Cognitive Resonance

Bibliographic Data: Han, Jung-sun N. An Imperial Path to Modernity: Yoshino Sakuzo and a New Liberal Order in East Asia, 1905-1937. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Main Argument: This study argues that

Perceiving the tacit relationship between liberalism and the imperialist order, the Japanese chose to conform to liberal ideas and institutions to direct Japan's transformation into an imperialist power in Asia. … Trying to sustain and rationalize the imperial project, Japanese liberals actively sought to make the domestic political stage less hostile to liberal ideas and practices by appealing to the interests of the new middle class. The press was their main instrument of power. Facilitating the creation of print-mediated public opinion, liberal intellectuals attempted to enlist the new middle class as a social ally in circulating liberal ideas and practices within Japan and throughout the empire. (6, 7)

Historiographical Engagement: Najita, Hara Kei; Gordon, Imperial Democracy; Barshay, State and Intellectual; Duus, Party Rivalry and Political Change; Fromkin, The Peace to End All Peace

( Liberal elitism in imperial Japan )

Critical assessment: This book has several related problems that are all features of its single overarching problem, which is that it never articulates its central intellectual problem and why it matters. As Professor Berry would say, it lacks gravitas, and particularly compared to a book like State and Intellectual in Modern Japan, it's kind of bloodless--as a certain wise scholar said to me, there's never a sense of why people in general thought of Yoshino as the great Japanese democratic hope, so ironically given her remarks in the introduction, Han winds up reiterating the elitism that other scholars have identified in the "liberals" of late Meiji and Taisho. She also never explains why Royama Masamichi is the person to follow of of Yoshino's circle, or to what extent all this theorizing of the cooperative community had any impact on the people who were setting it up, and setting it up to run itself into the ground. There are some good points in here, but they all need to be expanded by a significant percentage, in my opinion. In other words, this is a missed opportunity.

Further reading: Fogel, Politics and Sinology; Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales

Meta notes: But no really, why do we care? The book needs to tell us this.

Bibliographic Data: Allison, Anne. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Main Argument: Allison argues that several things were different about the "J-cool" boom that began in the 1990s, beginning with the fact that it had a far greater level of influence on the U.S. marketplace than did previous Japanese cultural imports. Allison believes that fantasy, capitalism, and globalism are conjoined and (re)configured in Japanese media mix properties [the term is anachronistic to her book], and that the "polymorphously perverse" play they engender (and embody) is key to their appeal--both at the level of practice and at the level of the media mix itself.

( Pokemon, Power Rangers, Sailor Moon, tamagotchi )

Critical assessment: I would have liked this book much better if I had read it before I read Marc Steinberg's book, which I think offers a much better grasp on much of the same territory. Admission: that is because I am not an anthropologist, and because I am allergic to culture as a primary causal factor in anything for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture but which can be symbolized by the assertion that culture changes damn quick when people want it to. The "techno-animism" argument, frankly, I think is better explained by simply saying that Japan moved into a new mode of capitalism before other countries; this is Latour's "parliament of things" in a capitalist inflection. But also, I don't like Freud, and Allison is very much a Freudian, albeit in a feminist inflection. Sidenote: WTF is with feminists liking Freud? Freud does not like you, ladies! Freud does not even believe that queerness exists! Vomit. That said, once Allison gets away from all that and into her analysis of capitalism, I think she's basically on the money, albeit in a different and frankly somewhat dated idiom. A worthwhile book, for sure, but very much not the whole story.

Further reading: Steinberg, Anime's Media Mix; The LEGO Movie

Meta notes: Gotta catch 'em all! Also, what does "New Age" even mean anymore?

Bibliographic Data: Vlastos, Stephen. Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Main Argument: In early modern Japan peasant protest was ubiquitous, which is less attributable to the oppressiveness of the Tokugawa order than to the fact that "the internal organization of the peasant class and its position within the Tokugawa polity were highly conducive to collective action," particular the Tokugawa status system and the fact that villages were independent administrative units which were collectively responsible for tax payments (11). Vlastos is, by his own admission, "less interested in what set of conditions 'caused' peasants to protest than in the nature, form, and content of the movements" and in "the structure of conflict and what it can tell us about class relations," since he assumes (correctly) that conflict between lord and peasant was the central tension of the system (5).

( Peasants and protests )
Critical assessment: NB: Vlastos is heavily influenced by the earlier generations' assumptions about "Tokugawa stability," reports of which to my mind have been somewhat exaggerated. I think this book is too short, but the structure is also too long? It does not need eight chapters, and frankly, a lot of these points were covered more perceptively by Mark Ravina 10 years later. (See Further Reading, below.)

Further reading: Ravina, Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan; Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery

Meta notes: The weapons of the weak are weapons all the same.

Bibliographic Data: Najita, Tetsuo. Hara Kei in the Politics of Compromise, 1905-1915. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Main Argument:

…the growth of the parties in Japan was the result of a crucial transformation among party men from an ideological to a strategical orientation; or, from an attitude of uncompromising opposition to the government based on the ideal of a single, unified, popular party (mintô gôdô) to that of realistic compromises within the government structure. In particular the successes of one party, the Seiyûkai, under Hara Kei, in pursuing this course of action were decisive in steering party politics in Japan away from multiparties toward two major competing party alignments. (xii)

Historiographical Engagement: Mostly the question of the end of "Taisho democracy," in Japanese

Preface: Argument, Sources, Examples Najita argues that at the time he was writing (47 years ago!), studies of the party era in prewar Japanese politics were generally captive to two fallacies: 1) giving too much weight to documentary evidence written "through the eyes of these idealists who believed that compromises within the political order indicated submission to 'absolutism' and that those in power could be quickly and decisively overthrown (daha) if the parties remained firmly united"; and 2) "to see the parties as the major cause for the political dislocations underlying Japan's steady drift in the 1930s toward a disastrous war" (ix, x). Hence, according to Najita, "an analytical distinction must be made between first, the sustained struggle by the parties (which, while no doubt causing political discontent along the way, changed their status from groups of marginal significance into powerful elites in the government) and second, those driving forces accompanying rapid modernization which generated political dislocations of the sort described by Maruyama. …the casual lines between the two should be treated with considerable care" [if, indeed, they exist at all] (xi).

Important points
# Hara effected a transformation in the regional political structure "from the system of 'self-government' [sic] planned by Yamagata into a pervasive, party-oriented interest structure" (78)
# By the so-called "Taisho political crisis" in 1913, "the systematic expansion of Seiyûkai power had resulted in the steady erosion of the bases of the ruling cliques" and had "made a multiparty system in Japan a practical impossibility" (121)
# Katsura forming the Dôshikai in January 1913 was a direct reaction to the Seiyûkai's power and brought about an end to the Hara/Katsura compromise that "had dominated politics since 1905, an alliance that had provided a working relationship between the major centers of power--the House of Peers, the Lower House, and the bureaucracy--and had stymied the growth of a second party" (140)
# The reforms that were enacted under the Yamamoto cabinet of 1913 were a triumph for the "politics of compromise" in that they struck down barriers to party government and reduced the influence of the Yamagata faction
# The Seiyûkai created its enemies by stimulating the growth of a rival anti-Seiyû coalition

Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Najita argues, among other things, that "by enhancing its power the Seiyûkai, in fact, from 1905 on, prevented this Meiji elite from perpetuating itself and the style of rule commonly called transcendental government" (215). He also argues that the parties' ties with the general public were "tenuous and vague" and that the elite politicians of the parties distrusted the masses and viewed them solely instrumentally (214). In summary, "the crisis of 1912-1913 dramatically reaffirmed the overall trend of parties to move steadily into the mainstream of power relationships in the Meiji constitutional order" and "the politics of compromise was [sic] intended to overcome the structural disadvantages of the Meiji political order and the Yamagata faction imbedded in it" (219).

Critical assessment: Shockingly enough, dear readers, I don't actually think that the achievement(s) of imperial democracy can be laid solely at the feet of one Hara Kei, who was if nothing else a smooth operator--indeed, he seems rather like Itô Hirobumi in this regard, with the important difference that Itô eschewed creating a faction or a reliable patronage network and Hara lived for politics and for attaining political power. We might also add that both of them were nonetheless assassinated on railway platforms; make of that what you will. More fundamentally, I think Najita is wrong about what happened in the 1930s (see Young and Gordon, below) and I think that he recommits the mistake of the elite party politicians themselves by seeing in the riots of the era of agitation for imperial democracy (1905-18) as apolitical, uninformed rabble-rousing. I leave filling in the details of my objections to that view as an exercise for the reader.

Further reading: Gordon, Imperial Democracy; Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire

Meta notes: It's not (only) politicians who make history.

Bibliographic Data: Bowen, Roger W. Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan: A Study of Commoners in the Popular Rights Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Main Argument: This study attempts to take the people who participated in the violent incidents (gekka jiken) of the Freedom & Popular Rights era seriously, arguing that they "were rebellions, not only in the sense that their goal was 'liberation' from certain economic and political injustices, but also in the sense that they were less than revolutionary in effect (as opposed to intent), or, from another perspective, they were revolutions which failed in the attempt to establish a 'foundation of freedom'" (5).

( Freedom & Popular Rights )

Critical assessment: This is a massive book, perhaps needlessly so, but it's quite good, particularly considering the period in which it was written. Bowen does an excellent job of restoring agency and intelligence to the farmers who rose up to demand their rights in the 1880s, whose actions should not be consigned to the category of "failure," or lightly forgotten.

Further reading: Gordon, Imperial Democracy; Kim Kyu Hyun, The Age of Visions and Arguments

Meta notes: But the human microphone will find a voice/And a change is gonna come/Said the signal to the–