Inventing Japan: 1853-1964 (Modern Library Chronicles)

by Ian Buruma

  In the 1980s, conservative politicians and their intellectual supporters had also begun to fret about the lack of values in modern Japan. The young, especially, softened by the good life, seemed shiftless and lacking direction. Nakasone Yasuhiro, an ex–naval officer and member of the Tanaka faction, tried to promote a new nationalism when he became prime minister in the mid-1980s. In fact, the propaganda associated with his period in office sounded much like the old nationalism: the virtues of a monoracial state, respect for the imperial institution, the uniqueness of the Japanese spirit. Some of this was meant as an antidote to the leftist dogmas cranked out for years by the Teachers Union and Marxist intellectuals. Partly it was a ham-fisted attempt to give meaning to a nation whose only political aim was to expand its economic might. But nationalist musing about the essence of Japaneseness was mainly a poor substitute for political debate.

  Nakasone’s nationalism was little more than hollow bluster anyway. It did not even have the political energy of Kishi’s attempts to revise the constitution. Nakasone may have sounded at times like a wartime patriot, but he also called Japan an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the United States. No amount of nationalist rhetoric could change the skewed nature of U.S.-Japanese relations. The Gulf War in 1991, fought partly to safeguard Japan’s own oil supplies, made this painfully apparent: The Japanese could only look on, unable to help in a crisis that directly concerned them. Japan’s only role was to pay the United States and its allies a huge amount of money, too late, and for scant thanks. It was not just Japanese nationalists who felt a sense of humiliation.

  Two years after the Gulf War, the LDP, racked by more corruption scandals and the defection of some powerful politicians, lost an election. For a short while, it looked as though the LDP System might finally come to an end. Perhaps a new government formed by opposition parties could make the necessary reforms to inject life into Japan’s blocked political system. One of the leading LDP defectors, a veteran pork barrel operator named Ozawa Ichiro, even talked of revising the constitution, to make Japan, as he put it, “a normal country.” It was high time, he argued, that Japanese became individuals, prepared to take risks and stand up for themselves. Constitutional change would enable Japan to play a more independent role in the world. And revising the electoral system, skewed for so long in favor of the decreasing rural population, would lead to a robust two-party system, which would end the dominance of the LDP.

  It turned out to be another false dawn. The electoral changes did not go far enough to make a difference. The opposition leaders wasted their energies fighting among themselves. Outside the LDP, Ozawa was unable to spread enough money around to get things done and keep his party members happy. In 1994, the LDP was back in power in coalition with, of all parties, the socialists. By 1997, Ozawa and his fellow rebels against the LDP were finished.

  Yet something did change, not through political will, but through economic circumstances: The great bonanza ended in a massive stock market crash. Real estate prices tumbled, banks went under, and the Japanese bubble quickly seemed as fantastic in retrospect as tulip mania in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Japanese triumphalists and Western alarmists were stunned into uncharacteristic silence. This did not bring down the LDP System, to be sure, but it more or less killed people’s trust in it. The bureaucratic elite lost much of its prestige. From trusted and safe guarantors of stability and growth, they came to be seen as arrogant blunderers out of touch with reality. The LDP still rules, but faute de mieux, and no longer alone. It has to share its power with other parties, such as the Komeito, linked to a right-wing Buddhist organization. And for the first time since the 1950s, even the highly educated salary-men in the senior ranks of large corporations can no longer be sure of a lifetime job. You see them in libraries, coffee shops, and railway stations, men in neat blue suits reading newspapers, pretending to work, but in fact cast adrift in a society that is slowly unraveling. The economic crash has not made many Japanese destitute, not yet. Fifty years of high-speed growth created huge reserves of wealth. But the Ikeda deal is over.

  Even Tokyo, normally the most boisterous of capitals, appears to be strangely subdued, as though people are sunk into contemplation over what could possibly have gone wrong. The prime minister, as I write these lines, is Koizumi Junichiro, who became a media star in 2001 because of his plain speaking, his youthful appearance, and his promises of radical reforms. Like all his predecessors, he said he would abolish the party factions and curb bureaucratic interference. Under him, the corrupt old system of kickbacks, out-of-control construction, and unaccountable budgets would be brought to heel. People hoped that he might be the Japanese Gorbachev, the reformer who brings down the system. It didn’t happen. And public cynicism toward the politics and politicians grows by the day. In a young democracy, this is always ominous. Combined with frustrated nationalism and economic despair, it could nudge Japan once more into illiberal directions.

  People talk of the current governer of Tokyo, Ishihara Shintaro, as the man to watch. Some speak of him with desperate hope, as though he represented the last throw of the dice, and some with fear and loathing. Ishihara made his name as a popular novelist in the 1950s. Like Koizumi, he is admired for his telegenic looks and his outspoken views, which are publicized in an endless stream of books, videos, magazines, and TV talk shows. Like other populists before him, Ishihara, too, has voiced his discontent with the bureaucratic grip on the LDP System. His most famous novel, about rich teenage rebels, came out in 1955, the year the LDP was founded and one year before the Economic White Paper announced the end of the postwar. Ishihara’s message since those days has barely wavered. He blames the United States for creating an effete and spiritually vapid nation. Japan, in his view, fought a just war, and he believes it is high time for postwar Japan to cut its umbilical cord with Washington and resume its position as the dominant power in Asia.

  This, too, may be only so much bluster, an expression of frustration, and the lingering humiliation of wartime defeat. But it is not only people of his own generation who respond to Ishihara’s emotional nationalism. It appeals to young people, too, the result, I think, of an intellectual culture stunted by dogmas of the Left and the Right. It is also the result of a political establishment that deliberately stifled public debate by opting for a monomaniacal concentration on economic growth. And it is the result of an infantile dependency on the United States. Until these problems are resolved, the postwar will not be over.

  But how to resolve them? This is where the story goes back to the beginning, to the time when Japan first confronted the force of the West, the time when, in the opinion of some, the long war with the West began. I am writing in Tokyo, in the early spring of 2002. And I think of the number of times in the last few weeks when Japanese told me, in all seriousness, that they wished the black ships would come round once again, to unblock the political system. Only foreign pressure, they say, can cut the knots that tether this insular society to the old ways that no longer function. I can see what they mean, but I look forward, nonetheless, to the day when Japanese free themselves and can finally bid the black ships farewell, because they no longer need them.

  GLOSSARY

  Shogun: Literally it means “general.” The shoguns were the military rulers of Japan. Between 1603 and 1867, the shoguns were from the same Tokugawa family. The time of their rule is called the Tokugawa or Edo period.

  Edo: The name of the city where the Tokugawa shoguns resided. After 1867 and the end of Tokugawa rule, it was renamed Tokyo and became the capital of modern Japan.

  Bakufu: The name of the shogun’s government, or shogunate.

  Samurai: The warrior caste. Samurai ranked from the shogun down to the lowliest retainer. Barred from engaging in trade, which was beneath them, the samurai were mostly poorly paid government servants. In times of peace, many of them were out of work. But they were the only caste allowed to bear arms or to commit ritual suicide.

  Rangaku: Dutch learning. Since the ea
rly Tokugawa period, Dutch merchants were the only Europeans allowed to live in Japan. By learning Dutch, Japanese scholars were able to get access to European scientific knowledge.

  Satsuma: The feudal domain located in what is now Kyushu prefecture. Satsuma was one of the three domains whose samurai clans rebelled against Tokugawa rule. It produced many prominent figures of the Meiji period, such as the statesman Okubo Toshimichi. Another Satsuma hero was Saigo Takamori, who led disaffected samurai in a revolt against the new government in Tokyo.

  Choshu: The domain at the southwestern tip of the main island of Honshu. Choshu samurai rebelled against the Tokugawa rulers as allies, and sometimes as rivals, of the Satsuma warriors. Ito Hirobumi, the great Meiji statesman, was a son of Choshu, as was the architect of the modern Imperial Army, Yamagata Aritomo.

  Tosa: The poorest and most liberal-minded of the three rebellious domains. It lay in the southern part of the island of Shikoku. The most famous Tosa figure was Sakamoto Ryoma, the rural swordsman, who ended up drafting the Meiji constitution.

  Bakumatsu: The last years of the Tokugawa bakufu, when Japan became a dangerous place full of intrigues, violent revolts, roaming swordsmen, and blood-soaked Kabuki plays.

  Meiji Restoration: The revolt against Tokugawa rule, which established a new government in Tokyo, where the emperor now resided in the shogun’s old castle. Meiji is the name for the period of the emperor’s reign immediately after the restoration.

  Bunmei Kaika: “Civilization and Enlightenment.” The main slogan of the Meiji period, during which Japan attempted to become a modern nation in the European mold.

  Fukoku Kyohei: “Strong Army, Rich Nation.” The other Meiji-period slogan, a variation of “Civilization and Enlightenment” with a stress on military and economic might.

  Diet: Parliament. Often used in the English language for parliamentary institutions outside Britain.

  Taisho: The reign of the Meiji emperor’s son, Yoshihito. It lasted officially from 1912 to 1926, but Yoshihito’s son, Hirohito, had to step in as regent in 1922, because his father was no longer capable of carrying out his duties.

  Kokutai: Polity. A semimystical idea of the Japanese nation, conceived as an authoritarian family state, ruled by the divine emperor. The “essence” of this sacred polity was laid down in the Kokutai no Hongi, or Fundamentals of the National Polity, published by the Ministry of Education in 1937.

  Kodoha: The Imperial Way faction. In the late 1920s, a group of mostly young army officers and their intellectual mentors developed a revolutionary program that sought to rid Japan of noxious Western influences such as liberalism, individualism, and capitalism. Instead, they wanted to conquer the world through the Japanese spirit, personified by the divine emperor, whose absolute rule would be “restored.” In February 1936, the Imperial Way tried to realize its ideals in a failed coup d’état.

  Toseiha: The Control faction. This was the rival faction in the armed forces. Though its members did not necessarily disagree with the goals of the Imperial Way radicals, they favored a more disciplined approach. After crushing the attempted coup in 1936, the Control faction dominated military policy.

  Zaibatsu: The business conglomerates that originated in the early Meiji period, when state industries were sold off to private companies. Privately owned companies, such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi, branched out, with government help, into many different enterprises, including banks, mines, heavy industry, and trading firms, which monopolized much of the Japanese economy. Although the owners of the family firms were dispossessed during the American occupation after World War II, the zaibatsu continued in a different, though not necessarily less monopolistic, form.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  If one were to read nothing else on the history of modern Japan, Marius Jansen’s The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000) contains pretty much everything one needs to know. I owe a great debt to Professor Jansen’s magisterial work. But there are other classics that cannot really be missed. East Asia: The Modern Transformation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1960), by John K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer, and Albert M. Craig, is still a reference work I use all the time.

  On the confrontation of Tokugawa Japan with the West, I benefited a great deal from Donald Keene’s The Japanese Discovery of Europe (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), especially for the discussion on Honda Toshiaki, the enlightened imperialist. A witty and well-documented account of Commodore Perry’s arrival, and the political struggles this unleashed, is Yankees in the Land of the Gods (New York: Viking, 1990), by Peter Booth Wiley; the quotations from Perry’s translator, the Reverend Samuel Wells Williams, are from this book. For the intellectual climate in late Tokugawa Japan, I turned to Masao Murayama’s Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974) and Grant K. Goodman’s Japan: The Dutch Experience (London: Athlone, 1986). Another invaluable source, especially on the Mito School and its offshoots, is Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), by Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi. Much has been written about Sakamoto Ryoma, the swordsman turned constitutionalist. I used Marius Jansen’s Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). Those who wish to delve deeper into the intellectual life of this period might look at Marius Jansen’s China and the Tokugawa World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

  To understand what it felt like for an educated Japanese to live in the Meiji period, it is probably best to read a few novels by Natsume Soseki, especially Kokoro (1914). This and other books of the time are discussed in Donald Keene’s Dawn to the West (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984). Being rather close to the Meiji spirit himself, Keene is an invaluable guide and a superb translator. The translations of Takamura Kotaro’s poems quoted in this book are his. My quotations from that other great Meiji figure, Fukuzawa Yukichi, are from The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), translated by Eiichi Kiyooka. A good book on the Meiji theater is J. Thomas Rimer’s Towards a Modern Japanese Theater: Kishida Kunio (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974). For the early history of Japanese cinema, Donald Richie and Joseph L. Anderson’s The Japanese Film (New York: Grove Press, 1959) is still the classic text. Julia Meech-Pekarik’s The World of the Meiji Print (New York: Weatherhill, 1986) is about far more than woodcuts. It is full of wonderful descriptions. I lifted the passages by Pierre Loti about the goings-on at the Deer Park Pavilion from her book. Mishima Yukio’s lament about Meiji prudery is from his introduction to a splendid book of photographs by Yato Tamotsu, now scandalously out of print, entitled Naked Festival (New York: Weatherhill, 1968).

  On the ideology of modern nationalism, I can think of no better or more engaging book than Carol Gluck’s Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). I would not know what to do without it. On Japanese empire building, I find The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), edited by Ramon Myers and Mark Peattie, indispensable. Roger W. Bowen’s Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) was of great use to me for the People’s Rights Movement and other revolts against authority.

  Edward Seidensticker’s Low City, High City (New York: Knopf, 1983) offers evocative, elegiac descriptions of Taisho-period Tokyo. This should be read together with some of his translations of that great nostalgist Nagai Kafu. If nothing else, one should read A Strange Tale from East of the River. Less enjoyable, but for some perhaps equally fascinating, are the writings of Kita Ikki. I took my quotations from Kita Ikki Ron (Tokyo: Gendai Hyoronsha, 1981), by Matsumoto Kenichi, but the standard work on Kita in English is George M. Wilson’s Radical Nationalist in Japan: Kita Ikki, 1883–1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969). Just as interesting, though obviously a book of its time, is D. C. Holtom’s Moder
n Japan and Shinto Nationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943). An important source for the 1936 revolt is Ben-Ami Shillony’s Revolt in Japan: The Young Officers and the February 26, 1936 Incident (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). On the modern history of the imperial house, and particularly Hirohito’s education, I found Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), by Herbert P. Bix, of enormous benefit.

  Manchuria is becoming a hot topic now, but no one writing on this subject can afford to ignore Japan’s Total Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), by Louise Young. I used it extensively, especially for its information on popular culture and government propaganda. The Nanjing massacre is perhaps an even more fashionable topic. Almost everything written about it has a political bias. For a decent liberal/left Japanese view, one should read Honda Katsuichi’s The Nanjing Massacre (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1999). My quotation of the Japanese soldier who fought in Nanjing is from The Other Nuremberg, by Arnold C. Brackman (London: Collins, 1989), an excellent account of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. The battle of Nomonhan is exhaustively described in Alvin D. Cox’s Nomonhan: Japan Against Russia, 1939 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985).

  One of the best and best-known accounts of the attack on Pearl Harbor is by Gordon Prange, entitled At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981). On the diplomacy that preceded the attack, I used Toward Pearl Harbor: The Diplomatic Exchange Between Japan and the United States, 1899–1941 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), edited by Ralph E. Shaffer. Hayashi Fusao, in Daitoa Senso Koteiron (Tokyo: Yamato Bunko, 1978), quotes some Japanese reactions. I cite the literary critic Okuna Takao. One can disagree, as I do, with some of its premises, but as a history of wartime mentalities, John W. Dower’s War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986) is a mine of information. A much slimmer but equally thought-provoking essay related to this subject is An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan, 1931–1945 (London: Kegan Paul International, 1986), by Tsurumi Shunsuke. I also find myself reaching again and again for Akira Irye’s Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War 1941–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). Japan’s surrender is well documented in Robert J. Butow, Japan’s Decision to Surrender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1954). For an overall picture of the war, allowing for a left/liberal bias, Ienaga Saburo’s The Pacific War 1931–1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1978) is still useful.