The chauffeur’s activity in turn makes the liquor-dealer busy …
Without any aspirations, this living corpse obtrudes itself around the earth … The window through which God would invade a life so superficial and so completely absorbed in the present has been closed.
This ‘busyness’ was a form of self power, fostered by a standardized education that did little more than bolt the required skills, attributes and allegiances onto children who were expected to pass through school mannequin-like in their blankness and availability to the state’s interests. Human beings were already intrinsically something, Kagawa wanted to insist, part of a continuum of biological life by means of which the Absolute is reaching for ever higher levels of creativity and perfection.
But cosmic contextualization of this sort – which was to surprise international observers by becoming more rather than less prominent across all points on the Japanese political spectrum in the 1930s – was not everyone’s cup of tea. Kagawa’s union rivals in particular were incensed by what they saw as his utopian gradualism and bourgeois time-wasting. ‘Down with the hermit monk!’ they shouted, as his star waned across the second half of 1921. ‘Down with the boss of the beggars!’
These seemingly rather odd epithets were a dig at Kagawa’s notorious living arrangements. More than a decade previously, he had moved to Kobe’s Shinkawa neighbourhood, one of Japan’s most notorious slums. There he took his place among around 10,000 people crammed without sanitation into tightly packed wooden hut-like housing – a conflagration waiting to happen, homes heated as they were by charcoal-burners and dimly lit with kerosene lamps. Many of Shinkawa’s residents were migrants from the countryside, who had headed to Kobe in search of work, but who had found instead various combinations of extreme poverty, exploitation, gambling, alcoholism, prostitution, disease and crime.
Kagawa first gained a reputation in the neighbourhood as someone who kept ghosts at bay, after surviving a few nights in a two-room dwelling believed to be haunted by the ghost of a man recently beaten to death there. He was soon room-mates with ‘the copper statue’ – an alcoholic turned red and stuporous by drink – and with a bean-cake dealer who was sure he was being followed by the ghost of a man he had killed for overturning his cart. The latter could only sleep if Kagawa held his hand.
Kagawa became known, too, as an easy mark. People came seeking money or clothes at the point of a knife or gun. On one occasion, a well-aimed punch parted Kagawa from his four front teeth. On another, a man challenged Kagawa to hand over his shirt – claiming that if he did not, his Christianity would be proved a sham. Unable to think of a strong come-back, Kagawa took off his shirt and handed it over. The man duly returned the next day for his trousers and coat, leaving Kagawa sporting a red woman’s kimono given to him by a neighbour – for the wearing of which he earned himself the nickname Baka (idiot).
If Taihoku was Gotō Shinpei’s ‘laboratory’, the Shinkawa slum was Kagawa’s. Both men used that same word, implying the application of experimental science, to describe their adopted homes. Kagawa’s many institutional projects included experiments with cooperatives, designed to help people get hold of cheap food and medical care and eventually to work in a business they themselves owned. He set up a restaurant called Tengokuya (Heaven’s Place), along with a toothbrush-making concern.
All of this, combined with a bestselling memoir, Shisen Wo Koete (Across the Death-Line), brought Kagawa a degree of fame both at home and abroad that after a while he found it hard to live without. He told one admirer that he was destined to become more famous than Itō Hirobumi – after all, even people in Sweden had heard of him. And he made numerous trips to the United States, where people on the lookout for a Far Eastern Tolstoy or Gandhi welcomed him with open arms.
The same criticisms that Mahatma Gandhi faced in India dogged Kagawa in Japan. His religious convictions might be genuine enough, but was he really the solution to the problems of modernity and a mass society? He struck some as a media-savvy egotist, adept at telling different people what they wanted to hear, diluting much-needed radicalism with spiritual platitudes, and in the end only too happy to work with an oppressive state when it suited him. He carried out research on social policy for the government in the mid-1920s, and participated in an official drive to teach rural people money-saving modern habits, including the use of a communal village clock. Years later, Kagawa dismayed his admirers by dining with one of Japan’s arch-imperialists – the sincerity of whose ‘[Asian] continental policy’, claimed Kagawa, ‘almost brought me to tears’.
The truth, however, was that battle lines in 1920s and 1930s Japan – bosses versus workers, state versus its critics – were rarely clear or uncrossable. Both Kagawa and the workers of Kobe found themselves increasingly drawn, during these years, to some rather unlikely champions of radical change: civil servants.
This was a group of people associated, in the early Meiji era, with such close and cosy relationships to business that when in the mid-1880s fish started to float down the oddly coloured water of the Watarase and Tone rivers – either dead or so lifeless that they could be caught by hand – civil servants had first agreed to turn a blind eye. It was obvious that effluent from the nearby Ashio Copper Mine was causing the trouble, which extended in later years to dramatic floods when the mine’s need for lumber resulted in major deforestation nearby. Denials and stalling from government and business alike brought some of modern Japan’s first environmental protestors onto the streets. One group of farmers even tried to march on Tokyo, only to find that quick-thinking police had dismantled a major bridge along their route. The numbers that dribbled into the capital were, in the end, too small to make much of a difference. Only very belatedly was the mine-owner forced to spend more than a million yen cleaning up his operation.
But as the state and its power grew, so too did the number of civil servants. There were around 1.3 million of them across the country by the end of 1928 – roughly 5 per cent of everyone in work – ranging from police and teachers in government schools to diplomats and higher-level ministry bureaucrats based in Tokyo. These last were a class apart. They had been through Japan’s top schools, on to Tokyo Imperial University (where the overwhelming majority specialized in law), and had passed higher-level civil service exams that were legendary for their exceedingly high failure rate. At the very top of the civil service were career bureaucrats fulfilling roles like bureau chief, prefectural governor and vice minister.
It was bureaucrats in the Home Ministry in particular who over time became known for a keen interest in managing Japan’s process of industrialization, not least by addressing left-wing concerns and activism before they boiled over. The Ministry attracted few recruits from Japan’s business-owning families; most were instead the sons of government officials or military men. And it was a sign of their growing independence from industrial interests that Japanese business leaders complained about young bureaucrats being sent abroad only to return home with the unrealistic ambition of grafting Western labour laws onto a Japanese system (part of an enduring trend in modern Japan for painting the inconvenient as culturally inappropriate).
Success in their social management endeavours required three things: good information, influence at all levels of society and a reputation for acting neutrally in the national interest. Home Ministry civil servants increasingly enjoyed the first two, at least. Behind some of the stand-out progressive moments of the 1920s, from universal male suffrage to poverty relief to support for workers’ organizations, lay their research and negotiation and policy-making. Bureaucrats imagined their task in the grandest of terms. They favoured a concept of ‘moral suasion’ (kyōka), steeped in a combination of Tokugawa-era neo-Confucianism and more recent gleanings from American and European social policy. One of the leading lights of the Home Ministry’s Social Bureau, Yasui Eiji, wrote proudly in 1923 of ‘the state’s transcendent position above the classes’.
Campaigns of mass cajolery dated back to
a Local Improvement Campaign, beginning in 1906. Tokyo bureaucrats had worked then to rationalize local governance and worship alike, including the steady replacement of folk shrines with state-sponsored ones – a move which helped to inspire Yanagita Kunio’s fondness for folklore. And they had done their best to chivvy the peasantry into working harder, paying their proper taxes and splashing less of their cash on alcohol and festivities. Critically important to success, they found, was collaboration with local interest groups, including youth organizations.
The state even took to creating its own interest groups. In 1924, a National Federation of Moral Suasion Groups was established, overseeing several hundred such groups just a year later. Civil servants’ major target audience were the educated, professional urban middle classes – a demographic they well understood, since they were part of it themselves. When the Ministry of Education launched a daily life improvement campaign, presenting particular ways of living – from home economics to personal hygiene – as desirable in scientific and even civilizational terms, they were essentially reaching out to the kinds of people with whom they had gone to school and university.
Such close class and cultural ties (rather belying the fantasy of transcendence) helped these self-styled ‘shepherds of the people’ to become steadily more adept at giving particular groups in Japanese society what they wanted – or what they could be persuaded they wanted. Middle-class women pressing for access to politics found the House of Peers implacably opposed, but the civil service willing to work with them in reinterpreting ‘politics’: away from power (which they couldn’t have) and instead towards influence (which they could). Leading women educators were persuaded to take on roles in the Ministry of Education’s League for Daily Life Improvement, while more broadly the professional ‘housewife’ (shufu) emerged in state propaganda and allied media and consumer culture as a centrally important figure, not just in the family, but in Japanese life more broadly.
The feminist writer Hiratsuka Raichō had once eviscerated her country’s familial arrangements, claiming that women were merely ‘their husbands’ slaves during the daytime and their prostitutes at night’. But she found later that the experience of bringing up two small children while looking after her ailing partner changed her view of the state, from patriarchal and backward to at least potentially benevolent. In particular, the idea that it might step in to offer financial help to mothers in pregnancy, childbirth and the early years of raising children seemed an eminently sensible one.
Yosano Akiko, famous for her anti-war poem during Japan’s conflict with Russia, thought very differently: mothers who did deals with the state were accepting at best a very limited view of womanhood, and at worst a ‘slave morality’ of dependence. Mothers in need of help shouldn’t be asking Where’s my handout? but rather Where’s my husband? Family life ought to be equal, and as little as possible of the state’s business.
Such debates were had around the world during these years, but in Japan Hiratsuka’s view steadily won out. Children, it was argued, were ultimately the property of society and the state. So the state contributing financially to the welfare of mothers, even providing incentives for them to have more children, represented both sound resource management – more troops on the way – and a means by which women could play a strategic role in the nation’s affairs.
Christian social reformers were welcomed into the fold too – for their energy, education, contacts and on-the-ground knowledge of urban and rural poverty. When the economic devastation of the Great Depression in the early 1930s condemned countless rural girls to urban prostitution, the Women’s Patriotic Association and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union joined forces with bureaucrats to fight it, not least by helping the police to crack down on the westernized licentiousness of café culture. The police objected to the ‘western’ part, the WCTU to the licentiousness – and both were happy to call their stances ‘patriotism’.
*
Even after Kagawa embarked on his limited cooperation with the authorities, he faced repeated arrest for his speeches and writings. In his ideal world, bureaucrats would end up on the side of the angels – state power in the end just another instrument of divine ‘other power’. The reality was that across the 1920s, into the early 1930s, the Japanese authorities operated a pincer movement consisting of cajolery alongside compulsion. It had never been possible to say simply whatever came into your head. ‘Preservation of the peace’ was an aspect of the Meiji Constitution that the police were inclined to take most seriously. And as Japan’s civil servants progressively co-opted causes that they could live with, they became less and less inclined to hear from those they couldn’t.
From 1928, one could be charged – and face the death penalty – for ‘crimes against the kokutai’, the ‘national body’, with the Emperor at its head. Most of those targeted first were calling for left-wing revolutionary change. But the bounds of acceptable speech quickly contracted from there. It became possible for a Tokyo University law professor (Minobe Tatsukichi) who dared to suggest that the Emperor was an organ of the state, rather than mystically coterminous with it, to be denounced in the upper house of the Diet as an ‘academic tramp’, censured by both houses, attacked by army veterans, and even threatened with death.
Japan’s law enforcement arrangements evolved in tandem with this narrowing national mood. Articles published in the Keisatsu Kyōkai Zasshi (‘Police Association Bulletin’) had once called for Japanese officers to develop a British-style tradition of policing by consent: maximizing authority while minimizing violent intervention. Instead, they were becoming known now, both at home and abroad, for extreme brutality and for a high number of deaths in custody – particularly of socialists and communists. The earlier desire for a kokumin keisatsu – a ‘people’s police’, or ‘a police for the people’ – turned into a 1930s slogan of tennō no keisatsu: ‘the Emperor’s police’.
Most feared of all was the Special Higher Police (Tokkō), created back in 1911 after the attempt on the Meiji Emperor’s life. Its brief was to tackle unwelcome ideologies and ‘thought crimes’ of all kinds. And its methods were appropriately psychological. One manual for interrogators warned officers to avoid politics, since radicals were often better educated than they were. Instead, they should play family off against comrades. A warm bowl of oyako-donburi (chicken and egg on rice) could be put in front of a recalcitrant detainee. Your mother’s worried about you, the interrogator would say. Why don’t you eat up, forget all this silliness, and go home?
With luck, tenkō (‘conversion’) and a confession would follow. Both were already features of Japanese law: philosophical principles of harmony and welcoming transgressors back into the fold dictated that punishment could be waived or leavened for the truly contrite. But they could also be useful in encouraging changes of heart in other detainees, as well as yielding additional arrests. And if homely cuisine failed to do the trick, there was always starvation, solitary confinement, physical torture and the sheer uncertainty and fatigue of indeterminate detention – the law on custody was circumvented simply by releasing a defendant and then re-arresting him or her at the door of the police station.
All this was about more than official detestation of left-wing politics, deeply concerned though the authorities were at the Russian Revolution and political uncertainty across Europe. By the early 1930s, decades of steady Japanese expansion in Asia and a progressive loss of trust with erstwhile Western allies looked like bringing international tensions to a head. Moral suasion, the co-option of prominent leaders and causes, the suppression of dissent: such things were no longer just about social management and salving modernity’s wounds. They were about preparing to fight what might be a very long war.
9
Theatre
Into the darkness shone a light. Blue, artificial light, emanating from atop the waters of the Yangtze and Huangpu rivers. From the land picked out by its broad beams came a barrage of answering mortar fire. But the intense illu
mination remained steady, undimmed. The first hours of 23 August 1937. The stage was set.
It had taken nearly six years for the players and props to assemble, and for the script to take shape. Much of that activity was directed not from the Diet building or civilian ministries in Tokyo, but by small groups of army officers and civilian activists meeting in secret at home and abroad. They confided to one another their disgust at the lack of vision and backbone shown by their country’s so-called leaders. And together they plotted small acts of violence – a blend of strategy and theatrical symbolism – that were designed to prepare the way for a much larger performance.
One of the first of those acts was the planting of a bomb near the tracks of the South Manchuria Railway (SMR) in September 1931, not far from Mukden, scene of the greatest land battle of the Russo-Japanese War. Damage to the track was negligible – a train passed safely across just minutes later. But bodies dressed in Chinese military uniform were ‘found’ at the scene, and immediately the cries went up. Sabotage! Revenge! Punishment!
The loudest of these voices belonged to the people who had in fact plotted the explosion: officers of Japan’s Kwantung Army, who were responsible for security in the area. Lt Colonel Ishiwara Kanji was a convert to Nichiren Buddhism, and had spent the last few years turning that sect’s teachings into predictions of an apocalyptic conflict destined to sweep the globe, drench it in blood, and finally make possible the peace that had for so long eluded humankind.
And if that sounds to you like the Great War, Ishiwara was fond of telling students at the Army Staff College, then you’re wrong. The war to come would make the one just gone look like a stripped-back dress rehearsal. And this time Japan’s role would be as principal player, pitted, at long last, against the United States – a conflict Japan had been destined to fight ever since Commodore Perry had sailed into its waters demanding peaceful relations at the point of a gun.
Japan Story Page 18
