An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan (1931-1945) Read online

  Now let us return to the more manifestly political plane, and discuss the question of insularity due to national isolation.*

  In its long history Japan has only twice been invaded by a foreign power. The first invasion was by the Mongols in 1274 and 1281, the second was the Allied invasion of Okinawa in 1945. These are the only two instances, and they are not of great significance when compared, for instance, to the historical experience of the Polish or German nations, which has lodged a fear of invasion from across the borders in the unconscious memory of these peoples.

  To be surrounded by sea is so different from being surrounded by land borders. The surrounding sea provides a sense that one's nationhood is a natural gift which can be enjoyed without the expenditure of effort. In addition, the same language and the same system of gestures unite the population so that they feel almost as though they were all distant relatives. The closing of Japan, completed in 1640, increased the insularity created by its island nature, and the opening of the country in 1854 did not destroy this element of Japanese culture, which persists today as one of its dominant characteristics.

  It is manifest, for instance, in a passage of the wartime diary of Koizumi Shinzō, a well-known liberal economist of Japan. The passage was quoted after the war by Koizumi himself in his biography of his son, who had died in action. He speaks of the calamitous results of the war: Admiral Yamamoto had died, officers had died, soldiers had died ... his list of the war dead stops there. His imagination does not stretch beyond the Japanese, even in his private journal. This is remarkable in view of the fact that in his youth Koizumi had studied in England and that he was known as an economist with an international perspective. After Japan's defeat, Koizumi became educational adviser to the Crown Prince and contrived his marriage with a commoner, the daughter of a capitalist. Koizumi thereby remodelled the Imperial Household to suit post-war democracy, and he also arranged for the wedding to be seen by the people on television, thus bringing the Imperial family closer to the average household. In the production of this mass communication event Koizumi managed to link the Japanese royalty to European and American theatre and exerted a greater influence on the Japanese people than any other opinion-leader in post-war Japan. But during the crisis of the war this man of such international perspective had lost all sight of the people who existed outside of Japan.18

  A key to the understanding of the cultural trait of insularity is provided by Morita Shirō’s description and analysis of the village life of central Japan in The Japanese Village. Morita draws attention to the phenomenon of villagers attempting to extend their fields by cunning at the expense of their neighbours, but there being no move to expel such villagers from the community. There is no attempt to eliminate the member whose attitude is unacceptable to the majority. This aspect of village life reveals not only the benignity of the majority, but the possibility of an attempt at reconciliation on the part of the minority. The cohesion of the village community not only ensures the toleration of individual deviation, but also ensures that there is no actual break with the majority so that its insularity remains unchallenged. The method of objection-raising used during the war should be understood as part of the same tradition: in wartime Japan there were few cases of revolt and resistance, while unchallenging remonstrance was common in all facets of life.

  The cultural trait of insularity is further explained in Katō Shūichi's reinterpretation of the well-known historical event of the forty-seven faithful samurai, who avenged the death of their lord by killing the nobleman who caused it. The event took place in 1702 and was dramatized in the play Chūshingura. It has been recounted by professional storytellers, and made the subject of novels and films many a time in the subsequent 300 years. According to Katō’s interpretation, the leader of the samurai was a man of great intelligence whose creative energy was directed entirely towards realizing the plan of vengeance which had been decided upon at the outset. The aim of the group was fixed at the beginning, and their intelligence was concentrated upon keeping the group intact and leading it to the set goal. It was never directed towards criticizing or reformulating the goal itself. The unwavering popularity of the story of the forty-seven samurai reveals its compatibility with the spirit of the Japanese people. Like the samurai, the Japanese have continued to work for the ideal set for them by the state at the beginning of the Meiji period - to rise on the ladder of civilization. They did their utmost during the war, never criticizing its aims, and when their efforts began to fail they did not direct their intelligence to reformulating the goal set for them. After the defeat, again, they worked for the goal of economic prosperity which the government imposed.19 In this we see the characteristic group solidarity and lack of rebellion against communal ideas by individuals. What Katō calls the ‘Chūshingura Syndrome’ is the product of the general cultural trait of insularity.

  The process of tenkō also arose from this cultural trait. Although torture was used to effect tenkō, and many died, if we compare the penalties imposed if tenkō was accepted with punishments imposed in China at the time, they appear much less severe. This could be interpreted as benignity on the part of the ruling class. It can also be seen as the product of cunning shrewdness. But it can ultimately be attributed to the tradition for dealing with deviation established in the pre-Meiji era.

  The district public prosecutor of a Nagoya court, Osabe Kingo, wrote a 450-page report in 1937, in which he concluded that he had been an individualistic liberal until he had participated in the state tenkō programme, but in leading the imprisoned leftist radicals to tenkō he, the state prosecutor, had reached the standpoint of a true Japanese. Now, he wrote, he had to replace the whole measuring stick on which many of his judgements had been based. The public prosecutor had, in leading dissenters to tenkō, himself undergone tenkō. This was partly because the leaders of the leftist movement at the time were students and graduates of Tokyo Imperial University, often of the Law Department, where the prosecutor had himself been educated. The prosecutor and prosecuted were former messmates and could communicate in the shared vocabulary of their school-days.20 In fact, the whole of the Japanese bureaucracy was itself undergoing a process of tenkō in reinterpreting the constitution in terms of the Emperor's Sovereignty Theory expounded by the jurists who preceded Minobe Tatsukichi, which replaced Minobe's Liberal Organ Theory (in which the Emperor was defined as an organ of the state).

  My House in the Village, an autobiographical novel by Nakano Shigeharu published in 1935, is a moving record of the author's experience of tenkō. In this novel, the protagonist signs a declaration of tenkō in prison and, on his release, returns to his father's house in a farming village by the Japan Sea. His father, a farmer, greets his university-educated son with a wry face and the words, ‘Since I heard that you were arrested I have thought of you as dead. I have been fully resigned. But you have come back alive. If you can't die for the belief you have chosen, you should abandon writing’. The son replies, ‘I can understand what you are saying, but I want to keep on writing.’ The hero had sworn before the public prosecutor that he would not engage in any political activity in the future, but even under torture and in confinement he did not divulge the secrets of his organization or betray his comrades and friends, and he would not renounce his position. He did his utmost, but to his father it was not enough. His father believed that because his son was a leader who had misled many followers he should either adhere unwaveringly to his original line of activity or he should die in atonement for the suffering of the many younger men who had responded to his call. These were his father's values, very different from his son's Marxist political ideology. It is because of such values that the village still exists today, but they have their shortcomings. They contrast in particular with the practical political shrewdness with which the son tried to preserve the line of resistance against rising militarism by retreating a step.

  Nakano continued to write. He was arrested again for ‘seditious’ writing, and during the Paci
fic War was totally excluded from journalism and was forced to work as a clerk. However, the little he could publish during the war shows how he tried to ally himself with those who opposed extreme militarism. When the war ended, Nakano rejoined the Communist Party, which was resurrected by the few who had refused tenkō and had remained in prison, but he did not forsake the indigenous Japanese conservative tradition, and continued to remonstrate against the existing order, which was essentially a continuation of the wartime government. Half a Pint of Wine, a short story published soon after the war, expresses this attitude in the character of the old village primary school principal, who has a lifelong affection for the Emperor as an actual flesh-and-blood person and because of this wants to free him from the yoke of politics and let him live as a human being.

  Later, Nakano wrote a longer novel, Muragimo or Of Mind, which portrays the Association of New Men. Muragimo is the epithet applied to ‘mind’ in Japanese poetry of the archaic tradition. In Nakano's novel the hero, a member of the New Men as had been the author himself, visits another Tokyo Imperial University student who is also a member of the New Men and who is the son of a viscount. When this friend coldly scolds an old maidservant for serving the guest a cup of lukewarm tea, the hero realizes that a different way of thinking lies hidden under his friend's ideology. He is reminded of a lecture he had attended given by a famous young professor. We may note that this character in the novel bears a close resemblance to the real-life Fukumoto Kazuo, who had argued that the radical intellectuals, in order to achieve true union with the people, should first separate themselves from the people in order to purify their thinking. The hero of the novel had liked the style of the professor's lecture, but then a student had raised a question and the young professor had answered, both of them quoting from German. Suddenly, the hero had been reminded of the children of his native farmland village, who believed that the thunder and lightning ripened the rice. The imported vocabulary was revered like just such a mysterious, heaven-sent magic power. The young man wanted to shout out his own reverence for the native and homely Japanese language, and his belief in the power of the vernacular. He wanted to shout out ‘I believe in pantheism’ (nowadays we would say ‘animism’). It is unlikely that the youthful Nakano ever had the audacity to cry out in such a way, but in his search for an understanding of his youth with the Association of New Men he wanted to rip open his mind and reveal the unconscious undercurrent to their ideas. He felt that an imported vocabulary had not the power to express the depth of his emotions. For foreign words to have true meaning they had to be transformed by transplantation into the soil of an indigenous tradition. This was the goal for which the frustrated youthful Nakano struggled, and which he achieved only thirty years later; this was the new tenkō begun in My House in the Village, which was published immediately after his release in 1935.22

  Today, the cultural trait of insularity presents a new problem. It was formed and developed while Japan was still predominantly agricultural and had a relatively small population to feed. Since the end of the war, the proportion of young people in their twenties engaged in farming has dropped to 7 per cent, and the majority of the labour force has moved to the factories and service areas, but the trait of insularity is still the dominant characteristic of Japanese culture. At the same time, it is an important obstacle to the solution of Japan's contemporary problems. The same insularity confronted the Association of New Men when they tried to renovate Japan on the basis of imported vocabulary and ideas. The gravity of the problem was already evident, but their response lacked foresight, with regard to both Japan's future and their own.

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  * Tayū and saizō. These words refer specifically to a matched pair of roles taken in drama. In manzai comedy, they are the roles of the straight-man and the wit.

  * The Japanese word here is ‘sakoku which originally referred to the Edo-period policy of exclusion of foreigners, and is now used metaphorically to describe the cultural characteristic of national isolation.

  4 National Structure

  The concept of kokutai* or ‘national structure’ derived from the fundamental insularity and isolation of the Japanese. The concept served as a powerful linguistic weapon both for attack and defence in the political arena of the period 1931-1945. Although the expression ‘national structure’ disappeared with Japan's defeat in 1945 and a new style of political argument was initiated by the United States occupation, the concept, if not the term, is still alive in a submerged form in Japanese politics.

  The word originated from the correspondence between Yoshida Torajirō and Yamagata Taika towards the end of the Tokugawa period.23 Yoshida saw ‘national structure’ as the unique propelling power of Japan. Yamagata did not consider the Japanese nation unique, but argued that each of the nations of the world had such a propelling power and that therefore ‘national structure’ was not peculiar to Japan. Yoshida used the term to express the continuity of the traditions of the Japanese people, and argued that this interpretation could be tested with empirical evidence. However, in its subsequent history the term took on a somewhat different meaning: after the Meiji Restoration, ‘national structure’ was used to signify the uniqueness of the existing government of Japan. The word became a glorification of that order, a claim that the present had existed since time immemorial. Since the oldest book extant was the Kojiki, which recounted the descent from heaven of the ancestor of the Royal Family, the national structure was generally understood to centre on an unbroken line of emperors of heavenly origin.

  I follow here Hashikawa Bunzō’s account of the history of this concept. According to Hashikawa, before the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution the disagreement between its chief designer, Ito Hirobumi, and his chief assistant, Kaneko Kentarō, revived the original argument between Yoshida Torajirō and Yamagata Taika referred to above. Itō held that national structure was not something unique to the Japanese state, whereas Kaneko insisted that the word meant not merely the fundamental structure of the state, but referred to the unique aspects of that of Japan. During the Fifteen Years’ War, Kaneko's view became the state orthodoxy and no divergent interpretation was permitted.

  Until the start of the war a world-view based upon this national myth was propagated in primary schools and in military schools. In contrast, in high schools and universities education was based on the European world view. In an attempt to deal with the problems which arose from insularity, the original architects of the Meiji state had divided the Japanese into two groups. On the one hand, in order to preserve Japan's internal family cohesion and village integration, they applied a newly invented glue: an exoteric national cult of the family-state, based on the legend of the unbroken line of emperors descended from heaven. On the other hand, they educated the steersmen of the ship of state in an esoteric cult compatible with Western education, to enable them to steer the course of the country in the turbulent sea of international politics.

  The esoteric national cult was strongly influenced by European civilization. Immediately after the Meiji Restoration in 1871, the government sent the younger, more flexible half of its high command to Europe and the United States to study Western institutions. To send abroad an expedition of 106 high officials must have been an exceptionally extravagant venture for a poor, underdeveloped country suffering grave economic difficulties. The expedition was headed by Iwakura Tomomi, then forty-eight years old and the most influential person in the newly established government, and also included Kido Kōin and Ōkubo Toshimichi, both aged thirty-eight. These last were two of the so-called three Heroes of the Meiji Restoration, but the third, Saigō Takamori, led the uprising against the government after the expedition's return, militating against the Europeanized policies adopted by the expedition's members, who now occupied the key positions in the government. The group also included Itō Hirobumi, then thirty, who became the first Prime Minister of Japan after the European cabinet system was adopted by the Government and who was also the chief desig
ner of the constitutional monarchy.

  The members of the expedition of bureaucrats were impressed by the technological sophistication and efficiency of Western countries. They also admired the religious and moral precepts which underlay that efficiency. They therefore tried to mould the Shinto tradition into the impetus for an efficient technological civilization. Emperor-worship was established as the ideology for a technological civilization which could flourish in Japan, and Japan alone.

  In this makeshift national ideology, the legend of the Imperial family underwent a transformation. In Kojiki, the oldest book of legends, the emperors and their divine ancestors are constantly making errors and fighting and hindering each other for worldly motives. These tales of folly had been retold without shame, and the idea of infallible divinity is entirely absent from these legends. Rather, they reveal Shinto as a kind of polytheism. However, as the state religion of a new ‘civilized’ Japan, Shinto was given a role akin to that of Christianity in Western countries and an increasingly monotheistic character. There emerged the image of the infallible emperor, which in the Meiji and Taisho periods was a mere fiction, since the state was controlled by the elder statesmen and the high bureaucrats trained in the esoteric national cult.