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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Waswo, Ann. “The Transformation of Rural Society, 1900-1950.” In The Cambridge History of Japan vol. 6, ed. Peter Duus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989: 541-605.
Main Argument: Land reform during the occupation, "though certainly important, was the culmination of slow, evolutionary processes that date from the late nineteenth century" (542). The origins of that process lie in four early Meiji policies: the land tax reform, the reform of local administration, compulsory elementary education and universal military conscription.
Argument, Sources, Examples Despite the establishment of private property, hamlets retained their hierarchical structure and their corporate ownership of water and forests; the maintenance of solidarity took a lot of work given the inequality that prevailed in the vast majority of hamlets; moreover, distinctions in status were not clear-cut. Three kinds of relationships: honke-bunke, landlord-tenant, and patron-client, with landlord-tenant being most common in areas where agriculture was most commercialized; all three vertical relationships, however, functioned as an insurance policy for low-status households, defusing tensions. After the turn of the C20, however, the assumption that inequality was natural died, resulting in the tenant farmer movement and the ideology of nôhonshugi: "both were essentially petty-bourgeois movements, and both sough political representation as well as economic betterment for their members" (557). Why? "(1) the acquisition by middling farmers of skills and experiences that formerly had been monopolized by the rural elite and (2) the accumulation among those same farmers of new and newly perceived economic grievances to which the rural elite seemed reluctant to attend" (559). Examples: education, veterans' associations = accumulation of unequal privileges in a hierarchical system. Gov't responded by fomenting policies of agricultural improvement, strengthening villages' fiscal/administrative capabilities; and reorganizing rural residents into local associations. Proximate causes of tenant movement = rice inspections + increase in rice prices during WWI boom + end of wartime boom in 1920. But tenant unions did not develop a rationale to justify their existence outside of cyclical economic changes that could sustain membership long-term; was helped along by gov't countermeasures and conflict management. Nôhonshugi by contrast served "during the 1930s as a direct and indirect instrument of fascist transformation" (589). Origins = Shôwa depression + structural factors that meant most farmers were trapped in the old Japan looking in on the glories of the new; solution to both was "rural regeneration." Gov't response to rural social change of Great Depression was led by the new "renovatonist" bureaucrats of 1932; policies were not regressive but restructuring and rationalizing, effects = strengthen gov't controls over rural population (via collectivization of local associations), enhance status and influence of middling farmers at expense of rural elite. "This dismantling of the old order and the economic rationality on which the new was based" = "part of 'the formation of Japanese fascism'" (602, qt. Mori 1971). Thus according to Mori, "in Japan, as elsewhere, fascism was the product of modern development and embodied the principles and power of monopoly capitalism" (ibid). Principal architect = the (military) government. Occupation-era land reform equalized members of hamlets, ratified many previous developments thereby.
Bibliographic Data: Peattie, Mark R. “The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945.” In The Cambridge History of Japan vol. 6, ed. Peter Duus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989: 217-70.
Main Argument: "Japanese imperialism was more situational than deliberate in origin. The aggressive movement of Japanese forces into Korea, China, and Micronesia was as much due to the absence of effective power to resist it as it was to specific Japanese policies and planning" (223). Also, "the inner logic of Japan's strategic doctrine thus committed the empire to ever-expanding and ever-receding security goals, each colonial acquisition being seen as a 'base' or 'outpost' from which the empire could, in some way, control a sphere of influence over more distant areas" (220).
Argument, Sources, Examples Japan different from Euro-American contemporaries in regional character and cultural affinity with its subject peoples, as well as economic/historical timing: Lenin's argument that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism does not hold, because industrial capitalism actually flowered after the beginning of Japan's colonial empire.
Two conceptions of colonial policy: one derived from European "New Imperialism", "a racially separatist approach to colonial rule" derived from social Darwinism and self-consciously rational, as well as paternalistic, passively humanitarian, and gradualist (238). "In sum, it was rational, conservative, and paternalist. It perceived the colonies as separate territories, distinct from the homeland and not merely extensions of it; yet it took pride in Japan's participation in what was seen as a universal 'civilizing mission'" (240)
- second conception "stemmed in large part from the general Asian provenance of the Japanese empire" and was essentially assimilationist based on ideas of 1) indissoluble bond with other countries of the Sinitic sphere; 2) "strongly moralistic element derived from Confucian tradition" (ibid) ; 3) "mystical linkage drawn between the Japanese race and the Japanese people," which was extendable (241); and 4) "idea of the direct application of the laws and institutions of metropolitan Japan to its territories overseas" (242).
- after 1937, "colonies" disappeared (only naichi and gaichi--inner and outer territories); European colonial model reviled; Japanese pan-Asian rhetoric grew more openly racist
- military governors general of Taiwan and Korea ruled as imperial proconsuls over empires within the empire. the civilian government never developed an effective centralized colonial administration
- internal security: "modern and superbly efficient police forces supplemented by the clever exploitation of indigenous systems of community control" (250)
- Japan's colonial economic activities were not cost-effective, though certain groups found them highly profitable; some infrastructural benefit to Taiwan and Korea, but "it does not appear that Japan provided the necessary elements of sustained nonagricultural growth in either colony" (260).
Critical assessment: I sort of feel like focusing only on the colonial empire is cheating. The empire was destroyed by its so-called "informal" possessions, and putting them out of the frame is…questionable, to my mind. And for that matter, the idea that imperialism is "situational" = "accidental" is frankly somewhat offensive. If Peattie means that Japan's unit-level decision making was structured by the parameters of the system, fine. If he means that Japan acquired its colonial possessions in a fit of absent-mindedness, that's wrong.
Bibliographic Data: Najita, Tetsuo and Harry Harootunian. "Japanese Revolt Against the West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century." In The Cambridge History of Japan vol. 6, ed. Peter Duus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989: 711-74.
Main Argument:
July 1942 "debate on modernity" in Kyoto: "commonly shared assumption that the outbreak of the Pacific War had convinced the participants that the conflict was both ineffectual and military" (759); "overcoming" = criticism of evolutionary as well as dialectical historicism; hoped to eliminate alienation in society by reconstituting a sense of cultural wholeness; were distressed by shallowness of popular uptake; "Japan's modern intellectual fate" as a peculiar tragedy in which the modern was figured as malaise (ibid). Questions about linear/evolutionary time and the meaning of bunmei. Also problem of global expansion of utilitarianism = Americanism. Criticism of Meiji utilitarianism in general and Meiji bureaucrats in particular "was inseparable from the more general denunciation of the international order constructed and dominated by the Western powers" (767). NB: attack on modernity provided the justification for supporting Konoe's "New Order in Asia" and the war that was required to establish it, which of course was an expansion by the very state that they vilified - this "only underscores the unconsciously ironic deception in which the debaters were implicated" (768).
Critical assessment: Well, these people were an unrepentant bunch of fascists--and here's the thing I found myself asking: if they had been advocating the same sorts of things that Nazi intellectuals [sic] did, would we still be giving them the time of day? Also, Graham Parkes among others savaged this chapter in particular for "poor and irresponsible" scholarship.
Main Argument: Land reform during the occupation, "though certainly important, was the culmination of slow, evolutionary processes that date from the late nineteenth century" (542). The origins of that process lie in four early Meiji policies: the land tax reform, the reform of local administration, compulsory elementary education and universal military conscription.
Argument, Sources, Examples Despite the establishment of private property, hamlets retained their hierarchical structure and their corporate ownership of water and forests; the maintenance of solidarity took a lot of work given the inequality that prevailed in the vast majority of hamlets; moreover, distinctions in status were not clear-cut. Three kinds of relationships: honke-bunke, landlord-tenant, and patron-client, with landlord-tenant being most common in areas where agriculture was most commercialized; all three vertical relationships, however, functioned as an insurance policy for low-status households, defusing tensions. After the turn of the C20, however, the assumption that inequality was natural died, resulting in the tenant farmer movement and the ideology of nôhonshugi: "both were essentially petty-bourgeois movements, and both sough political representation as well as economic betterment for their members" (557). Why? "(1) the acquisition by middling farmers of skills and experiences that formerly had been monopolized by the rural elite and (2) the accumulation among those same farmers of new and newly perceived economic grievances to which the rural elite seemed reluctant to attend" (559). Examples: education, veterans' associations = accumulation of unequal privileges in a hierarchical system. Gov't responded by fomenting policies of agricultural improvement, strengthening villages' fiscal/administrative capabilities; and reorganizing rural residents into local associations. Proximate causes of tenant movement = rice inspections + increase in rice prices during WWI boom + end of wartime boom in 1920. But tenant unions did not develop a rationale to justify their existence outside of cyclical economic changes that could sustain membership long-term; was helped along by gov't countermeasures and conflict management. Nôhonshugi by contrast served "during the 1930s as a direct and indirect instrument of fascist transformation" (589). Origins = Shôwa depression + structural factors that meant most farmers were trapped in the old Japan looking in on the glories of the new; solution to both was "rural regeneration." Gov't response to rural social change of Great Depression was led by the new "renovatonist" bureaucrats of 1932; policies were not regressive but restructuring and rationalizing, effects = strengthen gov't controls over rural population (via collectivization of local associations), enhance status and influence of middling farmers at expense of rural elite. "This dismantling of the old order and the economic rationality on which the new was based" = "part of 'the formation of Japanese fascism'" (602, qt. Mori 1971). Thus according to Mori, "in Japan, as elsewhere, fascism was the product of modern development and embodied the principles and power of monopoly capitalism" (ibid). Principal architect = the (military) government. Occupation-era land reform equalized members of hamlets, ratified many previous developments thereby.
Bibliographic Data: Peattie, Mark R. “The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945.” In The Cambridge History of Japan vol. 6, ed. Peter Duus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989: 217-70.
Main Argument: "Japanese imperialism was more situational than deliberate in origin. The aggressive movement of Japanese forces into Korea, China, and Micronesia was as much due to the absence of effective power to resist it as it was to specific Japanese policies and planning" (223). Also, "the inner logic of Japan's strategic doctrine thus committed the empire to ever-expanding and ever-receding security goals, each colonial acquisition being seen as a 'base' or 'outpost' from which the empire could, in some way, control a sphere of influence over more distant areas" (220).
Argument, Sources, Examples Japan different from Euro-American contemporaries in regional character and cultural affinity with its subject peoples, as well as economic/historical timing: Lenin's argument that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism does not hold, because industrial capitalism actually flowered after the beginning of Japan's colonial empire.
Two conceptions of colonial policy: one derived from European "New Imperialism", "a racially separatist approach to colonial rule" derived from social Darwinism and self-consciously rational, as well as paternalistic, passively humanitarian, and gradualist (238). "In sum, it was rational, conservative, and paternalist. It perceived the colonies as separate territories, distinct from the homeland and not merely extensions of it; yet it took pride in Japan's participation in what was seen as a universal 'civilizing mission'" (240)
- second conception "stemmed in large part from the general Asian provenance of the Japanese empire" and was essentially assimilationist based on ideas of 1) indissoluble bond with other countries of the Sinitic sphere; 2) "strongly moralistic element derived from Confucian tradition" (ibid) ; 3) "mystical linkage drawn between the Japanese race and the Japanese people," which was extendable (241); and 4) "idea of the direct application of the laws and institutions of metropolitan Japan to its territories overseas" (242).
- after 1937, "colonies" disappeared (only naichi and gaichi--inner and outer territories); European colonial model reviled; Japanese pan-Asian rhetoric grew more openly racist
- military governors general of Taiwan and Korea ruled as imperial proconsuls over empires within the empire. the civilian government never developed an effective centralized colonial administration
- internal security: "modern and superbly efficient police forces supplemented by the clever exploitation of indigenous systems of community control" (250)
- Japan's colonial economic activities were not cost-effective, though certain groups found them highly profitable; some infrastructural benefit to Taiwan and Korea, but "it does not appear that Japan provided the necessary elements of sustained nonagricultural growth in either colony" (260).
Critical assessment: I sort of feel like focusing only on the colonial empire is cheating. The empire was destroyed by its so-called "informal" possessions, and putting them out of the frame is…questionable, to my mind. And for that matter, the idea that imperialism is "situational" = "accidental" is frankly somewhat offensive. If Peattie means that Japan's unit-level decision making was structured by the parameters of the system, fine. If he means that Japan acquired its colonial possessions in a fit of absent-mindedness, that's wrong.
Bibliographic Data: Najita, Tetsuo and Harry Harootunian. "Japanese Revolt Against the West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century." In The Cambridge History of Japan vol. 6, ed. Peter Duus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989: 711-74.
Main Argument:
Many believed that by realizing the best of East and West, Japan had achieved a new cosmopolitan culture. The recognition of having achieved this unprecedented synthesis validated the subsequent belief that Japan was uniquely qualified to assume leadership in Asia, although much of the rhetoric that the writers used referred to the world at large. Whereas an earlier cosmopolitanism promoted the ideal of cultural diversity and equivalence based on the principle of a common humanity, which served also to restrain excessive claims to exceptionalism, the new culturalism of the 1930s proposed that Japan was appointed to lead the world to a higher level of cultural synthesis that surpassed Western modernism itself. (712)Argument, Sources, Examples Radical restorationists beginning in the 1920s espoused two theories: "one emphasized the necessity of resolving the question of domestic politics by ridding the country of incompetent leaders and ineffective institutions"; "the other orientation focused on the foreign problem and sought to solve it through frontal military strategies" (713). Rejection of Westernization as contrary to the kokutai and valorization of same. Japan, go back to Asia. Continuing sense of national peril led to the idea of a "war to end all wars" (saishû sensô) to resolve the question of the West once and for all. Kita Ikki was patron saint of the former; he advocated constitutional reorganization of the imperial principle as a symbol of national community ==> national socialism. Patron saints of the other school (Gondô Seikei, Inoue Nisshô, Tachibana Kosaburô) "dramatized the ideal of an Asian agrarian community independent of the state and a sacred sanctuary free from the erosions of contemporary history" (722). [NB: These people were all a bunch of fascists, in thought and word if not in deed.] Most of the people who make up the more prominent school of "culturalist" fascists (Tanizaki Jun'ichirô, Nishida Kitarô, Watsuji Tetsurô, Yanagita Kunio, Yokomitsu Riichi) had been Neo-Kantians before they returned from cosmopolitanism to "the familiarity of traditional culture" (735). Similarly, Miki Kyoshi saw the war in Asia as "an advancement to a new, yet-to-be-understood, historical stage beyond discredited forms of modernism" once peace returned (740). By contrast, "the philosophers of the Kyoto school inverted this formulation to regard war as a requisite condition for determining national culture" (741). Simplified Nishida's concept of space to mean the world stage; Nishida, NB, "claimed to be looking for a philosophically stable basis of 'life' that could transcend the limitations of material interest, historical change, and the Western bourgeois concept of egoism" (737). The world was the "moral training ground of the state" and thus "if war is waged for a proper cause, then the state will authenticate its ethical subjectivity" (742). Watsuji's aestheticized rejection of "Western civilization as a hegemonic force over Japan" was grounded "in the climactic and spatial foundations of Japanese civilization" (749). Yanagita Kunio = paranoid cultural particularist. Tanizaki articulated his culturalism in terms of an essay in praise of shadows (as opposed to the culture of the West), which for him was "an aesthetic and cultural choice that had to be articulated intellectually as an abstraction" (754). The Romanha writers (Yasuda Yojûrô, Hayashi Fusao, Kamei Katsuichirô, Sato Haruo, Hagiwara Sakutarô, and briefly Dazai Osamu and Mishima Yukio) echoed these sentiments when they "called upon their contemporaries…to return to the authentic literary tradition" (755).
July 1942 "debate on modernity" in Kyoto: "commonly shared assumption that the outbreak of the Pacific War had convinced the participants that the conflict was both ineffectual and military" (759); "overcoming" = criticism of evolutionary as well as dialectical historicism; hoped to eliminate alienation in society by reconstituting a sense of cultural wholeness; were distressed by shallowness of popular uptake; "Japan's modern intellectual fate" as a peculiar tragedy in which the modern was figured as malaise (ibid). Questions about linear/evolutionary time and the meaning of bunmei. Also problem of global expansion of utilitarianism = Americanism. Criticism of Meiji utilitarianism in general and Meiji bureaucrats in particular "was inseparable from the more general denunciation of the international order constructed and dominated by the Western powers" (767). NB: attack on modernity provided the justification for supporting Konoe's "New Order in Asia" and the war that was required to establish it, which of course was an expansion by the very state that they vilified - this "only underscores the unconsciously ironic deception in which the debaters were implicated" (768).
Critical assessment: Well, these people were an unrepentant bunch of fascists--and here's the thing I found myself asking: if they had been advocating the same sorts of things that Nazi intellectuals [sic] did, would we still be giving them the time of day? Also, Graham Parkes among others savaged this chapter in particular for "poor and irresponsible" scholarship.