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Doak - A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan - Placing The People (Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 5 Japan) - BRILL (2007)
Doak - A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan - Placing The People (Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 5 Japan) - BRILL (2007)
Section Five
Japan
Edited by
M. Blum
R. Kersten
M.F. Low
VOLUME 13
A History of Nationalism in
Modern Japan
by
Kevin M. Doak
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2007
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
ISSN 0921-5239
ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15598 5
ISBN-10: 90 04 15598 8
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Preface ……………………………………………………………… ix
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
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).
2 CHAPTER ONE
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.
REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE 3
3
Cf. It Kimiharu, Yanagita Kunio to bunka nashonarizumu (Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten, 2002). Yoshino Ksaku, Bunka nashonarizumu no shakaigaku (Nagoya:
Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 1997).
4 CHAPTER ONE
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 distinctive-
ness) 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
REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE 5
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.
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 &
6 CHAPTER ONE
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.
8 CHAPTER ONE
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).
REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE 9
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
10 CHAPTER ONE
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.
REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE 11
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.
16
Anthony Smith, National Identity, 8.
17
Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes, (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 1986), 27.
REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE 13
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.
14 CHAPTER ONE
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.
16 CHAPTER ONE
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.
REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE 17
25
Ramsay Muir, Nationalism and Internationalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1917): 51, 54.
18 CHAPTER ONE
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.
27
W.B. Pillsbury, The Psychology of Nationality and Internationalism (New York:
D. Appleton and Company, 1919), 22.
REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE 19
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.
20 CHAPTER ONE
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.
REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE 21
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.
22 CHAPTER ONE
sciousness both as a way to limit the claims of the state over the self-
expression 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.
24 CHAPTER ONE
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).
REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE 25
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.
26 CHAPTER ONE
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.
REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE 27
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.
28 CHAPTER ONE
50
Cf. Tyama Shigeki, Kindaishi: kaiky to minzoku no kaimei o shu to shite,
kza rekishi, vol. 2 (Tokyo: tsuki Shoten, 1955).
30 CHAPTER ONE
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.
REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE 31
53
Hashikawa Bunz, Nashonarizumu, Kinokuniya Shinsho B-32 (Tokyo:
Kinokuniya, 1968; reprinted 1994), 16.
32 CHAPTER ONE
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
54
Hashikawa, Nashonarizumu, 123-6.
55
Hashikawa, Nashonarizumu, 186.
REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE 33
“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
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).
2
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.
PRECONDITIONS OF NATIONALISM 39
4
Sakamoto Takao, Meiji kokka no kensetsu, 23.
5
Yamamuro Shin’ichi, Kindai nihon no chi to seiji: Inoue Kowashi kara taishü
engei made (Tokyo: Bokutakusha, 1985), 148-9.
40 CHAPTER TWO
6
Kano, Kindai nihon shis annai, 30.
7
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
PRECONDITIONS OF NATIONALISM 41
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.
42 CHAPTER TWO
10
It Yahiko, Ishin to jinshin (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1999), 2.
PRECONDITIONS OF NATIONALISM 43
13
Tanaka Akira, Bakumatsu ishinshi no kenky, 238.
14
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.)
PRECONDITIONS OF NATIONALISM 45
16
Mitani Hiroshi, Meiji ishin to nashonarizumu (Tokyo: Yamakawa shuppansha,
1997).
46 CHAPTER TWO
17
It Yahiko, Ishin to jinshin, 43.
PRECONDITIONS OF NATIONALISM 47
20
Cited in Sakamoto, Meiji kokka no kensetsu, 29.
PRECONDITIONS OF NATIONALISM 49
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 anti-
bakufu 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).
50 CHAPTER TWO
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.
PRECONDITIONS OF NATIONALISM 51
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 anti-
Westernization (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.
PRECONDITIONS OF NATIONALISM 55
28
Yamazaki, “‘Kgi’ yshutsu kik no keisei to hkai,” 68.
56 CHAPTER TWO
29
Katsuta Masaharu, Haikan chiken: “Meiji kokka” ga umareta hi (Tokyo:
Kdansha, 2000), 68-70.
PRECONDITIONS OF NATIONALISM 57
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).
58 CHAPTER TWO
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.
PRECONDITIONS OF NATIONALISM 59
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.
60 CHAPTER TWO
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.
62 CHAPTER TWO
42
Tetsuo Najita, Japan: The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Japanese
Politics, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), 78.
64 CHAPTER TWO
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).
PRECONDITIONS OF NATIONALISM 65
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.
PRECONDITIONS OF NATIONALISM 67
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.
68 CHAPTER TWO
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.
PRECONDITIONS OF NATIONALISM 69
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.
70 CHAPTER TWO
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.
PRECONDITIONS OF NATIONALISM 71
58
Haga, Meiji kokka no keisei, 236.
59
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.
72 CHAPTER TWO
65
Yamamuro, “Mitsukuri Rinsh to Kawazu Sukeyuki”, 307-312.
PRECONDITIONS OF NATIONALISM 75
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
76 CHAPTER TWO
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.
PRECONDITIONS OF NATIONALISM 77
72
Miyazaki Mury, “Furansu kakumeiki: jiy no kachidoki,” 66-67.
78 CHAPTER TWO
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.
PRECONDITIONS OF NATIONALISM 79
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
80 CHAPTER TWO
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 post-
Revolutionary 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.
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.
PRECONDITIONS OF NATIONALISM 81
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 anti-
democratic 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.
82 CHAPTER TWO
82
Yamamuro Shin’ichi, “Meiji kokka no seido to rinen,” 129.
CHAPTER THREE
TENN
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.
86 CHAPTER THREE
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.
TENNO 87
5
[Kimura Junji], Kindai nihon shis kenkykai, eds., “Tenn ron no keifu,” in
Tenn ron o yomu, 207.
88 CHAPTER THREE
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.
TENNO 89
7
Haga Noboru. Meiji kokka no keisei, 166-7.
8
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.
90 CHAPTER THREE
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.
11
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.
TENNO 91
13
Dai nihon teikoku kenp, reprinted in Nihonkoku kenp (Tokyo: Kdansha,
1985), 66-77, at 66.
14
Haga Noboru, Meiji kokka no keisei, 170.
92 CHAPTER THREE
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).
TENNO 93
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.
94 CHAPTER THREE
18
Maruyama Masao, “Theory and Psychology of Ultra- Nationalism,” (1946), 5.
TENNO 95
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.
96 CHAPTER THREE
21
Sakamoto Takao, Meiji kokka no kensetsu, 368.
22
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.
TENNO 97
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.
98 CHAPTER THREE
27
Nihonkoku kenp, 69.
28
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.
TENNO 99
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.
TENNO 101
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 post-
Constitutional 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.
102 CHAPTER THREE
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.
35
Katano, Kofun no hito Kashiwagi, 2.
TENNO 103
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…
104 CHAPTER THREE
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.
TENNO 105
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.
TENNO 107
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.
42
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.
108 CHAPTER THREE
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.
TENNO 109
49
Cf.“Shinto ni arawareta minzoku ronri,” in Zensh 3—Ch Kron.
50
Kimura Junji, “Dajsai no hongi: Orikuchi Shinobu,” Tennron o yomu, 20-21.
TENNO 111
51
The predominant reference in Kokutai no hongi is to the people as the (multi-
ethnic) 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.
112 CHAPTER THREE
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.
TENNO 113
53
Miwa, 389.
54
Oguma Eiji, <Minshu> to <aikoku>: sengo nihon no nashonarizumu to
kkysei (Tokyo: Shin’ysha, 2002), 104-5.
114 CHAPTER THREE
55
Oguma, 122.
56
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.
TENNO 115
58
Kimura Junji, “Tennron no keif,” Tennron o yomu, 215.
59
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).
116 CHAPTER THREE
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.
TENNO 117
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 <aikoku>, 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.
118 CHAPTER THREE
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).
TENNO 119
67
Kimura Junji, “Tennron no keif,” 219.
68
Kimura, 219-20.
120 CHAPTER THREE
69
Amino Yoshihiko, Ikei no ken, Nihon chsei no hi-ngymin to tenn, cited in
Kimura, 220-22.
TENNO 121
70
Kimura, 222-3.
122 CHAPTER THREE
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 Yalta-
Potsdam, 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.
TENNO 123
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.
124 CHAPTER THREE
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.
TENNO 125
76
Rikki Kersten, “Revisionism, reaction and the ‘symbol emperor’ in post-war
Japan,” Japan Forum 15 (1) 2003: 15-31, at 20.
126 CHAPTER THREE
SHAKAI
1
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1990), 13.
2
Giddens, 14.
SHAKAI 129
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.
SHAKAI 131
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.
132 CHAPTER FOUR
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.
SHAKAI 133
12
Sait, Meiji no kotoba, 184.
13
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.
134 CHAPTER FOUR
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.
16
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.
SHAKAI 135
18
Haga, Meiji kokka no keisei, 236.
19
Sait Tsuyoshi, Meiji no kotoba, 209.
136 CHAPTER FOUR
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.
SHAKAI 137
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.
138 CHAPTER FOUR
24
Sakamoto, Meiji kokka no kensetsu, 16.
140 CHAPTER FOUR
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
Haga, 226-7.
26
Sakamoto Takao, Meiji kokka no kensetsu, 99-102, 148-164.
142 CHAPTER FOUR
27
Kaji Ryichi, Meiji no shakai mondai, 20.
SHAKAI 143
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.
144 CHAPTER FOUR
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.
30
Makihara, 23.
31
Irokawa, Culture of the Meiji Period, 106-7.
SHAKAI 145
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.”
146 CHAPTER FOUR
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 (1851-
1894) 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.
SHAKAI 147
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.
148 CHAPTER FOUR
38
Ishida, 47.
39
Yoon Keun-cha, Nihon kokumin ron, 99.
40
Yoon, 99.
SHAKAI 149
41
Nishikawa Nagao, Kokumin kokka ron no shatei, 86.
42
Ishida, Nihon no shakai kagaku, 47.
43
Ikimatsu Keiz, Gendai nihon shisshi 4 Taishki no shis to bunka (Tokyo:
Aoki Shoten, 1971), 30-45.
150 CHAPTER FOUR
44
Ishida, Nihon no shakai kagaku, 47, 73.
45
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.
SHAKAI 151
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.
152 CHAPTER FOUR
49
Usui Jish, “Kokumin no gainen,” 46.
50
Watanuki Tetsuo, “Minzokusei,” Nihon shakaigakka nenp, Shakaigaku, daini
sh, 99-150 at 138-150.
SHAKAI 153
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.
154 CHAPTER FOUR
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.
SHAKAI 155
58
Ishida Takeshi, Nihon no shakai kagaku, 161-7.
156 CHAPTER FOUR
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
SHAKAI 157
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.
60
Ishida Takeshi, Nihon no shakai kagaku, 172-3.
61
Ishida Takeshi, Nihon no shakai kagaku, 176.
158 CHAPTER FOUR
62
Rikki Kersten, “Shimizu Ikutar: Prophet of the Common Man 1931–1951,” 32-
33, in Shimizu Ikutar: The Heart of a Chameleon (forthcoming).
SHAKAI 159
63
Kersten, 46.
64
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):
160 CHAPTER FOUR
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).
SHAKAI 161
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.
162 CHAPTER FOUR
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.
SHAKAI 163
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
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.
166 CHAPTER FIVE
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.
KOKUMIN 167
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.
168 CHAPTER FIVE
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.
KOKUMIN 169
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
Nishikawa Nagao, Kokumin kokka ron no shatei (Tokyo Kashiwa Shob, 1998),
79.
170 CHAPTER FIVE
8
Greenfeld, Nationalism, 188.
9
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.
KOKUMIN 171
13
Nishikawa Nagao, Kokumin kokka ron no shatei, 82.
172 CHAPTER FIVE
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.
KOKUMIN 173
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.
174 CHAPTER FIVE
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.
KOKUMIN 175
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, 9-
19; 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.
176 CHAPTER FIVE
25
Sait, Meiji no kotoba, 372.
26
Sait, Meiji no kotoba, 384.
KOKUMIN 177
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.
KOKUMIN 179
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 anti-
government 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.
180 CHAPTER FIVE
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 <yume> 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
KOKUMIN 181
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,
182 CHAPTER FIVE
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.
38
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
KOKUMIN 183
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).
184 CHAPTER FIVE
41
Nakae, trans., “Uin-shi bigaku,” 216.
42
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.
KOKUMIN 185
48
Scheiner, 93.
49
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
KOKUMIN 187
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.
188 CHAPTER FIVE
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.
KOKUMIN 189
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.
190 CHAPTER FIVE
58
Elshtain, Democracy on Trial, 9.
59
Kozaki, Seiky Shinron, 75.
60
Kozaki, Seiky Shinron, 79.
KOKUMIN 191
61
Kozaki, Seiky Shinron, 4.
62
Yamamuro Shin’ichi, “Kokumin kokka keisei-ki no genron to media,” 485.
192 CHAPTER FIVE
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.
KOKUMIN 193
65
Motoyama, 211.
194 CHAPTER FIVE
66
Motoyama, 206-7.
67
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.
KOKUMIN 195
68
Motoyama, 222.
196 CHAPTER FIVE
69
Katano Masao, 124.
70
Kuga Katsunan, “Nihon bunmei shimp no kiro,” Tokyo Denp, (June 1888);
cited in Nishikawa Nagao, Kokumin kokkaron no shatei; 84.
KOKUMIN 197
71
Nishikawa, 84-5.
72
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.
198 CHAPTER FIVE
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.
KOKUMIN 199
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.
200 CHAPTER FIVE
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.
KOKUMIN 201
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.
202 CHAPTER FIVE
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.
KOKUMIN 203
86
Havens, 544. Emphasis in original.
87
Kevin M. Doak, “Building National Identity through Ethnicity: Ethnology in
Wartime Japan and After,” The Journal of Japanese Studies, 27:1 (1-39): 3.
204 CHAPTER FIVE
88
“Nihonkoku kenp,” reprinted in Nihonkoku kenp, 1-58, at 16.
89
“Nihonkoku kenp,” 18.
KOKUMIN 205
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.
KOKUMIN 207
93
Maruyama Masao, Nihon no shis, 106.
94
Curtis Anderson Gayle, “Progressive Representations of the Nation: Early Post-
war 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.
208 CHAPTER FIVE
95
Rikki Kersten, Democracy in Postwar Japan, 71.
96
Kersten, Democracy in Postwar Japan, 66.
97
Kersten, Democracy in Postwar Japan, 212.
98
Gayle, “Progressive Representations of the Nation,” 14.
KOKUMIN 209
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.
210 CHAPTER FIVE
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
Ishida Takeshi, Nihon no seiji to kotoba-ge, 225-9.
102
Ishida, 224-6.
KOKUMIN 211
103
Pyle, The Japanese Question, 94-101.
104
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.
212 CHAPTER FIVE
110
Matsumoto Ken’ichi, “Hi-no-maru, Kimi-ga-yo” no hanashi (Tokyo: PHP
Kenkyjo, 1999), 193-4.
KOKUMIN 215
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
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.
MINZOKU 217
4
Haga Noboru. Meiji kokka no keisei, 236.
5
Yasuda Hiroshi, “Kindai nihon ni okeru ‘minzoku’ kannnen no keisei: kokumin,
shimmin, minzoku,” 61-72 Shis to gendai 31 (September 1992): 62.
218 CHAPTER SIX
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.
MINZOKU 219
11
Sait Tsuyoshi, Meiji no kotoba, 370.
12
Hashimoto Mitsuru, “Minzoku: nihon kindaika wo tg suru chikara,” Senjika
nihon shakai kenkykai, ed., Senjika no nihon, 6.
220 CHAPTER SIX
18
Oguma Eiji, Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen, 27-32.
222 CHAPTER SIX
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.
MINZOKU 223
20
Constitution of the Great Japan Society (1897); cited in Oguma, 57.
21
Oguma, 57-8.
224 CHAPTER SIX
22
Takayama Chogy, Chogy zensh, volume 5, 313.
23
Takayama, volume 5, 20-22.
MINZOKU 225
24
Oguma, 99-100.
25
Oguma, 109-113. Ebina also went so far as to praise the patriotism of An Chung
Ken who had assassinated It Hirobumi in 1909.
226 CHAPTER SIX
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.
26
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983): 104
MINZOKU 227
27
Matsumoto Hikojir, “Minzoku kenky to kojiki,” Shigaku vol. 25 (1914): 228-
34.
228 CHAPTER SIX
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.
MINZOKU 229
32
See Yoshimoto Taka’aki, “Nihon no nashonarizumu,.”
33
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.)
230 CHAPTER SIX
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 self-
determination” 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.
MINZOKU 231
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.
232 CHAPTER SIX
36
yama Ikuo, Seiji no shakai-teki kiso (1923); reprinted in yama Ikuo zensh
(Ch Kronsha, 1947), 1:217-237, at 232-3.
MINZOKU 233
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.
234 CHAPTER SIX
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.
MINZOKU 235
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.
236 CHAPTER SIX
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.
MINZOKU 237
48
Hashimoto Mitsuru, “Minzoku: nihon kindaika wo tg suru chikara,” 8.
238 CHAPTER SIX
49
Watanuki Tetsur, “Minzokusei,” Shakaigaku no. 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,
1934): 99-150, at 139.
50
Watanuki, 150.
MINZOKU 239
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.
240 CHAPTER SIX
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.”
MINZOKU 241
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).
242 CHAPTER SIX
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.
MINZOKU 243
60
Tanaka, Sekai h no riron, I, 162-166.
61
Tanaka, Sekai h no riron I, 212-6.
MINZOKU 245
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.
246 CHAPTER SIX
64
Ksaka Masa’aki, Minzoku no tetsugaku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1942); 3.
MINZOKU 247
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 co-
prosperity. 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 non-
autonomous, 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
Ksaka, 193, 194-5.
66
Ksaka, 196, 197.
248 CHAPTER SIX
67
Nakano, p. 54.
68
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.
MINZOKU 249
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 Co-
Prosperity Sphere built around the particular ethnic identities in the
region.70 In the end, wracked with internal contradictions and multi-
vocal 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.
250 CHAPTER SIX
trying to hammer unity out of the plurality that has always been the
reality of Asia.72
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
MINZOKU 251
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.
252 CHAPTER SIX
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.
MINZOKU 253
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
254 CHAPTER SIX
79
Shimmei Masamichi, Shi-teki minzoku riron (Tokyo: Iwasaki Shoten, 1949): 36-
68.
80
Shimmei, Shi-teki minzoku riron, 55-6.
MINZOKU 255
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.
256 CHAPTER SIX
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.
MINZOKU 257
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
Kubokawa Tsurujir, Bungaku shis seikatsu (Tokyo: Shinseisha, 1948): 241-2.
85
Kubokawa, 26.
258 CHAPTER SIX
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
MINZOKU 259
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.
260 CHAPTER SIX
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, anti-
Western 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
MINZOKU 261
91
Takashima Zen’ya, Minzoku to kaiky (Tokyo: Gendai hyronsha, 1970): 29-53.
262 CHAPTER SIX
92
Peter N. Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1986), 38-39.
MINZOKU 263
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.
264 CHAPTER SIX
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
1
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.
268 CHAPTER SEVEN
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.
AFTERWORD 269
4
Asaba, Nashonarizumu, 250.
270 CHAPTER SEVEN
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.
AFTERWORD 271
9
Abe Shinz, Utsukushii kuni e, Bungei shinsho 524 (Tokyo: Bungei Shunj,
2006), 80-81.
272 CHAPTER SEVEN
10
Abe Shinz, Utsukushii kuni e, 98-99.
11
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.
AFTERWORD 273
12
Supreme Court decision (1977), cited in Abe Shinz, Utsukushii kuni, 66-7.
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284 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abe Is, 147, 150, 168, 199 Catholics, 85, 98-100, 117-118, 185,
Abe Jir, 228 198, 244, 272
Abe Shinz, 270-273 Chambers, William G. and Robert,
aesthetics, 177-183; Hegelian 181; 178
personalist, 183 Charter Oath, 50-51, 54, 57
Aizawa Seishisai, 40, 41, 84, 87 Chiba Takusabur, 73, 185
Akizuki Tanetatsu, 53-55 Chirot, Daniel, 197
Amino Yoshihiko, 120 Christ (see also Jesus), 198
Anderson, Benedict, 226 Christianity, 55, 94-101, 105-106, 109,
Anno Kinzane, 56 157, 167-168, 185, 187-190, 198-199,
Anpo (see US-Japan Security Treaty), 206, 223-224, 226-227
29, 30, 159 , 162, 260 Christians (see also Catholics,
Arano Yasunori, 166-167 Kumamoto Band of), 145, 147, 150,
Arendt, Hannah, 79, 167-168, 184, 186-188, 194, 196,
Arisugawa Taruhito, Prince, 48-52 198, 207, 223, 225-226, 243-244,
Armstrong, John, 7 252
Asaba Michiaki, 267-269, 271 ch-kokkashugi (see ultra-
Ashida Hitoshi, 113 nationalism), 25-26, 28
Ashio Copper Mine Incident, 146-147 Chsh domain, 47, 59-61
Asukai Masamichi, 179 civic nationalism, 6, 80, 205-208, 212,
264, 270-273
bakufu, 42-49, 52, 58, 61, 66, 87, 166, civil society (shimin shakai), 41, 63-
168-169, 216, 220 64, 72, 76, 78, 80-82, 158-162,
baku-han system, 38, 40, 42, 61, 167; 168-169, 185, 189-190, 261
dissolution of, 39, 42-49, 52, 58, Civil Society School, 156, 159
61, 66 civilization and enlightenment (see
Bälz, Erwin von, 221 bunmei kaika), 169-170
Band Hiroshi, 25 commoners, 44, 52, 75, 79, 133, 136-
Barnes, Harry Elmer, 15, 137, 141
Bauer, Otto, 15, 17, 23, 231, 234 communism, in Japan, 256
Befu, Harumi, 160 constitution: Japanese, 51, 68, 69, 73,
Benedict, Ruth, 251 192-195, 205, 221-222, 242;
Bluntschli, Johann Caspar, 71, 144 Imperial Constitution of 1889
Boissonade, Gustave Emile, 69, 185, (Meiji), 62-63, 73, 81-82, 88, 91-
192 97, 101, 103, 115, 122, 148, 175-
Buddhism, 167, 190, 227 176, 193-197, 220, 244, 267; of
bunmei kaika (see civilization and Japan (postwar), 33, 118, 122-124,
enlightenment), 170 191, 204-205, 266, 269, 272
cultural nationalism (see
Catholic Funeral Affair, 106 Kulturnation), 3, 29, 108, 117, 156,
Catholic political theory, 100 194-195, 203, 223-224
286 INDEX
Dajkan, 45, 49, 51-53, 56-61, 67, 68, Fujioka Nobukatsu, 211-212
140, 166 Fujioka Wakao, 161-162
Dale, Peter, 262 Fujita Shz, 119
Dan Takuma, Baron, 123 Fujita Tok, 88
domains, abolition of (see haihan fukoku kyhei (rich country, strong
chiken), 59, 60, 173 military), 67
Dumas, Alexandre, Ange Pitou, 74-79, Fukuchi Gen’ichir, 133
217 Fukuoka Takachika (Ktei), 50-54
Fukuzawa Yukichi, 26, 64, 69, 73,
Ebina Danj, 225 87-89, 105-110, 125, 130-132, 134,
Egami Namio, 256 140, 166, 168, 171-172, 178, 198,
Eguchi Bokur, 258, 261 207-208, 242
1881 Political Crisis, 71, 73, 90, 175, Furuno Kiyoto (Kiyondo), 239, 241
177, 179
Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 80, 160, 185 Gayle, Curtis Anderson, 207, 257
emperor, of Japan (see tenn), 37, 40- Gellner, Ernest, 10, 128-129
45, 48-52, 70-77, 103-108, 110- Gen’ysha, 216-217
116, 118-125, 147-148, 168, 193, George, Henry, 224
197, 273 Gibbons, Herbert Adams, 15
Emperor Godaigo, 120, 122 Giddens, Anthony, 128-129
Emperor Heisei (Akihito), 122-123 Giji Taisai Torishirabesho, 54
Emperor Meiji (Mutsuhito), 77, 104, gij, 49, 52, 54,
112 Giseikan, 52-53
Emperor Showa (Hirohito) 110, 112, Gluck, Carol, 81
115, 122, 124-125 Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur, 21,
Emperor Taisho (Yoshihito), 112 goken und (protect constitution
Enomoto Takeaki, 91, 92 movement), 104, 107
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, 9-10 Goldfarb, Jeffrey C., 213, 215
étatism (see kokkashugi, statism), 2, 6, Gooch, G.P., 15, 230
27, 94, Got Shjir, 48, 52
ethnie, 7-8 Greenfeld, Liah, 5-10, 129, 135, 169,
ethnic nationalism, 9-10, 22-24, 28-35, 197
108, 110, 114, 121-122, 148, 156, Gumplowics, Ludwig, 224
164-165, 180, 192-194, 197, 200, gunken, 55-56, 61
205-206, 208-209, 211-212, 216-
217, 220, 223-224, 226, 228, 230, Haga Noboru, 71, 89
232, 235, 239, 242, 245, 248, 251- Hagi Uprising of 1876, 62, 216
253, 255-257, 259-261, 263-264, haihan chiken (abolition of domains,
268-273 establishment of prefectures; see
Ethnic Research Institute, 153, 241, domains, abolition of), 173
247 Hamano Teishir, 176
ethnology, and nationalism, 221 Hani Gor, 121,
Ethnology, Japanese Journal of, 153 Harootunian, H.D., 41, 150
Ethnology, Japanese Society of, 153, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 234
238 Hashikawa Bunz, 31-32
Et Shimpei, 62, 67, 140 Hashimoto Mitsuru, 219, 233, 237
Hashimoto Rytar, 124
Fenollosa, Ernest Francisco, 180-181 Havens, Thomas R.H., 200-203
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 169, 252-253 Hayashi Fusao, 121-122, 202, 236,
French Revolution, 79, 83, 138-139, 261-262
141, 267; impact on Japan, 73-79 Hayashi Kentar, 157
INDEX 287
Nipponshugi (see Japanism), 223 race, and nationality, 7-8, 16-17, 19-
Nishi Amane, 71, 132 20, 26-27, 31, 184, 205, 224-225,
Nishi Masao, 24, 234 233, 237, 244, 246, 250-251, 254
Nishikawa Kjir, 147, 199 Ramos, Ruy, 271-272
Nishikawa Nagao, 169, 196-197, 252 Renan, Ernest, 16, 169, 193
Nishimura Shigeki, 171, 178
Nishio Kanji, 212 Saeki Keishi, 213-214
Nishitani Keiji, 202 Saga domain, 66
Nitobe Inaz, 168 Saga Uprising of 1874, 216
Nomura Yasushi, 61 Saig Takamori, 47, 61, 179, 216
Novalis, 12, Sa-in (Left Chamber), 62
Sait Tsuyoshi, 130, 133, 176, 218-
e Shinobu, 136 219
e Taku, 136 Sakaguchi Takakimi, 13-14
Oguma Eiji, 98, 114, 221, 223, 251 Sakai Toshihiko, 147
Ogy Sorai, 183 Sakamoto Ryma, 48
hara Shigetoku, 57 Sakamoto Takao, 38, 96, 108
hira Masayoshi, 209 Sakuda Shichi, 241
i Kentar, 62, 66 Sakurada Momoe, 75-76
Oka Masao, 237, 240, 255-256 Sakurai Yoshiko, 214-215
ki Takat, 53-54, 69 Sanj Sanetomi, 48
kubo Toshimichi, 47, 140, 216; Sano Manabu, 24
1878 assassination of, 216 sanshoku (Three Offices), 49
kuma Shigenobu, 52, 73, 90-91, Santo, Alessandro “Alex, ”, 271
175, 179, 192 san’yo, 49, 53-54
Orikuchi Shinobu, political theology, Sasaki Takayuki, 141
110 Sat-Ch clique, 90, 92, 105, 164
Oshikawa Masayoshi, 97 Sat Masayuki, 134, 154
ta Takeo , 235 Satsuma domain, 47, 52, 58-60, 79,
tsuka Hisao, 156 90-91
yama Ikuo, 151, 228, 231 Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, 69, 107,
yama Iwao, 91 179, 185, 216
Ozaki Hotsumi, 248 Scheiner, Irwin, 184-185
Ozaki Yukio, 104, 168 Schlegel, Friedrich, 12
Ozawa Ichir, 269-271 Schnee, Heinrich, 15
Seitaisho (“Constitution of 1868”), 51,
patriotism (aikokushugi, aikokushin), 67
20-21 28, 31-32, 98, 101-102, 159, Seki Eikichi, 152
175, 185-186, 199 Seton-Watson, Hugh, 7
People’s Rights Movement, 13, 28, shakai, 35, 127-129, 132-135, 143-
63-64, 66, 72, 74-75, 77-78, 87, 145, 147, 149-152, 154-155, 160,
105, 109, 133, 143-144, 146, 177, 163, 199, 218, 245, 265-266, 272
187, 194, 196-197, 217, 223 shakai mondai, 80, 145, 147
Perry, Commodore, 31, 37, 41-46, Shibusawa Eiichi, 140
174 Shibusawa Keiz, 239
Pillsbury, William B., 15, 18-19, 21, shid minzoku (Herrenvolk), 241
233 Shiga Shigetaka, 194-195, 219-220
Pittau, Joseph, 85 Shiga Yoshio, 113-114, 155
Pyle, Kenneth B., 211, 263 Shimada Sabur, 168
Shimaji Mokurai, 188
Shimazaki Tson, 31
INDEX 291