Synopsis
In this superbly written and eminently readable narrative, Andrew E. Barshay presents the contrasting lives of Nanbara Shigeru (1889-1974) and Hasegawa Nyoze-kan (1875-1969), illuminating the complex predicament of modern Japanese intellectuals and their relation to state and society. Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, a powerful modern state began to emerge in Japan, and with it, the idea of a "public" sphere of action. This sphere brought with it a new type of intellectual - a "public man" whose role was to interpret and nationalize "universal" (and largely foreign) ideas and ideologies. Activity within the public sphere took many forms as Japanese intellectuals sought to define their changing roles. At no time was such public activity as intense as during the crisis years of later imperial and early postwar Japan.In contrasting case studies, Andrew E. Barshay presents the lives of two modern Japanese intellectuals, Nanbara Shigeru (1889-1974), professor of Western political thought at Tokyo Imperial University, and Hasegawa Nyozekan (1875-1969), a versatile independent journalist. Through their writings and experiences, Barshay examines the power of the idea of "national community" in public life. He treats Nanbara's and Hasegawa's ideas and actions as they developed within the contexts of Western intellectual tradition and modern Japanese history. The result is a superbly written narrative that illuminates the complex predicament of modern Japanese intellectuals and their relation to the state and society. Barshay's work is ultimately a study of intellectual mobilization in a modern state, and of the price of national identity in the twentieth century.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Andrew E. Barshay is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.
From the Back Cover
"Very well written, informative and informed and tells us a good deal about the limits of the dominant discourse on politics and culture in the immediate pre-war years."—Harry Harootunian, University of Chicago
"Deftly written and eminently readable, this book sets a high standard of excellence in the field of modern Japanese intellectual history."—Peter Duus, Stanford University
"Deftly written and eminently readable, this book sets a high standard of excellence in the field of modern Japanese intellectual history."—Peter Duus, Stanford University
From the Inside Flap
"Very well written, informative and informed and tells us a good deal about the limits of the dominant discourse on politics and culture in the immediate pre-war years."—Harry Harootunian, University of Chicago
"Deftly written and eminently readable, this book sets a high standard of excellence in the field of modern Japanese intellectual history."—Peter Duus, Stanford University
"Deftly written and eminently readable, this book sets a high standard of excellence in the field of modern Japanese intellectual history."—Peter Duus, Stanford University
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis
By Andrew BarshayUniversity of California Press
Copyright 1991 Andrew BarshayAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0520073932
The Dual Senses of "Public" in Imperial Japan
Text in Nanbara Shigeru's hand
of "Waga nozomi" (My desire, ca.
1898; for a translation, see p. 52).
Courtesy of Education
Centre, Kagawa Prefecture.
Both Nanbara Shigeru and Hasegawa Nyozekan regarded the emergence of the modern state as a universal, defining condition of national historical development. And both recognized it to be a process specific to each national society: every history is unique. Hasegawa Nyozekan at moments embraced an explanation of Japan's history based on a conjuncture determined ultimately by the dominant mode of production in society as it articulated with external economic forces; at other times he relied for explanation on cultural formations handed down from the past. Nanbara Shigeru was more consistent. For him history was an unfolding of worldviews whose logical contradictions compelled further development via dialectical breaks with the past. Both were keenly aware of the "unique" aspects of their nation's history, especially its political development. But that very awareness of difference was born of a deeper belief in Japan's irrevocable and complete entry into the stream of world history, and bespoke, further, the conviction that all particular histories would ultimately converge.
In this basic outlook, the two men were very much products of the Japan that had been opened to the world in the mid-nineteenth century. For with the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and Japan's subsequent exposure to a bewildering variety of Western modes of thought, Japan's history and future development appeared in an arresting, even thrilling, new perspective. This was the viewone with indigenous roots to be surethat all history, Japan's included, was inherently relative and manipulable; and that what Japan needed was to review its past and determine its future course in the light of the advanced state already reached by the powers that had made their appearance on the horizon at that crucial moment. This view, challenged though it has been by a powerful quasi-nativist reaction, has never been superseded.1
At the same time, Japan's spectacularly successful entry into the stream of universal development also produced recurring fears that someday the bubble would burst, that the nation would forever be forced to play catch-up with the West. This complex has given Japan's modern history an urgent, and sometimes violent and frenetic, quality. And it has, in most periods, fostered a preoccupation with national identity, with being "understood" by the outside world. In its efforts to "stand shoulder to shoulder with the West," Japan met great success at the turn of the twentieth century, only to find its "special relationship" to East Asia a source of friction, hostility and frustration vis--vis its fellow colonial powers (not to mention those actually subject to Japanese rule). Such experiences have in their turn produced spates of compensatory
truculence and encouraged explanations for the actions of the state that look directly to cultural predisposition and the national character.
Whatever may become of this mind-set in the future, there can be no doubt that its proximate origins are to be found in the late Tokugawa and early Meiji periods, when the consensus was formed among the nation's leadership to make a forced march to national strength, lest Japan suffer the fate of China. In its urgency, this consensus on the need for a "rich country and a strong army" ( fukoku kyohei*
) also presupposed that the state itself would direct the nation's development toward its utilitarian end. But who made up the state? Who was to supply the resources and shape priorities and strategies? What was fukoku kyohei to mean for the people?
In the years roughly between 1868 and 1898, an answer emerged from among the myriad factional conflicts, clashes of economic interest, and confrontations over matters of principle among the social forces struggling for a voice in the polity. This answer can, I think, be encapsulated in three contemporary formulas.
First, kanson minpi : "Exalt officialdom, slight the people/officialdom is exalted, and the people base." This is perhaps the key to the process by which the Meiji leadership sought to create a modern state. Influenced both by Tokugawa traditions of bureaucratism long divorced from actual feudal landholding and, after the 1880s, by imported Prussian models for administration, the "founders" built a state in which preponderant power lay with official bureaucracy and a transcendent cabinet rather than with an elected representative body. A description of this process is far beyond the scope of this introduction, of course. Here, let it suffice to say that the state, itself composed of power blocs frequently at odds with one another, managed to take effective, though not undisputed, charge of laying the infrastructure of national strength and identity: a conscript army, a new land tax system, standardized and compulsory education, a constitution, local and national assemblies, railroads, telegraph, post, and so forth. Stupendous popular energies were released, particularly among the upper segments of the peasantry, with the disestablishment of traditional statuses. But all at a price: vast numbers of legally equal imperial subjects were excluded from any political representation. The land tax did not ease the burden of the peasantry, but attempted to rationalize collection and concentrate revenues in the hands of the central authority. Warrior discontent over disestablishment split the leadership and had finally to be put down by force. Industrial development, spurred by military expenditure and transfer of
ownership and management of plant to select private hands, took off in the mid to late 1880s, but did not proceed on a scale sufficient to absorb an increasing rural population. Instead, writes the economist Makoto Itoh, it created a "huge impoverished reserve army in the rural villages," which "served to hold back the improvement of industrial workers' wages." "In stark contrast to the rapid growth of capitalist production, peasants and wage earners continued to suffer poverty and insecurity. Labor unrest in the cities developed parallel with [indeed, independently of] socialist ideologies, including antiwar campaigns, and at the turn of the century began to attract the attention of a wider public."2
The second formula is kazoku kokka , "family state": it describes how the kokutai articulated with the nation as a whole. Thus "family state" will represent the complex legitimating ideology that took shape by the 1890s as the leadership rejected (and partly coopted) proposals, made from within the ruling group and by publicists close to the sovereignty question, for a "mixed" English-style constitutional monarchy and a more radical democratic system derived from natural-rights theory. The "family state" postulated a semidivine monarch whose family was the "great house" for all those of his subjects, at once chief priest of the Sun line and a modern ruler with enormous prerogatives who "presided over" (suberu; tochi suru*
) but did not "involve himself" (ataru ) in the actual administration of the state. Many of the implications of this pattern will be discussed in succeeding chapters. Here let us stress its valorization of organic harmony and patriarchal integration over any conflictual notions of the composition of the polity. This ties in, of course, with the "exaltation" of officialdom, which, along with the independent military, acted for the first three decades of the modern period as the structural expression, so to speak, of the imperial will.
In its fully elaborated form, the kazoku kokka also bound the ethnos (minzoku ) to the state that ruled it in an ostensibly timeless relation. The system of rule was presented as wholly specific to the national culture; ideas that challenged the political system became threats to the national/ethnic identity of Japan. Under the auspices of modern education, from the imperial university to the elementary school; of the army and reserve organizations; and through untold private expressions, this consciousness permeated Japanese society. The identification of state and ethnic identity has had decisive consequences for the shape of critical thought on politics and society in Japan throughout the modern era.3
To these formulas, however, must be added an unstable and vital thirdbanki koron*
(ni kessubeshi ), a phrase from the new govern-
ment's Charter Oath of 1868 that might be translated as "all measures [shall be decided by] public discussion."4 What was meant by "public" (ko/oyake*
)? Who was the "public" in the modern Japanese state? How represented in the polity? If the "people" were to be "slighted," where did "public" as the manifest subject of politics ("public discussion") reside? For the eventual victor in the contest over state sovereignty, and for those actually operating the state machinery, "public" equaled official.
Indeed, the term public had, from the time of Japan's first absorption of continental political thought from China (directly and via Korea) been connected with governing authority. Consideration of the meaning of the counterpart terms in classical Chinese political thinking is clearly beyond our purpose here. But it is noteworthy that the oldest layer of meaning attached to the Japanese term oyake*
seems to be that of "sovereign," (imperial) "palace," "court," and "government." Associated with this term were (and are) ideas of impartiality; absence of bias, private intent or interest; joint possession; the realm of common human feeling; and (more recently) society. All told, although oyake can now be understood to refer both to state and to society, history is on the side of those who would identify public with what pertains to governing authority.5 Concretely, we find that in Japan ko*
(ku ) referred to "public" lands and their inhabitants, the former having been declared the property of the imperial family at the time of the Tang-style Taika Reform of 645. It was also a term for the nobility, later for the shogunal authority and daimyo*
. Thus at the end of the Tokugawa period, "public discussion," strictly speaking, referred to the daimyo /court/bakufu councils designed to deal with the regime's deepening crisis. With the Restoration and abolition of the feudal system, of course, "publicness" reverted to the imperial institution and its bureaucratic guardians. In sum, then, we can say that ko/oyake did not emanate from the min the common peoplebut was from the first presumed to inhere in the entities that ruled over them, notwithstanding the more recent ambiguity in the meaning of the term.
We may also approach the "public" from the standpoint of ethics, in view of its association with Confucian conceptions of statecraft. Ko/oyake*
was contrasted to shi/watakushi , denoting private interest or concerns. It was the cardinal sin of the official to mask selfishness with a public faade. It may be worthwhile to point out the constant presence of a countertradition in Chinese ethical thought that, rather than drawing a rigid distinction between the "public" (kong ) and the "private" (si ), or placing the latter in clear subordination to the former, stressed an ideal of government that was invisible, and, implicitly, did nothing to
obstruct popular energy. Particularly relevant here is the fusion of this insight with the Spencerian notions we find in the writings of Yan Fu (18531921), Liang Qichao (18731929), and other late Qing reformist thinkers. In their work, the idea emerges that the energy of the min gives life to the larger, nonofficial "public" sphere, which might now be called "society." It was from this sphere, Yan Fu insisted, that the state derives its true strength. Yan Fu, of course, treated Spencer's Victorian "Old Liberalism" as a prescription for the state. It was as a formula for building a powerful state that he cherished the thesis of continuity between popular energy and national might.6
The irruption of Western ideas into Chinese political and ethical discourse, then, did not render the multiform deposit of tradition forever irrelevant. Neither did this hold in Japan. Indeed, the state builders and imperial myth makers of early Meiji, having prevented the colonial fragmentation of their country, were able to set about their task with far greater confidence of legitimacy than their counterparts in post-Taiping China. The official disestablishment of the four traditional statuses of Tokugawa societywarrior, peasant, artisan, merchantand legal equalization of the populace as imperial subjects did more than lay the infrastructure of national identity. It created a "public world" not necessarily coterminous with imperial subjecthood as officially defined .7 Indeed, Fukuzawa Yukichi (18351901), however much he went on to become a booster and apologist for the imperialist policies of the Meiji government, saw in this creation the true significance of the "revolutionary Restoration." Although his conclusion (at the time of the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement) that the people were too immature to assume a direct hand in their governance led him into the quasireactionary camp, Fukuzawa's valorization of a differentiated society of individualsconcretely, of middle-class property holdersremained a key alternative to the presumptive disparagement of "popular" (= individual) interest found in the kanson minpi formula. He had argued in Gakumon no susume (An encouragement of learning, 1872) that scholars should not seek government postsofficial statusbut should enhance their own personal independence, and promote that of the nation, from an "outside" (zaiya ) position. Finally, Fukuzawa's own refusal to take any official position speaks to his conviction that real vitality lay outside the state. Fukuzawa's choice must also be understood in the context of the disbanding in 1875 of the Meirokusha, the high-level society for public discussion that was the very emblem of the Meiji Enlightenment. The Meirokusha, it will be recalled, faced a choice be-
tween publication of its journal under new, emasculating press laws or its dissolution as a body. After some debate, it chose the latter. For a brief period, then, "publicness" had remained undifferentiated. The publicists of the Meirokusha confidently proposed; the government, including some of their number, disposed. But this situation could not last once the state, pleading raison d'tat , began to erect barriers between the two spheres.8
I discuss Fukuzawa only to suggest that in the early Meiji years a new discourse arose around the notion of a nonofficial public sphere of action based on the legitimate worldview of individuals and groups in, and as constituting, society. We may recognize in a number of Tokugawa thinkers the streams that fed this discourse: in the separation of public and private realms that, as Maruyama Masao argued, began with Ogyu Sorai*
; in Ito Jinsai*
, with his "vitalist" celebration of individual energy; in the widely shared discussion during the late Tokugawa period of "practical studies" (jitsugaku ) as the concern of the man of "merit" or "talent" regardless of status (within the warrior class). (We must be content to suggest, rather than prove, any such genealogy.) The point is that the post-Restoration years, quite apart from the eclectic designs of the founders of the Meiji regime, saw the creation of the intellectual and social space for a new public discourse.9
Indeed, there were other alternatives besides Fukuzawa's middle-class public. Irwin Scheiner's study of Protestant converts among former samurai has shown that transcendent conscience, rather than property ownership, could define a basis for social action, criticism, and solidarity that was independent ofbut did not rejectnational identity.10 We may point to a third alternative, one that has remained in undeserved obscurity. This is the "communitarian" public reconstructed by Irokawa Daikichi and other historians of the minshushi*
(people's history) school. With origins in late Tokugawa peasant solidarism, this communitarian public saw expression, for example, in "underground" discussions of a proposed constitution for the new state drawn up by the local activist Chiba Takusaburo*
in the Tama district, west of modern Tokyo. This and other grass-roots proposals helped to shape the ideology of the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement, the struggle against which compelled the leadership to protect itself and the state via the illiberal "granted constitution" of 1889. Irokawa has shown how official hostility to these innovative and democratic "outsider" proposals for the political direction of the country issued in the multifaceted, but hegemonic, imperial orthodoxy of the years after 1890.11
As Fukuzawa himself feared, the "undue preponderance of authority" (kenryoku no hencho*
) in the government, especially after the Prussian option was taken in matters of sovereignty and state administration, worked like an albatross, stunting the growth of public consciousness, and forcing it into expression as a self-serving "nationalist" privatism: one cannot but be struck, for example, by the constant refrain of industrialists, through the 1940smany from wealthy peasant families finally liberated from inhibiting status restrictionsthat all their efforts were aimed at "serving the nation."12 The success ethic of risshin shusse indeed equated self- and national aggrandizement. Even at their most acquisitive, however, Japanese would-be followers of Guizot's adviceenrichissez-vous !could not conceive of enrichment at the expense of the nation. Call this hypocrisyas it appeared to many critics then and nowthe point is that the compulsion to identify private and national benefit was in part the legacy of Meiji's "revolution from above": the founders had amassed great prestige by creating, through autocratic means, an independent state at a time when (as it appeared) permanently debilitating subservience to the West was equally possible. An "undue preponderance of authority" thus persisted, producing a catalogue of apparently unapologetic factionalism and greed by those in and near power. The idea that some structural, systemic problem of political economy was at work in the seeming selfishness of bureaucracy lay unexamined until, with the advance of industrialization, a socialist critique developed in the 1890s. Once established, it remains to add, this critique represented a realm beyond the pale of official tolerance, and the government sought with extreme prejudice to bring its adherents to heel.13
The state, then, sought to bind the "public" to itself, along with the authority to define the identity and values of its subjects. The centripetal force of this identification was most evident among bureaucrats, where personal, official, and national identity were intertwined with a powerful sense of missionto civilize the people, to acquire learning for the sake of the nation, to raise Japan's status in the world.14 It is not difficult to imagine that social status and prerogative over "outsiders" went hand-in-hand with this attitude. Criticism of status abuses, by the same token, had to confront this interlocking set of identities. As we have seen, one method was to posit another valid realmindividual/social good or interest, conscience, preexisting solidaritiesas a basis of criticism and counterideal. These "outsider" publics shared a common task: to disengage private and official from the circular logic of attacks on
"selfishness" and create from them a sphere of values, and action, outside the state. The "public," therefore, was not something wholly separate from the state, or vice versa. Rather, "public" affairs entailed conflict and compromise with official and truly private interest. But the end public action served was different from these two. Publicness in practice partook of official and private bodies, but was coterminous with neither.
We must also give attention to a powerful variant of the "outside" critique. This we might call that of the "imperial" public. From this standpoint, an unfeeling and despotic bureaucracy had grown so privatized that the emperor's deep concern for his putative children was denied expression. The dominance of officialdom was a fact of life in Japanese politics. When the parties came into the ascendant at a later time, the same critique held. Only direct communication between sovereign and subject could ensure that the beneficent will of the monarch would be given voice.
Appeal to a charismatic emperor was a tactic available to a panoply of critics across the ideological spectrum and throughout the imperial period. Early in the Meiji period, disaffected loyalists such as Saigo Takamori*
and Eto Shinpei*
had raised armies against the new government in the emperor's name. Fukuzawa, while more accepting of the status quo, had seen in the sovereign a harmonizing cultural center and focus of loyalty outside the state. And he emphasized the emperor's potential "usefulness" in promoting moral and cultural progress, proposing in a number of editorials in Jiji shinpo*
that the imperial house ought to be provided with resources for supporting excellence among the people.15 In formulating his ideologically eclectic minponshugi , the political theorist, journalist, and sometime activist Yoshino Sakuzo*
(18781933) treated the emperor's will as the ultimate justification for a vast broadening of the franchise. Finally, the radical antiparliamentarian agrarianist Gondo Seikyo*
(18681938) called for a virtually osmotic relation of emperor to subject in a number of influential essays and tracts, among them Komin jichi no hongi*
(Cardinal principles of autonomy under the emperor, 1919) and Kunmin kyoji ron*
(On joint rule by sovereign and people, 1932). The "Young Officers" of the 1930s who attacked "evil officials around the throne" (kunsoku no kan ), therefore, represented only the most extreme form of appeal to the "imperial" public.
In contrast to other "outsider" critiques based on individual interest or consciencehere we exclude revolutionary, hence heretical, ideologiesthe appeals to "imperial" publicness sought to make use of the
specificity of ethnic identity as a means to break the official monopoly on proximity to the source of that identity, the emperor. But because of their explicit particularism, such appeals were, compared to other "outsider" approaches, much more readily coopted by the state. Such would seem to be the import, for example, of Kano Masanao's analysis of autonomous local youth, religious, and cultural organizations, which as they came under state sponsorship were quickly disabused of their anti-bureaucratic thrust.16 The same may be said of post-Taisho*
political movements with strongly anticapitalist elements in their radical agrarian and/or emperorist programs. Since such movements had ties to the lower echelons of the army officer corps, their fates were often as violent as the means they chose to eliminate obstructions between emperor and people. In the long run, however, the radical critique was simply tamed: how else explain Konoe Fumimaro's proclamation in 1940 of a "New Order" whose program consisted of "putting into practice the Way of the Subject"?17
It would be wrong, therefore, to imagine that the public types outlined above represented from the first clear-cut, status-bound ideological products. Their fluidity was their greatest virtue. The government came only gradually and by twists and turns to assume its monopoly on defining national identity. Still, there can be no question that the promulgation of the Constitution, Education Rescript, Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, and other hortatory edicts, represents the crystalization of an enabling ideology that, combined with the proven power of official bureaucracy, stamped Japanese political evolution with a heavily statist character.
The ideological field, to put it differently, was valenced. Certainly there was competition among official elites (oligarchs, ministries, the armed services, Diet, peerage, and so on) for the right to use the imperial name, to "assist the throne" from a position of greatest proximity. Nor can we ignore the voice of the public outsider as it implicitly claimed legitimacy for itself through the act of speakingin the press, journals, local assemblies, political meetings, and in countless informal ways. In the end, however, one must consider the lesson of the Meiji Constitution itself: it may be true, as Joseph Pittau has argued, that the "hybrid constitutional monarchy" of Meiji was ambiguous enough to allow a "liberal" reading, once the political conditions for it had developed with the passing of the genro*
.18 In theory, however, this liberalism was highly circumscribed, and in practice it had to live and grow in the interstices of the imperial system rather than direct its operation. The parties, for ex-
ample, never overcame the taint of private factionalism attached to the word party (to*
) itself; and their voluntary dissolution in 1940, following upon a decade of declining influence, speaks eloquently to this reality. And if this was the case with the established partiesas opposed to the democratic movementhow much more heavily must the sanctions against separateness have weighed upon principled dissenters from the status quo? A party qua party could not assist the throne. Its separate identity had to be denied first.
We have already seen that economic activity had to be justified in terms of its "service to the nation," lest it be condemned as "individualistic." (Here, to digress briefly, we must note that individualism itself refers to a kind of corporate self-seeking rather than to any preference for solitary activity.19 It is for this reason that attacks on liberalism often took the heads of giant zaibatsu as their target, despite the fact that, objectively speaking, they were furthering capital accumulation to an unprecedented degree.)
But those who sought to make Japanese politics more representative had to face more than the immediate problem of wresting authority away from jealous bureaucratic factions and a hostile military; they had somehow to confront an intensely competitive society that tended to value qualification, status, and precedent over institutional innovation and experiment. And it is with that society and its values, as these bear on the problem of the public, that we must concern ourselves now.
Bureaucratic capitalism in Japan gave rise to a secular hierarchy in which unaffiliated, or "free," activity was in general held to be of less value than specialized work performed within a recognized organization, with service in the official bureaucracy assuming pride of place. This preference for affiliation and conformity, for "riding the rails of routine,"20 bedeviled attempts to "liberalize" the empire, politically, socially, and intellectually.
That government service should occupy the top rungs of this hierarchy is not surprising when one considers the long supremacy of the samurai-bureaucrat under the Tokugawa system, and the resulting cult of public authority. ("Justice comes from the august authorities"Seigi wa okami yori was the watchword.) To this add the continued role of the state in overseeing the industrialization of the country and protecting it from external harm. Clearly this is a circumstance that bore on the social experience, perspective, and life choices of educated persons under the empire (though not, as I shall argue, in any rigid, deterministic way).
It is a matter of record that the staff of the empire and business world eventually proved unable to provide positions for all the bright young men who emerged, beginning in the late Meiji years, from the higher schools and private and imperial universities. As Maruyama Masao observes, "the rapidity of the establishment of higher education exceeded that of the industrialization of Japanese capitalism."21 The competition for available posts was as intense as the school-inculcated ambition that drove it. An unhealthy commingling of "two contradictory principles of competition and status" soon transformed the search for talent into an exercise in formalism: no academic pedigree, no official appointment. Private bureaucracies in industry, business, and medicine followed this example. And as this formalism combined with an already utilitarian and compartmentalized approach to higher education, a prototype generation of "experts"defined as such by their academic pedigreesemerged from the classrooms of late Meiji academe. Very quickly, Japan movedas the journalist and historical essayist Yamaji Aizan put it in 1910from the "age of the [Restoration] hero . . . to the age of the student [shosei ] . . . to the age of the specialist." Indeed, Maruyama asserts, "it is no exaggeration to say that the universally infamous tendency toward compartmentalization and sectionalism that everywhere accompanies specialization was in Japan very nearly the 'original sin' of modernization itself."22
Possession of academic pedigree, then, led for the fortunate to a position in the bureaucratic elite, official or private. The "experts" were organization men, the "insiders" of the empire. And it was would-be organization men who, among others, fed the "intelligentsia" created by the shortfall of positions in the bureaucratic apparatus of the late Meiji era. But the contemporary critique of the "success" ethic, it must be stressed, was more than sour grapes. It is not to be reduced to a by-product of unemployment. Rather, derailed or frustrated careers often served as the occasion for a radical and profound questioning of personal ambition, and of the unforgiving values of contemporary Japanese capitalism as well. Beyond this, we must remember that the social approbation and deference that were the nominal rewards of insideness23 were matched, for some who chose outsideness, by freedom of movement and expression; a sense, perhaps, of unencumbered self-determination and spontaneity. This is certainly the impression one gains from the exuberant satire and flamboyant autobiographical writings of journalists such as Miyatake Gaikotsu and Yamazaki Kesaya. Indeed, Miyatake's autobi-
ography bears the provocative title I Am a Dangerous Individual (Yo wa kiken jinbutsu nari )!24
Described solely in occupational terms, the public man as insider was a would-be or actual organization man (including academics, researchers, and doctors at large institutions). What then was an outsider? Again, I refer to occupation; I shall try shortly to show how we may relate occupationprofessional and social beingto consciousness. As Maruyama Masao has suggested in his typology of Japanese intellectuals, outsider would refer to members of "private sector professions" such as "independent scholars and critics, physicians in private practice, and attorneys."25 We may also describe as outsiders journalists, artists, creative writers, and perhaps (paradoxically!) public school teachers and the operators of small private schools (juku ). Broadly speaking, it is clear that insiders would by definition belong to large organizations and occupy (at least potentially) upper-level positions within them; outsiders would perforce work in smaller scale, or socially suspect, organizations such as labor unions. They would also enjoy less security or regularity of affiliation and more mobility, voluntary or otherwise.
Clearly, the public worlds of the insider and outsider impinged upon each other constantly. Students by definition remained still undifferentiated in their publicness. The journalist reported and editorialized on the activities of the bureaucrat and sometimes sought his patronage. The bureaucrat cultivated, tolerated, and manipulated or harassed the journalist as his authority and interests dictated. Circumstances of birth and background alone might neither provide safe passage to insideness nor bar the entrance to it. Nor did separation mean mutual unawareness and unconcern or prevent informal contact. But that did not change the fact that by the middle years of the Meiji era, walls had grown up between "inside" and "outside" that, once in place, did much to determine how, and among whom, Japanese from then on lived their public lives. The insider enjoyed prestige, status, and public trust inaccessible to the outsider. The outsider might win fame, but any deference paid would be conditional and specific to his personal achievement. Unlike the insider, he could not count on respect being paid by virtue of title or affiliation; quite the contrary. Exceptions such as Soseki*
or Ogai*
aside, the independent writer, the private scholarin sum, the "free floater"treated, and was treated by, the wider public world in a manner different to the insider; this solely on account, not of his intellectual ability or particular "calling," but of the circumstances in which he worked.
The two linked, yet distinct, public worlds outlined here provided fertile ground for self-conscious reflection, critique, and attempts at transformation by those whose lives were shaped by, and helped to shape, those worlds. In other words, the public world produced its own ideologues and ideologies. These intellectual specialists sought to interpret and guide the development of the public sphere, of public discourse, in imperial Japan. It is to such individuals that I have given the name public men . As intellectuals, they were "professionally committed to the independent and deliberate use of the word"26 and to its transmission through largely impersonal means to audiences outside their own personal knowledge and immediate social milieu. This audience included a vastly expanding newspaper and book readership, especially among the urban middle classes, professionals, lower-level white-collar workers, business people, and students. It is obvious, however, that particularly after the second decade of the twentieth century, the audience for public questions was expanding beyond the urban middle class to include certain strata of the working class, and also, especially at the left end of the spectrum, crossing gender lines. (In this connection we may remark that public women and women's issues remained almost exclusively "outside," while labor and agrarian issues were taken up more broadly.)
The point is simply that the public world under discussion here was no longer one in which an undifferentiated and tiny number of enlighteners, such as the members of the Meirokusha, could gather to debate the issues. The growth of the state, of the industrial economy and working population, and powerful trends toward democracy all made this impossible. Public men occupied a valenced ideological field: a bureaucrat (including an academic bureaucrat) was better because he knew better. He had the academic pedigree and the proximity to power to prove it. This reflected the historical legacy of Tokugawa bureaucratism and status hierarchy, as well as the urgency of late capitalist development.
How are we to relate this bit of sociology to the actual intellectual content of public work? We may speak, I think, of public discourse in imperial Japan as being hegemonized by the state. The state controlled the boundaries of legality in public discourse by administrative, judicial, and legislative means. Moreover, it sought actively to define national values and identity; specifically to wed a patriarchal and corporate concept of family and society, an intensely competitive meritocracy, and an ethic of national service in the promotion of domestic capitalism and
enhanced power and status abroad. As Japan entered the twentieth century, and the membership of the ruling strata of society shifted and expanded, the dissonances and conflicts of logic and interest inherent in the secular hierarchy began to tell on the system. The "rules of the game" also changed, in that "democracy" emerged as a tolerable point of contention among public men, if such contention would keep "socialism" at bay. Under these conditions, therefore, it became easier rather than otherwise to perceive where the real danger lay: in systems of thought and organizations that either questioned the sanctity of private property (that is, capitalism) or challenged the "imperial rule"the constitutional system. An attack on either or both became heresy; the heretic ceased to be Japanese. Viewed in a negative sense (what they were not or tried not to be), public men sought not to be heretics. Sometimes they failed, often with devastating personal consequences. They also sought not to be sycophants. Here, too, they sometimes failed. The significance of the insider/outsider distinction in this context may be understood in this way: from the point of view of the state, an outsider was further from the locus of valuethe emperor and the state that protected the kokutai than an insider, and perhaps more susceptible to heretical claims. The ideological offenses of outsiders were thus less tolerable, because they were more dangerous: with less status to lose, politically dissident outsiders were far more prone to organize. On the other hand, outsiders could legitimately "withdraw" into (apparently innocuous) private, aesthetic concerns more easily than insiders, who were, ideologically speaking, "on call" all the time. And while being "on call" in fact permitted the insider greater access to "dangerous thought" (know your enemy), the insider also had status and organizational integrity to protect.
Short of a conscious decision for heresy, then, the insider might have experienced a greater sense of intellectual restriction in his public work. In return, to bring the discussion full circle, his ideological offenses were not always punished with the severity encountered by outsiders. Such were the rewards of insideness. In either case, insideness or outsideness, the state's own complex ideology, with its concomitant operating definition of heresy, became a reference point for public men as they made the personal, political, and intellectual choices that shaped their lives. Insideness and outsideness both created and reflected the choices they made.
Let us pass now to a consideration of the "positive" attributes of publicnessthat is, those features public men sought to possess and en-
hance. Earlier it was noted that the public world of late Meiji Japan was far different than that of the immediate post-Restoration years. In another sense, however, we find an interesting continuity in what we may call the "informal," albeit crucial, criteria for public work.
Broadly speaking, all public men, whether insider or outsider, official or nonofficial, shared two features. The first is the nationalist mentality, perspective, and rhetoric of the entire periodfrom Meiji onthat we have been discussing. All felt that it was their duty to "bear the fate of the nation on their shoulders." This attitude, as Maruyama Masao pointed out long ago, was simply the "common sense" of Meiji Japan.27 A public man felt it his duty to mold the consciousness of his audience in accordance with a public ideal. That ideal, of necessity, reflected the circumstances of its production. Insider public men tended to think of the state they served as (ideally) the proper means to the realization of "publicness"the harmonious and organic unity of state and nation. They did not accept the view that the state was the mere instrument of a ruling class, but believed that it could transcend the conflicting interests of "civil society," and was indeed the only conceivable means to overcome the inherently corrosive tendencies of individualism, particularly in the economic sphere. Some went further, realizing that the officials of the state itself engaged in self-aggrandizement and private factionalism, and harbored a counterproductive turf mentality. The role and posture of the armed services were especially, but not solely, indicative of such evils. The point is that an insideras the example of Nanbara Shigeru will showneed not be a supine agent of class or factional interest. This does not mean that the elitism of bureaucratic thinking, even among idealists, did not remain salient, or that certain assumptions about modes of expression and behavior did not tend to prevail among them. One could always spot the official.
Outsiders, as we saw apropos of Fukuzawa and other critics, held to a public ideal that took some other substrate as prior to the state. And they believed that it was necessary to defend this substrate from state encroachment for that ideal to be realized. There were of course outsiders who were more sympathetic to the statenotably moderate labor movement activists who preferred to deal with capital through the state rather than directly. And there were insiders, such as Minobe Tatsukichi and Yoshino Sakuzo*
, who did not automatically reject the idea that there ought to be popular checks on state authority. By and large, however, it is on the question of the proper role of the state vis--vis
society, the nation, or the people, that substantive distinction between the two types of public men rests.
At no point did public men cease to be concerned that their work contribute to the national enlightenment. But as industrialization advanced, along with the power and complexity of the state, the meanings of both national and enlightenment shifted. In the late Meiji period, and increasingly as Marxism and other socialist thought made its influence felt among educated strata, we begin to find that the "nation" ceases to be simply an unexamined point of departure and becomes for some public men a problem in itself. Why, they asked, had Japan's development taken the course it had? Was it not perhaps "distorted" in some fashionin favor of the official, the party man, the industrialist and financier, the absentee landlord? And was it not time for "enlightenment" to issue more directly in social reform, aimed not so much at uprooting the "absurd customs and evil practices" of Tokugawa feudalism as at breaking up the entrenched economic and bureaucratic interests that dominated modern society? In posing these questions, a minority of public men on the inside drew closer to those outside, and both flirted more openly with heresy. In a sense this became necessary as the moral and literary critique of "success" was joined by the conceptually more rigorous and radical critique of political economy embodied in Marxism. This was to prove an unstable combination, and the nationalist, humanist, and spiritual concerns of earlier critics soon were separated from the internationalism of class struggle. But in another sense, the nationalist mentalitythe unwillingness to be separated from the nationreemerged in the problem of tenko*
(ideological apostasy from the left) in the 1930s. The "nation-as-problem" approach never entirely disappeared, however, even during the heyday of ultranationalism. Instead, it became the key component of the "modernist" social criticism that emerged from the interwar generation of public men represented, for example, by Maruyama Masao, the economic historian Otsuka Hisao*
(1907), the sociologist Fukutake Tadashi (1914), and others. Most of these men, whose work I shall discuss in the conclusion, were the products of "insider" education, and spent the bulk of their careers in national universities as luminaries of the postwar enlightenment.28
The second shared feature also relates to the role of enlightener. In modern Japan this profession has entailed familiarity with the ideals, symbols, and (less so) the actual conditions of the "West," past and contemporary. The more education and advanced training one had in higher
school, university, and beyond, the more expert one became. (By this advanced stage, intellectual work in one's specialty would have become both habit and personal need, since it was in large part the single most important component in self-definition. For the insider, where work was undertaken was as important as its content.) Expertise, however, was for the public man more than a matter of keeping up with the literature in a limited area of specialization. Indeed, expertise brought with it the duty to interpret the intellectual, even spiritual, needs of Japan, and to contribute to the enlightenment of those not exposed directly to the influence of "Western" thought. This had been the case with the yogakusha*
the late Tokugawa "scholars of Western learning" who found their great champion in Fukuzawa. Who better than the independent yogakusha , Fukuzawa's Gakumon no susume asked, to lead the way to civilization? Those who later posed this question revised it to emphasize official over private training, but the ethos of publicness was shared sufficiently to distinguish the public man, for example, from the scientific technician. In certain fields and individuals, this distinction, too, was lost. This overlap was most pronounced among the "technical intelligentsia" (gijutsu interi ). Here we may take Yoshino Shinji (18881971)younger brother of Sakuzo*
and his protg Kishi Nobusuke (18961987) to be representative. As pioneers of Japan's "industrial policy" in the late 1920s and as members of the heavily bureaucratic Kokuikai (National Prestige Maintenance Association), Yoshino and Kishi aspired to a "reform [henkaku ] of the whole character of society" through the subordination of private interest to that of the "national economy." This effort was to follow a pattern of "leadership and assistance" in which technocrats were to occupy the former position. It is to be noted that as the policies of Yoshino and company were adopted, strong lateral ties were formed with sympathetic figures in the military, private industry, academia, and journalism, and that technocracy as a concept and a calling appealed to public men on both the left and the right. The bureaucratic presence, however, remained dominant. The aspiration to leadershipcontrolwas nurtured by a philosophy of the technocrat as a "new man" who united "technology" (gijutsu ) and "psychology" (shinjutsu ) in his personality. The technocrat, in this vision, was a shi (that is, a samurai) who embodied the Will zum Kulturleben .29 To coin a phrase, expertise oblige .
Let us summarize. The West never ceased to be the bearer of models of power and of culture to modern Japan. But, as we have seen, the development of national institutions for the training of experts and the
dissemination of their knowledge brought with it a status distinction between insider and outsider among experts in public questions. The ramifications of this distinction will become clear in the studies that follow. But we need to bear in mind that, at least by the 1890s, the distinction among such experts, as among insider and outsider in society as a whole, was deeply and keenly felt.
At the same time, public men did share the two broad features of national outlook and expertise in "imported" knowledge. To this extent, both insider and outsider belonged to what C. Wright Mills called the "cultural apparatus" of their country,30 an apparatus that was a product of the middle and late Meiji era. We may offer the following constellation of features as a definition of the public men under study here: (a) intellectuals concernedthough not exclusivelywith (b) the public sphere, which as defined earlier, includes what Ralf Dahrendorf calls "representative" and "legitimative" activities, and contributes to the "reservoir of possible futures,"31 who are (c) expert in the knowledge of "Western" ideas and concepts relating to their concern, and (d) perform the role of "enlightener" either from a high status position "inside" the state (that of professor in an imperial university) or "outside" it (as a journalist, for example, on a major newspaper or periodical).
Given these two public types, how did social position and the content of public work interact? How and when was the meaning of public defined, and how did it evolve? How did public men represent their activities? What purposes did they claim to serve? Did they identify more with the state? Nation? Society? How did these identities develop? To what action did they lead? How, in sum, did public men come to terms with the valenced ideological field within which public discourse was conducted in imperial Japan?
The preceding definition, rough though it is, will have to set the stage for a brief characterization of what the contemporary phrase called "the crisis of the state" of the early Showa*
period (192545).32 It is with this crisis in mind that this study examines the lives and work of its subjects, and tries to answer the questions posed above. The significance of this period should need no explanation, as its broad features are only too well known: the collapse of parliamentary government coinciding with Japan's military expansion into Manchuria, China, and finally Indochina; the attempt in domestic politics to mobilize the population for war under the aegis of a failed quasi-totalitarian "new order"; world war, loss within two years of an immense empire, stupendous destruction by conventional and atomic weaponry used on major cities; abject
defeat; occupation and the disestablishment of the imperial system. How did Japanese public men act and react under these conditions of unexampled and convulsive change? How did they adjust to the drastic eruption of their country onto the world stage and its destruction by the West? What did it mean to be Japanese in 1925? In 1935? In 1945? Who decided? Who set the terms of discourse? These are some of the questions posed by the Showa*
crisis.
Yet what was the internal crisis? How did it develop? The early Showa period brought a multifaceted crisis, involving both the resolution of long-standing tensions and the creation of new and explosive precedents.33 Whatever the continuities with earlier periods, "something happened" between 1925 and (roughly) 1932 that sets the entire period apart, both from the years before it, and from those after 1945.
The first year of Showa began with the coordinated enactment of universal male suffrage on the one hand, and the Peace Preservation Law (Chian iji ho*
) on the other. The former ratified attempts since the beginning of the Taisho*
period to broaden the franchise, made in recognition of the vastly expanded number of industrial workers, and the spread of education and literacy. The latter defined the boundary between heresy and acceptability in political behavior: any expression of, or organization for the purpose of expressing, opposition to the kokutai as officially defined, or to the system of private property, fell outside the pale of orthodoxy. This measure also had its ancestors, from the late Meiji anti-socialist legislation of 1900 to more immediate precedents in the form of procedural changes in the Justice Ministry's approach to ideological offenders. Both, in short, grew out of developments during the Taisho years.
For our purposes, "Taisho" may be viewed as two linked periods, with the crucial fulcrum at 191718. Prior to this date, public discourse was largely institutional. Public men, notably Minobe Tatsukichi and Yoshino Sakuzo*
, tried to theorize a redefinition of the political community that centered on the political parties (Yoshino put greater emphasis on "democratizing" the system as a whole). The passing of the "founding generation" had made some broadening necessary. The Taisho political crisis, which coincided with the death of the emperor in 1912 and culminated in the emergence of a "two-party" establishment, along with a defiant rebuff of military high-handedness in ministerial appointments, bore this out. Hara Kei's "politics of compromise" ensured that the Seiyukai*
would be allowed to form the cabinet in exchange for its promise to promote government legislation in the Diet. But even though the parties were brought into a more active governing role, the more
deeply rooted discontent of the nationalized masses lay unanswered.34 The emergence of formal party government after 1918 came only when the masses, inspired by the Russian revolution of 1917 and driven to the limits of physical endurance by the huge inflation of the war years, erupted in midsummer in the so-called "Rice Riots" that brought down the "transcendental" cabinet of Terauchi Masatake. Earlier popular unrest notwithstanding, it was the events of 191718 that introduced the concept of "society" into public discourse all across the political spectrum, and into the day-to-day workings of government. The late Taisho*
period saw the expansion of education at all levels, the decentralization of the imperial universities, government involvement in conciliation of labor disputes, the legalization of certain unions, and so forth. The combination, then, of institutional reform and the forceful impingement of society onto politics created the long-term conditions for reaction, and hence for the "crisis of the state" that was to come. In this context, enfranchisement was, as Kato Komei*
phrased it, an inevitable "leap into the dark," and the Peace Preservation Law the elite's insurance policy against an organized revolutionary threat. I shall have occasion further on to discuss the government's decimation of the left and its consequences.
Fear of the left, however, only reflected the economic conditions that had given dissent legitimacy. Economic crises, beginning with the postwar "bust" after 1918, a major financial collapse in 1927, and the devastating depression of 192932, alienated Japan's everyday people, not, to be sure, sufficiently to turn them en masse to revolution, but enough to swell the ranks of the many proletarian parties, however briefly. But the real significance of this growth lay in the impetus it gave to the right wing, both old-line bureaucratic and military forces unreconciled to the Taisho redefinition and their handmaidens on the newer anticommunist, pseudosocialist "mass" right.
For these groups, all the ills of the status quoits openly pork-barrel approach to public policy, inability to come to grips with the maldistribution of national wealth (especially its tolerance of rural poverty and relative overpopulation), "weak-kneed" foreign policy, and general subservience to the capitalist Anglo-American powerscould be attributed to the "liberal-genro*
-party bloc." This bloc had "usurped" traditional authority to the detriment of the masses and of Japan's national strength. Furthermore, it had allies in the bureaucracy and its "chief priests" in the imperial universities. Liberalism, in sum, was synonymous with economic ruin for the little man, overpopulation and rural poverty, weakness and humiliation abroad. And in due course, "liber-
alism" as voodoo doll, and as umbrella term for the institutional expansion of the ruling elite and broadening of the political community, was rejected, and decisively so.35 However, this rejection, at least in its radical component, relied on the very broadening it decried. As against the "cosmopolitan" appeal of the proletarian parties of the left, the radical, "mass" rightthe fringes of the "imperial" publicappealed to the masses as Japanese, and to the emperor on their behalf.
A drastic "renovation" was called for, a "Showa*
Restoration." This restoration, admittedly, had as many meanings as proponents. During the formative years of the crisis, the initiative lay with rebellious junior officers in the army at home, who embarked on a series of unsuccessful but bloody attempts at coup d'tat, and above all with the Kwantung Army, which unlike its domestic counterparts, quite successfully set the future direction of Japan's foreign policy by overrunning Manchuria in 1931. Having demonstrated the weakness, and won the acquiescence, of the government, the military was in a position to compel Japan's reoientation from diplomatic cooperation to a regionalist power-bloc approach to foreign relations. And it should not be thought that the whole civilian establishment was unhappy with this rejection of internationalism, any more than it had been with the suppression of the democratic movement at home.
However, the "crisis of the state" was not resolved with the rise of the military (or by its reintegration after 1936). Rather, the state remained in crisis because of that ascendancy. For although party power per se had ebbed in the early 1930s, no new political actor had come to the fore with strength sufficient to control all the elementsin the military, industry and finance, the parties, peerage, and bureaucracythat had ranged themselves to the "right" in the Taisho*
rearrangement. The end of party government was the fulcrum, not the conclusion, of the crisis. For other vestiges of liberalism remained subject to attack by "renovationist" forces in sometime alliance with segments of the bureaucracy and peerage. A series of coup attempts and assassinations of political and business leaders by the radical front of young officers and "outsider" civilian conspirators was only the raw and violent edge of antipluralist, antiparliamentary reaction. But it was this same general movement in Japanese politics that brought about the rejection of Minobe's "organ theory" of stateto be discussed belowand a purge in the late 1930s of noted liberal critics of fascism and Japan's China policy.
The key date, it would seem, in the development of reaction into a "positive" program was 193637. These years saw the defeat and ab-
sorption of the radical renovationist arm of the military, followed by the government's definitive commitment to an expanded war in China, and alliance with Germany. After this date the government, especially under Konoe Fumimaro, could focus its appeal to the nation on the need to "resolve" the situation in China. This was to mean the mobilization of all national resources, military, technological, capital, and ideological, in an effort to create a regional power bloc in East Asia with Japan at its core as an "advanced national defense state."
It is true, of course, that state authority remained fragmented. Elites, including party men, all competed for a role in the organization and control of the coming new order. Konoe's attempt to build a new, statedirected mass "assistance" organization to parallel the dirigist reintegration of the economy succeeded only in reducing constitutional government to a "mangled caricature."36 Konoe's foreign policy meanwhile set in motion a chain of events that led Japan into world war. Nevertheless, national mobilization, "assistance" politics, and war itself put an end to the earlier "crisis of the state." After 1937 there was no more open internecine strife. The price of its solution was, of course, total war and total defeat.
Let us return now to the problem of how public men acted and reacted during the "crisis of the state" and the subsequent total war. Between 1931 and 1940 Japan's ideological orientation also shifted, in ways analogous to the overlapping of reaction and redirection that had marked the politics of the period. And with similar results: broad, surface conformity to the generally totalitarian tenor of the regime reproduced itself in public discussion of social and political thought.
Thus as demokurashii yielded to yokusan ("assistance" of imperial rule) in political practice, societythe "discovery" of late Taisho*
thinkersyielded to the minzoku , or nation. The individual came to mean in political thought what the party meant in politics: a selfish center of interest and a hoarder of power. Materialistic Anglo-Saxon individualism was exposedand not only on the radical rightas the great abettor of Bolshevism. Communitarian harmony became the desideratum, the ideal of all orthodox political thought, whether it wore Japanist or pseudo-Marxist dress. Thus the first decade of the Showa*
period brought not only a state crisis but a broad cultural struggle.37
Among the intellectual elite, public insiders and outsiders of status, the ingrained habits of thought and critical method that made them "ex-
perts" in imported knowledge also had to compete with the terrific pressure to conform to the antiliberal tendencies in national politics. Indeed, to an extent, conformity was a presumed concomitant of national/public status. But, just as in politics, an internal tension (between expertise and status) persisted, despite the totalitarian machinations of the regime. It must at the same time be borne in mind that however "pluralist" the system was in its institutional makeup, it was decidedly not so in its values. Under a yokusan -style regime, one did not have the right to say no to the system openly, for how could one "assist" that which one doubted or questioned? It was not the right of an individual to make such a judgment. One did have the freedom, given a suitable highstatus environment such as a university, to make one's yes mean something as close to no as ingenuity and conviction would permit. Only a very few, whose resistance was grounded in an explicitly cosmopolitan or transcendent ideology, dared to utter a no that was no. Examples include non-apostate Communists; pacifist Christians, such as Yanaihara Tadao; Akashi Junzo*
and other members of the Jehovah's Witnesses; and certain Buddhists, such as Seno Giro*
. But in terms of insiders as an unorganized body, those who doubted relied on what E. M. Forster called "the slighter gestures of dissent"individual, sanity-preserving declarations of opposition. And this only at the risk of accusations of hubris and defeatism by others more openly committed to the national purpose, however ill-defined.38 Such "slighter gestures" shaded into, and were outnumbered by, vague, guarded, and unoriginal professions of loyalty, which, thanks to their very ambiguity, were the best protection of integrity and status. Together, these "slighter gestures" and hedged bets of loyalty make up what we may call the "intermediate strategies" for intellectual survival adopted by public men.
But beyond such essentially negative postures, we must also consider the gradations of voluntarypositiveservice. What are we to make of those public men of both types whoin numbers greater than was imagined in the years immediately after the defeathewed to the state? Is their positive service reducible to sheer opportunism, or perhaps to coerced and self-protective enthusiasm? No doubt this is true in part. But we must admit that for many public men, "hewing to the state" represented the cutting edge of ultramodernity. For some academics and journalists, such as those studied recently (from disparate points of view) by Ito Takashi*
, Muroga Sadanobu, Sakai Saburo*
, James Crowley, and Miles Fletcher,39 the "crisis of the state" and war meant a chance to acquire real policy influence; a chance to put into practice ideas that
were the product not of a sudden "ideological apostasy" (tenko*
), but of considerable reflection and personal conviction. There is no gainsaying the sometimes execrable political and intellectual judgment exercised by Japanese public men. But the relevant question is not why did they abandon (an undefined) "liberalism" and/or "individualism"? It is rather what did they hope to achieve through voluntary cooperation and mobilization? What did they think that "policy influence" might actually mean? What, furthermore, was the alternative to state service? And what in general was the circumference of possible postures vis-a-vis the system of ideological mobilizationset by status, personal background, experience, and day-to-day political developments within and involving Japan, as well as by the "objective" social and economic state of the country? Surely the range of action for public men was not unlimited; it is my purpose to show what those limits were, and how public men worked within them.
Mention has already been made of tenko . For early interpreters of Showa*
intellectual history, this meant a sudden and coerced ideological apostasy, and was used to explain the trend, after the mid 1930s, toward state service (or in our terms, toward "crossover" into insideness by public outsiders). The work of Ito*
and others alluded to above has done much to demonstrate the limitations of the "coercion model" of involvement. There is simply too much that cannot be explained without so qualifying and stretching the category of "apostasy" that it borders on uselessness. Specifically, tenko as interpretation rests on the assumption that roughly after 1930, no one should of his own free will have desired to serve the Japanese state or to give his talent to the officially designated national cause. But as I have argued, the nature of the public man's commitment was such as to disallow any total withdrawal from national life; and after the elimination or cooptation of alternative centers of organized public activityopposition political parties, the labor movementthe public man was left all dressed up with no place to go except into the arms of the state, which was the sole repository of legitimate public service. For a public man, finding a way not to serve was the more difficult task.
Granted, then, that public men were predisposed to work within a national framework"national" reflecting relatively stronger or weaker identification with state or with society depending on the individual and the period. In any case, state and society were defined in the light of theories imported from the West, naturalized and manipulated for the purpose of national enlightenment or reform.
The cruder discussions of tenko*
sometimes give the impression that Japanese public men renounced the beliefs of their period of intellectual formation as easily as they changed clothes. To a degree, as Fletcher points out, somethe more superficial thinkersmight have felt it necessary to "digest" one after another "set of Western ideas."40 Admittedly, some cases of tenko to communitarian nationalism and, after 1945, to "democracy," have been quite spectacular. And perhaps, too, some public men shared a tendency to treat ideas not as they related to "actual" conditions of Japanese state and society, but only as they related to each other in the abstract. Such a tendency would certainly explain the apparent ease with which affiliations shifted.
Fletcher's work, however, proves a more important point: that if one looks not only at the content of particular concepts, but at the stated (or unstated) problematic and context, the intellectual reorientation loses its appearance of caprice. The "New Order" theorist Royama Masamichi*
(18951979), for example, urged that the Meiji constitution was better interpreted in the light of the "traditional and historical . . . internal principle" of the "national community" (kokumin kyodotai*
; Volks-gemeinschaft ) rather than of a plurality of institutional claims on the body politic. By arguing that "the fundamental principle in the political formation of the Japanese people inheres in the national polity," Royama*
sought to redefine constitutionalism so as to reflect more intimately "the actual life of the people."41 It takes little imagination to see that his proposed (and tautological) reading both renders illicit any social conflict and justifies, implicitly, the suppression of such conflict in the name of some presumptive harmony. At the same time, the force of factionalism in contemporary Japanese politics was, under the system of collective irresponsibilities enscribed in the constitution, impervious to deterrence. (It was illegal, of course, to seek to amend the constitution.) Royama certainly erred in attempting to promote a fictive harmony to the status of a political principle. But in the context of the void in political thought left by the apparent internal collapse of European parliamentary systems, combined with the sorry performance of the domestic arrangement, his conceptual equipmentnaturalized German state and administrative "science"left him little alternative. In any case, one can see how easily Royama and others, like his young Tokyo University colleague Yabe Teiji, might have found in ideological mobilization a satisfying solution to the demands of status and expertise.
Or take the case of the Asahi shinbun's Ryu Shintaro*
, whose mammoth bestseller Nihon keizai no saihensei (1939) proposed the corpo-
ratist "reorganization of the Japanese economy" along lines pursued in Nazi Germany. This controversial work set the terms for informed discussion of the measures necessary for Japan to "respond effectively to the economic problems caused by the China War." Ryu*
essentially argued that the government ought to create a network of cartels for strategic industries and regions; policy was to be determined by associations made up of industrial managers and representatives of appropriate political, especially bureaucratic, entities. Underlying this effort, Ryu urged, a "new economic ethic" based on the goals of the "national community" rather than individual (enterprise) profit had to be inculcated; to give this ethic bite, Ryu proposed the "separation of capital and management." This would ratify what had already begun to take place in large zaibatsu firms. Family-owned capital had become divorced from daily management of the enterprises with the rise of a new managerial class that did not own stock and hence felt "no responsibility toward capital." Ryu also supported the strengthening of dividend-limiting legislation, and called for government supervision of "surplus profit."
Some critics found Ryu's desire to suppress enterprise profits communistic; others objected to his assertions that "peace industries," rather than munitions, ought to be relied on to drive the economy. Clearly certain interests were threatened by Ryu's proposal, which formed the basis for discussion of economic matters in Konoe Fumimaro's think tank, the Showa Kenkyukai*
. But it is noteworthy that Ryu's ideas were congruent in the main with the dirigism that marked the thinking of Yoshino Shinji and Kishi Nobusuke. The dual features of the "national community" and a technocratic thrust were fully evident in the thinking of all three men.42
A final example points to the convergence of activist thinking on the question of China. By the late 1930s only the myopic could have failed to see that Japan was moving toward a broad-front war on the continent. It comes as little surprise to find, then, that the ideological justification of that aggression engaged a number of prominent thinkers. Among them was the philosopher Miki Kiyoshi (18961945). Miki fused a heavily Lukcsian Marxism; a Heideggerian rhetoric of crisis and authenticity, being and national community; and Nishida Kitaro's*
category of "fundamental experience" into a philosophy of Japan's world-historical role. Vis--vis China, Miki advanced the thesis that Japan's mission was to supersede the Westtemporally as the stage of capitalism was brought to a close through the force of "cooperativism" (kyodoshugi*
) and spatially as Japan's dominance in East Asia was established in place of the ebbing Western tide. For Miki Japan's lan as a
modernizing force was legitimate over and above any claim of Chinese nationalism for control of such processes. Why? Because "cooperativism" worked at home; it was authentic, and rooted, he claimed, in East Asian tradition. Japan was thus repaying a cultural debt to China with the point of a bayonetvery hard currency indeed. Miki sincerely hoped that this phase would soon end. He criticized an exclusively military approach to the resolution of the China problem, asserting that the country "clearly could not be occupied forever."43 By 1942 Miki had had enough of Japan's world-historical role. Disillusioned, he fell silent and resumed contact with former colleagues on the left. Imprisoned for harboring a suspected Communist, Miki died in prison in September 1945, after the surrender but before the release of political prisoners was ordered. A better example of the public man in extremis can hardly be imagined.
Public men like Royama*
and Ryu*
embraced fascist or corporatist theories of political and economic organization because they seemed to suggest solutions to the nearly decade-long, and sometimes violent, crisis of state and polity; to the intractable problems of China policy; and to the question of Japan's position vis--vis a Europe reorganizing itself into power blocs. The ideas of the activist public men mentioned above were unexceptional in their antidemocratic, statist, and dirigist thrustunexceptional both in the Japanese and European contexts. In the broadest sense, these activists felt themselves to belong to the "worldwide" reaction against the interest-oriented politics of the parliamentary status quo, and against the individualistic economic and philosophical assumptions underlying that status quo. These assumptions they subsumed under the category of "liberalism." But one must again understand that when such men attacked "individualism," they were referring, as a practical matter, to institutional individualism, to the force of faction, rather than to any deep-seated anticollectivist impulse in Japanese politics. In the light of their general reading of the situation, then, it was entirely consistent with their achieved status that ambitious public men should have reached out for antiparliamentary, communitarian models of social and political organization put forth by European fascist and totalitarian ideologues.
The fact that Japanese public men did not look to their own tradition also stems from their "public" background, the salient features of which we observed earlier. (Royama, I might add, buttressed his appeal to "tradition" with qualified citations from Nazi theorists of community, among them Rudolf Brinkmann, state secretary in the German Ministry
of Economics, whose writings supported Royama's*
belief that "the freedom of the [individual] personality consists in recognizing by oneself the higher necessity of the cooperative body [kyodotai*
], entering into it, and being placed under it.")44 And it reflects the pervasive belief of such men, across the ideological spectrum, that Japan had, to all intents and purposes, moved into a historical stream alongside (even ahead of) those societies that had provided models for Japan's own development. Consider for example the prototypical position of the early "social policy" thinker Kanai Noburu, who founded the Shakai Seisaku Gakkai (Social Policy Association) in 1896. For Kanai, Japan as one "follower" country could not only learn "how to" from industrializing pioneers such as Britain, it could also seek to avoid the pathologies of industrial developmentclass conflict, revolutionary labor movements, and so forth. Japan in Kanai's view could, along with other "followers" such as Germany, apply the lesson of "don't let this happen to you." By practicing meliorative social policy la Bismarck, and attempting, specifically, to preserve rural communities intact, Japan could spare itself the radicalization of rural migrants as they were caught up in the industrial process. The experience of Europe was regarded as wholly relevant to that of Japan; it was seen as the duty of public men (such as Kanai) to arrive at formulas for the manipulation by the state of social processes perceived as universal, so that these could benefit, protect, and strengthen the nation.45 Other examples of the belief of public men in the relevance of Western thought to Japan come quickly to mind: the conviction of the constitutional theorist Minobe Tatsukichi that the promulgation of the Meiji constitution had transformed Japan into a modern state; and of Yoshino Sakuzo*
that under this constitution, Japan could work out a lasting democratic arrangement suitable to the spirit of the age, and in keeping with a personalist Christian social ethic.
The "West," of course, was not one, but many. Antiliberal and revolutionary thinkers also turned there first. Indeed, for theoretical guidance no Japanese public man could or would turn first to the Japanese past. Just as, for the most part, they did not write for the world, neither did they seek to learn from their own society's past. Their concern with it was instrumental; to illuminate and manipulate it in the interest of the national future and their own role in it. The question was to which "West," and when, would they turn?
It should be kept in mind, however, that Japanese political tradition had, apart from its enshrinement in official propaganda since the late Meiji era (when it was "invented"),46 become largely the playground of
"national moralists" or obscurantist ideologues. It was only gingerly, and against much opposition, that critical method, beginning in the 1890s, had been applied to the national political past. Though not the first, the example of the cultural historian Tsuda Sokichi*
(18731961) is instructive. Beginning in 1916, but particularly in the years from 1924 to 1930, Tsuda had published studies that argued a now-accepted fact: that Japan's mythic heritage, as recorded in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki , was the intentional product of a far later age, and of a ruling group in need of a legitimizing source for its hegemony. (Tsuda, as will be related below, eventually ran afoul of the publications and lsemajest laws on account of such views.) In general, the time was yet to come when learned and politically independent syntheses of "Western" and Japanese thought and culture, or, alternatively, attempts to argue for Japan's unique contributions to world culture, could be written without the taint of cultural imperialism. Notable attempts were made, of course. One thinks of the great philosopher Nishida Kitaro's*
Nihon bunka no mondai (The problem of Japanese culture, 1938), or Hasegawa Nyozekan's Nihonteki seikaku (The Japanese character, 1938). But whatever the value (which was considerable) that some such works might have had in themselves, many of them, even Watsuji Tetsuro's*
erudite study, Sonno shiso*
to sono dento*
(Imperial loyalist thought and its tradition, 1943) lent themselves, intentionally or not, to later cooptation. In some casesfor example, Tanabe Hajime's articles on the "logic" of social and national existencethe question was not one of cooptation so much as virtual, albeit unintended, prostitution. Witness, in recognition, the title of Tanabe's first postwar work, Zangedo*
toshite no tetsugaku (literally, Philosophy, path of confession, 1946), the manuscript of which, significantly, was already complete by the summer of 1944.47
A minority of public men, oriented to a "purer" West, or at least to a clearly defined political ideal of their own, were unwilling to lend their prestige to a too-obvious justification of current policy, feeling that it was rash to assign "world-historical significance" to a war that had yet to be concluded. Thus Nanbara Shigeru openly criticized Tanabe Hajime in print; the journalist Kiyosawa Kiyoshi (18901945) was more circumspect, choosing to record his misgivings and forebodings in his now famous diary, Ankoku nikki (Diary of dark times).
The presence of such a minority report, however, should not obscure the larger point. There was no organized "resistance" movement in Japan. No public man, however much opposed to militarism, fascism,
and war, could have expressed or agreed with the political philosopher Harold Laski's dissentin the midst of World War Ifrom the proposition that "in a crisis the thought and soul of the individual must be absorbed in the national life."48 Some way had to be found to serve expertise and status, to be part of the "national life." Thus the fact that Japanese public men felt drawn to the state in crisis should occasion no surprise. This says nothing about their judgment, which was far from uniform. The same may be said of their European contemporaries in similar circumstances. Not all German intellectuals pandered to the Nazis; not all opponents of the regime were killed or driven into exile. Some stayed, unwilling to abandon their nation despite the hideously misguided undertaking it had launched. They tried to maintain conscience and sanity, believing that ultimately a decent order would be restored in Germany. Some, like the members of the Kreisau Circleto be discussed latertried to do so as a network; this cost them their lives. By the same token, we must consider the case of intellectuals in a regime like Vichy, which had, at least under Ptain, a plausible claim to legitimacy (so Robert Paxton argues) as a government of national salvation. One did not have to be fascist to serve; not at first. The philosopher Emmanuel Mounier (who might profitably be compared to Miki Kiyoshi) is a case in point. The time was to come when one did have to be a fascist, even a traitor, to serve the Vichy regime. This was never the case in Japan.49
Let us conclude. It is unhistorical to assume that there should have been wholesale resistance among public men to the trend of the times. (That we must argue so pitifully is of course testimony to the truth of Simone Weil's stern dictum.) We should rather begin with the presumption of basic, if initially passive, allegiance to the state in crisis. We have also observed a divergence of postures. In a few instances, there was explicit resistance to the war as such among Japanese public men. These are analogous to the recorded cases of domestic sabotage by Japanese workers of machines in wartime. Both public men and workers, that is, used the tools of their trade to act against the system.50 The vast majority of Japanese, regardless of class, fell into the category of survivors.
How did people survive? How was it allwar, crisis, privationto end? How were personal and national fates to be intertwined? We remain quite ignorant about how people actually felt as the situation grew increasingly desperate. And the time is not far off when those who do remember will be gone. We may imagine that there was no one, outside of the few genuine fanatics in the general population, who did not wish
to survive the unnatural-become-natural condition of total war. One did what one had to do; nothing more or less. The public man's work, however, was verbal and ideological, and, in the case of insiders especially, was underlain by an ethic of organizational service. Thus every statement had to be weighed, its effects calculated. Responsibility cut both ways. For the unenthusiastic, as we remarked, some way of saying "no" while saying "yes" had to be worked out. On the other hand, there were among public men truly zealous servants of power who fought the "ideological war" to the end. There were opportunists who measured out their zeal in smaller and smaller portions as the situation worsened, so that they could claim to have "opposed" the war when defeat came. This attitude, however, dovetails with the nonopportunistic realm of survival psychology.51 To sort out the ramificationspersonal, political, and moralof how individual Japanese regarded their wartime service in the light of defeat lies far beyond the scope of the present discussion.
Once the intangible but inescapable aura of defeat had formed over Japanese society, each individual had to cope with it in one way or another: by believing in the cause all the more; by resignation; by looking ahead; by simply falling silent, doing what one had been assigned to do, clinging to it, until the inevitable came. Some, such as Nanbara, actually sought to hasten its arrival.
When it did come in Japan, defeat was a foregone conclusion, but no less a shock. The instant of surrender on 15 August seems to have been experienced as an eternity of anguished uncertainty turning to eviscerating realization: the past fifteen years had been a waste. The lan of the imperial system, its entire legitimacy riding on the promise of victory, seems to have burst like a bubble. But soon there was a thrilling new feeling: that no one else, oneself included, would have to die. As the Catholic philosopher Yoshimitsu Yoshihiko remarked to a friend shortly after the end of the war, "It's like a Greek tragedy, Father; everyone is weeping, but everyone is happy."52
Whether or not they themselves felt the need for self-criticism after 1945, Japanese public men of this period have a lesson to teach about the nature of the modern state. The state demands the use of its subjects' intelligence in its service. In the absence, for obvious reasons, of conditions of civil war or actual invasion; and leaving aside contemporary polities of an internal colonial type (those that rest on the explicit exclusion of an exploited majority on racial grounds, for example), the state in crisis receives that service. Indeed, the capacity to mobilize it may be another way of saying that its rule is regarded as legitimate. This legiti-
macy cuts across ideological lines between and within states. It overrides (sometimes with violence) the moral objections of its own and outside critics. It exalts the nation and deracinates society: war is only the ultimate deracinator. (As the German legal philosopher Gustav Radbruch remarked, "War, which is the apex of the militaristic view of the state, is at the same time the nadir of national distinctiveness.")53
Yet mobilization must have a cause. Pressure must be applied; along with a national mission, a threat, real or imagined, foreign or domestic, must be invoked. For althoughindeed becausenational identity is the "very tissue of modern political sentiment,"54 doubt and dissent breed in moments of slack and in corners only desultorily propagandized. Here resentment at long injustice or neglect combines with reason to produce withdrawaland resistance. Such opposition may not aim to overthrow the state in toto but only to return it to its "proper" course. This in turn may mean only the least degree of interference in social life. Or it may entail an attempt to compel the state to live up to the values it itself propagates, even to infuse a new and healing vision of justice into a power-swollen system. In any case, such attempts must compete with the constant impulse to follow official dictates, to work for aims of the state. For it is never easy to deny the wishes of national authority, however vacuous, once it is admitted that some, even the slightest good, might be achieved through obedience. That in Japanese public men this conflict may be seen in heightened form is clear, I think, from the foregoing. And it is in this context that their "war responsibility" and unequal contest with the "great problems of public life" may and must be judged. Not to damn out of hand; still less to excuse; but to deny their "otherness" and assert the profound relevance of their experience and thought processes to the situation of thinking members of national societies in the present: this has been my underlying aim in writing.
This said, we are ready to begin our investigation: Nanbara Shigeru, political philosopher, and Hasegawa Nyozekan, journalist and critic, were public men, insider and outsider respectively. As "public" tended more and more to fuse with national community, and national community with state, both men, as I have noted, were called upon to adhere to and promote an extreme cultural particularism. This was a task both found onerous, yet curiously irresistible. How they attempted to resolve this paradox, at once personal and derived from status, is the central question of the studies that follow.
Continues...
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