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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Faison, Elyssa. Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Bill Mihalopoulos, The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 69, No. 1 (Feb. 2010), pp. 253-55 .
Main Argument: Family + industrialization = patriarchal authority of the father grated onto the state ==> "corporate paternalism" mode of production centered around integrating women into hierarchical relations by disciplining female workers bodily, fixing of cultural standards of womanhood (i.e. women workers treated more as women than as workers). Capital shapes social knowledge as well as the individual; "capital shapes the capacity to communicate and to feel the content of what we think" (254). Method: Marx + Foucault = feminist revolution?
Bibliographic Data: Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. The Technological Transformation of Japan: From the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Penelope Francks, The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 49, No. 2 (May, 1996), pp. 419-20.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Edward E. Pratt, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Nov., 1996), pp. 1006-07.
Main Argument: Japan's ability to adapt and absorb imported technology beginning in the Meiji period was based on prior accumulations of skills and capacities necessary for innovation in Tokugawa period; postwar absorption of imported technology made possible by trial and error experiences of state and business during the interwar and wartime periods. Japan's technological success thus does not actually have anything to do with 'culture' per se. Key themes: relationship between imitation and innovation (i.e. the latter initially involved incremental improvements on endogamous technologies); technological change = central gov't and large corporations + small firms and local communities (cf. 珍道具), esp. in earlier periods; "social network of innovation" = links facilitating the diffusion of information on latest technologies to production centers. State's best role is not technological importation/diffusion per se but rather creation of additional nodes in the social network at different levels between state and local.
Bibliographic Data: Harootunian, Harry D. Overcome By Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Andrew Barshay, Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Winter, 2002), pp. 146-51.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Christopher S. Jones [now Goto-Jones], Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 66, No. 1 (2003), pp. 141-45.
Main Argument: Capitalism required unevenness internally to sustain itself, and "not the worker but the woman was the true other of modernity"; externally, Japan's sense of cultural difference from the global capitalist core was vastly overdetermined. All life being lived in the modern capitalist now ==> aporia that was overcome by reconceptualizing time as place. Gemeinschaft capitalism + half-hearted democracy gives way to despotism, in this case fascism of the kyôdôtai. First beginning: lived experience of urban/rural unevenness generated vast anxieties on left and right, as no one but the masses were wiling to affirm consumption as such. Second beginning: the Nov. 1941-1942 symposia [NB: there were multiple symposia in this 12 month period, not just the July 1942 meeting] on overcoming modernity, in which participants were unclear which modernity they were overcoming (the Restoration or Japanese modern times?), and which was, in H's argument, the closure and the culmination of the interwar effort to grasp daily life in its actuality. Also irony: despite efforts to grasp everyday life, "the folk" became as much od an abstraction as any other.
Critical assessment: ABars argues that the conference[s] were a prefiguration of defeat; Japan stood for nothing. ABars also says that H. fails to give fascism its due weight and makes capitalism responsible for too much (here again the significance of Weimar is doubled). Chris G-J (before he became G-) says that H. doesn't understand Nishitani Keiji and Miki; they were trying to recover an ontological standpoint from which to witness true reality (is this connected to what Heidegger actually achieved?), not a golden Japan. NB: According to Abars, H is post-Marxist; CGS points out that H. uses Žižek (who is a Marxist and has been accused of being a fascist) and says H. has a Marxist agenda. CGS says H. fails to take the idea of cultural difference seriously. "In the final analysis, H. locates origins of Japanese fascism in refusal of Japanese intellectuals to become either materialists or Marxists." Well, no/t quite, Harry. I want to remind CGS, though, that in the capitalist world order capitalism may be localized, but it still deterritorializes and reterritorializes everyone according to the same general principles. As usual with H., some errors and very few citations.
Bibliographic Data: Fogel, Joshua A. Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naito Konan (1866-1934). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Marius B. Jansen, The International History Review, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Feb., 1986), pp. 161-164.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Linda Grove, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Aug., 1985), pp. 806-808.
Main Argument: Naito's hypothesis was to find a kind of early modernity, dominated by the emperor, in China beginning in the Song dynasty; the counterpart to this political centralization was the social concentration on local society. The converse of contemporary China, however, was that it had a weak center and did not know its own history, thus leaving ample space for outside powers to govern border areas that would consequently fall away--enter Japan. The point for Naito was decreasing importance for government and increasing importance for culture in the minds of most Chinese people; these conclusions however were appropriated by people who did not share his appreciation for the Chinese tradition and people. Naito hated the continental shishi and was not necessarily imperialist per se, but he was also wholly incapable of understanding Chinese nationalism. He didn't even speak Chinese! LG critique: focusing on Naito leads F. to seek to justify his recherché views, such as the idea that the Ma Fourth movement was less important than the May Thirtieth movement (lolwut); status as mere biography limits its larger relevance.
Bibliographic Data: Ruoff, Kenneth J. Imperial Japan at its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2600th Anniversary. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Yuka Fujioka, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 72, No. 1 (February 2013), pp. 205-06 .
Main Argument: Japanese people had war responsibility: at least until war turned against Japan, "many ordinary Japanese in fact enjoyed their lives, took great pride in the success of the imperial armed forces,a nd enthusiastically supported their country's war efforts" (205)--cf. imperial tourism, mass participation in imperial propaganda, etc. Celebration of 2600th anniversary in 1940 = wartime popular nationalism. Most importantly imo, "Ruoff demonstrates that the history of wartime Japan is incomplete unless Imperial Japan is positioned as an empire and Japan proper is analyzed in relationship to its colonies and beyond where Japanese resided overseas" (206). However, F. argues that balance of responsibility still rests with gov't because of structural factors: 1) imperial tourism and mass consumption of empire was more or less compulsory when it was one of the only acceptable forms of leisure [but remember L. Young's point that imperial tourism outside the metropolitan islands was actually quite costly--this was mostly an elite activity]; 2) by 1937 there was little space for citizens acting autonomously of the state; 3) needs to draw a sharper distinction between elites and ordinary people.
Bibliographic Data: Ruoff, Kenneth J. The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945-1995. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Genzo Yamamoto, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Nov., 2002), pp. 1384-86.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Stephen S. Large, Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Summer, 2002), pp. 239-42.
Main Argument: Postwar constitution relegated emperor to role of symbol, and despite efforts to minimize changes from prewar order (including on the part of so-called liberals), R. argues that by the mid-1950s Japanese people had happily accepted the symbol monarchy, thus dooming conservative revisionist movements. Hirohito and company strenuously defended his existence and power, and Hirohito himself actively participated in remolding his image from political and military ruler to pacifist and defender of Japan's people and culture. Postwar nationalism within democratic value framework = conservatism, and reign of Akihito has moved the emperorship to even more of a "monarchy of the masses" (cf. the British royal family). Acceptance of democratic processes and values, increasing willingness to reinterpret the monarchy and Japan's past in that light = popular democracy, and multiple nationalisms rather than one monolithic right wing. Similarly, many of the nationalist recrudescences that have irked left-wing critics (the national anthem, the era names bill, National Foundation Day) were the result of broad popular support and lobbying rather than of the actions of a conservative state. SL: One wonders whether the relationship between the emperor and the people is really all that chummy.
Bibliographic Data: Kingsberg, Miriam. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Main Argument: Civilization, both as a social and a moral condition, was highly unstable because it was constantly evolving, and could never be fully achieved even by its framers; "crises of legitimacy thus erupted frequently throughout the world during the era of nation building," followed by moral panics that sought to reassert a nation's civilizational credentials (1). Japan experienced three crises of sovereignty related to narcotics in its first modern century: the first was in 1895, when its claims to joining the civilizational club as an abstinent nation were then challenged by the fact that in Taiwan it had just acquired a colony full of drug users (200K out of a population of 3 million). The colonial solution was to create a state monopoly on the sale of narcotics with the ostensible goal of weaning addicts off their supply, which of course never happened; Japan's civilizational status was thus assured at the same time that the colony of Taiwan was made less and less of a financial burden on the metropole. The drug addict was thus also figured as racially and civilizationally inferior: the Chinese opium smoker. The second crisis was in 1905, when Japan acquired the Kwantung Leased Territory and adapted the narcotics regulatory regime it had pioneered in Taiwan, with the result that within 20 years Korea was the global capital of morphine and the port of the KLT city-state handled the second highest volume of banned drugs in the world after Shanghai. At the same time as the colonial state literally profited off its subjects' addictions, moral crusaders in Japan--Kingsberg uses the term moral entrepreneus--were polishing their middle class and civilizational credentials on the figure of the opium addict, deploying that stereotype and others in order to cement their own role in framing national morality. Opium functioned as a marker of racial difference in an era of "benevolent" colonial government that fused civilizational uplift with Confucian relations between unequals, fixing the Taiwanese and the Koreans somewhere between the abstinent Japanese and the addicted Chinese. Furthermore, "in 1931, at the height of the moral crusade against narcotics, the windfalls of the illicit drug economy financed the Japanese military takeover of Manchuria" (6). The puppet state of Manchukuo failed to meet international standards for statehood and civilization, but the Kwantung Army was not deterred in its radical experiment in colonialism; even as moral entrepreneurs reformulated the issue of narcotics from a problem of Chinese racial degeneracy to an imperialist conspiracy against Japan, "meanwhile, the military government organized the the public sale of drugs for profit, accumulating the resources to ultimately wage war on Asia and the West. With its political economy, foreign relations, and national morality dependent on opium, Manchukuo was one of the world's first modern narco-states" (7). The final crisis came at the end of the Occupation, when the "hiropon age," lasting from 1952-56, presented the specter of the Japanese methamphetamine addict--Self and not Other--as "a metaphor for the postwar nation: a powerless victim, a prisoner of anxiety, a bullied inferior, and above all, a deeply flawed, even strange personality. The addict, transformed from the racial Other into the Self, evoked unprecedented popular alarm, attention, and activism" around the successful attempt to remodel drug users into independent citizens as an index of Japan's reintegration into global society "as a confident, cooperative, moral nation-state" (7). Just as Japan's joining the ranks of great powers "gave civilization credibility as a universal rather than a merely Western value," "the history of narcotics in Japan is not simply a domestic or even regional story, but a global account of the emergence of the nation as a moral category in the modern world" (8).
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Bill Mihalopoulos, The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 69, No. 1 (Feb. 2010), pp. 253-55 .
Main Argument: Family + industrialization = patriarchal authority of the father grated onto the state ==> "corporate paternalism" mode of production centered around integrating women into hierarchical relations by disciplining female workers bodily, fixing of cultural standards of womanhood (i.e. women workers treated more as women than as workers). Capital shapes social knowledge as well as the individual; "capital shapes the capacity to communicate and to feel the content of what we think" (254). Method: Marx + Foucault = feminist revolution?
Bibliographic Data: Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. The Technological Transformation of Japan: From the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Penelope Francks, The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 49, No. 2 (May, 1996), pp. 419-20.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Edward E. Pratt, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Nov., 1996), pp. 1006-07.
Main Argument: Japan's ability to adapt and absorb imported technology beginning in the Meiji period was based on prior accumulations of skills and capacities necessary for innovation in Tokugawa period; postwar absorption of imported technology made possible by trial and error experiences of state and business during the interwar and wartime periods. Japan's technological success thus does not actually have anything to do with 'culture' per se. Key themes: relationship between imitation and innovation (i.e. the latter initially involved incremental improvements on endogamous technologies); technological change = central gov't and large corporations + small firms and local communities (cf. 珍道具), esp. in earlier periods; "social network of innovation" = links facilitating the diffusion of information on latest technologies to production centers. State's best role is not technological importation/diffusion per se but rather creation of additional nodes in the social network at different levels between state and local.
Bibliographic Data: Harootunian, Harry D. Overcome By Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Andrew Barshay, Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Winter, 2002), pp. 146-51.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Christopher S. Jones [now Goto-Jones], Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 66, No. 1 (2003), pp. 141-45.
Main Argument: Capitalism required unevenness internally to sustain itself, and "not the worker but the woman was the true other of modernity"; externally, Japan's sense of cultural difference from the global capitalist core was vastly overdetermined. All life being lived in the modern capitalist now ==> aporia that was overcome by reconceptualizing time as place. Gemeinschaft capitalism + half-hearted democracy gives way to despotism, in this case fascism of the kyôdôtai. First beginning: lived experience of urban/rural unevenness generated vast anxieties on left and right, as no one but the masses were wiling to affirm consumption as such. Second beginning: the Nov. 1941-1942 symposia [NB: there were multiple symposia in this 12 month period, not just the July 1942 meeting] on overcoming modernity, in which participants were unclear which modernity they were overcoming (the Restoration or Japanese modern times?), and which was, in H's argument, the closure and the culmination of the interwar effort to grasp daily life in its actuality. Also irony: despite efforts to grasp everyday life, "the folk" became as much od an abstraction as any other.
Critical assessment: ABars argues that the conference[s] were a prefiguration of defeat; Japan stood for nothing. ABars also says that H. fails to give fascism its due weight and makes capitalism responsible for too much (here again the significance of Weimar is doubled). Chris G-J (before he became G-) says that H. doesn't understand Nishitani Keiji and Miki; they were trying to recover an ontological standpoint from which to witness true reality (is this connected to what Heidegger actually achieved?), not a golden Japan. NB: According to Abars, H is post-Marxist; CGS points out that H. uses Žižek (who is a Marxist and has been accused of being a fascist) and says H. has a Marxist agenda. CGS says H. fails to take the idea of cultural difference seriously. "In the final analysis, H. locates origins of Japanese fascism in refusal of Japanese intellectuals to become either materialists or Marxists." Well, no/t quite, Harry. I want to remind CGS, though, that in the capitalist world order capitalism may be localized, but it still deterritorializes and reterritorializes everyone according to the same general principles. As usual with H., some errors and very few citations.
Bibliographic Data: Fogel, Joshua A. Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naito Konan (1866-1934). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Marius B. Jansen, The International History Review, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Feb., 1986), pp. 161-164.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Linda Grove, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Aug., 1985), pp. 806-808.
Main Argument: Naito's hypothesis was to find a kind of early modernity, dominated by the emperor, in China beginning in the Song dynasty; the counterpart to this political centralization was the social concentration on local society. The converse of contemporary China, however, was that it had a weak center and did not know its own history, thus leaving ample space for outside powers to govern border areas that would consequently fall away--enter Japan. The point for Naito was decreasing importance for government and increasing importance for culture in the minds of most Chinese people; these conclusions however were appropriated by people who did not share his appreciation for the Chinese tradition and people. Naito hated the continental shishi and was not necessarily imperialist per se, but he was also wholly incapable of understanding Chinese nationalism. He didn't even speak Chinese! LG critique: focusing on Naito leads F. to seek to justify his recherché views, such as the idea that the Ma Fourth movement was less important than the May Thirtieth movement (lolwut); status as mere biography limits its larger relevance.
Bibliographic Data: Ruoff, Kenneth J. Imperial Japan at its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2600th Anniversary. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Yuka Fujioka, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 72, No. 1 (February 2013), pp. 205-06 .
Main Argument: Japanese people had war responsibility: at least until war turned against Japan, "many ordinary Japanese in fact enjoyed their lives, took great pride in the success of the imperial armed forces,a nd enthusiastically supported their country's war efforts" (205)--cf. imperial tourism, mass participation in imperial propaganda, etc. Celebration of 2600th anniversary in 1940 = wartime popular nationalism. Most importantly imo, "Ruoff demonstrates that the history of wartime Japan is incomplete unless Imperial Japan is positioned as an empire and Japan proper is analyzed in relationship to its colonies and beyond where Japanese resided overseas" (206). However, F. argues that balance of responsibility still rests with gov't because of structural factors: 1) imperial tourism and mass consumption of empire was more or less compulsory when it was one of the only acceptable forms of leisure [but remember L. Young's point that imperial tourism outside the metropolitan islands was actually quite costly--this was mostly an elite activity]; 2) by 1937 there was little space for citizens acting autonomously of the state; 3) needs to draw a sharper distinction between elites and ordinary people.
Bibliographic Data: Ruoff, Kenneth J. The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945-1995. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Genzo Yamamoto, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Nov., 2002), pp. 1384-86.
Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Stephen S. Large, Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Summer, 2002), pp. 239-42.
Main Argument: Postwar constitution relegated emperor to role of symbol, and despite efforts to minimize changes from prewar order (including on the part of so-called liberals), R. argues that by the mid-1950s Japanese people had happily accepted the symbol monarchy, thus dooming conservative revisionist movements. Hirohito and company strenuously defended his existence and power, and Hirohito himself actively participated in remolding his image from political and military ruler to pacifist and defender of Japan's people and culture. Postwar nationalism within democratic value framework = conservatism, and reign of Akihito has moved the emperorship to even more of a "monarchy of the masses" (cf. the British royal family). Acceptance of democratic processes and values, increasing willingness to reinterpret the monarchy and Japan's past in that light = popular democracy, and multiple nationalisms rather than one monolithic right wing. Similarly, many of the nationalist recrudescences that have irked left-wing critics (the national anthem, the era names bill, National Foundation Day) were the result of broad popular support and lobbying rather than of the actions of a conservative state. SL: One wonders whether the relationship between the emperor and the people is really all that chummy.
Bibliographic Data: Kingsberg, Miriam. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Main Argument: Civilization, both as a social and a moral condition, was highly unstable because it was constantly evolving, and could never be fully achieved even by its framers; "crises of legitimacy thus erupted frequently throughout the world during the era of nation building," followed by moral panics that sought to reassert a nation's civilizational credentials (1). Japan experienced three crises of sovereignty related to narcotics in its first modern century: the first was in 1895, when its claims to joining the civilizational club as an abstinent nation were then challenged by the fact that in Taiwan it had just acquired a colony full of drug users (200K out of a population of 3 million). The colonial solution was to create a state monopoly on the sale of narcotics with the ostensible goal of weaning addicts off their supply, which of course never happened; Japan's civilizational status was thus assured at the same time that the colony of Taiwan was made less and less of a financial burden on the metropole. The drug addict was thus also figured as racially and civilizationally inferior: the Chinese opium smoker. The second crisis was in 1905, when Japan acquired the Kwantung Leased Territory and adapted the narcotics regulatory regime it had pioneered in Taiwan, with the result that within 20 years Korea was the global capital of morphine and the port of the KLT city-state handled the second highest volume of banned drugs in the world after Shanghai. At the same time as the colonial state literally profited off its subjects' addictions, moral crusaders in Japan--Kingsberg uses the term moral entrepreneus--were polishing their middle class and civilizational credentials on the figure of the opium addict, deploying that stereotype and others in order to cement their own role in framing national morality. Opium functioned as a marker of racial difference in an era of "benevolent" colonial government that fused civilizational uplift with Confucian relations between unequals, fixing the Taiwanese and the Koreans somewhere between the abstinent Japanese and the addicted Chinese. Furthermore, "in 1931, at the height of the moral crusade against narcotics, the windfalls of the illicit drug economy financed the Japanese military takeover of Manchuria" (6). The puppet state of Manchukuo failed to meet international standards for statehood and civilization, but the Kwantung Army was not deterred in its radical experiment in colonialism; even as moral entrepreneurs reformulated the issue of narcotics from a problem of Chinese racial degeneracy to an imperialist conspiracy against Japan, "meanwhile, the military government organized the the public sale of drugs for profit, accumulating the resources to ultimately wage war on Asia and the West. With its political economy, foreign relations, and national morality dependent on opium, Manchukuo was one of the world's first modern narco-states" (7). The final crisis came at the end of the Occupation, when the "hiropon age," lasting from 1952-56, presented the specter of the Japanese methamphetamine addict--Self and not Other--as "a metaphor for the postwar nation: a powerless victim, a prisoner of anxiety, a bullied inferior, and above all, a deeply flawed, even strange personality. The addict, transformed from the racial Other into the Self, evoked unprecedented popular alarm, attention, and activism" around the successful attempt to remodel drug users into independent citizens as an index of Japan's reintegration into global society "as a confident, cooperative, moral nation-state" (7). Just as Japan's joining the ranks of great powers "gave civilization credibility as a universal rather than a merely Western value," "the history of narcotics in Japan is not simply a domestic or even regional story, but a global account of the emergence of the nation as a moral category in the modern world" (8).