A Cultural History of Postwar Japan

by Shunsuke Tsurumi

  7

  Ordinary Citizens and Citizens’ Movements

  The words which non-Japanese students of contemporary Japanese find most striking and often the most difficult are words which the Japanese have borrowed from other cultures, because they do not appear in any dictionaries. Even when the original meaning of the word is understood, the meaning is altered in the context of Japanese culture. These words can be said to belong to a world culture, or, more exactly, to an international culture.

  One such Japanese word is ‘circle’.77 Its origin may be traced to June 1931, when Kurahara Koreto (1902–) borrowed it from a Russian context for use in NAP, the organ of the All-Japan Proletarian Arts League (Zen Nihon Musansha Geijutsu Renmei, established in 1928). In this context it was used to designate literary and artistic groups to be organized in factories and labour unions under the direction of the specialist groups belonging to the NAP, which was, in turn, under the direction of the Japan Communist Party.

  The NAP was dissolved in October 1931 on the basis of Kurahara Koreto’s proposal to form KOP, Japan Proletarian Cultural League (Nihon Puroretaria Bunka Renmei), which was established in November of the same year by integrating 12 cultural organizations, not only in the field of the arts but also proletarian scientific organizations. ‘Circle’ then designated the group’s activities in arts as well as science under the supervision of the Communist Party. After the group defection of 1933, these circles also declined and underwent a transformation. Their originator, Kurahara, however, refused tenk all through the war years, in spite of imprisonment. He was arrested in April 1932. After spending eight and a half years in prison, he was released because of his tuberculosis in October 1940, and spent his later years on a sick bed under police supervision.

  In the meanwhile, circles, which had become independent of any directives of the Japan Communist Party, continued their activities. Notable among them were the ‘World Culture’ group and the ‘Saturday’ group, which had overlapping membership.78 They were active from 1936 to 1937, in the middle phase of the Fifteen Years’ War. They were suppressed during the round up of prominent Communists for their alleged connection with the Communist International, but in fact there was no such connection. They took no orders from the Japan Communist Party, for it no longer operated outside prison.

  These two groups reacted to the way in which militarism warped people’s lives. The magazine World Culture analyzed the situation on a theoretical level. The weekly paper Saturday carried comments on daily life. Neither group was bound by ideology. They were issue-oriented. As such they were the forerunners of the citizens’ movements after 1960.

  Saturday was edited and managed by a movie actor, and copies were circulated in coffee houses in Kyoto. It was a weekly devoted to critical observation of the Japanese life style, and as such it throve as a communication enterprise, leaving some surplus funds in the bank at the time of its suppression.

  World Culture included among its contributors economists, sociologists, physicists, philosophers and foreign language teachers. The chief contributor to this magazine, as well as to another weekly paper, was a philosopher, Nakai Masakazu (1900– 1952), who concerned himself with the popular front movement on three theoretical levels.

  In the first place, he was born and bred in a family tradition of Buddhism in the Shinran Sect in Hiroshima Prefecture, where Buddhist priests had long supported the farmer-merchants’ resistance against the political authority of war-lords. He was bound through filial piety to this Buddhist tradition, which gave him a reason to concern himself in local tradition. After release from imprisonment, he became a librarian in his home town of Onomichi, where the city library became the centre of cultural activities among farmers in the postwar period.

  In the second place, he was a sportsman, a member of his college crew. Analysing his experience as a member of the crew, he wrote an article, ‘The Structure of the Sportsman’s Experience’, in which he revealed how the same mood seemed to infect crew members through the accumulation of communal training. A group subjectivity emerged and supported them.

  These two experiences created an awareness of group movement as a commune, which is on a different footing from the rational, utilitarian, contractual relationship of a Gesellschaft. His idea of a circle is a small Gesellschaft supported by a Gemeinschaft within it.

  In the third place, Nakai developed his theory of the logic of committee work in 1936. He traced the history of models of communication in Western philosophy since ancient times and distinguished three types: dialectics, which developed from conversation; the logic of internal consistency, which developed from meditation; and inductive logic, developed from the wide sharing of experience through the printed medium. Inductive logic diversifies further into functional, mathematical logic, which developed out of highly specialized industrial production, and into the logic of committee work which grew out of a survey of the whole process of industrial production. It aims at a synthesis, a point of view from which one can review, criticize and reconstruct different parts of the thinking process conducted by man. The examples that Nakai cites are all taken from industrial enterprise, but he clearly draws his inspiration from Lenin’s political writings, forbidden by the thought police of the time.

  With his threefold approach, Nakai saw the communal aspect of the popular movement and also the necessity of committee work which would counterbalance the emotional setback that might result from the rule of the mob to which the popular right wing of the movement is sometimes prone. Rational planning alone might deprive a movement of its spontaneity. A surge of communal emotion might lead to mob rule. A popular movement is always exposed to this dilemma, of which Nakai was aware in his threefold analysis.79

  World Culture and Saturday were both sympathetic to the policy of the Soviet Union. However, due to the historical circumstance which deprived them of any contact with that country, they continued their own popular front movement independently of the Japan Communist Party and the Communist International. They thus came close to forming a popular front movement based on local Japanese tradition.80

  After Japan’s surrender the Communist leaders who had refused tenk during the long war years returned to leadership. They thought it proper to give directives to the cultural circles that had arisen in the postwar period. After the bloody May Day of 1952, faction fighting within the Communist Party caused them to loosen their grip on the circles, which became more independent. By 1960, the word ‘circle’ had come to mean any small group of amateurs pursuing some cultural activity, be it artistic or academic. It no longer had the connotation which coupled the word with Communist Party directives.

  The way in which this foreign word has taken root in such a short time may be explained by its connection with Japan’s village tradition. Tamaki Akira, the agricultural sociologist, has conducted comparative research on agriculture in East Asia. He has found a similar development of self-rule in the control of water in rice paddies in Indonesia and Japan.81 The formation of a character such as the village chief Tanaka Shz (1841–1913) should be understood in this context. He has only just emerged from a half-century’s oblivion with the first publication in Japan of his complete works, mostly letters and memoranda. His resurrection may be attributed to the high industrialization since the 1960s. His biography, written in English, is Kenneth Strong’s Ox against the Storm.82

  Tanaka was a hard-working young man, and his family had long been known for hard work and selfless devotion to the village cause. His house was very small, like any other house in the village, but his grandfather and father were village chiefs. When his father became the great chief of all the villages in the district, Tanaka Shz became chief of his own village at the age of 18. The village belonged to the feudal lord, whose son was shortly to marry. The manager of the lord’s household raised a tax from villagers in his domain, ostensibly to pay for the newly erected residence of the married couple. Tanaka Shz lodged a protest on behalf of the villagers, claiming that s
uch a tax was not according to the custom of the village. His grounds were solely village conservatism and the customs of self-rule in the village. Tanaka Shz was imprisoned and was only released two years after the Meiji Restoration.

  In the Meiji era Tanaka Shz rose to the central arena of politics with his election as a member of parliament. He took up the issue of the devastation of farming villages in his home provinces by pollution from a copper refinery which forced many farmers to leave their homes. He failed to receive a hearing and resigned his seat in parliament. He returned to live with the victims in the polluted villages, campaigning for public sympathy until his death. His wife, who remained in Tokyo, helped to organize sympathizers outside the village.

  When the industrialization of Japan introduced new diseases and created more victims of pollution, a citizens’ movement emerged, rallying around the victims, to protest to private enterprise and the government. With the development of this movement the activists realized that they had a precursor in Tanaka Shz. Tanaka’s method of returning to the grass-roots and living among the victims, rather than making appeals to the government through political parties and in parliament, was re-evaluated as a method to be inherited by later generations. Tanaka developed a point of view from which he could criticize the state authorities and the bureaucrats in terms of village tradition. He believed that if the village declined the state would decline, and stated that Japan is one small village. Such devotion to the specific issue in a specific locality deemed significant for the whole of the nation has served to revitalize the citizens’ anti-pollution movement.

  As a theorist of the citizens’ movement, a nuclear physicist and former member of the ‘World Culture’ circle during the war, Taketani Mitsuo (1911–) argues with regard to the issue of public safety that even though the number of victims may be only a small proportion of the entire population, they should still receive the closest attention.83 We cannot justify the argument that the employees of the company producing the pollution and the consumers of the product outnumber the victims. Even when the number of victims is small, these victims constitute the public, from whose point of view public safety must be measured. On questions of safety, we cannot appeal to simple majorities as in a parliamentary election.

  The most famous incident in the anti-pollution movement is the protest against Minamata disease.84 In 1953, citizens of Minamata City in Kumamoto Prefecture began to suffer from a strange paralytic disease. The disease also affected animals, and cats were seen to dance like rats and die. Between 1953 and 1961, 87 cases were confirmed. Among these there were 37 confirmed deaths.

  In 1959, the Welfare Department disclosed that the cause of the disease was mercury poured into the bay from the factory of the Japan Chisso Company. A small group of people rallied around the victims and began a protest against the company and the government. They sued the company and the government and gained a partial victory after many years, bringing the disastrous pollution to public attention. They demonstrated to the public what unauthorized amateurs could achieve on the basis of the hard facts of personal disaster.

  The Japanese citizens’ movement springs from the village tradition of the pre-Meiji period. Even when it is called the ‘circle movement’, it has, today, little to do with the form of cultural activity which Kurahara Koreto introduced from Soviet Russia and is more closely related to indigenous customs. It is rooted in the same village tradition which produced renga, or linked verse, which may be called an art form originally enjoyed by the circle.

  One instance of resistance rooted in the village tradition is the Sunagawa farmers’ protest against the enlargement of the airfield for the U.S. military base, which lasted from May 1955 to 18 December 1968, when the U.S. finally gave up the plan.85 Another is the campaign of the Sanrizuka farmers against the installation of the international airport at Narita, near Tokyo, which began in 1966, although in this case the farmers confronted the authority of the Japanese state itself rather than U.S. military policy backed by the Japanese riot squad. Even so, the tenuous property rights guaranteed to farmers by the constitution could be used to fight the dictates of the government.86

  In general, a circle is a small, voluntary and temporary community, meeting at regular intervals in pursuit of a common interest, such as flower arrangement, haiku, movies or reading. It can also be a study group of contemporary history or of a classic like The Tale of Genji, which may take several years of close reading. It is no longer the circle of the few years after 1931 and the few years after 1945, a lower sub-group taking orders from the headquarters of the Japan Communist Party. A circle may form around a specific political problem which has affected people badly, as in the case of Minamata disease, and gather the necessary support from doctors, chemists, reporters, lawyers and ordinary citizens. It tenaciously pursues a specific issue and may achieve partial victories solely through its independence of political parties, since it thus has greater appeal for the public at large and can solicit support from a wider sphere.

  A small monthly magazine called Regional Struggle is published in Kyoto specifically for the interchange of local information.87 Political activity of this sort usually centres on specific local issues and so cannot easily spread information to Tokyo. This is its weakness as well as its strength.

  In the issue of the pollution of tuna meat in 1954, a housewives’ reading circle took the lead, and, with the advice of Yasui Kaoru, a professor of international law, initiated a nationwide movement for the prohibition of atomic and hydrogen bombs, which developed into an international movement holding rallies at Hiroshima and Nagasaki for many years. These rallies were disrupted by friction caused by leftist factions tied to different state authorities. Although the movement began as a free and independent circle, it no longer preserves its original character. Since its disruption by political affiliations, it has become exceedingly difficult to regain the original independence it possessed at the outset.88

  In the case of the protest against Premier Kishi’s use of force to bring about the Military Treaty with the U.S.A. in May and June 1960,89 and of the protest against the Japanese government’s cooperation with the U.S. continuation of the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1973,90 the federation of free circles created a very large movement which even the political parties could not ignore. In both these cases, the small free circles which took the initiative in forming the federation of circles to pursue a specific issue made it plain that the movement was not dominated by any political party, a precaution not taken by the Anti-Bomb Movement.

  When a movement is issue-oriented, however, it disappears with the issue: the protest against Kishi subsided with Kishi’s banishment and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement subsided with the

  36 Beheiren ‘French Demonstration’ fills Yaesudori Avenue, 23 June 1970

  withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. The protest against Minamata disease will not come to an end as long as the diseased patients live.

  The evaporation of a large issue-oriented movement sometimes strikes onlookers as the outcome of unsteadiness and unreliability. Such movements are different in nature from political parties, which struggle to survive in the face of changing times.

  The citizens’ movements since the 1960s rely upon ordinary citizens, and on this their character depends, even when they incorporate only a fraction of the population. The ordinary citizen is not concerned with politics per se, with who is premier, who is elected to parliament, the titles and nature of new laws. Only when he feels his life affected by the political situation, or his life style hampered by it, does he rouse himself from political apathy and voice his political view in public. The citizen’s political interest is in contrast to the political interest of the professional activists whose livelihood depends on being politically well-informed.

  Of all postwar Japanese cartoons, ‘Sazaesan’ by Hasegawa Machiko has enjoyed the longest life, from 1946 right up to the present, as well as the greatest popularity in newspapers, paperback books and on televisi
on.91 A survey of residents in six major cities—Yokohama, Nagoya, Kyoto, Osaka, Kbe and Kitakyushu—in 1965, showed that this cartoon was the best-liked in every city, and this was certainly the case in Tokyo also, since this was the city in which the Asahi newspapers which serialized ‘Sazaesan’ had the strongest hold. To Japanese between the ages of two and a hundred, Sazaesan is a familiar figure, almost an acquaintance. In the earliest cartoons, Sazaesan was a girl of 20, living with her parents and siblings. Over the following quarter of a century, she has grown about ten years older and is now a housewife with a husband and infant son, still living with her parents and siblings. I have made a comparison of ‘Sazaesarn’ in 1946, one year after Japan’s surrender, and in 1970, ten years after the beginning of the prosperity which has changed the life style of Japanese city dwellers. In the content analysis of the 1946 series, recurrent social themes of cartoons are as follows:

  Repatriation from overseas (4 times)

  Occupation army (4 times)

  Food hunting trips (4 times)

  Gardening in the family back yard (3 times)

  Infectious disease (twice)

  Rationing (twice)

  Substitute food (once)

  Lack of fuel (once)

  Quick course for learning English (once)

  Unhealthy food products (once)

  Black market (once)

  Inflation, in connection with rises in postal stamp prices (once)

  Debate on the equality of rights of men and women (once)

  Democratization of police (once)

  War veterans’ return (once)