Andrea J. Horbinski (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ahorbinski) wrote2014-01-16 11:02 am
ahorbinski) wrote2014-01-16 11:02 am
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Book review: Molding Japanese Minds
Bibliographic Data: Garon, Sheldon. Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Main Argument: This book argues that "social management," which Garon defines as the system "in which the state has historically intervened to shape how ordinary Japanese thought and behaved," has been a powerful part of society in Japan since the Meiji period (xiv). The chief tool of the authors is "moral suasion," and has been carried out in conjunction with a variety of mostly middle-class interest groups, enabling the state to forge a powerful public consensus around its campaigns.
Historiographical Engagement: In some ways this book is a complement to T. J. Pempel's excellent Regime Shift: Comparative Dynamics of the Japanese Political Economy, which in my view is one of the two books on how Japan accomplished the Economic Miracle (the other being Andrew Gordon's The Wages of Affluence. He is also responding to, and extending, the literature of "social control," which up to this point focused mostly on Britain, France, and the United States.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Garon reviews the literature of social control and the process whereby it became a negative term in historiography after the 1960s, as well as the criticism that it 1) exaggerated the unity of the controllers; 2) denied the agency of the controlled; and 3) equated the aims with the results. In his discussion, Garon explains that he chose to avoid the term "emperor system" because it is frequently invoked to denote a bureaucracy that worked alone, whereas in his cases it clearly did not; thus, "social management" is a better term for Japan, because "control" implies too rigid a system of governance for Japan except for the height of the fascist period. Garon finds that in the prewar period officials spoke of "management" in two contexts: attempting to inculcate "self-management" in the
peasantry, and seeking to manage seikatsu "to strengthen national power and the economy" (7). Garon describes the Japan of the moral suasion campaigns as a "country at war in peace," and goes on to explain that he chose his case studies because they represent under-discussed aspects of Japanese history. The four prewar case studies were all areas of society that fell under the domain of the powerful Home Ministry, with the Ministry of Education playing second fiddle. Furthermore, the policies promulgated in these case studies were developed in close conjunction with outside groups, who in many cases demanded that the Home Ministry do something. Those groups were mainly middle-class, according to Garon, as evidenced by "the common desire to improve the morality and behavior of the ordinary people below them" (17).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter examines the evolution of "Japanese-style" welfare, in which those eligible for benefits are persuaded not to apply, and families are required and/or highly encouraged to take up most of the burden. In the prewar period, although public assistance programs did grow, "the most significant changes involved the evolution of elaborate mechanisms to manage and reform the poor at little cost to the state" (59). Between them, "the Japanese state and its local allies succeeded in re-creating and modernizing the intermediary communal institutions that had regulated and relieved the poor in the early modern era," and thereby "arranged for relief of the worst cases of poverty while reinforcing the unchanging message that families and the community represented the first line of defense against destitution" (ibid).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the regulation of religion in the interwar period, specially the regulation of so-called "new religions" at the strong urging of the older established religions: Buddhism, Christianity, and Shinto. Garon does not establish these developments under the rubric of the emperor system because a) it "tends toward the ahistorical"; the line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy is extremely hard to discern, given that state Shinto was not officially a religion until 1939; and the state, pre-1945, was not actually the fountainhead of all suppression (62). Rather than lese-majeste, the most serious crime of the new religions was that they developed national followings outside of the orthodox (read: state-supervised) institutional structures of the established religions, and constituted a threat to the social order and public morals thereby, as well as through the content of their rituals. Ironically, the support of the established religions for the eradication of the new religions paved the way for the state to introduce unprecedented controls on them in the fascist period, culminating in the subordination of all religions to the cult of the emperor in 1939. This represented a sharp break in terms of the relative power of the established religions vis-a-vis the state.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the regulation of licensed (and unlicensed) prostitution, and thereby sexuality, in prewar Japan. The Meiji system of licensed prostitution grafted European models onto existing Japanese traditions, thereby elaborating a contract system that had the benefit of ensuring that no woman who actually wanted to become a (licensed) prostitute could, and ensuring access to extramarital sex for men so as to preserve the traditional gender roles of the Japanese family. Both these systems came under strong threat in Japan's modern times, and the bureaucracy responded (allegedly at the prodding of middle-class groups) by abolishing sites of the modern including cafes and dance halls, even as they very nearly also abolished licensed prostitution itself, thwarted by the brothel industry's strength in the Diet. Garon claims that the bureaucracy would not have restricted and eventually abolished were it not for the middle-class anti-vice groups; in light of Silverberg's quotation of critics who saw through the justifications even at the time, I find this unconvincing.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores the relationship between women's groups and the state in the prewar period, particularly in the years between the failure of women's suffrage and the end of the war. Women's groups embraced a greater partnership with the state in the interwar period in a "any port in a storm" mentality--they believed that participating in state initiatives would eventually show that women could participate in public life qua women and deserve the vote. In fact, the state soon began to insist that a woman's only acceptable public role was that of a mother. Before that, however, as Garon writes, "the emergence of women as intermediaries in the project of social management…permitted the bureaucracy between 1920 and 1945 to intervene in everyday life [seikatsu] to a degree that had not been possible when male household heads served as the government's principal agents at the local level" (144-45).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the bureaucracy's efforts to recreate the "channels of moral suasion" after 1945, when the Occupation greatly hampered and in some cases permanently altered the institutions that had heretofore accomplished these campaigns, most notably with the dissolution of the Home Ministry in 1947. Although SCAP attempted to halt the close cooperation between state and society that had characterized prewar social management, its laws to that effect were skirted in practice during the Occupation and revised or abolished afterward: "Like their interwar and wartime predecessors, the postwar campaigns brought together government and private organizations in cooperative endeavors to influence everyday behavior" (177).
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter covers "sexual politics and the feminization of social management," arguing that the links between women's group and the state deepened over the course of the "era of the housewife" in Kano Masanao's phrase (the 1910s to the 1970s), because in the postwar period women were reluctant to relinquish the strong role within the household that they had gained during the war: namely, as the mainstay of the family. Ironically, the abolition of the system of licensed prostitution actually weakened "the postwar state's ability to interfere in the realm of illicit sexuality," via a mechanism in which women's groups and the government each thwarted the other's preferred strategy of dealing with prostitution, thus loosening social controls on overall access to the erotic marketplace.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter shoehorns together the postwar fate of the management of religion and of welfare in a very awkward way (probably because each is too short a story on its own). After covering the real break that the war represented in the state's management of religion--to wit, the postwar constitution got it out of the business entirely--Garon sketches the official response to Aum in 1995 and concludes with ominous predictions about the future of the state/new religion relationship that seem to have not come true. The welfare story is, in the end, more of the same; at the point when the Japanese state was poised to expand welfare benefits (1973), the oil crisis struck, leading the state to renege on its commitments and use its local agents--welfare commissioners are now almost all women--to keep people off the rolls. From what I've read, Abenomics means going in for more of the same.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Garon concludes that the 20thC saw a general shift from direct to indirect methods of social management on the part of the Japanese state, and that "perhaps the true genius of the Japanese state lies in its ability to marry the currents of democratization and social management" (236). Garon also argues that the resilience of social management in Japan is bound up with Japanese nationalism and the concomitant sense of vulnerability and isolation it so often inculcates (which to me suggests a possible discursive bridge across the chasm of the 1980s in the form of Nihonjinron).
Critical assessment: It's not Sheldon' Garon's fault that I read this book right after Miriam Silverberg's magisterial Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, and it's not his fault that it's nearly 20 years old and starting to seem more than a little dated. And yet--while I think this is a good book that deserves its ritual citation in most every book discussing modern Japan since it was written, I'm also kind of floored at how little quotation of individuals there is in here, and more than that, I also think that Garon's discussion doesn't cover at least two important aspects of the state/interest groups interaction that leads to "moral suasion." Namely, there is not much discussion in here of the concrete, and often draconian, policies that the Japanese state has implemented in order to get its way: significantly, nearly every prewar chapter ends with the fascist military government imposing some kind of sweeping new legislation that gives them total authority in yet another sphere of culture or society. In the postwar period, what comes to mind most readily is the nearly $3000 US fee that the government imposes to obtain a driver's license, as well as the punitive car registration requirements, used to keep individual drivers off the road. Garon also pays no attention to the mechanism by which "moral suasion" was and is made the common sensical, the unquestioned, the everyday [seikatsu]. For that, one needs to look at a book like Louise Young's Japan's Total Empire, which portrays vividly the interactions between state, society, and media that formed an iron-clad imperialist consensus in the early 1930s, or Lois Peak's Learning to Go to School in Japan, which explores the inculcation of social norms and mores in preschools. I appreciate Garon's discussion of things like the regulation of religion and of licensed prostitution, which have not received enough attention, and this book is very good as far as it goes; it's just that it's only part of the story. And on a minor note, coming off of Silverberg's focus on the urban metropolises in the modern period, I found myself wondering with respect to Garon's book--is "Japan" the cities or the countryside? I also, passé Silverberg, have a quarrel with Garon's axiomatic equation of "modernization and Westernization"; to equate the one with the other is to deny the hybrid modernity that Japan created via conscious choice. Finally, the rupture that the 1980s and the Bubble economy creates in Garon's otherwise smooth narrative bears further consideration.
Further reading: Sheldon Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan
Meta notes: Someone please smack me before I ever put an epigraph by Thomas L. Friedman anywhere in my damn book.
Main Argument: This book argues that "social management," which Garon defines as the system "in which the state has historically intervened to shape how ordinary Japanese thought and behaved," has been a powerful part of society in Japan since the Meiji period (xiv). The chief tool of the authors is "moral suasion," and has been carried out in conjunction with a variety of mostly middle-class interest groups, enabling the state to forge a powerful public consensus around its campaigns.
Historiographical Engagement: In some ways this book is a complement to T. J. Pempel's excellent Regime Shift: Comparative Dynamics of the Japanese Political Economy, which in my view is one of the two books on how Japan accomplished the Economic Miracle (the other being Andrew Gordon's The Wages of Affluence. He is also responding to, and extending, the literature of "social control," which up to this point focused mostly on Britain, France, and the United States.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Garon reviews the literature of social control and the process whereby it became a negative term in historiography after the 1960s, as well as the criticism that it 1) exaggerated the unity of the controllers; 2) denied the agency of the controlled; and 3) equated the aims with the results. In his discussion, Garon explains that he chose to avoid the term "emperor system" because it is frequently invoked to denote a bureaucracy that worked alone, whereas in his cases it clearly did not; thus, "social management" is a better term for Japan, because "control" implies too rigid a system of governance for Japan except for the height of the fascist period. Garon finds that in the prewar period officials spoke of "management" in two contexts: attempting to inculcate "self-management" in the
peasantry, and seeking to manage seikatsu "to strengthen national power and the economy" (7). Garon describes the Japan of the moral suasion campaigns as a "country at war in peace," and goes on to explain that he chose his case studies because they represent under-discussed aspects of Japanese history. The four prewar case studies were all areas of society that fell under the domain of the powerful Home Ministry, with the Ministry of Education playing second fiddle. Furthermore, the policies promulgated in these case studies were developed in close conjunction with outside groups, who in many cases demanded that the Home Ministry do something. Those groups were mainly middle-class, according to Garon, as evidenced by "the common desire to improve the morality and behavior of the ordinary people below them" (17).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter examines the evolution of "Japanese-style" welfare, in which those eligible for benefits are persuaded not to apply, and families are required and/or highly encouraged to take up most of the burden. In the prewar period, although public assistance programs did grow, "the most significant changes involved the evolution of elaborate mechanisms to manage and reform the poor at little cost to the state" (59). Between them, "the Japanese state and its local allies succeeded in re-creating and modernizing the intermediary communal institutions that had regulated and relieved the poor in the early modern era," and thereby "arranged for relief of the worst cases of poverty while reinforcing the unchanging message that families and the community represented the first line of defense against destitution" (ibid).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the regulation of religion in the interwar period, specially the regulation of so-called "new religions" at the strong urging of the older established religions: Buddhism, Christianity, and Shinto. Garon does not establish these developments under the rubric of the emperor system because a) it "tends toward the ahistorical"; the line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy is extremely hard to discern, given that state Shinto was not officially a religion until 1939; and the state, pre-1945, was not actually the fountainhead of all suppression (62). Rather than lese-majeste, the most serious crime of the new religions was that they developed national followings outside of the orthodox (read: state-supervised) institutional structures of the established religions, and constituted a threat to the social order and public morals thereby, as well as through the content of their rituals. Ironically, the support of the established religions for the eradication of the new religions paved the way for the state to introduce unprecedented controls on them in the fascist period, culminating in the subordination of all religions to the cult of the emperor in 1939. This represented a sharp break in terms of the relative power of the established religions vis-a-vis the state.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the regulation of licensed (and unlicensed) prostitution, and thereby sexuality, in prewar Japan. The Meiji system of licensed prostitution grafted European models onto existing Japanese traditions, thereby elaborating a contract system that had the benefit of ensuring that no woman who actually wanted to become a (licensed) prostitute could, and ensuring access to extramarital sex for men so as to preserve the traditional gender roles of the Japanese family. Both these systems came under strong threat in Japan's modern times, and the bureaucracy responded (allegedly at the prodding of middle-class groups) by abolishing sites of the modern including cafes and dance halls, even as they very nearly also abolished licensed prostitution itself, thwarted by the brothel industry's strength in the Diet. Garon claims that the bureaucracy would not have restricted and eventually abolished were it not for the middle-class anti-vice groups; in light of Silverberg's quotation of critics who saw through the justifications even at the time, I find this unconvincing.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores the relationship between women's groups and the state in the prewar period, particularly in the years between the failure of women's suffrage and the end of the war. Women's groups embraced a greater partnership with the state in the interwar period in a "any port in a storm" mentality--they believed that participating in state initiatives would eventually show that women could participate in public life qua women and deserve the vote. In fact, the state soon began to insist that a woman's only acceptable public role was that of a mother. Before that, however, as Garon writes, "the emergence of women as intermediaries in the project of social management…permitted the bureaucracy between 1920 and 1945 to intervene in everyday life [seikatsu] to a degree that had not been possible when male household heads served as the government's principal agents at the local level" (144-45).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the bureaucracy's efforts to recreate the "channels of moral suasion" after 1945, when the Occupation greatly hampered and in some cases permanently altered the institutions that had heretofore accomplished these campaigns, most notably with the dissolution of the Home Ministry in 1947. Although SCAP attempted to halt the close cooperation between state and society that had characterized prewar social management, its laws to that effect were skirted in practice during the Occupation and revised or abolished afterward: "Like their interwar and wartime predecessors, the postwar campaigns brought together government and private organizations in cooperative endeavors to influence everyday behavior" (177).
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter covers "sexual politics and the feminization of social management," arguing that the links between women's group and the state deepened over the course of the "era of the housewife" in Kano Masanao's phrase (the 1910s to the 1970s), because in the postwar period women were reluctant to relinquish the strong role within the household that they had gained during the war: namely, as the mainstay of the family. Ironically, the abolition of the system of licensed prostitution actually weakened "the postwar state's ability to interfere in the realm of illicit sexuality," via a mechanism in which women's groups and the government each thwarted the other's preferred strategy of dealing with prostitution, thus loosening social controls on overall access to the erotic marketplace.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter shoehorns together the postwar fate of the management of religion and of welfare in a very awkward way (probably because each is too short a story on its own). After covering the real break that the war represented in the state's management of religion--to wit, the postwar constitution got it out of the business entirely--Garon sketches the official response to Aum in 1995 and concludes with ominous predictions about the future of the state/new religion relationship that seem to have not come true. The welfare story is, in the end, more of the same; at the point when the Japanese state was poised to expand welfare benefits (1973), the oil crisis struck, leading the state to renege on its commitments and use its local agents--welfare commissioners are now almost all women--to keep people off the rolls. From what I've read, Abenomics means going in for more of the same.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Garon concludes that the 20thC saw a general shift from direct to indirect methods of social management on the part of the Japanese state, and that "perhaps the true genius of the Japanese state lies in its ability to marry the currents of democratization and social management" (236). Garon also argues that the resilience of social management in Japan is bound up with Japanese nationalism and the concomitant sense of vulnerability and isolation it so often inculcates (which to me suggests a possible discursive bridge across the chasm of the 1980s in the form of Nihonjinron).
Critical assessment: It's not Sheldon' Garon's fault that I read this book right after Miriam Silverberg's magisterial Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, and it's not his fault that it's nearly 20 years old and starting to seem more than a little dated. And yet--while I think this is a good book that deserves its ritual citation in most every book discussing modern Japan since it was written, I'm also kind of floored at how little quotation of individuals there is in here, and more than that, I also think that Garon's discussion doesn't cover at least two important aspects of the state/interest groups interaction that leads to "moral suasion." Namely, there is not much discussion in here of the concrete, and often draconian, policies that the Japanese state has implemented in order to get its way: significantly, nearly every prewar chapter ends with the fascist military government imposing some kind of sweeping new legislation that gives them total authority in yet another sphere of culture or society. In the postwar period, what comes to mind most readily is the nearly $3000 US fee that the government imposes to obtain a driver's license, as well as the punitive car registration requirements, used to keep individual drivers off the road. Garon also pays no attention to the mechanism by which "moral suasion" was and is made the common sensical, the unquestioned, the everyday [seikatsu]. For that, one needs to look at a book like Louise Young's Japan's Total Empire, which portrays vividly the interactions between state, society, and media that formed an iron-clad imperialist consensus in the early 1930s, or Lois Peak's Learning to Go to School in Japan, which explores the inculcation of social norms and mores in preschools. I appreciate Garon's discussion of things like the regulation of religion and of licensed prostitution, which have not received enough attention, and this book is very good as far as it goes; it's just that it's only part of the story. And on a minor note, coming off of Silverberg's focus on the urban metropolises in the modern period, I found myself wondering with respect to Garon's book--is "Japan" the cities or the countryside? I also, passé Silverberg, have a quarrel with Garon's axiomatic equation of "modernization and Westernization"; to equate the one with the other is to deny the hybrid modernity that Japan created via conscious choice. Finally, the rupture that the 1980s and the Bubble economy creates in Garon's otherwise smooth narrative bears further consideration.
Further reading: Sheldon Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan
Meta notes: Someone please smack me before I ever put an epigraph by Thomas L. Friedman anywhere in my damn book.