, a single people with a shared cultural identity. Thus, even through the Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese and others were all part of the Turanian race, their distinctiveness resulted from the fact that this race, like all races, was divided into Naturvölker (shizen minzoku) and Kulturvölker (jinbun minzoku). The Naturvölker were those peoples who had yet to develop an integral, shared culture that provided the dynamism for their own independent states; the Kulturvölker were those ethnic groups who had emerged out of the state of nature to built an independent state on the basis of their unique culture.23 Of course, among the Turanian race, only Japan met the requirements of a Kulturvölker. In one broad sweep of the pen, Takayama had sketched the conceptual foundations for modern Japanese imperialism as well as the grounds for culturalist attacks on Christianity as a foreign creed 22 23

Takayama Chogy, Chogy zensh, volume 5, 313. Takayama, volume 5, 20-22.

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incompatible with the culture of the emperor-nation. Not surprisingly, his last work published in 1902, the year he died, was an exploration of the thinking of the medieval xenophobic Buddhist monk, Nichiren. The annexation of Korea in 1910 renewed and sharpened the debate on whether Japan should be a homogeneous ethnic nation-state and whether the concept of minzoku was flexible enough to incorporate Koreans in the Japan minzoku. Again, Christian intellectuals played a leading role in asserting an optimistic, open reading of the potential limits of ethnic assimilation, while the Japanist and statist intellectuals like Takayama and Inoue Tetsujir were slow to accept a sense of minzoku that was not thoroughly and exclusively racist. Yamaji Aizan had laid the foundations for his fellow Christians, arguing several years prior to annexation that the Japanese were a “composite” nation, historically formed through a combination of Ainu, Malay, and the Yamato (a branch of the Turanian race). On the eve of annexation, he refuted the argument presented in Takekoshi Yosabur’s 1910 Nankokuki that the Tenson (descendents of the gods) group was entirely Malay.24 Yamaji’s arguments were controversial, but the helped spawn a sense that Japan’s national identity, even when conceived in ethnic or racial terms, was more open, more pliable, to the forces of history than some anthropologists and racial determinists were willing to acknowledge. Christians in particular had reason to argue in favor of this multiethnic notion of Japanese nationality. Their interests were complex, involving both domestic and regional concerns, but it is not accurate to say that they simply were promoting imperialist intervention against a mono-ethnic interpretation of the nation that might have prevented imperialism. The crux of the matter was not imperialism (both sides supported the annexation of Korea), but over how Japan’s new imperial subjects should be treated: compassionately, as members of the same family; or as a conquered people to be exploited. Influential Christian intellectuals like Ebina Danj and Ukita Kazutami argued the former line, with Ukita stressing that the annexation of Korea was not the result of a self-interested policy on the part of Japan and that intermarriage between Japanese and Koreans, and thus Korean assimilation, should be encouraged.25 Japanese Christians generally welcomed the incorporation of Koreans 24

Oguma, 99-100. Oguma, 109-113. Ebina also went so far as to praise the patriotism of An Chung Ken who had assassinated It Hirobumi in 1909. 25

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into the empire since they hoped the relatively larger number of Korean Christians would strengthen the voice of Christianity within the empire and counter the rising Shintoist nationalism at home. (It is also not unreasonable to assume that they had a personal interest in intermarriage, so that their own sons and daughters would have a wider pool of Christian marriage partners.) This position was in sharp contrast to the views of the national polity (kokutai) and Shinto nationalists for whom Japan’s annexation of Korea was proof of Japan’s superior ethnic identity and the necessity of keeping Koreans in a separate and inferior social position. Even for those like Inoue Tetsujir who grudgingly came to accept the “composite nation” theory of the origins of the Japanese, the true underlying moral fiber that held together the empire was to be found in the monarch as a moral figurehead for his subjects. These tensions over how the concept of minzoku was to be deployed continued to play a role in nationalist discourse throughout the imperial period.

Minzoku and Liberal Political Theory The outbreak of world war in Europe, sparked by a nationalist Serbian revolt against the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian empire, had a significant impact on Japanese concepts on nationhood. While Japan played an extremely limited role in the fighting of the war, no one in Japan could ignore the resurgent ethnic nationalism (minzokushugi) that the war had unleashed in the world, particularly as a tool against multi-ethnic empires like their own. As Benedict Anderson has noted, “by 1922, Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Romanovs and Ottomans were gone…. From this time on, the legitimate international norm was the nation-state, so that in the League [of Nations] even the surviving imperial powers came dressed in national costume rather than imperial uniform.”26 Legitimacy now meant a government had to make a persuasive case that it represented the nation, which is to say, the people. This national principle was a new and revolutionary idea. In 1914, Matsumoto Hikojir recorded one of the earliest recognitions of the new challenge posed by this rising ethnic nationalism, as it struck close to home in the form of attacks by Chinese nationalists on Japanese in China during September 1913. Clearly, Takayama and the Japanist belief in Asian racial solidarity 26

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983): 104

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against the West was revealed as limited in its appeal and, as a consequence, the racial flavor of their understanding of the nation was also losing any attraction it once might have had as a principle of unity against the West. The reality of ethnic tensions within Asia made the demand for a new understanding of “what a nation is” an urgent one. To meet that demand, Matsumoto introduced a new approach to understanding the formation of ethnic nations that relied less on biological and natural scientific claims about past origins and more on consciousness of the nationals themselves as expressed in the present. New psychological theories were seen as offering an advantage over the old racial studies approaches that, at best, had introduced “composite” nations, but which were seen as mired in an old-fashioned way of thinking about nations at a time when a multitude of new nations seemed to be exploding out of the present, rather than the past. To explain this new phenomenon, Matsumoto introduced Wilhelm Max Wundt’s Elements of Folk Psychology as the most recent development in scientific understanding of the formation and function of national identity. Given this assumption that nations were mainly a matter of consciousness, Matsumoto proposed a new theory of national identity built around religion. The constructivism of his approach is evident in his suggestion that the religion needed to hold Japan’s empire together was not State Shintoism, but a new composite religion that would weave together the shard and patches of native Shintoism, Buddhism and even Christianity.27 Needless to say, Matsumoto’s proposal for a newly constructed religion for the empire went unheeded. But his introduction of psychology as the best hope for a scientific understanding of minzoku was a watershed event. The immediate effect of this approach was to call attention to the difference between the institutional reality of the state and the cultural and psychological force of national identity. With a world war underway that was reinforcing the claims of an ethnic identity, an identity that was not always easily mapped out spatially, the distinction between the nation (conceived in ethnic terms) and the political state was a growing feature of Japanese discourse on minzoku. In what may have been an indirect rejoinder to Matsumoto, the historian Tanaka Suiichir (who established the Mita Historiographical Institute which would produce many of the important theorists on minzoku) drew from Rudolph Springer to 27

34.

Matsumoto Hikojir, “Minzoku kenky to kojiki,” Shigaku vol. 25 (1914): 228-

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reinforce the argument that the nation (minzoku) and the state (kokka) were distinct entities and should be kept “as separate as religion and politics.”28 Tanaka may not have appreciated Matsumoto’s effort to shift Japanese national identity toward a new, composite religion, but both men were in agreement that Shinto, as a state religion, was unlikely to succeed in raising national consciousness in most Japanese people’s minds. It was simply too closely associated with the state. Liberal and leftist intellectuals were quick to seize on this theory of the nation as a form of consciousness, as they saw in it a way to break free of the determinism of the older, racial theory of the nation. Abe Jir was one such liberal who was attracted to this new form of ethnic nationalism. One of the most influential intellectuals of the time, he wrote in 1917 that there was no contradiction between the individualism of liberals and ethnic nationalism; indeed, he argued that only by assimilating oneself to “the ethnic national spirit that is alive and well” could the individual truly thrive. His worry was that the state might suppress the unique identity of ethnic nations and reduce them all to some generalized, universal human nature. The greater threat to international justice, he concluded, was not ethnic nationalism but “imperialist statism” (teikokushugi-teki kokkashugi).29 Two years later, his support for ethnic nationalism was echoed by the leading “Taisho democrat” Yoshino Sakuz who waxed exuberantly in the pages of the influential Ch Kron that the reorganization of the international world on the basis of ethnic nationalism was simply the completion of the movement towards democracy that began with “nineteenth century civilization.”30 Yoshino’s colleague, and later socialist luminary, yama Ikuo joined the chorus, singing the glories of an ethnic nationalism that would not be a “subjugating imperialism” like the old nationalism built around the state, but would usher in a new era of “international harmonism.”31 What animated this liberal support for ethnic nationalism was a broad consensus that it was not “blood” nationalism, but an identity that rested on the consciousness of individuals to embrace their own forms of identity. It was, therefore, democratic.

28

Tanaka Suiichir, “Minzokushugi no kenky,” (1916); cited in Kevin M. Doak, “Culture, Ethnicity and the State in Early Twentieth-Century Japan,” 189. 29 Abe Jir, “Shisj no minzokushugi,” Shich 1: 99-120, at 116-9. 30 Yoshino Sakuz, Sekai kaiz no ris: minzoku-teki jiy byd no ris no jikk kan, Ch Kron 367 (1919): 87-91, 90. 31 yama Ikuo, “Shinky nishu no kokkashugi no shtotsu,” Ch Kron 367 (1919): 74-86, 82-83.

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If this new psychological approach to national consciousness emphasized the difference between nation and state, it also encouraged diverse ways to think about the nation itself. One of the most remarkable texts to express this way of thinking about the nation was Nakamura Kyshir’s The Nations of the Far East. The text is interesting for many reasons. It was part of a series published by the Min’ysha, so it had a historical connection with one of the groups that had originated the discourse on minzoku in the late nineteenth century. It came with two glowing introductions: one by Tokutomi Soh and another by Yoshino Sakuz, both among the most influential intellectuals of that time writing on issues of populist nationalism. But it also was unusual in its effort to reach a broad audience. The text provided furigana throughout, so that even those who were only marginally literate could understand what was written. This consideration, along with the topic itself, suggests a serious effort to reach readers in Taiwan and Korea who may not have been native Japanese speakers, in addition to native Japanese of limited literacy but unlimited interest in the problems of nationalism. Anyone who is inclined to follow Yoshimoto Taka’aki’s postwar theory that the nationalism of intellectuals never reached the nationalism of the masses should first pay careful attention to this text.32 Nakamura’s work faithfully reflects both the broader intellectual world’s concern with coming to a proper conceptual understanding of the problem of nation as minzoku, and the growing turn from racial concepts in favor of a sense of the nation that was distinct from the state but formed through the usual factors: common ancestral lineage, historical unity, common culture, common religion, common language and customs, shared economic interest, and a common state structure. The repetition of the familiar recipe for a nation is as important as Nakamura’s insistence that a minzoku was not the same thing as race (jinshu), political nationhood (kokumin) or a state (kokka).33 In short, Nakamura’s text reveals how widely diffused this burgeoning discourse on minzoku as a mode of cultural consciousness was, as well as how much this discourse was mobilized to intervene in the political realities of the Japanese empire. 32

See Yoshimoto Taka’aki, “Nihon no nashonarizumu,.” Nakamura [Nakayama] Kyshir, Kokut no minzoku (Tokyo: Min’ysha, 1916 ), 6-10. For further analysis of this text in its historical milieu, see my chapter, “Narrating China, Ordering East Asia: The Discourse on Nation and Ethnicity in Imperial Japan,” in Kai-Wing Chow, Kevin M. Doak and Poshek Fu, eds., Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.) 33

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The end of the First World War and the convening of the Paris Peace Talks in 1919 brought the issue of this new, populist nationalism to the attention of journalists, intellectuals and politicians around the world. Japan was no exception. The basic question this new nationalism raised was how to set uniform conditions for recognition as a nation. The old rules, under which any government that could demonstrate exclusive authority over a certain territory could be recognized as a sovereign entity, no longer sufficed, as the war had witnessed the ravages of a new, bloody nationalism that had brought down empires rather than shoring up existing power structures through indoctrinating loyalty among its people. Suddenly, the world was awash with claims of national identity, nationality, nationhood, and thus demands for recognition and political independence of countless new groups. It was impossible to recognize all these groups as sovereign nation-states, and it was left to a handful of diplomats at Versailles to decide who had a “right to selfdetermination” and who did not. Most of the claims raised at the time did not concern Japan. But the outbreak of Korean and Chinese nationalism in March and May of 1919 was not unrelated to this surge in populist, ethnic nationalism and did require a response from Japanese government officials. The problem of who constituted a nation under the new, post World War I rules was, in the end, also an urgent matter for Japan. Masaki Masato was one of the first to address directly the problem of identifying this new principle of national “self” determination in the postwar years. He did so by introducing William McDougall’s 1920 book, The Group Mind which promised to bring the certitude of science, psychology to be exact, to resolve the thorny problem of who constituted a nation and who did not. Masaki’s article “What is a Minzoku?” went beyond a mere review of McDougall’s book as it surveyed the field of liberal theories of national identity, introducing many of the theorists whose work would continue to inform Japanese debates on minzoku for the next ten to fifteen years. Chief among them were, in addition to McDougall, Karl Lamprecht, G.P. Gooch and Ramsey Muir. Together, their work reinforced the idea that the nation (minzoku) is not equivalent to the state, nor is it the same thing as race (jinshu); rather, the nation is defined by the ties of affinity that people conceive with one another on the basis of a variety of grounds.34 Masaki’s article was explosive, and both conservatives and

34

Masaki Masato, “Minzoku to wa nani zo?”, 151.

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Marxists responded quickly to the liberal claim that the nation was in essence a form of collective consciousness, or “group mind.” To counter Masaki and defend the empire, Uesugi Shinkichi employed the rhetoric of restatement in his article published the same year on “The Source of the State’s Powers of Unification.” Uesugi rephrased Masaki’s question as “what is the state (kokka)?” Uesugi latched on to the psychological approach’s recognition of the open definition of a minzoku to reappropriate the concept for the service of the imperial state. Since, as Uesugi repeated, “a nation (minzoku) is not the same as race” there could be no objection to conceiving even an imperial state like Japan as a “nation-state.” Korean identity, for example, was merely a contingent form of group consciousness that can, and would, change over time.35 Not to be left behind, socialists and Marxists also tried to appropriate minzoku nationalism for their agendas. For them, the main attraction of the concept was the demonstrated ability of minzoku movements to break up empires. yama Ikuo emerged as one of the leading leftists to contribute to the minzoku project when, in 1923 he published a book-length study, The Social Foundations of Politics, that built on his earlier argument that minzoku had unleashed a new kind of nationalism that was on a collision course with statist imperialism. He drew on the Austrian social democrat Otto Bauer, particularly Bauer’s distinction between the socialist nation and the capitalist state, as a pre-condition for positing minzoku as the preferred social imaginary, a proletarian agency that would rise up against capitalist imperialism. Like the liberals, yama accepted that minzoku was the effect of a group consciousness and not an effect of racial or natural ties, but he preferred Bauer’s mode of explanation: nations, he argued, were products of history rather than of nature and this meant that nationality (minzoku), like the state, was the result of struggle, war and conquest. In short, he accepted the liberals’ view that without an adequate definition of the nation, the formation of nations would be a matter left to sheer power politics. But he turned the problem around and argued that power was ultimately all there was to the matter: no rules, however carefully crafted, could or should restrain the violence unleashed by minzoku movements. Although yama did not share the liberals’ belief that a better theory of nationality might reduce, if not completely prevent, wars fought for national independence, he did agree with them that the 35

Uesugi Shinkichi, “Kokka ketsug no genryoku,” Ch Kron, no. 36 (1921): 15-37, at 24.

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concepts of nation, nationality and nationalism were fraught with confusion and required clarification. His own effort to define these terms is worth citing at length: What I would like to add here is a reflection on how such terms as ethnic nationalism (minzokushugi) and nationalism (kokuminshugi) are generally understood in their actual usage. The insistence on liberating one or more nationalities from the statist domination of another nationality usually is expressed through the term minzokushugi–“principle of nationality” [yama's own English gloss]. In contrast, when a nationality [minzoku] that occupies a dominant position within a state attempts to realize its desire to express its existence in the form of an independent nation-state by carrying out assimilation policies or oppressing weaker nationalities at home, while manifesting hostility in various ways toward other nationalities or foreign states, we usually call the guiding principle behind such efforts kokuminshugi–“nationalism” [yama 's English]. This is because a nationality that is under the dominance of another nationality is usually simply called a minzoku–“a nationality” [yama 's English], but a nationality that either has already formed its own state, or that occupies the center of superior dominance and power within a state–a nationality that has made a state–is therefore called a kokumin “nation” [yama 's English]. We must pay careful attention to the fact that in Japanese common usage, the original word "nation" is often used in a highly indiscriminate way, and its direct Japanese translation as kokumin is also used in a very thoughtless manner. In Japan, there are many cases where the word kokumin is used as a direct translation of the German Staatvolk to express collectively the general members of the object of sovereign power. Before we use such terms as minzoku and kokumin, we should first be prepared to distinguish these points.36

What is striking about yama’s terminology is his negative view of kokuminshugi and his valorization of minzokushugi. This valorization can only be explained as the influence of the Versailles principle of “self-determination” as the right of ethnic groups to their own nation, and his own Marxist commitment to undermining imperial Japan, which was nothing more than an elitist, capitalist state that had suppressed the ethnic nations of Asia. There still were two forms of nationalism at war with each other, as he had argued in 1919. But now he argued that, in addition to Japan’s oppression of other ethnic nations, the polarization of politics in Japan suggested that this war between nationalisms also could be found within the same country,

36

yama Ikuo, Seiji no shakai-teki kiso (1923); reprinted in yama Ikuo zensh (Ch Kronsha, 1947), 1:217-237, at 232-3.

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that there was, in effect, something like “internal colonization” in Japan. If it is true, as Hashimoto Mitsuru has argued, that by the beginning of the Showa era (1926), minzoku first became a major feature of Japanese political debate, it is not because, as he claims, Japanese society had begun to coalesce around a minzoku identity.37 Just the opposite. From 1925 to 1935, minzoku discourse was more diverse than at any other time in Japanese history. This development can be explained as a result of the appeal minzoku still had for various people, parties and political agendas across the spectrum: from right to left, everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of the action. The effect of this broad interest in minzoku was not an enhanced national unity in Japan, but a dispersed, contested discourse over what minzoku meant, both conceptually and in practice, and a broad disagreement over how Japanese people should respond to its appeal. Through that decade, advocates of the liberal psychological approach continued to present their case. Kamikawa Hikomatsu summarized their arguments in his 1926 essay in the Kokka gakkai zasshi, which reviewed McDougall, Hayes, Muir and Pillsbury, and sought to provide what Hayes had announced was urgently needed: a systematic theory of nationality and nationalism. Kamikawa’s theory merely admitted race had some influence on the formation of a nation, but ultimately he concluded that a nation was formed most through the subjective factors of culture, history and tradition.38 The following year, former Diet member and Tokyo Imperial University professor Nakatani Takeyo drew from the same theorists to once again seek in minzoku a fusion of self and society that would not extinguish the liberal hopes for a culture of personalism. He rejected Carlton Hayes’s effort to separate minzoku (nationality) and nationalism (minzokushugi), arguing such an effort was not consistent with the lessons of social psychology: if the nation was the effect, not the cause, of national consciousness, then there can be no significant time lag between the emergence of national consciousness and nationalist movements. Since minzoku, in contrast to the state, was a mode of consciousness that existed simultaneously in the mind of the individual and in the minds of those who shared his national identity, minzoku consciousness was in fact the mediation between individual and the group. Consequently, nationalism, which completes the 37 Hashimoto Mitsuru, “Minzoku—Nihon kindai o tg suru chikara,” in Senjika Nihon Shakai Kenkykai, ed., Senjika no nihon, 6. 38 Kamikawa Hikomatsu, “Minzoku no honshitsu ni tsuite no ksatsu,” 1851.

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individual, and is therefore a liberal movement, can be called a kind of “national personalism (minzoku-teki jinkakushugi), or social individualism (shakai-teki koseishugi).”39 This theory of minzoku as a form of subjective consciousness had a deep and broad influence on liberal political thinkers of the early Showa period, including Yanaihara Tadao, Tanaka Ktar, and Hasegawa Nyozekan.40 At the same time, those further to the left continued to assert their preference for minzoku nationalism as the best hope for a revolutionary subjectivity. Nagashima Matao played a significant role in making minzoku acceptable to Japanese Marxists. His 1929 article on “The Nation and Nationalist Movements,” published in the journal Under the Banner of the New Science, was essentially a response to yama’s interest in the nationalism theories of Otto Bauer. Nagashima explored Bauer’s writings on the nation in depth, but he also cited heavily from Stalin’s “The National and Colonial Question.” This minzoku turn among Marxists was made possible by the shift within the Marxist movement towards a reconsideration of cultural and national issues in the late 1920s that lay behind the establishment of the journal Under the Banner of the New Science.41 In addition, Sano Manabu and Nishi Masao had just translated Stalin’s work on the “National and Colonial Question” as “Minzoku Mondai” in 1928, drawing their comrades into the already vigorous debate over the meaning and politics of minzoku. Following Stalin’s writings closely, Japanese Marxists contributed to the discourse on minzoku by, paralleling their analysis of class struggle, positing a national struggle (minzoku ts) with “dominant nations” (shihai minzoku) and “dominanted nations (hi-shihai minzoku), or sometimes “oppressor nations” (appaku suru minzoku) and “oppressed nations (hi-appaku minzoku).42 These distinctions were of course unstable, and allowed Sano himself (along with Nabeyama Sadachika) to abandon Marxism in 1933 in order to remain loyal to his own

39 Nakatani Takeyo, “Minzoku oyobi minzokushugi,” 127. Nakatani is responding to the arguments Carlton J.H. Hayes made in Essays on Nationalism. 40 For more on liberal views on minzoku during this time period, see my chapter on “Culture, Ethnicity and the State in Early Twentieth-Century Japan,” ; on Tanaka Ktar’s views on minzoku, see my “What is a Nation and Who Belongs?: National Narratives and the Ethnic Imagination in Twentieth-Century Japan.” 41 See my article, “Under the Banner of the New Science: History, Science and the Problem of Particularity in Early 20th Century Japan.” Philosophy East and West vol.48: no.2 (April 1998): 232-256. 42 Cf. Nagashima, 30-31.

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minzoku.43 Sano had come to believe, not merely that national struggles paralleled class struggles, but that in fact national struggles were the fundamental ones. Sano and Nabeyama’s abandonment of Marxism was a watershed event for many on the left. Both held key positions on the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and their turn from Marxism toward a closer embrace of the nation made support for minzoku even more controversial among Marxists. Tosaka Jun was the loudest voice against an intoxication with minzoku identity, warning that it would always lead to reactionary politics and undermine the struggle against capitalism.44 Not all Marxists agreed. Matsubara Hiroshi (Suga Hirota) published his own outline of Stalin’s ideas on minzoku in 1935 as study material for his comrades who were planning a conference on ethnic nationalism. Matsubara emphasized that Stalin’s definition of the nation “is a most accurate, principled critique…of the confusion we find in our ‘everyday’ consciousness of ethnicity [minzoku], tribe [shuzoku], and race [jinshu], or of the ethnic nation [minzoku], the state [kokka], and the political nation [kokumin].”45 Matsubara’s memo on Marxist minzoku ideas was vigorously debated by Tosaka Jun, Izu Tadao, ta Takeo, Hirokawa Hisashi, Utsumi Takashi, Kojima Hatsuo and Mori Kichi at the conference. Their views ranged widely, but their responses to Matsubara, published in the 49th issue of the journal Studies in Materialist Theory, revealed that most accepted minzoku as a useful tool, even as they stressed that it was a product of history, and therefore was both real and contingent.46 Although their politics were different, Marxist and liberal intellectuals shared a broader conceptualization of the ethnic nationality as a matter of consciousness (“ideology”) and as a historical reality that was forged through culture and history, rather than through organic, racial ties.

43

Sano Manabu, “Nihon minzoku no yshsei o ronzu,” (February 1934); reprinted in Sano Manabu chosakush (Tokyo: Sano Manabu chosakush kankkai, 1958): 945-61, 945. 44 Tosaka Jun , Nippon ideorogii ron (1936); reprinted in Tosaka Jun zensh (Tokyo: Keis Shob, 1966); vol. 2: 223-438, at 316-7. 45 Matsubara Hiroshi, “Minzoku no kiso gainen ni tsuite–kenky sozai,” Yuibutsuron kenky, no. 30 (April 1935); reprinted in Band Hiroshi, ed., Rekishi kagaku taikei 15: minzoku no mondai, 9. 46 Band Hiroshi, “Rekishi ni okeru minzoku no mondai ni tsuite,” in Band Hiroshi, ed., Rekishi kagaku taikei 15: minzoku no mondai, 313-314.

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Minzoku and War During the ten years from 1925 to 1935, when the influence of liberal and leftist discourse on minzoku was at its zenith, the emphasis of this discourse gradually shifted from political theory to cultural theory. It is tempting to attribute this shift to an internal development of the discourse itself: the force of conceptualizing the nation in terms of psychology and consciousness, artifice and contingency, history and tradition which ultimately drew theorists to culture as the ground of such identity-making practices. And there may be some truth to that analysis. But contingency was not only a theory, as specific events and particular individuals did make a difference. For example, in 1935 Yasuda Yojr founded a new journal Nihon Rmanha that spawned an influential literary movement that lasted throughout the war. The Romantic School writers were not inclined to theoretical articulation of the nation, nor did they connect with the earlier efforts to keep up with the latest writings on nationalism coming from the West. Rather, drawing on late eighteenth century German romantics, they condemned such “intellectual” activities as modern scholarship and sought to actually re-present the ethnic nation itself through the creation of aesthetic and literary works that spoke less to the intellect than to the heart. Along with Kamei Katsuichir and Hayashi Fusao, among others, Yasuda sought the core of Japanese national identity in an ethnic or Völkisch cultural identity which he traced back to the sixth century, before Korean, Chinese (and certain Western) cultures had influenced Japan.47 Needless to say, this poetic archaicism was not easy to reconcile with the reality of the modern Meiji state, and part of the fascination of the Romantic School writers is the variety of ways in which they tried to reconcile these two, the nation and the state. From the middle of the 1930s, Japanese literary and philosophical works were awash with minzoku impulses. In 1935, Watsuji Tetsur wrote an influential tract, On Climate,
that sought to explain the Japanese national character as a function of Japan’s unique climate. While he situated Japan within a broader monsoon climate that included other Asian nations, ultimately he argued that Japan’s climate was a unique blend of monsoon and temperate climates which 47 On the Japan Romantic School and their contribution to minzoku discourse, see my Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); also “Ethnic Nationalism and Romanticism in Early Twentieth-Century Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 22, no.1 (1996): 77-103.

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yielded the unique ethnic character of the Japanese people. Indeed, Watsuji’s argument on climate was in fact anti-nature in a manner that paralleled the emphasis on minzoku as a cultural or spiritual principle that contrasted with the nature of biological race. When applied to explaining Japan’s unique climate and its role in shaping Japan’s particular culture, Watsuji’s argument was an effort to isolate Japan both from the claims of Westernizers and from Orientalists who would relocate Japan in Asia. Watsuji’s approach blended literary and philosophical ideas with social scientific concerns. There was a sense that the social sciences (other than psychology) were lagging behind the humanities, particularly in terms of responding to the appeal of minzoku. Indeed, Hashimoto Mitsuru has concluded that the discourse on minzoku in the social sciences merely followed the initiative of philosophy and sought empirical evidence to support the ideas of minzoku philosophies through fieldwork.48 If political science, philosophy and literature had quickly gravitated to the concept of minzoku as a product of culture rather than nature, anthropology was taking a bit longer to accept this idea. As a discipline, it was still recovering its footing in the aftermath of the subjectivist challenge from psychology, and was moving away from an emphasis on the “objective” approaches of physical anthropology and its emphasis on race in favor of new appreciation of the impact of culture and consciousness. There were earlier hints of this new direction, particularly in 1925 when Yanigita Kunio and Oka Masao founded a new journal Minzoku to shift the focus of anthropological research from race studies to a more culturally informed ethnological approach. But Yanagita’s influence on professional anthropologists was limited, as he mainly worked outside the professional discipline, drawing as much from the mythological streams that fed Yasuda as from cutting edge anthropological scholarship. And Oka left for Vienna in 1929, not to return until 1935, a pivotal year in minzoku discourse. Consequently, the anthropological turn to ethnicity was spurred in large measure by the work done by sociologists. Many of the future ethnologists in Japan were trained in sociology, as it was in sociology that they focused on developing an adequate theory of the people as the national body (see Chapter Four). A key barometer of the sociological interest in ethnicity is the 1934 Annals of the Japanese Society for Sociology. All six of the essays carried in that volume were explicitly concern with the problem of minzoku. Since they were 48

Hashimoto Mitsuru, “Minzoku: nihon kindaika wo tg suru chikara,” 8.

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treated above in Chapter Four in some depth, here I merely want to focus on how some of these key arguments continued to shape the formation of ethnology and wartime discourse on minzoku. Watanuki Tetsur’s article called “Nationality” (minzokusei) followed Usui Jish’s article on “The Concept of Nation” (kokumin no gainen), and implicitly raised the question of what the distinction between kokumin and minzoku is. And, in fact, that question was the fundamental one that his article addressed. Watanuki did not build his argument around a theoretical response to the difference between kokumin and minzoku so much as a historical analysis of different minzoku within the Japanese nation. He explicitly drew his conceptions of what a minzoku (nationality) is from the liberal, psychological vein, citing Muir, McDougall, Fouilée, and Le Bon, among others, to make the point that what constitutes a sense of nationality is not so much “consciousness” (ishiki) as “mind” (kokoro).49 His reliance on McDougall’s concept of nationality as “group mind” allowed him to distinguish his approach to nationality from the Marxist theory that transferred class consciousness to nationality consciousness. Instead, Watanuki was interested in how sub-groups (what today we would call “ethnicities”) within a given state or national arena develop distinctive cultural styles that yield distinctive ethnic identities, or nationalities. What made his argument most provocative was that it emphasized different “national mores” (kokuf) within Japan, specifically the different cultures of Tosa people and Nagasaki people. Watanuki skillfully employed subjectivist theories of nationality as a form of “group mind” to conclude that Nagasaki and Tosa represented two particularly strong examples of the variety of nationalities (minzokusei) that existed within Japan proper. Ultimately, Watanuki concluded that, as revealed by the example of Nagasaki and Tosa as particular cultural styles that co-existed within the Japanese state, current efforts to reorganize global politics based nationality as the fundamental unit of political society failed to reflect the continuous dynamic change in these social identities called minzoku.50 Watanuki’s article was provocative and influential. A shift was underway within sociology and it bore fruit when the Japanese Society of Ethnology was formed in 1934. The members of the Society read like a “who’s who” of minzoku theorists during the 49 Watanuki Tetsur, “Minzokusei,” Shakaigaku no. 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1934): 99-150, at 139. 50 Watanuki, 150.

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wartime: Uno Enk, Ishida Kannosuke, Koyama Eiz, Shibusawa Keiz, Shinmura Izuru, Kuwata Yoshiz, Utsurikawa Nenoz and Furuno Kiyoto, with Shiratori Kurakichi as the Chairman of the Society’s Board of Directors.51 All these men (but Ishida, Koyama and Shinmura in particular) would make substantial contributions to the wartime discourse on minzoku and, at least initially, all started with the belief that the cultural, subjective nature of minzoku required a specific discipline distinct from the natural orientation of anthropology and the institutional formalism of sociology. But in fact, sociology in Japan was changing under the impact of minzoku theory. No one did more to push the discipline into a serious engagement with ethnology that the senior sociologist Takata Yasuma who joined his theory of “total society” to the new work being done on minzoku with revolutionary results. In 1934, the same year that Watanuki’s article appeared, Takata published his major work on Class and the State which sought to refute the theory put forth by Marxist social scientists that posited a deterministic relationship between class and the state. In the process of building a pluralistic theory of political structures, Takata argued that the concept of minzoku held an independent value that could not be reduced to the political state in all cases.52 In that work, Takata’s main concern was with demonstrating the pluralistic nature of the state; he was not yet focused on the problem of minzoku and he strongly rejection the notion that he supported ethnic nationalism (minzokushugi).53 But it immediately became the central concern of his work to the end of the war.54 Between 1935 and 1939, Takata mainly developed a theory of minzoku that situated it within both modernist and subjectivist approaches, rejecting blood as the primary factor and also criticizing 51

See my “Building National Identity through Ethnicity: Ethnology in Wartime Japan and After,” 18-9. 52 Takata Yasuma, Kokka to kaiky, (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1934): 15. 53 In a October 1934 issue of Keizai rai, Takata published a rebuttal of Shimmei Masamichi’s claim that Takata had converted to a minzokushugi position, describing his own position as that of a cosmopolitan (sekaishugisha). Cited in Seino Masayoshi, “Takata Yasuma no Ta minzoku ron,” 29-59 in Senjika Nihon Shakai Kenkykai, ed., Senjika no nihon: shwa zenki no rekishi shakaigaku, 32. But as Seino goes on to demonstrate, “But by 1942…Takata had converted into one of Japan’s leading ethnic nationalists.” (33). 54 The centrality of minzoku in Takata’s wartime work can be gleaned from a quick list of some of his major publications: Minzoku no mondai (Tokyo: Nihon Hyronsha, 1935); Ta minzoku ron (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1939); Minzoku to keizai, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Yhikaku, 1940); Minzoku ron (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1942); Minzoku to keizai, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Yhikaku, 1943); and Minzoku kenkyjo kiyo (Tokyo: Minzoku kenkyjo, 1944), which he edited.

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“climate” theories (Watsuji’s?) for relying too much on natural causes and not enough on culture (see the discussion on Takata’s sociology in Chapter Four above). Takata’s 1939 A Theory of East Asian Nationality made a major, original contribution to both minzoku discourse and imperialist ideology by offering the concept of a single, culturally determined East Asian nationality (k minzoku; ta minzoku).55 This idea of a new, East Asian nationality drew from the subjectivist theory that nationality was a matter of consciousness or “mind” and thus was relatively open in possibilities. If nationality was largely a subjective sense of identity, then why could not socialization result in a singular sense of loyalty among all East Asian peoples to the Japanese empire? The key, however, remained the necessity of a state to raise the level of identity to a true consciousness, thereby yielding a modern nation (kindai minzoku). Until they developed such a consciousness, other East Asian nationalities would remain at a pre-modern stage of development and would have to rely on the imperial Japanese state to provide them with organization and structure. In this way, Takata transformed and extended a theory of a pluralistic state to a theory that justified Japan’s multi-ethnic East Asian empire. Takata had begun to outline a theory of ethnic nationality that could reconcile the two countervailing pressures in minzoku discourse up to that time: on the one hand, minzoku appealed as a cultural theory of identity that was not invested in regional or racial identities; yet at the same time, it was deeply implicated in post World War I political movements for nationalism and a right to self-determination. For Takata, and for those who sought to legitimize the Japanese empire, the problem was how to embrace this new concept as a cultural theory without losing their right to govern other ethnic nationalities. The solution Takata found was a dual notion of minzoku, one that was temporally and spatially inflected: not all minzoku were at the same stage of historical development, and not all minzoku identity claims were narrow in scope. But it was Oka Masao who came up with the most powerful articulation of this concept. Having spent the years from 1929 to 1935 in Vienna, where he watched the development of ethnology, he returned to Vienna again that year and stayed, impressed with the Nazi support for ethnology. When he returned to Japan in 1940, he brought with him a new idea. Within 55

On Takada’s theories on minzoku, see Hashimoto Mitsuru, “Minzoku: nihon kindaika wo tg suru chikara,” 16-19; Doak, “Building National Identity through Ethnicity.”

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Takata’s horizontal community of an East Asian ethnic nationality there had to be a “hierarchy of ethnic nations (minzoku chitsujo) that reflected the different historical stages of development of each member minzoku. And since Japan was the only ethnic nation to have developed its own independent state, it was accorded the top position, the Herrenvolk (shid minzoku) with the moral responsibility to develop the other ethnic nationalities to their own, eventual political independence. Oka not only provided intellectual support for imperial ethnology, he was also the motive force behind the creation of the Japan Ethnic Research Institute (Minzoku Kenkyjo) in 1943. Takata was named the Director of the Institute. Oka had many valuable contacts in the military, as well as in companies with close connections to the military and civilian powerbrokers. He received substantial help from Furuno Kiyoto who was working for the East Asian economic research department of Mantetsu and had strong ties to people in the Ministry of Education and in the Imperial Navy. Once it became clear that minzoku ideas were not limited to the Marxist agenda, pragmatic imperial bureaucrats, bankers and high level military offers were eager to use the fruits of this discourse both to suppress Marxism and to shore up imperial rule. Ishiwara Kanji is a case in point. Drawing on the idea of Kyoto Imperial University Professor Sakuda Shichi that the ideals of ethnic national harmony and integration within the political state were compatible goals, Ishiwara founded Kenkoku University (National Foundation University) in Manchuria in May 1938, placing Sakuda effectively in charge of the University. At that university, ethnic harmony was not only an idea, but enacted through admissions policies that yielded a remarkable ethnic balance among the students enrolled. According to research done by Naka Hisao, a member of the last class of Kenkoku University, the first class enrolled 65 Japanese, 59 (Han) Chinese, 11 Koreans, 13 Taiwanese, 7 Mongolians and 5 White Russians, a proportion that was maintained until the university closed in 1945.56 But Tj Hideki thought Ishiwara’s belief in ethnic national harmony was quixotic at best, and he never warmed to Ishiwara’s social reorganization plans for Manchuria. In fact, he finally recalled Ishiwara to Tokyo and placed him on inactive service.57 56 Naka Hisao, “‘Minzoku kywa’ no ris: ‘manshkoku’ kenkoku daigaku no jikken,” 81-100 in Senjika Nihon Shakai Kenkykai, ed., Senjika no nihon, 90-91, 83-84. 57 Cf. Miyazawa Eriko, Kenkoku daigaku to minzoku kywa (Tokyo: Fma Shob, 1997).

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Oka’s contribution to wartime Japanese minzoku discourse revealed a new shift in the way that discourse placed the people in relation to the Imperial state. The concern no longer was limited to a shift from race to ethnicity through the mediation of culture. Rather, cultural and political issues began to merge more frequently, particularly under the influence of the Nazi model that the State itself could be reconceived as a Volk-Staat. This mode of taming the force of ethnic nationalism to serve an expansive wartime state was providing Imperial Japan’s state bureaucrats with hopes that they might be able to overcome the Wilsonian liberal theory of minzoku as a form of nationalist self-determination, an anti-imperialist movement. This was a marked shift from the negative assessment of minzoku that was characteristic of imperial state apologists from the days of Fukuzawa Yukichi, Kat Hiroyuki and Uesugi Shinkichi. From the late 1930s, the emphasis within Japanese minzoku discourse turned toward ways the state might appropriate minzoku for its own purposes. This was no simple matter. First, the state had to adopt the liberal theory that minzoku was not an objective, racial identity but a matter of consciousness. Second, it had to make a persuasive case that such ethnic consciousness could be transformed, and transformed in a way that would align minzoku identity with what was institutionally, historically, and legally a multi-ethnic Empire. And finally, it had to find methods that would successfully accomplish this goal, transforming minzoku consciousness from a potentially anti-imperial movement into one that would further invest the loyalties of various peoples throughout Asia in the Japanese Imperial State. What made this agenda particularly difficult was it had to be accomplished without completely alienating ethnic nationalists within Japan who had been opposed to the modern, bureaucratic empire that had, in the words made famous in Japan by J.A. Hobson, become a “debasement of…genuine nationalism by attempts to overflow its natural banks and absorb…reluctant and unassimilable peoples.”58 At the same time, the incorporation of minzoku into official ideology had to proceed without transforming the very nature of the constitutional Imperial state. Few of the state bureaucrats who were now turning toward minzoku discourse wanted Japan to change its constitutional system as Germany had. And fewer yet were interested in overthrowing the monarchy. 58

J.A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (New York: James Pott & Co., 1902), 4. The quote is from Hobson’s introductory chapter, “Nationalism and Imperialism” which was widely cited by the liberal theorists of nationalism discussed above. It was particularly influential on Yanaihara Tadao.

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Domestically, the extreme positions were marked out by conservative ethnic nationalists like Yasuda who sought in minzoku a principle of overcoming all traces of modernity, including the modern Japanese imperial state, and “reform bureaucrats” inspired by Nazi Germany who sought to push the limits of the imperial state as close to the Nazi model as possible. In between these two extremes were legal theorists like Yanaihara Tadao and Tanaka Ktar who incorporated minzoku discourse into their writings but with the goal of resisting both the anti-modernity of romantics like Yasuda and the totalitarianism of the “reform bureaucrats.” Significantly, in the context of a rising State Shintoism, both men were Christians. Yanaihara was a mukykai (“non-affliliated,” i.e., in Uchimura Kanz’s tradition) Christian, and was inclined to see institutions like church and state as secondary to ideals which, transcendent, must be employed to guide institutions. He brought this idealist philosophy to bear on the problem of minzoku in two books Minzoku to Heiwa (1936) and Minzoku to Kokka (1937), the latter based on a series of speeches he had delivered in Nagano between 31 August and 02 September 1937. On the basis of these works, Yanaihara developed a theory of national identity that accepted ethnic nationality (minzoku) as the foundation of national identity, and he saw the state as an artificial institution that needed to be guided by the ideals of a nation (minzoku). In practice, he was offering a critique of the Imperial States efforts at assimilating Koreans and at the war in China that had just started in July. When he published this moral critique of the Japanese state in Ch Kron in September, he attracted the attention and ire of the rightwing ideologue Minoda Muneki who attacked Yanaihara for his pacifism, and ultimately Yanaihara was forced to resign his chair at Tokyo Imperial University.59 While the precise reasons for Yanaihara’s removal from teaching at the Imperial University are in dispute, what is clear is that he argued that the state must be accountable to the minzoku, not the other way around. And this view directly contradicted what statists had been trying to do with the concept of the minzoku since the outbreak of the second Sino59

In fact, Yanaihara was only removed from the classroom and had his writings on minzoku and the state suppressed. At the same time, he was allowed to stay on as librarian at Tokyo Imperial University and was never imprisoned. As Susan C. Townsend has noted, “the Japanese authorities, although they persecuted and harassed Japanese Christians, were reluctant to imprison them” (267-8). See her Yanaihara Tadao and Japanese Colonial Policy: Redeeming Empire (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2000): esp., 235-251. On Yanaihara’s minzoku discourse, see my “Colonialism and Ethnic Nationalism in the Political Thought of Yanaihara Tadao (1893-1961),” East Asian History (July 1997): 79-98.

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Japanese war: subordinate minzoku claims to the imperial structure of rule. In any event, Yanaihara was neither persecuted for advocating minzoku ideas nor for being a Christian liberal. That much is clear from the example of Tanaka Ktar, a liberal, Catholic professor of law at the same university. Conceptually, Tanaka agreed with Yanaihara that the nation (minzoku) had developed out of race but had matured into a concept distinct both from race and from the state.60 The real question from the perspective of international law, or what Tanaka called “global law,” was to determine whether a state was the by-product of a nation, or whether a nation could be engineered by a state. Tanaka rejected the idea put forth by radical conservatives that the Japanese state was an expression of the Yamato nation. But he also rejected the notion that ethnic nationality was merely a tool, either to overthrow the state (Marxists) or to be used to support the multi-ethnic state (authoritarian imperialists). Staking out his position in the moderate middle, Tanaka argued that the relationship between nation and state was one of mutual influence, or what we might today call “overdetermination.” His main point, from a perspective grounded in the transcendental principle of natural law, was to limit the state’s activities to regulating the objective forms of social life: the state should simply stay out of national issues, as the nation was, ultimately, a spiritual reality.61 This argument was not only a defense of the right to be both Christian and a loyal Japanese–as outlined by Maeda and Linguel forty years earlier–it was also a defense of Article 28 of the Meiji Constitution that guaranteed freedom of religion. At the same time, it did not completely reject empire as a viable and potentially just political system. Like Yanaihara, Tanaka’s approach was not a structuralist, deterministic one, but a human, practical one: how might moral men exercise power in imperfect institutions to achieve the most just and humane result possible? But unlike Yanaihara, Tanaka did not adopt a pacifist position, either in principle or in regard to the second Sino-Japanese war. And, even though he was an active and devout Christian throughout the war, he never suffered any persecution. There were, however, many social engineers who were eager to make the principle of minzoku subordinate to the raw political interests of Japanese imperialism. From the late 1930s, it became an increasingly common feature of minzoku discourse that morality 60 61

Tanaka, Sekai h no riron, I, 162-166. Tanaka, Sekai h no riron I, 212-6.

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ultimately rested in the state, and thus minzoku identities could, and should, be manipulated to suit the interests of the Japanese state.62 One way this argument was put forth is evident in the collection of essays called Minzoku and War published by the Young Japanese Foreign Relations Association in 1939. This volume, with essays by leading minzoku theorists Shimmei Masamichi, Kada Tetsuji, Shimizu Ikutar, Nagata Kiyoshi and Maehara Mitsuo, placed ethnic nationality at the center of Japan’s war in Asia, arguing from a variety of perspectives that Japan had a moral mission to rectify the political instabilities in the region that resulted from a failure to resolve the claims of ethnic nationalism. The purpose of the book, which was addressed to young men of draft age, is best captured in the title of Shimmei’s article, “The Role of War in Establishing Ethnic Societies [minzoku shakai].” It provided a bibliography, which illustrated the enduring influence of liberal national theories and established the writings of Takata, Yanaihara, Kada, Koya Yoshio, and Komatsu Kentar as canonical works in the Japanese discourse on minzoku.63 But most importantly, the authors had learned the lessons of the failure of the liberal theorists to establish a definitive theory of who or what constituted a nation. Ultimately, they concluded, the liberal effort to seek an adequate theory of the nation had failed, and the only solution was to be found through the effects of war. This approach to resolving the minzoku issue through force became most salient after 7 (8 in Japan) December 1941, when the attack on Pearl Harbor offered the chance to reinterpret the overtly imperialist war in Asia as a war for the liberation of Asia from the West. The war could not be presented effectively as a war of liberation of Asian nations without a compelling case for what 62

The scope of this minzoku discourse from the late 1930s is truly impressive and of course there are individual variations within it. But a representative sample of the influential works would include: Komatsu Kentar, Minzoku to bunka (Tokyo: Rissha, 1939); Izawa Hiroshi, Minzoku ts shikan (Tokyo: Sangab, 1939); Takata Yasuma, Ta minzoku ron (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1939); Tanase Jji, Ta no minzoku to shky (Tokyo: Kawade Shob, 1939); Matsuoka Jhachi, Shina minzokusei no kenky (Tokyo: Nihon Hyronsha, 1940); Kamei Kan’ichir, Dai ta minzoku no michi (Tokyo: Seiki Shob, 1941); Koyama Eiz, Minzoku to jink no riron (Tokyo: Hata Shoten, 1941) and Minzoku to bunka no sh-mondai (Tokyo: Hata Shoten, 1942); Kaigo Katsuo, Ta minzoku kyiku ron (Tokyo: Asakura Shoten, 1942); the 12 volume Minzoku series published by Rokumeikan in 1943, Ogawa Yatar, ed., Nihon minzoku to shin sekaikan (Osaka: Kazuraki Shoten, 1943); Hirano Yoshitar, Minzoku seijigaku no riron (Tokyo: Nihon Hyronsha, 1943); and Minzoku kenkyjo kiyo (Tokyo: Minzoku Kenkyjo, 1944). 63 Nihon Seinen Gaik Kykai, ed., Minzoku to sens (Tokyo: Nihon Seinen Gaik Kykai, 1939): 211-244.

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nationality was and how it could be liberated by an outside state–Japan. Yet, as we have seen, the effort over several decades to establish a definitive theory of nationality had met with little success. Even so, the failure of political theorists to establish a theory of nationality for the empire did not lessen the need for a philosophy of nationality, a normative outline for how nationality, properly understood, could provide a justification for Japan’s war. And there was no shortage of philosophers in Japan ready to provide just that. Ksaka Masa’aki, a leading philosopher in the Kyoto School tradition, emerged as the most influential of such philosophers when he published a book called The Philosophy of Minzoku in April 1942. In that book, he drew from the liberal theory of minzoku as a contingent product of history, as well as conservative views of those like Yasuda that there was no transcendental moral principle beyond that of the minzoku. He argued that the true subject of world history was neither the individual nor class but the minzoku, and he drew from Muir and others to emphasize that minzoku was distinct from both race and the state. But Ksaka offered something new. He emphasized that the ultimate goal, “a world historical nation” was a “state-nation” (kokka-teki minzoku): Of course, the world is not going to be changed solely through minzoku; the minzoku must be mediated by culture. And even if the world itself can be seen as a kind of negative universal (mu-teki fuhen), there must be within the historical world a species-subject (shu-teki shutai). And that is the state-nation.64

Ksaka’s fusion of nation with the state, minzoku with kokka, through the process of mediation, was a new, original contribution to the moral discourse on minzoku. He was not proposing a nation-state (minzoku-kokka), which would have contradicted the multi-ethnic empire, but the need for all minzoku in the region immediately to associate themselves with a state (the only effective option being the imperial Japanese state). Even while recognizing the distinction between the two concepts, he subjected that conceptual distinction to his historicist philosophy that was more interested in offering creative assertions about new realities than the more modest goal of reflecting what was traditionally seen as limitations to what the nation and the state could demand of the individual. This was no mere philosophical game. Ksaka made it clear that his interests were practical and involved specifically offering a rationale for the policy of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity 64

Ksaka Masa’aki, Minzoku no tetsugaku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1942); 3.

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Sphere. The key to resolving the national question within the empire, he felt, lay in the grand concept of a co-prosperity sphere. Once the pluralistic and artificial (“historical”) character of minzoku was grasped, Ksaka believed there would be no barrier, certainly not nature (he spent a great deal of energy distinguishing and discounting natural scientific concepts like race from the historical subject of nation), to the reconstruction of minzoku in a new relationship of coprosperity. It was “not simply a matter of liberating nations in East Asia, but of a new discovery of them and an establishment of them.” Sounding very much like Takata Yasuma, he argued that the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere does not simply mean that existing states and existing nations will enter into a new relationship of co-prosperity. Rather, it means the construction of their own states, the beginning of their own history, for those nations that are nonautonomous, that lack their own history, and in this way, a new East Asian world will open a new stage in world history.65

Such a grand constructivist project was possible, Ksaka maintained, because a minzoku was an on-going social construct (gen ni dekitsutsu aru). But from a world historical standpoint, the most important consideration was how such non-historical nations would become historical state-nations. The answer was quite predictable. “Through the leadership of our nation, new states will arise from among the other nations and appear on the stage of world history. But this will also mean that our nation’s mode of existence will be fundamentally enlarged and become capable of mediating the process toward a new world.”66 While this 1942 defense of the co-prosperity sphere placed Ksaka squarely among those on the political right, his philosophy of minzoku could not have taken shape without the contribution of liberal and leftist theories of minzoku that had sought to overcome the constraints of nature and of race in particular. By the late 1930s, imperial minzoku discourse had taken shape around two distinct conceptual approaches. Ksaka and Takata represented the corporatist approach that insisted that the plasticity of the concept of minzoku provided the grounds for the creation of a new, single East Asian identity that would provide the basis for the construction of a New Order in Asia. Takata’s student Nakano Seiichi gave this theory its strongest articulation as a policy position in his 1944 article on “An Unfolding of the Nationality Principle in East Asia” published in the Bulletin of the Ethnic Research Institute. 65 66

Ksaka, 193, 194-5. Ksaka, 196, 197.

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Nakano recognized Oka’s call for an “ethnic national hierarchy” in the region, but he added Takata’s notion of a “broader ethnic nation” as the foundation for a sense of community within the hierarchy of ethnic ations in the East Asian region. He noted that the basis of all East Asian ethnic nations is to be found in the position of a single East Asian Ethnic Nation (Dr. Takata). Once we accept this fact, then it is clear that the position of an East Asian ethnic nation is also basis of the position of ethnic national complementarity (minzoku hokan no tachiba). Moreover, this means that what appears as a complementary relationship among the ethnic nations is, when seen from a different angle, merely each ethnic nation making manifest its own special job. So, we can call this position of ethnic national complementarity the position of ethnic national duty. In time, as this complementarity progesses, disarray might arise in the relationship between ethnic nations and their specific duties. If we are to avoid such a development, there will need to be a hierarchy among the ethnic nations. Thus, the position of ethnic national complementarity is tightly linked to the position of an ethnic national hierarchy.67

Nakano’s synthesis was not a very successful one. It is most valuable as an example of how far the social theory of constructed identity could go in providing justification for imperialism as a project that would “overcome” the limitations to national formation history had recorded, and which were seen in the last years of the war as a problem of modernity, or the West.68 If Nakano had sought his synthesis largely from within the corporatist approach to nationality in the empire, those who believed that unity in East Asia could best be formed on the basis of a league of separate ethnic nationalities remained unconvinced by his policy recommendation. Kamei Kan’ichir still asserted that the life of the empire depended not on some dubious social experiment in engineering unprecedented forms of ethnic identity, but in strengthening existing ethnic identities in East Asia. Kamei had been deeply impressed by the ethnic nationalism he found in Nazi Germany, and he drew from that experience to argue that something analogous was possible in East Asia and would lead to unity under the Japanese empire. His league approach had been favored by many activists since the early 1930s, including Ozaki Hotsumi and Ishiwara 67

Nakano, p. 54. For a more detailed treatment of Nakano’s ethnic nationality policy, see my chapter on “Nakano Seiichi and Colonial Ethnic Studies” in Akitoshi Shimizu and Jan van Bremen, eds., Wartime Japanese Anthropology in Asia and the Pacific, Senri Ethnological Studies no. 65 (2003): pp. 109-129. 68

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Kanji.69 But after Pearl Harbor and the shift in ideology to emphasize the war as a war against modernity, the league approach began to lose influence to the corporatists, who had an easier time connecting their image of a new East Asian minzoku with the effort to overcome modernity and its emphasis on the state as the privileged unit of modern political life. But the debate continued down to the end of the war, preventing any final consensus on a nationality policy for the empire. The unresolved tensions between these two approaches informed the massive “A Study of Global Policy with the Yamato Volk as the Core” composed in 1943 by bureaucrats in the Ministry of Social Welfare’s Research Office Department of Population and Nationality. The report reflected the same tensions that existed in the broader public discourse on minzoku which pitted Takata’s new, single East Asia Volk against Kamei’s vision of a Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere built around the particular ethnic identities in the region.70 In the end, wracked with internal contradictions and multivocal arguments, the report could only conclude that the Japanese state needed to establish a nationality policy that would bring these various minzoku into an organic unity.71 Yet, there was to be no reconciliation of these two approaches. In a sense, the failure to establish a nationality policy was most likely the result of intractable differences of opinion within the department over what a minzoku is and how far it could be molded into something new. But, at the same time, it may simply be that these bureaucrats found themselves confronted with the fundamental problem of Asian regionalism, as Yamamuro Shin’ichi has expressed it: the impossible dilemma of

69

On the East Asian League (Ta remmei) and the East Asian corporatist (Ta kydtai) approaches to nationalism in the empire, see my chapter on “The Concept of Ethnic Nationality and its Role in Pan-Asianism in Imperial Japan” in Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann, eds., Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 70 Indeed, one section of the report urges cultural assimilation of other East Asian Völker by Japan, Yamato minzoku o chkaku to suru sekai seisaku no kent 7, 2351; another section argues against any single policy for all the Völker of Asia, and particularly warns that assimilation efforts would merely cause a backlash against the Japanese (7, 2364-5). On the public debate between proponents of a single Ta minzoku and those who insisted on a plural interpretation of Ta (sho-)minzoku, see my “Narrating China, Ordering East Asia,” 102-105, 112, n. 57. It is easy to suspect Kamei’s hand behind the anti-assimilation sections of the report, due to his influence in governmental circles, familiarity and support for Nazi nationality theories, and the parallels in the report’s arguments and in Kamei’s published works. 71 Yamato minzoku o chkaku to suru sekai seisaku no kent 7, 2197.

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trying to hammer unity out of the plurality that has always been the reality of Asia.72 Minzoku and the Postwar Nation It is often assumed that the devastation of Japan’s cities in the final years of the war and the humiliation of defeat and occupation cleansed the Japanese people of any attraction to nationalism. Alternatively, it is claimed that during the seven years of military occupation, certainly during the early stages, any overt expression of nationalism was censored or punished by SCAP. Evidence offered in support of this view is principally the ease of the Occupation and the rarity of any retaliatory attack on the foreign soldiers in Japan. Nationalism must have been worn out by the long war, it is presumed, or there would have been more resistance to the Occupation. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was a wide ranging and very public expression of nationalism from the immediate postwar days throughout and beyond the period of occupation, and it came from all points on the political spectrum: right, left and center. Why did occupation officials allow this open expression of nationalism? Why have so many historians of Japan in the past failed to recognize the vigorous nationalism in the early postwar period? And how has this failure to recognize and restrain nationalism during the years of occupation subsequently shaped the political discourse on national identity and nationalism throughout the postwar period? To understand why a free expression of nationalism was permitted under military occupation, it is necessary first to recognize that appeals to minzoku and minzokushugi are indeed forms of nationalism. The most common expression of nationalism in the immediate postwar period was made in minzoku terms. American observers of Japanese political thought from the occupation period up until quite recently have not always understood that appeals to the minzoku were inherently forms of nationalism; instead they have often swept the problem of minzoku under the rug of “race.” This tendency to believe that a reference to the Japanese minzoku identity was simply a depoliticized (if somewhat morally disreputable) way of referring to race was encouraged by anthropological studies of the Japanese, the 72

Yamamuro Shin’ichi, “‘Ta ni shite ichi’ no chitsujo genri to Nihon no sentaku” In Aoki Tamotsu and Saeki Keishi, eds., ‘Ajia-teki kachi’ to wa nani ka (Tokyo: TBS-Britannica, 1998).,43-64

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most important of which was Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a work widely read among occupation officials and even translated into Japanese as early as 1948.73 In short, there was a curious kind of mirror-effect, in which Americans who had been encouraged during the war to view the Japanese as a “race” different from themselves, reflected their own racial interpretation of the Japanese onto discussions of minzoku identity among the Japanese. The irony was that the postwar Japanese were not talking about race as the Americans understood it, of course, but were continuing a discourse on nationalism that had been quite vibrant during the wartime and prewar years. But in seeing this discourse as one about “race” rather than about nationalism, American Occupation officials could easily conclude that it was a politically harmless, if somewhat distasteful, topic for Japanese intellectuals to indulge. The imperial Japanese discourse on minzoku that separated minzoku claims from the right to an independent state only augmented this predilection for seeing minzoku discourse as political harmless. There were also structural reasons for the resurgence of minzoku discourse in the immediate postwar years. Oguma Eiji has summarized the structural changes that made minzoku so attractive after the war. As he points out, a key condition for the rise of this myth of minzoku identity was the transformation of Japan from the multi-ethnic Meiji Imperial State to a mono-ethnic nation through the process of de-imperialization. In short, the “liberation” of such territories as Taiwan and Korea from the Japanese empire meant that the claims of ethnic nationalism there now resonated with a sense of ethnic purity within Japan. Koreans and Taiwanese were no longer automatically “subjects” or citizens of the Japanese nation (Okinawans were not to be Japanese again until 1972), and this ethnic cleansing of the empire encouraged among the Japanese people a sense of being a mono-ethnic nation. Moreover, drawing from both prewar Marxist and liberal theories that idealized the minzoku and criticized the state, this early postwar minzoku nationalism found it easy to imagine the minzoku as a peaceful nation in contrast to the prewar, militaristic, multi-ethnic state.74 And, equally important, the earlier liberal distinction between the nation as minzoku and the state (kokka) provided a sense of legitimate national identity through minzoku for the seven years of foreign occupation when an 73 Aoki Tamotsu, ‘Nihon bunka ron’ no hen’y (Tokyo: Ch Kron Shinsha, 1999), 31. 74 Oguma, Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen, 339-40.

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independent Japanese state did not exist. The theoretical distinction between nation and state seemed to be borne out by the political realities of occupied Japan. One of the most remarkable continuities between wartime and postwar Japan is the way this minzoku discourse continued on, unchallenged by either occupation officials or by liberal or leftist Japanese. In recent years, Nishikawa Nagao described the spell minzoku has continued to have over the Japanese people as the preferred form of national identity, even while they have largely distanced themselves from the state.75 It may be tempting to conclude that this continuity, one of many historians have depicted across the prewar-postwar divide, represents the retention of rightwing, even “fascist,” elements in postwar democratic Japan. Yet, on closer inspection, the continuity in minzoku discourse proves to be, not an exclusively or even largely conservative ideology, but also an extension of the liberal and leftist minzoku discourse of the prewar period. Certainly, rightwing ethnic nationalists tried to express their views, but they had the most difficulty getting their ethnic nationalism in print under the occupation. It was not their ethnic nationalism that raised objections, but simply their identities, past associations with wartime pro-government parties, or other extraneous, often personal, reasons that led them to be blacklisted by the occupation censors. Kageyama Masaharu has detailed was he sees as a history of oppression that “rightwing” ethnic nationalists suffered at the hands of the occupying forces.76 But he also points out that, as a right-wing ethnic nationalist, he took considerable solace in reading the nationalist appeal of the Christian Yanaihara Tadao that was permitted to appear in the pages of the leftist journal Sekai (although Kageyama distanced himself from Yanaihara’s Christianity).77 While the extreme right was prevented from expressing their views through the occupation censors, minzoku nationalism was able to thrive through liberals and leftists who led the way in rehabilitating it in the context of post-imperial, occupied Japan. One of the earliest instances of minzoku nationalism in the postwar period was a lecture given on 11 February 1946 by Nanbara Shigeru, president of Tokyo University. Nanbara was an expert on Fichte, and he drew on his knowledge of Fichte in his speech on the “Creation of 75 Nishikawa Nagao, “Two Interpretations of Japanese Culture,” (trans. Mikiko Murata and Gavan McCormack) in Multicultural Japan, 247-8. 76 Kageyama Masaharu, Senryka no minzoku-ha: dan’atsu to chkoku no shgen (Tokyo: Nihon Kybunsha, 1979). 77 Kageyama, 103-8.

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a New Japanese Culture” in arguing that the minzoku is “the site for the creation of the spirit of freedom.” The war and all the horrible things Japanese had done to others–and had been victims of themselves–all this could be laid at the feet of the state. States go to war, but minzoku were just people, and people were by nature peaceful. Nanbara may have drawn inspiration from Fichte, but he was also implicitly rehashing arguments that had been raised under Wilsonian idealism around the time of the First World War: the hope that if the world map were only redrawn along the lines of ethnic nationalism, true world peace might be attained at last. Nambara’s investment in this minzoku form of national identity, and his belief that such a national identity would be the foundation for a more just postwar world order is evident in his statement that, “although our minzoku has made mistakes, we nonetheless rejoice that we were born into this minzoku and we have unending love for this minzoku. It is precisely for that reason that we seek to punish our minzoku ourselves and so recover its honor before the world.”78 When the president of Tokyo University makes such an appeal to the concept of minzoku, others are bound to follow. And follow they did. But what is most striking about the flood of articles and books on minzoku nationalism in the early postwar period is that it came largely from liberals and leftists, not from rightwing nationalists like Kageyama. Nanbara’s 1946 speech may have signaled that it was socially and politically acceptable to discuss minzoku identity in postwar Japan. But it was Shimmei Masamichi’s 1949 Theory of Historical Minzoku that provided the clearest connection to prewar and wartime minzoku discourse, while at the same time charting the future direction for many minzoku theories. Shimmei of course was an active minzoku theorist during the wartime: he was one of the contributors to the 1939 Minzoku and War volume discussed above. Indeed, the chapters of his 1949 book had been composed originally as lectures given at Thoku Imperial University between 1943 and 1945. As such, they provide ipso facto evidence of the transwar nature of this minzoku discourse. But they also allow us to see how the ideas of the earlier liberal theorists were used, not only to legitimate Japanese imperialism, but after the war to provide a foundation for a Japanese national identity in the absence of a state. Shimmei not only built his argument on wartime Japanese theorists like Takata Yasuma, Komatsu Kentar and Ksaka Masa’aki; he also went back to the 78

Nanbara Shigeru, cited in Oguma, Minshu to aikoku: sengo nihon no nashonarizumu to kkysei (Tokyo: Shin’ysha, 2002): 139

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liberal theorists Hobson, Muir and McDougall to emphasize that the core of national identity lies in this sociological sense of community forged through such elements as a common language, historical experience, and shared fate.79 Like the liberal theorists after World War I, he emphasized the importance of the sentiment of the people as determining whether or not they constituted a nation (minzoku). And like them, too, he also drew a sharp distinction between race, nation, and the state. In the two and a half years since the end of the war (the book was written in early 1948), Shimmei had time to consider how these ideas about the nation, articulated during the wartime empire, applied to Japan’s new situation as an occupied people. In revising the context and significance of his argument–if not the literal terms he employed–he was able to apply his earlier argument that minzoku, which captured the essence of a society and did not depend on the political form of the state for its existence, was the key form of national identity. As during the war, however, the relationship of minzoku to the state remained of crucial importance: Yet, while it is true that the state has an intimate role in the establishment of a nation (minzoku), it is not necessarily correct to think that the state precedes the nation and creates it…. The nation does not always depend on the state to create it, but may be thought of as coming into being in a spontaneous form. Of course, as the state’s political unification progresses, the nation’s formation will also progress necessarily…. But rather than saying this is the creation of the nation, it is better to understand this process as the completion of the nation. In this sense, the state is not the creator of the nation but that which fosters the nation…. In this way, the nation may be called a Kulturnation (bunka minzoku). But the fact that the Kulturnation is fully established apolitically, without any direct mediation by political unification, is sufficient proof that the political unification of the state does not necessarily constitute an absolute precondition for the nation.80

Shimmei’s was a nuanced argument with high stakes for postwar nationalism, and it deserves a careful reading. He explicitly termed his theory of the nation a “historical one”, thus aligning it ostensibly with the earlier Marxist theories of the nation that reduced the nation to historical determinism. But his ultimate objective was in asserting a sense of the nation, rooted in minzoku, as the real foundation of national identity. Here he found an unexpected bonanza in imperialist 79

Shimmei Masamichi, Shi-teki minzoku riron (Tokyo: Iwasaki Shoten, 1949): 36-

68. 80

Shimmei, Shi-teki minzoku riron, 55-6.

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national theory. During the empire, the theory that minzoku was the essence of national identity was offered to deny subjected peoples their own independent state. But now it was re-packaged as proof that the Japanese had not lost their nation and national identity, even though they had no state of their own.81 Shimmei’s postwar ethnic nationalism provides telling evidence of a continuity between wartime and postwar efforts to place the people as an ethnic nation that was distinct from–indeed substituted for–an independent political state. His argument is a powerful articulation of a conclusion that many others had come to in the early postwar years, even those who had to revise much of their wartime theories to make them fit Japan’s new circumstances. A key example of such a revisionist is Wakamori Tar. Wakamori was an active participant in the wartime ethnological discourse associated with Takata Yasuma, Oka Masao and others. In 1942, he legitimated Japanese imperialism in China with an argument that the Chinese people traditionally did not invest their nationality in a political state as the Japanese did. But in his Theory of the Japanese Minzoku published in 1947–when Japan no longer had an independent state to boast of–he reversed himself, arguing that any national identity promoted by or invested in a state was inauthentic. And to give context to this anti-statist minzoku nationalism, he added that it was Westerners–not the Japanese themselves–who seemed unable to understand the difference between Japan’s true nationality based in ethnic culture and the false national identity propped up by the state.82 Wakamori’s revisionism did not stop there. He laid the foundations for a particular brand of conservative ethnic nationalism that asserted a moral difference in the two sets of characters used to write the word minzoku (), with preference going to the latter set. Wakamori thus was one of the earliest ethnologists to argue that there was a similar distinction between an acceptable form of “folklore,” associated with Yanagita Kunio, that was derived from this preferred minzoku called minzokugaku (    ) and that was morally superior to the old,

81

For a different view of the relationship of state and nation in Shimmei’s work, see Fujita Kunihiko, “Senjika nihon ni okeru kuni no hon’shitsu,” Senjika no nihon, 61-79, esp, 67-68. I am not able to tell whether Fujita’s conclusion (that the state and nation were always connected) is due to his prior theoretical conviction or whether it is because he relies on a 1980 anthologized version of Shimmei’s Shi-teki minzoku riron. 82 Wakamori Tar, Nihon minzoku ron (Tokyo: Chiyoda Shob, 1947); cited in my “Building National Identity through Ethnicity: Ethnology in Wartime Japan and After,” at 33-34.

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discredited wartime ethnology (). The problem with Wakamori’s revisionist effort was that Yanagita himself rejected such orthographic distinctions, arguing that all minzoku referred to ethnicity and thus preferring himself the characters  to capture the subject of his ethnological studies.83
Yanagita’s epigones have uniformly ignored his warning on this point, and a postwar discourse of minzokugakucontinues to this day to promote a form of ethnic national identity that masquerades as merely “folklore.” Shimmei’s historical approach to minzoku was significant for another reason. Even as Wakamori was joined by wartime ethnologists Oka Masao, Ishida Eiichir, Egami Namio and others in asserting a new national identity determined by ethnic culture, Marxists were re-asserting their historically determined minzoku theories that had been silenced for ten years during the war. Although Shimmei did not join with them, his effort to present his theory as a “historical” one testified to the prestige that the Marxist minzoku theories enjoyed in the early postwar years. Kubokawa Tsurujir was one of the first of the Marxists scholars to revive the prewar leftist ethnic nationalism in the postwar period. His 1948 Literature, Thought, Life was, like Shimmei’s book, a republication of earlier work, essays that first had been written between 1936 and 1941 and published in earlier volumes that had appeared in 1940 and 1942. Kubokawa had been a member of the Communist Party until his conversion to nationalism in 1933, and he was most active as a literary critic from then until the end of the war. In 1945, he rejoined the Communist Party and played a leading role in the New Japanese Literature group. His experience, both in converting to nationalism and then back to Communism in the postwar period gave him an unusually flexible perspective on ethnic nationalism. Kubokawa was critical of minzoku cultural theories in the early postwar period because he saw how liberals and conservatives were embracing minzoku culture as a surrogate for the political state, when his own goal was political independence from the American-led occupation. Given the employment of minzoku culture during Imperial Japan as a tool for preventing political independence of nations within the Japanese empire, it is not surprising that he would argue that

83 Yanagita Kunio, “Minzokugaku kara minzokugaku e: Nihon minzokugaku no ashiato o kaerimite,” Minzokugaku kenky 14:3 (February 1950): 1; cited in my “Building National Identity through Ethnicity,” 34.

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the danger of Japan being colonized today comes from nothing but a spirit of anti-foreignism and ethnic nationalism. The reason is that ethnic nationalism and anti-foreignism are, as we all know, simply tools by which a certain group enslaves the people for their own interests. But the present danger of being colonized also arises because a certain group pursues its own interests by sacrificing the people, and through subordination, seeks to rely on a foreign country.84

Drawing from his knowledge of how minzoku was used in the imperial period as a cultural substitution for political independence by Japan’s colonies, Kubokawa was working toward a theory of internal colonization that would explain how some Japanese elites had betrayed the Japanese people through a similar ideology of minzoku as a substitution for political independence from the United States. The key point is that he did not reject ethnic nationalism ipso facto but was merely critical of its exploitation by certain elites who sought to prevent its inherent goal: political independence. The larger point of Kubokawa’s argument reveals that he was not opposed to all forms of anti-foreignism (here, his complaint seems directed at those wary of Soviet influence in the Communist Party of Japan). In his short essay on “The Conditions of Ethnic National Culture”, Kubokawa decried, not so much ethnic appropriations of national identity, but the “formalistic” and “abstract” nature of ethnic nationalism that left it devoid of any significant response to the demands of the day. In language quite reminiscent of Ksaka, he argued that this national theory should not be rejected but merely needed to be articulated in “world historical,” rather than in particularistic, terms.85 Kubokawa wrote as a literary critic for literary scholars. But his call for a more “historical” approach to minzoku that would connect ethnic national culture to a critique of anti-colonization directed at the United States was answered by leading members of Japan’s historical profession. These historians were mostly Stalinists affiliated with the Japan Communist Party, the Party that had just announced a series of positions at its Sixth Conference that included a commitment to ethnic national independence (minzoku dokuritsu). While party members presented this turn to ethnic nationalism as a response to the Occupation of Japan by the capitalist side of the Cold War, it is clear from Curtis Gayle’s recent work that this appeal to minzoku could not be divorced from the prewar Marxist minzoku discourse that had been

84 85

Kubokawa Tsurujir, Bungaku shis seikatsu (Tokyo: Shinseisha, 1948): 241-2. Kubokawa, 26.

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derailed during the wartime.86 Of course, there were difference emphases. There were, to start with, differences of context: the postwar Marxist historians benefited from a more open society, from a retrospective sense throughout society that the war was morally wrong and thus everyone who opposed it (Marxists figured prominently) were moral heroes, and from the affront of military occupation to national dignity. Thus, one finds a resounding theme in Marxist historical writing from the late 1940s through the early 1950s that emphasized interpreting the Japanese people as an ethnic nation oppressed by their own imperial state, betrayed by their postwar elites, and crushed under the rule of foreign military occupation. Ishimoda Sh, Toma Seita and Matsumoto Shinpachir were leaders in the “minzoku faction” of Marxist history, but the influence of minzoku as a way of conceptualizing the Japanese people was broadly and deeply felt: the 1951 and 1952 annual meetings of the Japan Historiographical Research Association were focused on the problem of minzoku as the true subject of national history.87 Leftist historians all agreed that the minzoku was “a product of history” but beyond that formulaic expression there was little agreement as to how far back in history its origins were to be found. Ishimoda’s “minzoku faction” sought to explain that historical production internally, as a precapitalist, organic development going all the way back. In contrast, Inoue Kiyoshi, Eguchi Bokur and Tyama Shigeki’s “modernization faction” argued that the Japanese minzoku was a product of capitalism and the advent of the West in the mid-nineteenth century.88 In spite of this difference, both wings of the Marxist minzoku movement shared a negative view of modernity, seeing postwar history not as a liberation of the nation from fascism, but as only further ensconcing the people in fascism under liberal democratic cover.89 86

Curtis Gayle, Marxist History and Postwar Japanese Nationalism (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003): 52-57. 87 Doak, “What is a Nation and Who Belongs? National Narratives and the Ethnic Imagination in Twentieth-Century Japan,” at 302-3. 88 Gayle, Marxist History and Postwar Japanese Nationalism, 86-87. Gayle quite correctly notes the similarity between Ishimoda’s faction and the primordialism of Anthony D. Smith’s theory on the historical origins of ethnic nations. One might also add that Inoue and the “modernization faction” reflect arguments on the connection between modern capitalism and national formation that have been raised more recently by Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner. 89 Cf. Kubokawa, “Here I believe is the essence of this tendency that, in contrast to the fascism of militarism we had in the past, now spreads fascism under the name of “democracy…our only true way to live is to make every effort to protect the peace, freedom and independence of Japan from the dangers of a new fascism and war; I

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The Left was not the only part of the political spectrum in postwar Japan that was outraged at foreign occupation and that turned to minzoku as the preferred form of nationalism. Conservative ethnic nationalists who had been prominent during the war were often silenced by occupation censorship, but some continued to write under pseudonyms. Yasuda Yojr, one of the most influential of this group, was purged in 1948. Yet, he continued to find ways to express himself: in print through poetry and essays published under other names, and in social gatherings where he influenced the thinking of fellow conservatives who were not purged. Yasuda’s influence was especially pronounced in the journal Sokoku (1949-55). During this period, he found various ways to present his argument that the Japanese minzoku, an agrarian people, had remained largely unchanged in their commitment to ways and mores that were distinctive from the Western forms of life introduced during and after the Meiji Restoration.90 In curious ways, Yasuda’s conservative ethnic nationalism echoed aspects of the ethnic nationalism of the leftist historians: an appeal to Asia as an alternative to the modernity promoted by the occupation, a sense that minzoku was a preferred alternative social identity to that of citizenship in the postwar liberal state, and a romantic appeal to pacificism as grounded in Asia as the “third way” beyond the Cold War polarities of the United States and the Soviet Union. Of course, there were serious political differences that separated Yasuda from the likes of Ishimoda and Inoue. But even within their appeal to ethnic nationalism, there were significant differences. While the leftwing ethnic nationalists intoned Asianism and a critique of modernity, what they meant by “Asia” was a political principle of resistance to capitalist imperialism and what they meant by “modernity” was simply bourgeois class culture. In contrast, to Yasuda “Asia” was a thoroughly poetic mode of being prior to and outside of modernity, and by “modernity” he meant the entire culture of the world as he experienced it in his day. Modernity included the United States, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the communism of Mao Zedong. Perhaps because of the depth of Yasuda’s anti-modernity at a time when much of Japanese society was convulsed with celebrations of modernity, his writings (even after he was freed from censorship) believe that is the only way we can discover the true historical image of Japan at this current moment.” Bungaku shis seikatsu, 242. 90 The best summary of Yasuda’s postwar ethnic nationalism is Oketani Hideaki, Yasuda Yojr (Tokyo: Kdansha, 1996), 136-217.

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never garnered the attention and influence of his wartime work. But he remained one key anchor of conservative, anti-state minzoku nationalism for many postwar intellectuals. Yasuda’s influence was also diminished by the attack on him by Marxists and other leftists in the immediate postwar period. His high school classmate and friend Takeuchi Yoshimi was able to avoid criticism for “war responsibility” and bring to the public’s attention many of Yasuda’s ideas about Asia and ethnic nationalism. As a Sinologist, Takeuchi saw Asia less as a projection of Japan’s own resistance against the West, and more in terms of China as both victim of Japanese aggression and as offering a way outside of modernity (which he equated with Westernization). But even for Takeuchi, the core of this alternative to modernity was, as imperialists had argued during the war, the national concept of minzoku as an alternative to the modern state. Takeuchi’s first impulse was to resist the postwar modernists who sought to move beyond ethnic nationality and invest Japanese national identity in the new postwar sovereign nation-state. In his 1951 essay on “Modernism and the Problem of the Ethnic Nation,” he argued against the notion that Yasuda and the Romantic School were responsible for everything that was wrong with the war. While he explicitly decried the invasion of China and other parts of Asia, he celebrated the Pacific theater as a war against the West and suggested that postwar Japan should be built on a minzoku consciousness as the foundation for a pan-Asian, antiWestern regionalism. Many aspects of Takeuchi’s embrace of ethnic nationalism make him easy to confuse with the Marxist ethnic nationalists: especially, his critique of modernity, his expressed solidarity with “Asia”, and his antipathy toward the American Occupation. The belief that he was really on “the left” was encouraged further by his 1959 essay “Overcoming Modernity” which was seen as providing a rationale for the “progressive” riots against the LDP and the United States over the handling of the revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo) in 1960. Here, “the left” really meant those who were “anti-America.” But, regardless of whether one characterized the Anpo riots as “leftist” (and there is ample evidence of participation by those on both ends of the political spectrum), Takeuchi was no Marxist (he included Marxism in the modernity that he rejected) and was in fact politically and personally close to Yasuda and the conservative ethnic nationalist movement. The decade of the 1960s saw the rise of populism in Japan, as elsewhere, and this populism had a decisive if complex impact on minzoku nationalism. As mentioned above in Chapter Five, as a

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resurgent state tried to regain the people’s respect and allegiance under Prime Minister Ikeda’s economism and income-doubling plan, rising affluence and an assertive youth culture combined with the protest culture to make the relationship between state and minzoku a more estranged one. Takashima Zen’ya is perhaps the best example of how the 1960s transformed the debate over minzoku. In a series of articles and books, most notably his 1970 Minzoku and Class, Takashima offered a new theory that would synthesize the Stalinist approach of Ishimoda with liberal minzoku theories of Watsuji Tetsur and Imanaka Tsugimaro and the conservative nationalism of Hayashi Fusao and Mishima Yukio. To Takashima, the key point in understanding Japanese nationalism was the distinction between state and nation. Nationalism held that the nation was the purpose of the state’s existence, and by “nation” Takashima really meant the minzoku conceived as a natural mode of existence prior to the institutions of politics and culture. His pet formula was “minzoku as mother, class as master” (botai to shite no minzoku, shutai to shite no kaiky).91 Takashima explained that “minzoku as mother” was a literary expression (a gesture toward conservative literary nationalists like Takeuchi Yoshimi, Mishima Yukio and Hayashi Fusao?) and “class as master”(or “subject”) was a philosophical expression (a gesture toward Marxists like Ishimoda, Inoue and Eguchi?). The precise meaning of Takashima’s poetic argument is elusive, but as metaphor it quite clearly was attempting a synthesis of minzoku theories as well as a synthesis of the nation itself that had split between right-wing and left-wing ethnic nationalists. Significantly, Takashima saw class as a sub-category of minzoku, emphasizing that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat were equally members of the Japanese minzoku and each had valuable contributions to make to the minzoku. Takashima’s goal was a laudable one. He argued that by first separating nation (minzoku) from the state, the crisis that confronted Japanese nationalism could be resolved by building a civil society that would tame the state to serve its own purposes. But his democratic theory was fatally flawed by his equation of the nation with an ethnic body and by his dismissal of kokumin as a national identity that was not moored to the natural claims of ethnicity. Rather than to democracy, his national theory brought him closer to national socialism. National socialism, even understood as ethnic nationalism in proletariat packaging, remained marginal to postwar Japanese 91

Takashima Zen’ya, Minzoku to kaiky (Tokyo: Gendai hyronsha, 1970): 29-53.

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political culture. In part, this was because minzoku was increasingly discussed in isolation from the state, as a form of Nihonjinron that sought to imbue the Japanese people with a distinctive identity not determined by what was seen as a bureaucratic postwar state run by the LDP for their American masters. As the postwar state receded into managerial and technological bureaucratism, national identity, if not quite nationalism, became even more closely associated with minzoku. But minzoku was increasingly intoned as an ostensibly benign cultural theory of how the people in Japan really are: their identities, values and traditions. As Peter Dale has summarized it, the curious thing about the nihonjinron is that while they express, beneath a bewilderingly diverse range of ideas, a coherent ideology of nationalism, they at the same time deny that they have anything to do with ideology or politics. A key theme of the literature distinguishes the ostensibly ideological, power-fixated character of Western discourse from the putatively aesthetic and sentimental expressionism of the Japanese…. Postwar nihonjinron merely attempts to salvage this discourse [of prewar nationalism] by detaching it from the more overly imperial-political idiom.92

If Takashima had hoped to move minzoku away from political theory toward a more culturally inflected nationalism, he had succeeded in ways he surely had not intended. The relationship this cultural theory had to nationalism may not always have been clear, but minzoku certainly had retreated from the kind of overtly political stance that leftists like Ishimoda and Inoue, or conservatives like Yasuda and Hayashi, or liberals like Yanaihara or Nanbara, had given it in the early postwar period. It provided the people with a coherent identity of a people set apart, but the degree of identity thus achieved was also a measure of its distance from the institutions and organizations that shaped political life. Nation and state were indeed separate and distinct. By the early 1980s, nationalism had left the realm of ideas and intellectuals and was becoming a central concern of mainstream politicians. This “neo-nationalism” has often been attributed both to Japan’s rising economic prosperity and to increasing frictions with Japan’s major trading partners, notably the United States. But personalities played a role too. The most important individual in reviving a political theory of minzoku was Nakasone Yasuhiro. When Nakasone became prime minister in 1982, he brought with him the 92

Peter N. Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 38-39.

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long aspirations of the Democratic wing of the LDP to overturn the “abnormal” nationalism of Yoshida Shigeru and the Liberal faction’s emphasis on mercantilism as a sufficient national purpose for postwar Japan. At an LDP seminar in Shizuoka in 1986, Nakasone proposed a new “liberal” nationalism that would reconcile the people with the postwar state. Tragically, he articulated this project the following year as the need to “reconcile internationalism with correct nationalism” which he explicitly identified with minzokushugi.93 Nakasone’s emphasis on ethnic nationalism as the “correct” or “healthy” form of nationalism, along with a series of pronouncements on Japan’s ethnic homogeneity, offended those Japanese who had begun to think beyond ethnic nationalism, as well as many who simply were not ready to see their ethnic national identity associated by political elites with the postwar state. To simply write off Nakasone as an ethnic nationalist is to miss a good deal of what he was trying to achieve. He was one of those postwar Japanese political elites who, as Kenneth Pyle noted a few years after the controversy, “more often seek to contain, if not to suppress, political nationalism.”94 Nakasone was trying to associate the appeal the Japanese people felt for a cultural theory of ethnicity with the state so that the Japanese state might be able to act more resolutely, with broader popular support, in the international arena. This project of reconciling the ethnic nation and the state was a good part of his much ballyhooed “final accounting” of the postwar period. That he confused ethnic nationalism with liberal nationalism is easy to understand, given the long history in Japanese political discourse, dating back to the First World War, that sought to embrace ethnic nationalism for liberal and even Marxist agendas. That his effort to reconcile the ethnic nation with the state met with such stiff resistance tells us as much about Japanese attitudes toward the state as it does about antipathy toward ethnic nationalism. By the turn of the century, support for ethnic nationalism by the Japanese public, as well as among intellectuals, was fading. This turn of events is surprising, especially since nationalism was a growing feature of intellectual and political discourse. Part of the reason for this new devaluation of ethnic nationalism can be attributed to the shock effect of seeing a leader of the postwar democratic state reverting to a discourse that was deeply implicated in the wartime 93

Nakasone Yasuhiro, “Minzokushugi to kokusaishugi no chwa o,” Gekkan jiy minshu (October 1987): 44-61, at 44-45. 94 Kenneth B. Pyle, The Japanese Question: Power and Purpose in a New Era (Washington, D.C.: The AEI Press, 1992): 63.

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empire (many critics immediately brought up Nakasone’s wartime connections with the imperial state). Another part of the reason, however, can be attribute to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the general demise of Marxism around the world that followed in its wake. The two main supports of postwar ethnic nationalism–a Marxist theory that found in ethnicity a foundation for an anticapitalist nationalism and conservatives who had accepted ethnicity as a pacifist substitute for a nationality invested in the postwar state–had been seriously undermined. But ethnic nationalism was not only falling of its own accord. Increasingly, it was being challenged by an alternative nationalism, a liberal nationalism that was grounded in political membership in the postwar state and which was more concerned with integrating the people’s loyalties into the state than with proclaiming their ancient ethnic lineages. This new nationalism (kokuminshugi) did not always escape the tugs of ethnicity, especially when articulated by older intellectuals who had been influenced by the postwar minzoku discourse.95 Yet, the very fact that this neonationalism more often preferred to be known as kokuminshugi rather than minzokushugi is a significant departure from the dominant appeal enjoyed by ethnic nationalism in Japan for most of the twentieth century. How significant this change will be for the future of Japanese nationalism, and whether ethnic nationalism will eventually give way to a more civic nationalism, only time will tell.

95 Representative of this rising kokuminshugi which, alas, did not always escape from elements of ethnic nationalism is Matsumoto Ken’ichi, ‘Hinomaru, kimigayo’ no hanashi (Tokyo: PHP Kenkyjo, 1999).

CHAPTER SEVEN

AFTERWORD: THE PLACE OF THE NATION IN JAPAN TODAY As a handbook on Japanese nationalism, this volume has not set out to present an evaluation of nationalism, nor a particular thematic approach to nationalism such as “nationalism and war,” “nationalism and memory,” or “nationalism and gender.” There is, at any rate, a plethora of such studies already available in English and Japanese. Instead, this volume has tried to identify the basic elements of nationalism in Japan from which other specific arguments and assertions about nationalism in Japan have been, are, and presumably will continue to be, built. It is comparatively easy to offer a thematic study on nationalism in Japan, and the bookstores and newspapers are full of them. But without first identifying the basic building blocks of nationalist discourse in Japan, it is impossible to fully understand what nationalism means in particular historical and discursive instances. This is particularly true when those building blocks are obscured by language that is not explicit about its sources and conceptual definitions. The goal of this handbook has been to identify those basic elements of Japanese nationalism, but also to demonstrate how those elements themselves were not static but subject to historical change over time. This process of historical change, as we have seen, is both an effect of the internal dynamics of national discourse and of historical events, both events in Japanese political life and in the broader world. Japanese nationalist discourses, like all discourses, were structured around a common subject (tenn, shakai, kokumin, minzoku), even as they were open to influences from other nationalist and non-nationalist discourses, most especially those concerning the state and race. The chronological structure of the individual chapters of this book was deemed necessary in order to convey something of the historical nature of these discourses. Nothing could be more misleading than to see kokumin, minzoku or other elements of Japanese nationalist discourse as essential, trans-historical ideas that simply inform nationalist debate. Certainly, some nationalists believe that to be the case (just as ethnic nationalists assert there is no

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distinction between a minzoku and a kokumin). But the historical record of these basic elements of Japanese nationalism stands against such reductive arguments–indeed against all efforts to erase the reality of historical specificity in the emergence and development of nationalism. To identify these basic building blocks of Japanese nationalism, and even to understand their historical developments is not, however, sufficient to comprehend Japanese nationalism, past or present. A comprehensive understanding of Japanese nationalism requires yet another conceptual move. Once these individual elements (tenn, shakai, kokumin, minzoku) are understood in their own historical and discursive contexts, they must then be interrelated with each other to yield the meaning and significance of particular nationalist assertions. In essence, the individual chapters of this book need to be understood as particular national discourses in their own independent contexts and simultaneously interwoven with and against the national elements addressed in others chapters at specific moments in time. At that point, we can begin to appreciate just how elusive any final grasp of something as complex as nationalism truly is. This final grasp of nationalism is not something that this book, or any book–limited as books are by the conventions of narrative structure and time–can bring to fruition: that must be left ultimately to the reader’s own powers of cognition and imagination. Nonetheless, a brief conceptual example may at least be offered of how these elements can and need be interwoven: to grasp what Japanese nationalism is in a given moment, one needs to take a crosssection of the discourses and events regarding, say, kokumin and reference it with the discourses and events shaping tenn, shakai, and minzoku at the same moment in time. In some instances, kokumin will align easier with tenn than with shakai or minzoku and in other cases not. When it does, we may have something like contemporary “official” nationalism where the kokumin is sovereign, the tenn is a symbol of the kokumin and, by remaining distant from shakai or minzoku, the latter concepts are reserved for less-nationalistic purposes (eg., shakai can refer to the space of residence in the territory of the state, regardless of citizenship or nationality, minzoku can be relegated to the realm of private ethnic identity or a consumerist approach to multi-cultural goods and service). Yet, this determination must also take into account other factors, especially how that particular nationalist equation relates to the state. When the state is premised on a sovereign kokumin (as under the Postwar Constitution), the above scenario is a possibility. However, when

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kokumin is not sovereign (as under the Meiji Imperial Constitution), then the result more closely approximates Kita Ikki’s efforts to construct a kokumin tenn as a critique of the Imperial Meiji state, with its more ambiguous implications for society and ethnicity. The most important elements indubitably are kokumin and minzoku. More so than the others, they directly address the question of who is or is not a member of the nation. Since, under the current constitution whoever is included in the kokumin shares specific rights of sovereignty, the relationship between kokumin and minzoku is of crucial importance. The greater the gap between them, the more ethnically inclusive (and by most standards, “democratic”) Japanese nationalism is. The more closely they converge, the more nationalism resembles an “ethnic nationalist” model and restricts membership in the circle of those who constitute the nation to members of a single ethnic group. Yet, all modes of connecting these elements of nationalism are instances of efforts to “place the people,” and thus forms of nationalism. But the position of, and limitations around, the “people” vary widely depending on how these conceptual elements are interwoven. And how they are interwoven has real consequences for those within and without the Japanese nation. Certainly, any assertion that denies the distinction between ethnicity and citizenship (“there is no difference between the kokumin and minzoku,” or “any effort to make a distinction between kokumin and minzoku is a mere parsing of concepts, not a reality”) is merely the familiar refrain of ethnic nationalists everywhere. A contemporary example may be found in a recent reprisal of Yoshimoto Taka’aki’s effort to locate Japanese nationalism in a nebulous, non-intellectual grounding among the people. Asaba Michiaki’s Nashonarizumu (2004) is exemplary of the effort to redress the relationship between the Japanese people and the state; it is also symptomatic of the inability to do so while remaining indifferent to the conceptual elements employed in historical Japanese nationalist discourse. Asaba surveys ten key nationalist texts from the Meiji period to the present day, and he offers a promising analysis that organizes all nationalisms around the polarities of “diffusion nationalism” (kakusan nashonarizumu) and “convergent nationalism” (shren nashonarizumu).1 “Diffusion nationalism” stemmed from the French Revolution and carried with it a belief in universal values; “con1 Asaba Michiaki, Nashonarisumu: meicho de tadoru nihon shis nymon, Chikuma Shinsho 473 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shob, 2004). Asaba acknowledges Raoul Girardet as his source for these two types of nationalism on 275.

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vergent nationalism” originated in Germany as a reaction against the Napoleonic invasion and emphasized the particular identity (“egoism”) of a nation. Note the similarities with civic (or republican) nationalism and ethnic nationalism discussed in Chapter One. Yet, what is most characteristic of Asaba’s theory is that, in the end, it is no theory at all. He not only follows Yoshimoto in erasing the historical distinction between minzokushugi and kokuminshugi under the imported term of nashonarizumu, but he also asserts that Japanese nationalism is exclusively of the “convergent” (ethnic) variety. This “convergent” Japanese nationalism that Asaba upholds is a functional equivalent of ethnic nationalism, not avant la lettre, but sans la lettre. Moreover, he joins a growing chorus of other covert ethnic nationalists who follow Yoshimoto in arguing that real nationalism lies at the instinctive level of the masses of Japanese, not among the ideas of intellectuals.2 These theoretical problems aside (and they are serious), Asaba quite correctly emphasizes that the problem of nationalism in Japan today is ultimately a matter of reconnecting the people and the state. His words are worth quoting: Japan is now in the period of maturity in terms of its modern state…. The excesses in efforts to repair [Japan’s] warped nationalism and military power [during the early Shwa period] led to the forcing deep into the subconscious, as a taboo, both the original choice to become a modern state and the significance of an egoism of self-existence and self-defense and its method, military power, which we have not been able to think about during the postwar period…. Thus we are on an asymptotic line toward the recovery of what we need: an equation of ‘state consciousness’ [kokka ishiki] with autonomy [shutaisei]. That is the current state of ‘nationalism’ in Japan.3

Asaba is no doubt correct that this subconscious desire for national respect and national autonomy is coming to the fore among ordinary people in Japan. He is also quite correct to note that intellectuals may be the last to recognize what is truly at stage in this “neo-nationalism” or return to a sense of responsibility for the defense of one’s own nation. But his argument is truly a double-irony: Like Yoshimoto, he rejects intellectual representations of this nationalizing phenomenon (he gestures instead toward manga, film, science fiction, etc. as sources of this populist neo-nationalism), but he does so within the 2 Cf. Kayama Rika, Puchi nashonarizumu shkgun: wakamono-tachi no nipponshugi, Chk shinsho rakure 62 (Tokyo: Ch kron Shinsha, 2002). 3 Asaba, Nashonarizumu, 288-9.

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traditional genre of intellectual discourse: an academic book replete with abstract, even mathematical, jargon. Whether intentionally or not, Asaba conveys an important truth about the state of nationalism in Japan today. It is not being addressed most effectively by intellectuals, even anti-intellectual intellectuals like Asaba and Yoshimoto. Rather, it is from journalists and politicians that the most promising inflections of nationalism are being articulated–and even more importantly–taken up as part of an effort to strengthen democracy in Japan. The outbreak of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 was a watershed event. When Japan was criticized for not sending troops to the arena and only offering monetary assistance instead, the Japanese government was criticized for its “checkbook diplomacy.” But what could Japan do? It was a nearly unanimous view among Japanese politicians, lawyers and judges that the postwar Constitution’s Article Nine forbade sending Japanese troops out of the region, even as part of a United Nations or Coalition Force. This event led to a recognition that if Japan were to pursue democracy while respecting its postwar Constitution, it could not participate with other democratic nations in their international military operations. Japan would be democratic, but isolated. Were Japan to join in international missions (and move closer to the requirements of a leadership position in the United Nations), it would risk at a minimum the appearance of violating the letter of the Constitution’s Article Nine. Ozawa Ichir, one of Japan’s best-known politicians, tried to address these problems in his 1993 Blueprint for a New Japan. His book has been fairly described as a “manifesto for a normal country.”4 Ozawa drew on the pioneering efforts by Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro during the mid-1980s to strengthen the office of the prime minister, as the chief representative of the people, and to connect the institutions of government with what he called “healthy nationalism” (kenzen na kokuminshugi). Ozawa’s contribution was to pick up this effort to redress the unhealthy alienation of popular nationalism from the state and to do so without falling into Nakasone’s ethnic nationalism (minzokushugi). He emphasized the need for Japan to become and act as a “normal country” (futs no kuni), by which he chiefly meant liberating Japan from the abnormal restraints on its military imposed by Article Nine and a misunderstanding of “the Yoshida Doctrine” that held Japan should always disavow its right to

4

Asaba, Nashonarizumu, 250.

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self-defense.5 His definition of a “normal country” is worthy of attention: What, then, must Japan do to become a true, “global state”? … Japan must become a “normal country.” What is a “normal country”? First, it is a country that willingly shoulders those responsibilities regarded as natural in the international community. It does not refuse such burdens on account of domestic political difficulties. Nor does it take action unwillingly as a result of “international pressure.” 6

Ozawa did not directly address nationalism per se, but by avoiding the language of ethnic nationalism and by calling on Japanese to become “a society that values the individual”7, he clearly was calling for an enhancement in Japanese society of everything that we normally associate with civic nationalism. The underlying civic nationalism is evident in his surprising remark that it is not the Japanese state that inhibits civic democracy but the Japanese people themselves. He concluded that “the biggest source of our lack of freedom lies with the people…. As long as citizens are unable or unwilling to take responsibility for themselves, we will have only a quasi-democracy, no matter how much politicians and bureaucrats strive to institute democratic practices.”8 Ozawa’s point that the key to democratic practice lies with the people is an important reminder that nationalism–the particular way in which “the people” are placed in relation to political, ethical and civic values–is a bottom up, not a top-down social phenomenon. Yet, it certainly will not suffice to simply wait for a bottom-up movement to happen spontaneously. One of the most astute of observers and practitioners of politics in Japan is Abe Shinz, son of a foreign minister and grandson of a prime minister, who became Japan’s youngest prime minister on 26 September 2006. Abe is also the first prime minister who was born in the postwar period, and thus has no personal link to the wartime. These personal facts give Abe a unique perspective on nationalism in Japan today.

5 Ozawa Ichiro, Blueprint for a New Japan: The Rethinking of a Nation, trans. Louisa Rubinfein, edited by Eric Gower, (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1994). Cf. with Ozawa’s original terminology, cited in Asaba, 250. 6 Ozawa Ichiro, Blueprint for a New Japan, 94. I have changed Rubinfein’s translation slightly: where she refers to “normal nation,” I render the concept “normal country.” 7 Ozawa Ichiro, Blueprint for a New Japan, 156-8 8 Ozawa Ichiro, Blueprint for a New Japan, 203.

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Just prior to his election as prime minister, Abe published a book, Toward a Beautiful Country, that builds on the previous work of Nakasone and Ozawa in moving Japanese society towards a tighter embrace of “healthy nationalism,” or kokuminshugi. Like Ozawa, he does not embrace minzokushugi in the way that Nakasone did. But unlike Ozawa, Abe directly addresses the topic of nationalism, providing us with a sense of where he stands in the discourse and how he “places the Japanese people” as a nation. Although he refers to nationalism in the ambiguous foreign loanword favored by Yoshimoto and Asaba (nashonarizumu), even a cursory reading of his book is enough to grasp that his nationalism in founded on the civic values and patriotic sensibilities that place the nation in an ethnic-free context that emphasizes individual freedom. Abe’s favored term for the nation is not minzoku, but kokumin. And he writes in moving terms of how national sports teams, particular in the World Cup soccer tournament, include nationals of various ethnicities. In reference to Japan’s own national team’s efforts to qualify for the 1994 World Cup, he notes At the “Doha tragedy” of 1993, when Japan entered the World Cup qualifying rounds for the first time, the native-born Brazilian [Ruy] Ramos shed tears of disappointment along with the Japanese. Even today, he is greeted with heartfelt applause when he performs in the major Japanese cities. We really have to see that this sense of belonging to the community is found in this consciousness that anyone who fights under the Hi-no-Maru flag, regardless of his country of origin, is one of us.9

Abe invokes a nationalism that locates the people as those who give allegiance to the flag and anthem of their country, not those who share the same blood or descent. His example of soccer is well made. Although Ramos was unable to play for Japan in World Cup competition due to his retirement in 1998, another naturalized Brazilian, Alessandro “Alex” Santos has played with the Japanese national team in both the 2002 and 2006 World Cup competitions. Ramos and Alex have given the Japanese people and the world undeniable evidence of the multi-ethnic nature of the legal, Japanese nation (kokumin). This emphasis on the kokumin as defined by laws, institutions and loyalty to the state is precisely what is meant by civic nationalism and stands in direct opposition to ethnic nationalism. In this regard, Abe is 9

Abe Shinz, Utsukushii kuni e, Bungei shinsho 524 (Tokyo: Bungei Shunj, 2006), 80-81.

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certainly no epigone of Nakasone. He directly rejects ethnic nationalism, noting that when nationalism is translated as minzokushugi, it encourages people to accept an untenable allegiance to two national flags. He implies that when “progressive” intellectuals separate Japanese nationalism into two types, they often do so only to discourage the Japanese people from embracing the kind of nationalism necessary for a democratic nation-state (kokumin-kokka). His civic nationalism is encapsulated in his insistence that “when Japanese wave the Hi-no-Maru national flag, they are not expressing any kind of intolerant nationalism.10 Of course, when “progressive” intellectuals criticize the nationalism of Abe and other democratic representatives, it is critical to understand that they do not always reject all forms of nationalism. They are often simply afraid that this civic nationalism, this multi-ethnic citizenship that embraces naturalized citizens like Ramos and Alex, is leaving their own preferred ethnic nationalism in the dustbin of history. It is precisely for this reason that any critique of nationalism in Japan must begin by clarifying its terms. The various controversies over a supposed neo-nationalism in Japan today need to be seen in this light. Whether it is the question of Prime Minister Abe’s future visits to Yasukuni Shrine, the issue of history textbooks, proposals to revise the Constitution, or Japan’s dispatching a small force to assist behind the lines in the war against terrorism in Iraq, the most important question is how the relationship of the various elements of Japanese nationalism–minzoku, kokumin, shakai, tenno–are mobilized in particular assessments of a given controversy. To take but one example, the issue of visits to Yasukuni Shrine. Former Prime Minister Koizumi made it clear in the past that he visited the Shrine to pay respects to those who sacrificed their lives for Japan, not for any religious purpose. Moreover, his visits were applauded by Catholic Japanese like Sono Ayako and Miura Shumon, who also visited Yasukuni to pay their respects to those who died for their country.11 Such visits were ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court in a 1977 decision that affirmed that visits to Yasukuni “for purposes of rituals in keeping with social customs, are not considered

10

Abe Shinz, Utsukushii kuni e, 98-99. I have written on the history of Catholicism’s respect for visits to Yasukuni Shrine in various Japanese media. See, for example, “Yasukuni sanpai no ksatsu ch, Sankei Shimbun (26 May 2006); “Sanpai wa ‘seinaru mono’ e no apurchi da,” Shokun! (August 2006): 24-35, ‘Shink’ kara mita yasukuni sampai mondai,” Voice (September 2006): 195-201. 11

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273

as religious acts.”12 Prime Minister Abe supports the constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion, noting that the monarch is, and always had been, a symbolic monarch. By way of contrast, it is important to note that, among Prime Minister Abe’s critics are those who see the emperor as an ethnic tribal chieftain, or who feel that visits to Yasukuni Shrine are part and parcel of a revival of Shintoism as an ethnic religion required of all Japanese. Such arguments are difficult to take seriously, however, in light of the fact that those souls enshrined at Yasukuni include former soldiers of various ethnicities and religions. Will Prime Minister Abe succeed in enhancing a sense of civil nationalism (and with it, civic responsibility) among the Japanese public? Will the “subconscious” ethnic nationalism that many intellectuals embrace overwhelm this more open, international, civic nationalism? How will the pieces of Japanese nationalism be put back together? It would require either extraordinary sagacity or unbounded imprudence to predict the future. There are, however, grounds for optimism when the current culture of Japanese pacifism, globalism and democracy are taken into account in understanding the reasons for the current awakening of interest in nationalism in Japan. This book has emphasized that nationalism in Japan, as in all modern societies, has been a conflict-filled mode of consciousness that appeals to humanity’s highest hopes for community, respect, love, and compassion as well as to our lowest temptations toward selfishness, arrogance, hatred and indifference. Democracy is impossible without nationalism, but so too was fascism. If nationalism has been so contested and yet essential to democratic life throughout the world, how could it be anything less in Japan?

12

Supreme Court decision (1977), cited in Abe Shinz, Utsukushii kuni, 66-7.

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INDEX Abe Is, 147, 150, 168, 199 Abe Jir, 228 Abe Shinz, 270-273 aesthetics, 177-183; Hegelian 181; personalist, 183 Aizawa Seishisai, 40, 41, 84, 87 Akizuki Tanetatsu, 53-55 Amino Yoshihiko, 120 Anderson, Benedict, 226 Anno Kinzane, 56 Anpo (see US-Japan Security Treaty), 29, 30, 159 , 162, 260 Arano Yasunori, 166-167 Arendt, Hannah, 79, Arisugawa Taruhito, Prince, 48-52 Armstrong, John, 7 Asaba Michiaki, 267-269, 271 Ashida Hitoshi, 113 Ashio Copper Mine Incident, 146-147 Asukai Masamichi, 179 bakufu, 42-49, 52, 58, 61, 66, 87, 166, 168-169, 216, 220 baku-han system, 38, 40, 42, 61, 167; dissolution of, 39, 42-49, 52, 58, 61, 66 Bälz, Erwin von, 221 Band Hiroshi, 25 Barnes, Harry Elmer, 15, Bauer, Otto, 15, 17, 23, 231, 234 Befu, Harumi, 160 Benedict, Ruth, 251 Bluntschli, Johann Caspar, 71, 144 Boissonade, Gustave Emile, 69, 185, 192 Buddhism, 167, 190, 227 bunmei kaika (see civilization and enlightenment), 170 Catholic Funeral Affair, 106 Catholic political theory, 100

Catholics, 85, 98-100, 117-118, 185, 198, 244, 272 Chambers, William G. and Robert, 178 Charter Oath, 50-51, 54, 57 Chiba Takusabur, 73, 185 Chirot, Daniel, 197 Christ (see also Jesus), 198 Christianity, 55, 94-101, 105-106, 109, 157, 167-168, 185, 187-190, 198-199, 206, 223-224, 226-227 Christians (see also Catholics, Kumamoto Band of), 145, 147, 150, 167-168, 184, 186-188, 194, 196, 198, 207, 223, 225-226, 243-244, 252 ch-kokkashugi (see ultranationalism), 25-26, 28 Chsh domain, 47, 59-61 civic nationalism, 6, 80, 205-208, 212, 264, 270-273 civil society (shimin shakai), 41, 6364, 72, 76, 78, 80-82, 158-162, 168-169, 185, 189-190, 261 Civil Society School, 156, 159 civilization and enlightenment (see bunmei kaika), 169-170 commoners, 44, 52, 75, 79, 133, 136137, 141 communism, in Japan, 256 constitution: Japanese, 51, 68, 69, 73, 192-195, 205, 221-222, 242; Imperial Constitution of 1889 (Meiji), 62-63, 73, 81-82, 88, 9197, 101, 103, 115, 122, 148, 175176, 193-197, 220, 244, 267; of Japan (postwar), 33, 118, 122-124, 191, 204-205, 266, 269, 272 cultural nationalism (see Kulturnation), 3, 29, 108, 117, 156, 194-195, 203, 223-224

286 Dajkan, 45, 49, 51-53, 56-61, 67, 68, 140, 166 Dale, Peter, 262 Dan Takuma, Baron, 123 domains, abolition of (see haihan chiken), 59, 60, 173 Dumas, Alexandre, Ange Pitou, 74-79, 217 Ebina Danj, 225 Egami Namio, 256 Eguchi Bokur, 258, 261 1881 Political Crisis, 71, 73, 90, 175, 177, 179 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 80, 160, 185 emperor, of Japan (see tenn), 37, 4045, 48-52, 70-77, 103-108, 110116, 118-125, 147-148, 168, 193, 197, 273 Emperor Godaigo, 120, 122 Emperor Heisei (Akihito), 122-123 Emperor Meiji (Mutsuhito), 77, 104, 112 Emperor Showa (Hirohito) 110, 112, 115, 122, 124-125 Emperor Taisho (Yoshihito), 112 Enomoto Takeaki, 91, 92 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, 9-10 étatism (see kokkashugi, statism), 2, 6, 27, 94, ethnie, 7-8 ethnic nationalism, 9-10, 22-24, 28-35, 108, 110, 114, 121-122, 148, 156, 164-165, 180, 192-194, 197, 200, 205-206, 208-209, 211-212, 216217, 220, 223-224, 226, 228, 230, 232, 235, 239, 242, 245, 248, 251253, 255-257, 259-261, 263-264, 268-273 Ethnic Research Institute, 153, 241, 247 ethnology, and nationalism, 221 Ethnology, Japanese Journal of, 153 Ethnology, Japanese Society of, 153, 238 Et Shimpei, 62, 67, 140 Fenollosa, Ernest Francisco, 180-181 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 169, 252-253 French Revolution, 79, 83, 138-139, 141, 267; impact on Japan, 73-79

INDEX Fujioka Nobukatsu, 211-212 Fujioka Wakao, 161-162 Fujita Shz, 119 Fujita Tok, 88 fukoku kyhei (rich country, strong military), 67 Fukuchi Gen’ichir, 133 Fukuoka Takachika (Ktei), 50-54 Fukuzawa Yukichi, 26, 64, 69, 73, 87-89, 105-110, 125, 130-132, 134, 140, 166, 168, 171-172, 178, 198, 207-208, 242 Furuno Kiyoto (Kiyondo), 239, 241 Gayle, Curtis Anderson, 207, 257 Gellner, Ernest, 10, 128-129 Gen’ysha, 216-217 George, Henry, 224 Gibbons, Herbert Adams, 15 Giddens, Anthony, 128-129 Giji Taisai Torishirabesho, 54 gij, 49, 52, 54, Giseikan, 52-53 Gluck, Carol, 81 Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur, 21, goken und (protect constitution movement), 104, 107 Goldfarb, Jeffrey C., 213, 215 Gooch, G.P., 15, 230 Got Shjir, 48, 52 Greenfeld, Liah, 5-10, 129, 135, 169, 197 Gumplowics, Ludwig, 224 gunken, 55-56, 61 Haga Noboru, 71, 89 Hagi Uprising of 1876, 62, 216 haihan chiken (abolition of domains, establishment of prefectures; see domains, abolition of), 173 Hamano Teishir, 176 Hani Gor, 121, Harootunian, H.D., 41, 150 Hasegawa Nyozekan, 234 Hashikawa Bunz, 31-32 Hashimoto Mitsuru, 219, 233, 237 Hashimoto Rytar, 124 Havens, Thomas R.H., 200-203 Hayashi Fusao, 121-122, 202, 236, 261-262 Hayashi Kentar, 157

287

INDEX Hayashi Shihei, 40 Hayes, Carlton J.H., 15, 19-21, 233 Hi-no-maru ( see national flag), 214, 271-272 Hibiya Riots of 1905, 102, 200 High Treason Incident, 103, 149 Hirata Atsutane, 43, 140 Hirokawa Hisashi, 235 Hishinuma Gor, 123 Hobson, J.A., 15-17, 242, 254 hken, 55 Hopkins, Caspar, 133 Howland, Douglas, 131 Hozumi Yatsuka, 109 Ichimura Mitsue, 109 Ida Shin’ya, 178 Igarashi Akio, 168 Ikeda Hayato, 208, 261 Ienaga Sabur, 121 Ikimatsu Keiz, 149 Imanaka Tsugimaro, 261 Imperial Rescript, 61, 91-94, 97-100 103, 167, 175 imperialism, 11, 15-16 , 20-25, 37, 102-103, 114, 212, 224-225, 228, 231, 244, 248, 253, 255, 259 Ino Kenji, 217 Inoue Kaoru, 61, 69, 91, 140-141, 192 Inoue Kiyoshi, 121, 216-217, 258-259, 261-262 Inoue Kowashi, 74, 82, 96 Inoue Mitsu, 109 Inoue Shun, 160 Inoue Tetsujir, as anti-Christian, 97105, 145, 168, 188, 192, 196, 219, 223, 225-226 Inukai Tsuyoshi, 104-105 Irokawa Daikichi, 185, 189 Ishida Eiichir, 256 Ishida Kannosuke, 153, 239 Ishida Takeshi, 143, 147-149, 155, 157, 159, 161-162 Ishikawa Sanshir, 199 Ishimoda Sh, 258-259, 261-262 Ishiwara Kanji, 241, 248 Itagaki Taisuke, 59-62, 73-74, 216 It Hirobumi, 51-52, 72-73, 86, 8892, 99-100, 175, 179, 192 It Miyoji, 88-89, 91

It Yahiko, 42 Iwakura Tomomi, 216 Iwamoto Yoshiharu, 97 Izu Tadao, 235 Janes, Capt. Leroy, 186 Japan Romantic School, 119,121, 236, 260 Japanism (see Nipponshugi), 223 Jesus, 99 jimbun minzoku (see Kulturvölker), 13 Jimpren Incident of 1876, 216 jinsai ty (rewarding talent ), 46, 59 Joseph, Bernard, 15 Kada Tetsuji, 15, 245 Kaempfer Engelbert, 40 Kageyama Masaharu, 252-253 Kaji Ryichi, 141 Kamei Kan’ichir, 218, 248-249 Kamei Katsuichir, 121-122, 202, 236 Kamikawa Hikomatsu, 21, 233 Kamishima Jir, 119 Kanai En, 168 Kanda Takahira (Khei), 54, 57, 171172 Kaneko Kentar, 88 Kano Masanao, 38, 40, 145 Karube Tadashi, 206 Kashiwagi Gien, 101, 168, 196 Katayama Sen, 103, 147, 199 Kat Hiroyuki, 54, 67, 72, 109, 136, 144, 196, 220, 242 Katsura Tar, 104-105, 149-150 Katsuragi Kenji, 162 Katsuta Masaharu, 56, 61 Kawakami Kiyoshi, 147, 199 Kawazu Sukeyuki, 73-74 kazoku (Peers), 78 Kazunomiya, Princess, 47 Kenkoku University, 241 Kersten, Rikki, 125, 157-158, 208, 212 Kido Takayoshi (Kin), 47, 50-52, 60-61, 68, 70, 79 Kikuchi Takeo, 111 Kimi-ga-yo (see national anthem), 214 Kimura Junji, 87, 119

288 Kimura Takatar, 222-223 Kinoshita Naoe, 147, 199 Kirchhoff, A., 14-15 Kirishitan (see Catholics), 85 Kita Ikki, 103-104, 107-108, 201, 267 Kitazawa Shji, 180-181 Kobayashi Yoshinori, 212 kbu gattai (unification of court and camp), 47 kgi seitai ron (debate on government through public consultation), 48, 51, 54, 57 kgi yoron (public consultation), 46 Kgisho, 54-58 Kohata Tokujir, 172 Kohn, Hans, 6-7, 10, 165 Koizumi Jun’ichir, 124, 272 Koizumi Shinkichi, 172 Kojima Hatsuo, 235 kokkashugi (see statism), - 3, 25, 27, 29, 94-95, 167, 196, 200-201, 207, 228 kokumin, 2, 8-9, 13-14, 22, 26-35, 38, 43, 67, 73, 75-76, 82, 89, 96, 101, 106-107, 111-119, 144, 151-152, 155-156, 158, 163-170, 172-178, 184-188, 190-196, 198-207, 209210, 215, 229, 232, 235, 238, 261, 265-267, 271-272 kokumin-kokka (civic nation-state), 31, 36, 38-39, 56-57, 169, 176, 202, 212, 272 kokumin seishin sdin (see National Spiritual Mobilization), 32-33, 202 kokuminshugi, 2-3, 27, 30, 35, 167168, 172, 176-177, 184, 198-201, 205, 207, 210, 232, 264, 268-269, 271 Kokurykai, 217 Kokuseki H (see Nationality Act), 195 kokutai, 40-41, 84-89, 94-95, 104, 106-107, 111-113, 115, 121, 201, 219, 226 Komatsu Kentar, 15, 245, 254 Konoe cabinet, 202 Ksaka Masa’aki, 246-247, 254 Ksaka Masataka, 202 Ktoku Shsui, 102, 147, 199 Koya Yoshio, 15, 245 Koyama Eiz, 153, 239

INDEX Koyanagi Kimihiro, 162 Kozaki Hiromichi, 167, 169, 186, 188-191, 198, 207 Kubokawa Tsurujir, 256-257 Kuga Katsunan, 194, 196, 219 Kulturnation, 13-14, 254 Kulturvölker (see jimbun minzoku), 13, 224 Kumamoto Band of Christians (see Christians), 101, 186, 188 Kume Kunitake, 101 Kurimoto Joun, 66 Kuroda Kiyotaka, 91 Kurokawa Mayori, 221 Kuwata Yoshiz, 239 Kyoto School philosophers, 202, 246 Lamprecht, Karl, 230 law, civil codes, 65 Lenin, Vladimir, 15, Liberal School of History, 124-125, 211-212 Linguel, Fr. François A.D., 98-100, 244 MacArthur, General Douglas, 115, 156, 204 Maclay, Rev. R.S., 185 Maebara Issei, 52, 62 Maeda, Fr. Chta, 98-100, 118, 244 Maehara Mitsuo, 245 Makihara Norio, 143-144, 172 Maruyama Masao, 25-29, 86, 93-94 119, 156-158, 206-208 Maruyama (“Modernization”) School, 119 Masaki Masato, 230-231 Mashita Shin’ichi, 157 Matsubara, Hiroshi (see Suga Hirota), 24-25, 235 Matsuda Kichir, 198 Matsukata Masayoshi, 91, 197 Matsumoto Hikojir, 226-228 Matsumoto Ken’ichi, 214 Matsumoto Sannosuke, 92, 119 Matsumoto Shinpachir, 258 Matsuura Takeshir, 173 McDougall, William, 15, 18-19, 2122, 152, 230, 233, 238, 254 Meinecke, Friedrich, 12-15, 26 Mill, John Stuart, 16-17, 131

INDEX Minami Hiroshi, 157 minken (rights of the people), 65-73, 81-82, 87, 90-91 Minobe Tatsukichi, 104, 109, 111, 115, 125 Minoda Muneki (Kyki), 111, 243 minzoku, 2-3, 9, 15, 21, 25-26, 28, 3035, 67, 69, 71, 76-80, 101, 106, 111, 114, 122, 134-135, 144, 148, 150-153, 155-156, 158, 160-161, 163, 165, 169-170, 176, 193-194, 199, 204, 206-211, 214, 216-262, 264-267, 271-272 minzoku chitsujo, 241 minzoku-kokka (ethnic nation-state), 9-13, 22, 26-27, 31-33, 36, 38-39, 56-57, 211-212, 214, 246 minzokushugi, 2-3, 26-27, 29, 31-33, 82, 176. 180-181, 197, 208, 216219, 226, 232-233, 239, 250, 263264, 268-269, 271-272 Mishima Yukio, 121, 261 Mita Historiographical Institute, 227 Mitsukuri Rinsh, 62, 64-65, 67, 70, 78, 80-82, 133 Miura Shumon, 272 Miwa, Kimitada, 112-113, 121 Miyajima Seiichir, 59 Miyake Setsurei, 194 Miyamoto Kenji, 113-114 Miyazaki Mury, 62, 64, 71, 74-80, 82, 217-218 Mizuno Hiroshi, 120 monarchy (see tenn), 34-35, 58, 63, 70, 72, 83-85, 87, 89-93, 96, 98, 100-109, 112-126, 136, 139, 169170, 179; of Japan, 115, 121, 125, 201, 216, 242; as ktei, 102, 115 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de, 64-65, 69-70, 72 Mori Arinori, 54-55, 57, 67, 91, 133 Mori Kichi, 235 Mri Takachika, 60 Morse, Edward S., 221 Motoda Nagazane (Eifu), 96-97 Motoori Norinaga, 39 Motoyama Yukihiko, 194-195 Mulford, Elisha, 190 Müller, Adam, 12 Müller, Max, 224

289 Muir, Ramsay, 15-18, 21, 230, 233, 238, 246, 254 Murofushi Takanobu, 216 Murota Mitsuyoshi, 70-71, 135, 217218 Nabeyama Sadachika, 234-235 Nagamine Hideki, 135 Nagasaki, as distinct minzoku, 238 Nagashima Matao, 24, 234 Nagata Kiyoshi, 245 Nait Chis, 221 Najita, Tetsuo, 62 Naka Hisao, 241 Nakae Chmin, 62, 66, 133, 138, 168, 177-185, 192, 207, 218 Nakamura Kyshir, 229 Nakamura Masanao (Keiu), 95-96, 100, 127, 132, 134, 167 Nakano Seiichi, 14, 24, 247-248 Nakasone Yasuhiro, 124, 210-211, 262-264, 269, 271-272 Nakatani Takeyo, 21, 233 Nakayama Kyshir, 229 Nakayama Tadayasu, 49 Nanbara Shigeru, 252-253, 262 nashonarizumu (English load word for nationalism), 3, 29-31, 267-268, 271 nation, etymology of, 5-6, 20-21, 3839 nation-state (see kokumin-kokka, minzoku-kokka), 36-38, 39, 56-57 128-129, 169, 171-172, 176, 191, 202, 211-212, 214, 225-226, 230232, 246, 260, 272 national anthem (see Kimi-ga-yo), 214 national flag, (see Hi-no-maru), 214, 272 National Spiritual Mobilization (see kokumin seishin sdin), 202 Nationality Act (see Kokuseki H), 148 nativism, 39, 41-43, 55, 87, 89 Naturvölker (see shizen minzoku), 13, 224 Neuman, J., 15 Nihonjinron (discourse on being Japanese), 160-162, 209-210, 262 Niijima J, 101

290 Nipponshugi (see Japanism), 223 Nishi Amane, 71, 132 Nishi Masao, 24, 234 Nishikawa Kjir, 147, 199 Nishikawa Nagao, 169, 196-197, 252 Nishimura Shigeki, 171, 178 Nishio Kanji, 212 Nishitani Keiji, 202 Nitobe Inaz, 168 Nomura Yasushi, 61 Novalis, 12, e Shinobu, 136 e Taku, 136 Oguma Eiji, 98, 114, 221, 223, 251 Ogy Sorai, 183 hara Shigetoku, 57 hira Masayoshi, 209 i Kentar, 62, 66 Oka Masao, 237, 240, 255-256 ki Takat, 53-54, 69 kubo Toshimichi, 47, 140, 216; 1878 assassination of, 216 kuma Shigenobu, 52, 73, 90-91, 175, 179, 192 Orikuchi Shinobu, political theology, 110 Oshikawa Masayoshi, 97 ta Takeo , 235 tsuka Hisao, 156 yama Ikuo, 151, 228, 231 yama Iwao, 91 Ozaki Hotsumi, 248 Ozaki Yukio, 104, 168 Ozawa Ichir, 269-271 patriotism (aikokushugi, aikokushin), 20-21 28, 31-32, 98, 101-102, 159, 175, 185-186, 199 People’s Rights Movement, 13, 28, 63-64, 66, 72, 74-75, 77-78, 87, 105, 109, 133, 143-144, 146, 177, 187, 194, 196-197, 217, 223 Perry, Commodore, 31, 37, 41-46, 174 Pillsbury, William B., 15, 18-19, 21, 233 Pittau, Joseph, 85 Pyle, Kenneth B., 211, 263

INDEX race, and nationality, 7-8, 16-17, 1920, 26-27, 31, 184, 205, 224-225, 233, 237, 244, 246, 250-251, 254 Ramos, Ruy, 271-272 Renan, Ernest, 16, 169, 193 Saeki Keishi, 213-214 Saga domain, 66 Saga Uprising of 1874, 216 Saig Takamori, 47, 61, 179, 216 Sa-in (Left Chamber), 62 Sait Tsuyoshi, 130, 133, 176, 218219 Sakaguchi Takakimi, 13-14 Sakai Toshihiko, 147 Sakamoto Ryma, 48 Sakamoto Takao, 38, 96, 108 Sakuda Shichi, 241 Sakurada Momoe, 75-76 Sakurai Yoshiko, 214-215 Sanj Sanetomi, 48 Sano Manabu, 24 sanshoku (Three Offices), 49 Santo, Alessandro “Alex, ”, 271 san’yo, 49, 53-54 Sasaki Takayuki, 141 Sat-Ch clique, 90, 92, 105, 164 Sat Masayuki, 134, 154 Satsuma domain, 47, 52, 58-60, 79, 90-91 Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, 69, 107, 179, 185, 216 Scheiner, Irwin, 184-185 Schlegel, Friedrich, 12 Schnee, Heinrich, 15 Seitaisho (“Constitution of 1868”), 51, 67 Seki Eikichi, 152 Seton-Watson, Hugh, 7 shakai, 35, 127-129, 132-135, 143145, 147, 149-152, 154-155, 160, 163, 199, 218, 245, 265-266, 272 shakai mondai, 80, 145, 147 Shibusawa Eiichi, 140 Shibusawa Keiz, 239 shid minzoku (Herrenvolk), 241 Shiga Shigetaka, 194-195, 219-220 Shiga Yoshio, 113-114, 155 Shimada Sabur, 168 Shimaji Mokurai, 188 Shimazaki Tson, 31

INDEX Shimazu Hisamitsu, 47, 140 Shimizu Ikutar, 157-160, 245 Shimizu Tru, 109 Shimmei Masamichi, 245, 253-256 Shinmura Izuru, 239 Shinto, 31, 89, 95-96, 101, 109, 117119, 124, 168, 196, 223-224, 226228, 243, 273 Shinto theology, 108 Shirakawa Sukenori, 49 Shiratori Kurakichi, 239 shizen minzoku (see Naturvölker), 13, 224 Shizuki Tadao, 40 Shtoku, Prince, 38 Shgiin, 57-59 Siebold, Heinrich Phillipp von, 221 Sieyés, Abbe Emmanuel Joseph, 67, 78 Silberman, Bernard, 89-90 Smith, Anthony D., 7-8, 11, 83 soccer, and nationalism, 271 social outcastes (burakumin, eta, hinin) 120, 136-137 socialism , Meiji, Society for the Study of, 102, 147, 150, 199, 203; Society for, 199, 203, sociology, 15, 128, 145, 149, 151-152, 160, 163; and nationalism, 237240 Soejima Taneomi, 51-52, 67 Sokoku, 259 sonn ji (respect the monarch, expel the barbarians), 89 Sono Ayako, 272 ssai, 49 Spenser, Herbert, 176 Springer, Rudolph, 227 Staatsnation, (see also kokumin) 1214 Stalin, Joseph, 15, 17, 23-25, 28, 30, 234-235 Stalinist nationalism, 22, 24-25, 29-30 state, distinct from nation, 1-11, 13-15, 20-36, 235-236, 239-241, 243-244, 251, 254-255, 258, 261-264, 266 statism (see kokkashugi), 94-95, 156, 175, 196, 200, 203, 205, 207, 228 Suga Hirota (see Matsubara Hiroshi), 235 Sugano Hachir, 44

291 Sun Yatsen, and ethnic nationalism, 219 Taguchi Ukichi, 71, 135, 168 Taisho Political Crisis, 149-150 taish (the people, masses), 31, 35, 117, 157, 161, 217, 226. 237, 254255, 257-258, 262-264 Takahashi Tetsuya, 124-125 Takamura Itsue, 110 Takashima Zen’ya, 157, 208, 261-262 Takata Yasuma, 15, 24, 150-152, 239-241, 245, 247-249, 253, 255 Takayama Chogy, 13, 223-226 Takekoshi Yosabur, 44, 225 Takeshita (Noboru) cabinet, 123 Takeuchi Yoshimi, 260-261 Tanabe Hajime, 202 Tanaka Akira, 43 Tanaka Ktar, 117-119, 121, 125, 234, 243-244 Tanaka Shz, 146-147 Tanaka, Stefan,180-181 Tanaka Suiichir, 227-228 Tani Kanj, 192 Tarui Tkichi, 145-146 tenn (monarch of Japan), 35, 38, 42, 83-84, 86-88, 93, 95-96, 100, 102, 109-110, 112-113, 115, 117, 121, 124-125, 219, 265-267, 272 Thelle, Notto, 167 Theology, Liberal, 102, 198-199 Tilly, Charles, 8-9 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 190 Tj Hideki, 241 Tokuda Kyichi, 113, 155 Tokugawa Akitake, 66 Tokugawa Iemochi, 47 Tokugawa Yoshikatsu, 59 Tokugawa Yoshinobu (Keiki), 48 Tokutomi Soh, 101, 168, 194, 220, 229 Toma Seita, 258 Torio Koyata, 61, 70 Tosa domain, 47-48, 50, 59-60, 62, 70, 74, 79, 152; as distinct minzoku, 238 Tosa Federation, 59-60 Tosaka Jun, 235 Tyama Mitsuru, 216 Tyama Shigeki, 28-31, 217, 258

292 Tsuchikata Teiichi, 180-181 Tsuda Mamichi, 54, 66-67 Tsuda School, 121-122 Tsuda Skichi, 115-116, 120-122 Tsuru Shigeto, 157 Twentieth Century Research Institute, 157 Uchida Ryhei, 217 Uchimura Kanz, 97-99, 147, 168, 223, 243 Ueki Emori, 73, 168 Uemura Masahisa, 97, 184, 186-188 Uesugi Shin’kichi, 109, 231, 242 Ukita Kazutami, 168, 225 ultra-nationalism (see chkokkashugi), 25-26 Uno Enk, 153, 239 US-Japan Security Treaty (see Anpo) 29, 159, 208, 260 Usui Jish, 14, 151-152, 238 Utsumi Takashi, 235 Utsurikawa Nenoz, 239 Véron, Eugène, 178-179, 181-184 Vigroux, Fr. Francis, 185 Volk, 10, 14, 76, 78-79, 139, 141, 152, 169, 249 Volk-Staat, 242 Wakamori Tar, 121, 255-256 Watanabe Osamu, 176

INDEX Watanuki Tetsuo, 152, 238-239 Watase Tsunekichi, 223-224 Watsuji Tetsur, 115-117, 205-206 Wilson, George M., 104 Wundt, Wilhelm Max, 227 Yamada Akiyoshi, 91 Yamaguchi Masao, 120-121 Yamaji Aizan, 168, 225 Yamamuro Shin’ichi, 64, 67, 81-82, 172-175, 191, 220, 249 Yamanouchi Toyoshige, 47-48, 54-55, 57-58 Yanagita Kunio, 154-155, 237, 255256 Yanaihara Tadao, 15, 22, 243-245, 252, 262 Yasuda Hiroshi, 219 Yasuda Yojr, 110, 119, 236-237, 243, 246, 259-260, 262 Yasukuni Shrine, 124, 272-272 Yokoyama Gennosuke, 168 Yonehara Ken, 106, 220 Yonetani Masafumi, 115 Yoon Keun-Cha, 148, 170, 220 Yoshida Shigeru, 118, 263, 270 Yoshimoto Taka’aki, 29-32, 197-198, 229, 267-269, 271 Yoshino Ksaku, 160 Yoshino Sakuz, 228-229 Yoshioka Tokumei, 87