Cognitive Resonance

Bibliographic Data: Gordon, Andrew. Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991.

Main Argument: Gordon argues that, rather than seeing a movement for "Taishô democracy" that began in 1905 and climaxed in 1918 (though mass male suffrage was not achieved until 1925), paying attention to "the history of workers, the urban poor, and the urban crowd" (2) shows that the movement for democratization in early 20thC Japan is better understood as what Gordon terms "imperial democracy," and that this movement "grew out of a profound transformation of society" (2-3) that was not limited to the urban bourgeoise.

Historiographical Engagement: Gordon is engaging with and arguing against the Japanese historiography of Taishô democracy. Although some Western scholars are cited in the footnotes, the fact that at the time most Western historians did not take the democracy movement in prewar 20thC Japan seriously means that Gordon does not have much to discuss with them.

( Long notes on a pivotal era )

Critical assessment: Gordon is essentially telling a story of a tripod structure (workers and their parties, the elites and their parties, and the bureaucracy)--and we should remember from Dune the mentat's dictum that a tripod is the most unstable of political structures. Gordon's problem, though, is that in his telling the bureaucracy is MIA in the second part of the book, which profoundly unbalances the work as a whole and makes the bureaucracy's central role in the third part seem to come out of nowhere. Despite this structural weakness, I think Gordon's framework of "imperial democracy" and his criticisms of "Taishô democracy" are both essentially sound.

I've previously read Gordon's history of modern Japan and his book on postwar labor, and despite Gordon's self-deprecating comments in the latter about wanting to write a book that his family could read and understand, one of the things I appreciated most about the volume in question right off the bat is how very readable it is. Gordon writes astonishingly well, and he makes his arguments forcefully but not stridently. I should pay attention.

I'm less bothered than most by quibbles about why Gordon chose Nankatsu or his - sensible, I think - refusal to get bogged down in the nitpicky definitionism that has hobbled historiography of earlier eras. Indeed, I think the central strength of this book - and the reason it deservedly won the (ironically named in this case) Fairbank Prize - is Gordon's willingness to look beyond the narrow confines of his subject and see how the Tokyo mobility, workers in Tokyo and throughout Japan, and finally elites of all stripes interacted together in a complex cauldron of forces to produce first imperial democracy and then imperial fascism. The point of this book is not actually about labor or economic history per se; it's about how those two forces, and the vectors they produced in society as a whole, drove the political history of imperial Japan. Missing that aspect of the story is deeply problematic.

I appreciated too Gordon's willingness to justifiably castigate espousers of nominalism and impact-response theory, who would deny Japan its place among fascist countries of the 1930s and 1940s and think that only outside forces can get Japan to do anything. It occurred to me while reading that, in addition to being historiographically untenable and deeply biased, the refusal to call a spade a spade in the case of Japanese fascism actually blunts the analytical usefulness of that concept, since Japanese democracy was vitiated and the country turned fascist without a charismatic maniac, unlike Germany and Italy. If it's that easy, we should all be more attentive to how and why imperial fascism was produced, not less.

My sense is that the dial on this question has moved somewhat since Gordon wrote this book, and I would guess that Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan is itself a large part of the reason why that is. The question of fascism remains, I think, one of the most vexed for the academy as a whole - witness the abandon with which some giants in the field of Japanese history threw the term around during the Bush years - and Gordon's approach offers a nice corrective to that sort of willy-nilly approach. All in all, this is an excellent book, and deservedly a classic.

Further reading: E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class

Meta notes: Thompson's Luddite workers are an anomaly, not a prototype.