Japan Story

by Christopher Harding

  A girl whose only experience of farm work up until now was feeding mulberry leaves to silkworms – her mother used to spin and weave the silk, sending it to Kyoto to be dyed and fashioned into kimono – now found herself working ten-hour days in the fields, before returning home to run her husband’s bath and make dinner: miso soup, with boiled and seasoned pineapple-field weeds.

  Against all odds, Ayako and Shitoku evolved into a happy couple, and from there into a happy family. A daughter was born in 1922, followed by a son in 1925, whose arrival in the middle of a working day left Ayako handling everything by herself. She laid out a futon and some newspaper, boiled water for the baby’s first bath, gave birth, cut the cord, cleaned up and buried the placenta in a tin can under the house. The baby soon joined her in the fields; sometimes on her back, sometimes in a cracker box with a flour bag draped over the top to provide shade.

  Twenty miles or so south of where the Kikugawas were shuttling between fields and home, Shitoku learning to whittle driftwood into toys for his children, US Navy vessels passed in and out of a dredged docking area. It was a sizeable operation, complete with shipyard, shops and other facilities. The days of King Kalakaua were by now long gone: he was dead, his kingdom had been overthrown and Hawaii had been a ‘territory’ of the United States since 1898. These particular docks now loomed large in American strategic interests, so much so that two vessels, the USS Lexington and USS Saratoga, were sent there in the early 1930s to stage mock attacks in order to see how prepared the defences were. The answer: not very. Pearl Harbor looked distinctly vulnerable.

  Both the Lexington and the Saratoga had started life as battlecruisers. Then, while they were still under construction, the US Navy found itself forced to turn them into aircraft carriers instead. Politics had intervened. Decades earlier, Commodore Matthew Perry had struggled to get the Japanese to open their doors. By 1921, the enthusiasm with which Japan was projecting its people and its military power out into Asia and the Pacific was becoming distinctly unwelcome. To try to forestall a potential naval arms race, Britain, the US and Japan agreed, in a Washington Naval Treaty signed in 1922, to maintain a 5:5:3 tonnage ratio across key parts of their seaborne fleets. There was to be a pause on the building of battlecruisers.

  The Japanese were observing the situation closely. At home, the 1920s was a decade of experimentation in managing a mass industrial society. Abroad, it was a period – depending on one’s level of optimism about international affairs – of fragile cooperation or of growing mistrust.

  Japan-watchers had hoped that victories over China in 1895 and then Russia in 1905 might have represented the summit of Japanese ambitions. But it was not to be, and Western imperial powers that had for generations treated global cartography as a colouring-in exercise – British pink, French blue – increasingly feared for their cultural and linguistic homes-away-from-home in South East Asia and the Pacific.

  The British were sprawled comfortably across such anglicized approximations of local people and place names as ‘Burma’, the ‘Malay Peninsula’, ‘Singapore’ and ‘Hong Kong’. Territory nearby had been christened ‘Indochine Française’ and ‘Nederlands-Indië’. And wars fought around the turn of the century by the soon-to-be staunchly anti-imperialist Americans had seen fall into their laps a string of islands named after the early modern Spanish monarch, Philip II. Spice, rubber and other valuable commodities poured out of these places, while Western administrators and educationalists, missionaries and military personnel poured in. It was a fine arrangement, and there was no room for newcomers seeking to muscle in.

  Modern Japan’s leaders had been empire-builders right from the start. The homeland of the Ainu, in the north, and the Ryūkyū Kingdom to the south had been assimilated early on as ‘Hokkaidō’ and ‘Okinawa’ prefectures respectively. Taiwan had been taken from China in 1895, and ten years later the Liaotung Peninsula lease, with its potentially lucrative South Manchuria railway corridor, was won from Russia. Korea went from contested peninsula to Japanese protectorate to fully annexed territory by 1910, a process whose violent latter stages cost nearly 12,000 Korean lives. For anyone beginning to sense a pattern, confirmation had come with Japan’s clearing of German forces from East Asia and the South Pacific during the First World War.

  By this point, some of Japan’s leaders thought that expansion had gone far enough. Senior, semi-retired statesmen had succeeded in persuading government ministers to abandon some of their more inflammatory demands upon China in their ‘Twenty-One Demands’ of 1915, such as the acceptance on Chinese soil of Japanese advisers. These statesmen were disturbed to see a new generation of politicians and military men coming through who could be recklessly hubristic in their diplomacy – too young, as they were, to remember the acute vulnerability of the recent past, and too full of themselves to see the long-term dangers of diplomatic grandstanding.

  And yet one of the lessons learned from the West early on was that a truly global power doesn’t keep modernity’s bounty for itself. It spreads it around, via a complex mixture of idealism, self-justification, avarice, and racial and cultural chauvinism. The French called it their mission civilisatrice. The journalist Tokutomi Sohō talked about Japan ‘extend[ing] the blessings of political organization throughout the rest of East Asia and the South Pacific, just as the Romans once did for Europe and the Mediterranean’.

  Bunmei kaika – ‘civilization and enlightenment’ – proved to be a domestic slogan easily repurposed for export. A raid on Taiwan in 1874, designed to create an early colonial toehold, had been whipped up by the media back home as the justified use of force against savages and cannibals. Woodblock imagery showed clean-cut Japanese accepting the surrender of grovelling Taiwanese. Later, it would be the turn of the Chinese to serve as the butt of Japanese and Western cartoon humour: lampooned as lumbering, lazy opium-junkies.

  As media imagery began to make abundantly clear, a pan-Asian mission civilisatrice was not just about culture. It was also very much about race. Lecturing at Tokyo Imperial University, the Christian author of Bushidō: The Soul of Japan, Nitobe Inazō, argued for an open-ended commitment to sensitive, humanitarian guidance that would deal with Japan’s less able neighbours strictly according to their own limited capacities. Meanwhile, over in Taiwan, Japanese governor Gotō Shinpei made a name for himself treating the island and especially its capital, Taihoku (Taipei), as a ‘laboratory’. A quiescent, not to say grateful, local population could, it was thought, be relied upon for their forbearance as all manner of science-based techniques of administration were tried out, from the planning of wide, airy streets to civil engineering and public hygiene projects (Gotō was a German-trained doctor). Taiwanese demands for a degree of self-determination were mostly moderate enough to be ignored. It was a conspicuous feature of Japanese empire here, as elsewhere, that Japanese constitutional rights were not thought appropriate for colonized populations.

  The popular press (Tokyo Nichinichi News) celebrate the Taiwan Expedition of 1874 Satirizing Chinese military prowess across two conflicts: ‘Jap the Giant-Killer’ pictured in British magazine Punch (1894) during the Sino-Japanese War; the American newspaper the Tacoma Times (1904) on the prospect of China getting involved in the Russo-Japanese War – harking back to 1894. China as a nation is here depicted as a laundry operator, referencing popular stereotypes of early Chinese immigrants into the USA. European visitors to Taiwan professed to love what the Japanese had done with the place. They lavished praise on colonial administrators for the manifest good they were doing. But Japanese imperial ideology was never entirely a European import. A Confucian distinction between civilized and barbarian, a kokugaku (nativist thought) concern with moral purity and impurity, and a resurgent interest in ancestry and bloodline linked to Shinto mythology all helped to entrench a view of racial discrimination, both abroad and at home, as perfectly in line with the facts.

  One of the most infamous signs of this was a wave of extreme anti-Korean violence in the immediate
aftermath of the 1923 earthquake. With much of Tokyo gone, and the rest of it in a febrile state, rumours spread – by word of mouth and in the newspapers – that Korean residents were taking the opportunity to start an uprising: poisoning wells, setting fires and carrying bombs around the city. Japanese vigilantes went looking for them, killing and brutalizing with an assortment of weapons ranging from guns to broken glass to fishhooks. People suspected of being Korean were tested on the national anthem or made to recite difficult Japanese phrases that would expose non-native speakers. Others were required to name all the stations on Tokyo’s Yamanote train line.

  Police and army personnel, some of whom had been involved four years earlier in quelling protests against Japanese rule on the Korean peninsula, largely stood aside at first – in some cases actually encouraging the rumour mill and joining in the violence. Only belatedly were thousands of Koreans gathered up and placed in protective custody. Others had been given refuge by Japanese neighbours. Up to 6,000 Koreans, perhaps many more, were less lucky – they were hunted down and murdered, in the space of just a few days. Later trials of the participants saw the accused, judges and onlookers exchange laughter and knowing looks. Many of those convicted received early parole.

  And yet, while in Japan intellectuals pontificated about a superior Japanese bloodline and spirit, and how best to share its modern fruits with Asian neighbours, abroad the Japanese were not regarded quite so highly. For a few years, the United States had been happy to accept the likes of the Kikugawas on its soil. But then came the ‘yellow peril’.

  Cartoons in the Tacoma Times satirizing China’s soldiery in 1904–5 were not primarily about foreign affairs. They had their real roots in local history. The 1870s and 1880s had seen laws passed and deadly riots break out in opposition to Chinese labourers in America. Much of Tacoma’s Chinese community was hounded out of the city by a mob in 1885 – with the full support of its mayor, Robert Jacob Weisbach, who called them ‘a filthy horde’. A local judge set the perpetrators free, allowing them home to a welcoming parade.

  Then, in the early years of the twentieth century, attention had turned to the Japanese. A ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ was struck in 1907–8, under which the Japanese authorities agreed to restrict migration to the US. Though she didn’t realize it at the time, Kikugawa Ayako had only made it to Hawaii under a rule that allowed picture brides to join husbands who were already living there. A few years later came the infamous 1924 Immigration Act. Henceforth no one who was ineligible for citizenship in the US would be allowed to enter the country as an immigrant – a category into which a Supreme Court ruling just two years before had explicitly placed all Japanese people.

  The move met with vocal resistance both in Japan and in the US, where in the same month – December 1923 – that the Bill was introduced into Congress the American Red Cross raised $12 million in relief aid for victims of the Tokyo earthquake. But combined with an American military build-up in South East Asia and the Pacific, and mutual suspicions over maritime power, the Act made the lives of internationally minded Japanese diplomats all but impossible back at home.

  With Japan’s economy seeing nothing like the economic benefits promised by these internationalists – instead suffering in a global climate where big players like Britain could rely on their empires for raw materials and markets – and with the limits of Western affection and respect for Japan now finally laid bare, it was becoming progressively easier to claim that the country’s fledgling party politics was achieving very little. It was selling its people short, in fact, both at home and abroad. For up-and-coming leaders like Konoe Fumimaro, the very idea of ‘internationalism’ began to look like cynical rhetoric, designed to blind people to an old and still enduring reality of ‘have’ and ‘have-not’ nations.

  *

  On 17 July 1921, the ghost of Bertrand Russell appeared in Kobe, Japan. All of a sudden, there he was: materializing in a temple dedicated to Amida Buddha, and voicing his support for striking workers at the nearby Mitsubishi and Kawasaki plants. Death having done nothing either way for his ability to speak Japanese, a local strike leader by the name of Kagawa Toyohiko helped out with interpretation.

  In fact, Russell was very much alive when he gave his short speech to the gathered activists. An over-zealous reporter for a Japanese newspaper, the Japan Advertiser, had somehow inflated a bout of pneumonia suffered by the great philosopher a few months earlier, and pronounced him dead in Beijing. Japan’s newsmen were slow to offer a correction, so when Russell arrived in Japan his partner Dora Black handed out notes to the Japanese media saying that Bertrand Russell would be unable to give interviews, on account of being dead.

  Still, journalists tried to sit next to the pair on trains, straining to overhear their conversations and later making up stories about them. On one occasion, the famous pacifist was reduced to chasing reporters away with his walking stick, after a throng of them caused Dora, then pregnant, to stumble on some stairs and almost fall.

  Undercover Japanese police were little better, booking the hotel room next door to Russell’s so that they could keep an eye on this notorious foreign leftist. He had, after all, arrived in Japan at a particularly sensitive time. A post-war depression, mass lay-offs and broader injustices in Japan’s economic and political arrangements together seemed poised to cast workers in great industrial centres like Kobe into oblivion, and their families along with them. So they were starting to organize and to ask an all-important question: who should we look to – in what sorts of power should we invest our hopes – in order to survive?

  Cooperation with big business perhaps? A labour organization called the Yūaikai, or ‘Friendly Society’, had grown to 30,000 members by this point, thanks to just such a gradualist approach to building worker power. Its founder famously likened the relationship between capitalists and labourers to that of husbands and wives.

  But critics were increasingly asking where, precisely, gradualism had got them. Kagawa Toyohiko looked like a better bet. ‘Isn’t it time’, he wrote, in a Yūaikai branch magazine called Shin Kobe (‘New Kobe’), ‘that capitalists started treating the workers at least as well as their horses? Aren’t we tired yet of [the Meiji-era slogan] “Enrich the state, strengthen the military”? Shouldn’t we move on from being a civilization premised on wealth, to one rooted in humanistic principles?’

  Kagawa was soon elected president of the Kobe branch of the Yūaikai, where he graduated from asking rhetorical questions to campaigning on major issues and organizing strike action at Kobe’s dockyards, heading a march by 35,000 workers that stretched for two and a half miles down the road. But an unprecedented moment of hope for workers in 1921 was steadily worn down as management first stalled (pretending that their top team was currently abroad, so couldn’t yet start negotiations) and then tempted some of the workers back with retrospective bonuses. Legal provisions were invoked to stop the remaining strikers gathering, and by the time Bertrand Russell came to town in the summer of that year activists were being forced to gather at religious locations, under cover of ‘worship’. Kagawa was soon cut adrift by disappointed movement members.

  In truth, he had never been fully on board, at least not with those who were most committed to direct action. A philosopher and Christian convert, Kagawa didn’t share the basic Marxist outlook of his comrades in the labour movement. Instead, he understood the situation for Japan’s workers as a balance between what Buddhists called ‘self power’ and ‘other power’: the power of human beings to sort themselves and the world out, versus the need to work with something greater and more mysterious.

  Kagawa had been a lonely, introspective child who, having lost his father and mother early on, had on several occasions considered taking his own life. His sense of helplessness contributed to a profound attraction towards this greater, sustaining ‘power’. Thanks in large part to friendships with two American Presbyterian missionary couples, Kagawa experienced that power first and foremost in terms of intimat
e love. ‘Faith’, he later wrote, ‘means a realization of the fact that one is loved’, and that the same power that runs through the universe ‘is also at work within one’s own being’. Buddhists understand this, and Christians understand it, he argued. The real obstacle to faith is not religious identity, but hopelessness. And yet so many in Japan are condemned by their conditions of life and labour to precisely this kind of alienating despair.

  Kagawa began to develop his spiritual critique into a cultural and economic one. He spoke out against the misuse of technology in enforcing cruelly relentless regimes of mechanized work. And where other critics of Japan’s modernity recoiled at the mistaken linearity that life was taking on, Kagawa’s portrait of it focused on its relentless, entrapping pace:

  ‘Busy, busy!’ says the woman, as she shuts herself up in the rear of the house and sews away at finery she will wear, at the most, not more than three days of the year.

  Businessmen there are who repeat the refrain ‘Busy, busy’ as they rush to and fro between their offices and the establishments where their illicit lovers live.

  Military men take up the tune, ‘Busy, busy’ as they care for their cannon and polish their guns.

  Students keep saying ‘Busy, busy’, as they sit up all night to prepare for examinations – and forget everything when the tests are over.

  The liquor-dealer’s bustle keeps the brothel-keeper busy.

  The brothel-keeper’s busyness keeps the physician busy.

  The physician’s rushing keeps the chauffeur on the go.