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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Barshay, Andrew E. State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988.
Main Argument: In fascist Japan, with no space left in which to be separate from the state, "public men" by and large turned to the state as the only avenue through which to perform the public service to which they felt called.
Historiographical Engagement: Barshay performs a close reading on the work of these intellectuals, but he also has a very deep command of the discourse of Western philosophy, particularly German philosophy, and of many other intellectual disciplines besides.
Preface: Argument, Sources, Examples In this brief preface, Barshay says that he attempts "to show how, for public men in imperial Japan, the intellectual content of public work and the mutually defining status positions of insider and outsider were interrelated" (xiv). He goes on to describe his reason for choosing Hasegawa Nyozekan and Nanbara Shigeru--both were strong intellectual influences on the young Maruyama Masao, whose presence in these pages is pervasive. The next section is a brief discussion of the life and import of Simone Weil, whom Camus described as "the only great spirit of our times," and who for Barshay is a "limit case" in "the price of national identity in the twentieth century" and in the truth that "modern human intelligence cannot do otherwise than believe in its strivings and accept its inevitable failures" (xvi). (Like Barshay, Weil was a Jewish convert to Catholicism.) According to Barshay, "the specter that haunted Simone Weil was the combined force of the bureaucratic state and the national, collective 'we': power and its enabling ideology" (xvii). Barshay goes on to briefly describe Nyozekan and Nanbara, saying that "both of these cases illustrate the daunting task of critical allegiance: to keep the comforting sanctuary that is one's nation from becoming a prison house, for oneself, for others. In this sense, this study may be read as a cautionary tale, whose focus on Japan is 'accidental'" (xx). Maruyama himself quoted Martin Niemöller, whose resistance to the Nazi state came too late but who crystallized his awakening "into two stark injunctions. First, Principis obsta: 'Resist the beginning'; second, Finem respice: 'Consider the end'" (ibid).
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples In this long and dense introduction, Barshay attempts to elucidate the dual senses of 'public' in imperial Japan. According to him, it derived first from three slogans: kanson minpi ("exalt the officials, slight the people"), kazoku kokka ("family state"), and banki kôron ("all measures [by] public discussion"), with the result that "public" meant "official." Barshay describes several possible quasi-counterpublics (Barshay calls them "'outsider' publics") such as the Meirokusha or Irv Scheiner's communitarian farmers, all of which "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" (8-9). At the same time as the audience for and potential participants in the public sphere grew with the massification of Japanese society, however, the number of university graduates came to far exceed the available positions for them, with the result that "insider" and "outsider" heightened into very separate career tracks determined largely by formalism but having lifelong consequences. Nonetheless, according to Barshay, all "public men" did share "the nationalist mentality, perspective, and rhetoric of the entire period--from Meiji onward--that we have been discussing" (16) and the second was expertise in one's chosen specialty. Both had and mutually constituted a sense of oblige. Barshay then outlines the course of the deepening crisis of the Japanese state from 1918-1945, with the key points at a succession of dates we all know: 1918, 1925, 1931, 1937, 1945, and centers on "the problem of how public men acted and reacted during the 'crisis of the state' and the subsequent total war" (23). Barshay explains the nature of the dilemma: it was in the public man's DNA, as it were, to play a part in national life, and after the state eliminated all associations outside itself, public men had no alternative but to serve the state: "it is unhistorical to assume that there should have been wholesale resistance among public men to the trend of the times. … The vast majority of Japanese, regardless of class, fell into the category of survivors" (31). This is the story of how Nyozekan and Nanbara survived: "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" (33).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter provides an intellectual biography of Nanbara Shigeru (1889-1974), Home Ministry bureaucrat turned professor of the faculty of law at Tokyo Imperial. Nanbara was a Christian of Uchimura Kanzô's "no church" persuasion, and much enamored of the writings of Hegel's pupil Fichte:
Like Fichte, Nanbara saw no true freedom outside state, and like Fichte, he privileged the national community. According to Barshay, he was ultimately "caught in his own idealist web. … Only idealism could save modern societies from the common fate of total systems, the total politicization of life, which was at the same time its depoliticization" (96). After exploring some of Nanbara's post-1937 writings and his secret wartime poetic diary, Barshay goes on to describe Nanbara's semi-farcical attempts, in spring 1945, to convince members of the military bureaucracy to argue for surrender. (He failed.) Although Barshay explicates the ways in which Nanbara did pen some highly coded criticisms, he concludes that in the end, "nationalism, Christianity, elitism, and rhetorical instinct all combined in tense balance to ensure that Nanbara would do more than survive. He served. And that had always been the point" (122).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores the life of Hasegawa Nyozekan (1875-1969), journalist and critic. Nyozekan was heavily influenced by the writings of Herbert Spencer, as well as by the example of Kuga Katsunan (1857-1907). Nyozekan wrote for the Osaka Asahi, Japan's leading newspaper at the time, until just after the Rice Riots, when he was forced out along with several other "liberals," some of whom helped him to found the journal Warera. What is remarkable about the two volumes of Critiques Nyozekan published is that he was an accurate political forecaster in the matter of the fate of Japan's political parties; on the level of thought, although the Critiques did not advocate revolution, they did advocate transformation through, as Darwin might have put it, very gradual change--although Nyozekan could not see how it might be accomplished. Barshay closes the account of the Critiques with a discussion of Takamure Itsue's criticism of Nyozekan's views on gender and the place of women in society: he had no real grasp of women's experience in society, and she saw his Marxism (and Marxism in general, it must be said) as "modern-day sophism." Most interestingly, Nyozekan penned a largely correct diagnosis of Japanese fascism in 1932--but after that, he "returned to Japan" and retreated into culturally-focused conservatism, even going so far as to serve in Konoe Fumimarô's Shôwa Kenkyûkai. As Barshay sums up:
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples The conclusion takes the form of notes on the "public" in postwar Japan; in the key passage, Barshay argues that
He then closes with a defense of Maruyama as the exemplar par excellence of an intellectual, a "public man" [sic] who resisted the forces of abstraction and detachment, which frankly is boggling in light of the actual events of Maruyama's career. (The episode mentioned in this book in which he intervened to help Nyozekan against some toughs roughing him up seems to be the only time Maruyama took any physical action.) The overall point, however, is well taken: that no one who takes up the life of the mind can afford to be casual of their intellectual independence from the state, or its preservation.
Critical assessment: This is a typically dense, excellent, and resolutely moral Barshay book. I said in a class discussion that in some ways it reminds one of doing the stations of the Cross, in which one follows along and suffers through what the intellectuals profiled in this book lived. Metaphors aside, however, I am impressed and gratified at Barshay's insistence on the fact of Japanese fascism after 1931, and highly impressed by his discussion of Nyozekan's analysis of it. This material is of much general relevance.
I have to disagree about the irrelevance of thinkers like Simone Weill to Barshay's project - I think that we as historians of Asia self-ghettoize our work at our peril, and in any case, Weill faced the exact same conditions as did intellectuals in Japan and Germany, and for that reason alone her response to them would be germane. She's the limit case, but Barshay is right when he points out that the vast majority of cases, such as those of Nanbaru and Hasegawa, don't lie that far out. For this reason, I find Barshay's study intensely worthwhile.
I'm glad to be able to see the threads of Barshay's proposed future study of Maruyama and the Marxist/Modernist paradigm that would unite in his second book, which I think offers a much more nuanced and valuable interpretation of Maruyama than a study of him alone would have done. If anything, I think Maruyama gets off too lightly here - one would have thought that Barshay's perceptive insider/outsider paradigm would have allowed him to see, in the context of the postwar, its very real limitations, which others in my cohort have alluded to: Maruyama was caught between the Enlightener role of the public man and the bitter irony that "public" men didn't really have much to do with the public, particularly not the public as it was reconstituted after the war. To be blunt: we should condemn Maruyama for his being content to merely proclaim the need to make citizens from on high without actually doing much more than publishing in academic journals and talking in academic fora about it. Had he and others like him been more activist, 1960 might have gone differently. I'm surprised, having quite clearly delineated the limits of that role in this book, that Barshay didn't go into more detail on that in Social Sciences - but I'm also not surprised, knowing how important Maruyama was to Barshay personally.
Overall, the feeling I had upon finishing State and Intellectual was something along the lines of Han Solo's "Didn't we just leave this party?" It's depressing to read a book written at the height of the Reaganite years and realize just how little has changed since then, just how much the neoliberal consensus elaborated then has altered the terms of public debate worldwide. But, reading the conclusion, it's also salutary to realize that things did change, have changed, in Japan - the power of the LDP was broken, and in the person of people like Amamiya Karin and even in his own peculiar way Azuma Hiroki we can see both the vindication and the vitiation of the "public man" tradition that Barshay describes here so well. The democratic glitter and spectacle of the Japanese cityscape, I would argue, is the place where real alternatives are being produced nowadays.
Finally, I think the insider/outsider typology is valuable not least because it manages to capture the stark reality that everyone in imperial Japan was defined by their relationship to the state. This is hard for us - what percentage of Americans don't vote? - to grasp, I think, because in some sense the ability to be apathetic is the real indication of the width of the gap between government and the private realm that we have been pleased to call the public sphere. It's not possible to be apathetic in a state that's in crisis; in imperial Japan it was not impossible to escape the state. That was the true crux of the dilemma - and I suspect Barshay would appreciate that particular Latin word in this context - that intellectuals faced, and overall I think Barshay succeeds at describing their passion with compassion but also with remarkably clear-eyed evaluation and, ultimately, judgment.
Further reading: Frank Miller, Minobe Tatsukichi, Interpreter of Constitutionalism in Japan; Tetsuo Najita, Hara Kei in the Politics of Compromise; Jung-sun Han, An Imperial Path to Modernity; Kyu Hyun Kim, The Age of Visions and Arguments
Meta notes: Principis obsta. Finem respice.
Main Argument: In fascist Japan, with no space left in which to be separate from the state, "public men" by and large turned to the state as the only avenue through which to perform the public service to which they felt called.
Historiographical Engagement: Barshay performs a close reading on the work of these intellectuals, but he also has a very deep command of the discourse of Western philosophy, particularly German philosophy, and of many other intellectual disciplines besides.
Preface: Argument, Sources, Examples In this brief preface, Barshay says that he attempts "to show how, for public men in imperial Japan, the intellectual content of public work and the mutually defining status positions of insider and outsider were interrelated" (xiv). He goes on to describe his reason for choosing Hasegawa Nyozekan and Nanbara Shigeru--both were strong intellectual influences on the young Maruyama Masao, whose presence in these pages is pervasive. The next section is a brief discussion of the life and import of Simone Weil, whom Camus described as "the only great spirit of our times," and who for Barshay is a "limit case" in "the price of national identity in the twentieth century" and in the truth that "modern human intelligence cannot do otherwise than believe in its strivings and accept its inevitable failures" (xvi). (Like Barshay, Weil was a Jewish convert to Catholicism.) According to Barshay, "the specter that haunted Simone Weil was the combined force of the bureaucratic state and the national, collective 'we': power and its enabling ideology" (xvii). Barshay goes on to briefly describe Nyozekan and Nanbara, saying that "both of these cases illustrate the daunting task of critical allegiance: to keep the comforting sanctuary that is one's nation from becoming a prison house, for oneself, for others. In this sense, this study may be read as a cautionary tale, whose focus on Japan is 'accidental'" (xx). Maruyama himself quoted Martin Niemöller, whose resistance to the Nazi state came too late but who crystallized his awakening "into two stark injunctions. First, Principis obsta: 'Resist the beginning'; second, Finem respice: 'Consider the end'" (ibid).
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples In this long and dense introduction, Barshay attempts to elucidate the dual senses of 'public' in imperial Japan. According to him, it derived first from three slogans: kanson minpi ("exalt the officials, slight the people"), kazoku kokka ("family state"), and banki kôron ("all measures [by] public discussion"), with the result that "public" meant "official." Barshay describes several possible quasi-counterpublics (Barshay calls them "'outsider' publics") such as the Meirokusha or Irv Scheiner's communitarian farmers, all of which "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" (8-9). At the same time as the audience for and potential participants in the public sphere grew with the massification of Japanese society, however, the number of university graduates came to far exceed the available positions for them, with the result that "insider" and "outsider" heightened into very separate career tracks determined largely by formalism but having lifelong consequences. Nonetheless, according to Barshay, all "public men" did share "the nationalist mentality, perspective, and rhetoric of the entire period--from Meiji onward--that we have been discussing" (16) and the second was expertise in one's chosen specialty. Both had and mutually constituted a sense of oblige. Barshay then outlines the course of the deepening crisis of the Japanese state from 1918-1945, with the key points at a succession of dates we all know: 1918, 1925, 1931, 1937, 1945, and centers on "the problem of how public men acted and reacted during the 'crisis of the state' and the subsequent total war" (23). Barshay explains the nature of the dilemma: it was in the public man's DNA, as it were, to play a part in national life, and after the state eliminated all associations outside itself, public men had no alternative but to serve the state: "it is unhistorical to assume that there should have been wholesale resistance among public men to the trend of the times. … The vast majority of Japanese, regardless of class, fell into the category of survivors" (31). This is the story of how Nyozekan and Nanbara survived: "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" (33).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter provides an intellectual biography of Nanbara Shigeru (1889-1974), Home Ministry bureaucrat turned professor of the faculty of law at Tokyo Imperial. Nanbara was a Christian of Uchimura Kanzô's "no church" persuasion, and much enamored of the writings of Hegel's pupil Fichte:
Aristotle had said that those outside the polis must be either beasts or gods. The problem of twentieth-century politics, Nanbara had come to realize, was that those who dwelt within increasingly assumed the character of both beast and god. What was more, they had philosophies to justify their transformation. (88)
Like Fichte, Nanbara saw no true freedom outside state, and like Fichte, he privileged the national community. According to Barshay, he was ultimately "caught in his own idealist web. … Only idealism could save modern societies from the common fate of total systems, the total politicization of life, which was at the same time its depoliticization" (96). After exploring some of Nanbara's post-1937 writings and his secret wartime poetic diary, Barshay goes on to describe Nanbara's semi-farcical attempts, in spring 1945, to convince members of the military bureaucracy to argue for surrender. (He failed.) Although Barshay explicates the ways in which Nanbara did pen some highly coded criticisms, he concludes that in the end, "nationalism, Christianity, elitism, and rhetorical instinct all combined in tense balance to ensure that Nanbara would do more than survive. He served. And that had always been the point" (122).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores the life of Hasegawa Nyozekan (1875-1969), journalist and critic. Nyozekan was heavily influenced by the writings of Herbert Spencer, as well as by the example of Kuga Katsunan (1857-1907). Nyozekan wrote for the Osaka Asahi, Japan's leading newspaper at the time, until just after the Rice Riots, when he was forced out along with several other "liberals," some of whom helped him to found the journal Warera. What is remarkable about the two volumes of Critiques Nyozekan published is that he was an accurate political forecaster in the matter of the fate of Japan's political parties; on the level of thought, although the Critiques did not advocate revolution, they did advocate transformation through, as Darwin might have put it, very gradual change--although Nyozekan could not see how it might be accomplished. Barshay closes the account of the Critiques with a discussion of Takamure Itsue's criticism of Nyozekan's views on gender and the place of women in society: he had no real grasp of women's experience in society, and she saw his Marxism (and Marxism in general, it must be said) as "modern-day sophism." Most interestingly, Nyozekan penned a largely correct diagnosis of Japanese fascism in 1932--but after that, he "returned to Japan" and retreated into culturally-focused conservatism, even going so far as to serve in Konoe Fumimarô's Shôwa Kenkyûkai. As Barshay sums up:
The new capitalist powers of the twentieth century reacted to both of these phenomena [bourgeois cosmopolitanism and international working class solidarity] with a massive display of armed nationalism. Nyozekan began a critique of this process--an effort recognized and praised by Marxists such as Sakai Toshihiko. But Nyozekan, rejecting the Soviet alternative both as a model and as a critical vantage point, was drawn into the reaction itself. … Nyozekan created a personal myth and shared it generously. As public man, it was the least he could do. As a critic, it was the most. (222)
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples The conclusion takes the form of notes on the "public" in postwar Japan; in the key passage, Barshay argues that
I do not think that the fragmentation and subversion of the postwar public discourse represents simply a resurgent particularism. It was encouraged for political and other reasons by those who controlled Japan, was consonant with conservative sentiment outside the ruling circles, and afforded an easy way out of a still unresolved moral dilemma. (245)
He then closes with a defense of Maruyama as the exemplar par excellence of an intellectual, a "public man" [sic] who resisted the forces of abstraction and detachment, which frankly is boggling in light of the actual events of Maruyama's career. (The episode mentioned in this book in which he intervened to help Nyozekan against some toughs roughing him up seems to be the only time Maruyama took any physical action.) The overall point, however, is well taken: that no one who takes up the life of the mind can afford to be casual of their intellectual independence from the state, or its preservation.
Critical assessment: This is a typically dense, excellent, and resolutely moral Barshay book. I said in a class discussion that in some ways it reminds one of doing the stations of the Cross, in which one follows along and suffers through what the intellectuals profiled in this book lived. Metaphors aside, however, I am impressed and gratified at Barshay's insistence on the fact of Japanese fascism after 1931, and highly impressed by his discussion of Nyozekan's analysis of it. This material is of much general relevance.
I have to disagree about the irrelevance of thinkers like Simone Weill to Barshay's project - I think that we as historians of Asia self-ghettoize our work at our peril, and in any case, Weill faced the exact same conditions as did intellectuals in Japan and Germany, and for that reason alone her response to them would be germane. She's the limit case, but Barshay is right when he points out that the vast majority of cases, such as those of Nanbaru and Hasegawa, don't lie that far out. For this reason, I find Barshay's study intensely worthwhile.
I'm glad to be able to see the threads of Barshay's proposed future study of Maruyama and the Marxist/Modernist paradigm that would unite in his second book, which I think offers a much more nuanced and valuable interpretation of Maruyama than a study of him alone would have done. If anything, I think Maruyama gets off too lightly here - one would have thought that Barshay's perceptive insider/outsider paradigm would have allowed him to see, in the context of the postwar, its very real limitations, which others in my cohort have alluded to: Maruyama was caught between the Enlightener role of the public man and the bitter irony that "public" men didn't really have much to do with the public, particularly not the public as it was reconstituted after the war. To be blunt: we should condemn Maruyama for his being content to merely proclaim the need to make citizens from on high without actually doing much more than publishing in academic journals and talking in academic fora about it. Had he and others like him been more activist, 1960 might have gone differently. I'm surprised, having quite clearly delineated the limits of that role in this book, that Barshay didn't go into more detail on that in Social Sciences - but I'm also not surprised, knowing how important Maruyama was to Barshay personally.
Overall, the feeling I had upon finishing State and Intellectual was something along the lines of Han Solo's "Didn't we just leave this party?" It's depressing to read a book written at the height of the Reaganite years and realize just how little has changed since then, just how much the neoliberal consensus elaborated then has altered the terms of public debate worldwide. But, reading the conclusion, it's also salutary to realize that things did change, have changed, in Japan - the power of the LDP was broken, and in the person of people like Amamiya Karin and even in his own peculiar way Azuma Hiroki we can see both the vindication and the vitiation of the "public man" tradition that Barshay describes here so well. The democratic glitter and spectacle of the Japanese cityscape, I would argue, is the place where real alternatives are being produced nowadays.
Finally, I think the insider/outsider typology is valuable not least because it manages to capture the stark reality that everyone in imperial Japan was defined by their relationship to the state. This is hard for us - what percentage of Americans don't vote? - to grasp, I think, because in some sense the ability to be apathetic is the real indication of the width of the gap between government and the private realm that we have been pleased to call the public sphere. It's not possible to be apathetic in a state that's in crisis; in imperial Japan it was not impossible to escape the state. That was the true crux of the dilemma - and I suspect Barshay would appreciate that particular Latin word in this context - that intellectuals faced, and overall I think Barshay succeeds at describing their passion with compassion but also with remarkably clear-eyed evaluation and, ultimately, judgment.
Further reading: Frank Miller, Minobe Tatsukichi, Interpreter of Constitutionalism in Japan; Tetsuo Najita, Hara Kei in the Politics of Compromise; Jung-sun Han, An Imperial Path to Modernity; Kyu Hyun Kim, The Age of Visions and Arguments
Meta notes: Principis obsta. Finem respice.