Japan Story

by Christopher Harding

  The American journalist Hallett Abend sensed that Nanjing was set to become somehow exceptional, even in this era of horrors on the Asian mainland. This would be ‘a page of history that the Japanese nation will always regret’, he wrote. Officials in Shanghai were not trying to deny what was going on. And their accounts were clearly reaching Tokyo: Ishigari Itarō, Bureau Chief of the East Asia section of the Foreign Ministry, confided to his diary the news he was receiving of the ‘atrocities of our army in Nanjing … [a] horrendous situation of pillage and rape. My God, is this how our imperial army behaves?’ But Abend rightly suspected that further afield and into the future there would be attempts to cover all this up. He himself was first bribed, then intimidated, and then branded as ‘anti-Japanese’ over his reporting – the last a label to be applied almost reflexively, for decades to come, to Japanese and non-Japanese alike who dared to describe and seek to understand the scale and causes of what Japan’s armed forces did in Nanjing.

  General Matsui Iwane (far left) leads the Nanjing Victory Parade, 17 December 1937 Matsui, for his part, certainly didn’t grasp the implications. A big believer in ‘Pan-Asianism’ – solidarity against the political and cultural threat of the West – he spoke in February 1940, on the day that the temple near his home was formally dedicated, of the carnage in China as the ‘mutual killing of neighbouring friends’. He still hoped that this ongoing ‘holy war’ (seisen) would eventually result in the salvation of East Asia. Dedicating his creation of bloody clay to that end and to the souls of the dead on both sides of the conflict, he gave to statue and temple alike the name Kōa Kannon: ‘Kannon for a Prosperous Asia’.

  *

  For those around the world whose dismay at Japanese aggression in Asia had now turned to disbelief at the extraordinary violence in Shanghai and Nanjing, grandiose talk of peace, prosperity, cooperation and holiness rang understandably hollow. And yet in his appeal to the divine – for cosmic context and moral justification – Matsui was far from alone.

  The Kōa Kannon statue The 1930s saw the coming together in Japan of some of the most radical philosophical critiques of Western modernity with some of the most radical political ones. Nishida Kitarō, a man with a good claim to being Japan’s first modern philosopher and now entering the final phase of a distinguished career, had long ago charged that Western culture was premised on two fundamental ideas – and both of them were wrong. First, the notion that reality is ultimately ‘something’. And second, that the natural mode of human be-ing is to live and process the world as a rational individual.

  Nishida claimed instead that reality is ultimately ‘nothingness’. Not in the sense of the once-was or the might-have-been, but absolute nothingness: an unfathomable ‘place’, or horizon, upon which both being and non-being arise. Look at a yellow flower, he said to his students at Kyoto Imperial University. But rather than noticing ‘a flower’ that is yellow, focus instead on the yellowness itself. Zoom in. Give it your full attention. Something interesting happens: your concern with the ‘is-ness’, the existence, of the flower – and also the ‘is-ness’ of yourself – begins to recede.

  Once you’re fully immersed in this yellowness, he continued, ask yourself where yellowness comes from. For some of you, the question won’t make sense. But those of you who persevere will find that you end up imagining yellowness not in terms of substance but in terms of place. The question becomes not ‘What is yellowness?’ but ‘Where is yellowness? Against what broader backdrop does ‘yellowness’ emerge?’

  You may find that the answer arrives courtesy of a new and special sort of consciousness. Not the familiar kind, where you have various thoughts, but one where thinking ‘has’ – creates – you. And if you’re prompted, finally, to ask ‘where’ this special consciousness ‘is’, the answer must be absolute nothingness, which produces and interpenetrates every plane of reality. You could say that absolute nothingness is God. And that God is absolute nothingness.

  None of this will make any sense until you’ve had a taste of Zen – so claimed a friend of Nishida’s by the name of Suzuki Daisetsu. Where Nishida was an occasional practitioner of Zen, Suzuki was a devotee and an evangelist: if Zen and an ideal of wordless insight were soon understood in the West as the very essence of Buddhism and Japanese cultural refinement, then Suzuki was one of a small handful of Japanese intellectuals who could claim credit.

  A similar shift occurred at home in Japan, where laypeople in search of practices of self-cultivation amidst the strains of modern life demanded of Zen Buddhist monks a training in meditation, along with shared use of space in their temples. Those monks were struggling to keep their temples open and their traditions alive in the wake of anti-Buddhist feeling after the Meiji Restoration. Contributions to their coffers came now on a voluntary basis only. So if meditation was what people wanted, then meditation would be what they got.

  This transformation within Zen, from a largely institution-bound set of specialized ideas into a widely intelligible resource for culturally and spiritually inflected political critique, proved extraordinarily influential in the middle years of the twentieth century. For a start, it possessed obvious nationalist and Pan-Asian potential. Suzuki suggested that in the face of Western culture, Buddhism in general provided a natural bond between the peoples of India, China and Japan. And, true to the legacy of Inoue Enryō, who derided religion in contemporary India as ‘crystallized superstition’ epitomized in bizarre and ‘exceedingly filthy’ cow-veneration, Suzuki insisted that Japan was where the Buddha’s teachings, and human spirituality more generally, had so far reached their highest realization. Thanks to a meeting, centuries ago, of the samurai spirit (seishin) with Chinese Ch’an Buddhism, Japanese life as a whole, he claimed, had developed to become ‘Zen-like’.

  D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966) Across the 1920s, influential professors of law at Tokyo Imperial University used a different idiom to propose and promote strikingly similar ideas. Uesugi Shinkichi and Kakehi Katsuhiko argued that the essence of ‘being’ lay in the organic connectedness of beings within a community – living with one another, with the dead, and with the as-yet unborn. Only a community capable of realizing, in the sense both of recognizing and practising, these profound interrelations could truly call itself a ‘society’. And only a society consciously striving for perfection was entitled to call itself a ‘state’.

  In the West, they argued, you find only rather pitiful approximations of this, mere hasty constructs of convenience or control. The ideal form is to be found in Japan, where the state was not ‘built’ at all: it was divinely revealed. Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, is the source and final goal of a polity animated by an organizational will provided by the Emperor himself – a ‘god made manifest as man’ (arahitogami). Such a state doesn’t need laws, or politics, or compulsion of any kind: morality comes naturally, rooted in the conviction that man’s most profound moment of understanding and self-realization comes when he merges – whether in life or death – with this will of the Emperor.

  Such thoughts by themselves hardly amounted to a call for war. But an unsettling breeze was starting to pick up in Japan, strengthened by tributary gusts like these. Other contributions included Watsuji Tetsurō’s claims about the intimacy of Japanese families versus the cold, pragmatic cohabitation found in the West. The novelist Tanizaki Junichirō suggested that whereas Japanese people experience the world as one might a room illuminated by the light of a candle – shifting shadows, the richness of ever-changing forms and feelings – Westerners live as though an electric light is either off or on: in total darkness, or in a blanched, bland world. Their inner lives are, in other words, artificial. Dead.

  A surprising number of these gathering winds were in fact westerlies. Nishida and his ‘Kyoto School’ philosophical colleagues were profoundly indebted to German philosophy. Suzuki lived and worked in the United States for more than a decade around the turn of the twentieth century. Uesugi and Kakehi both studied the state in Germany – Kakehi i
n particular was steeped in Christian theology and regarded the Roman Catholic Church as an exemplar of man’s desire for divine sovereignty. And one of the West’s redeeming features, in the eyes of early twentieth-century Asian intellectuals seeking to push back against its cultural dominance, had been its capacity for forensic self-critique, bordering on self-sabotage – encountered colourfully in psychoanalysis, which suggested that somewhere beneath colonialism’s starchy uniforms, pith helmets and high purpose there festered unspeakable thoughts and fantasies. Similarly, Japanese rejection of ‘the West’ often looked like the taking of sides in that region’s internal cultural tussles – or else part of a global, cosmopolitan conversation about ‘modernity’.

  But audiences mattered more than origins in the late 1920s and into the 1930s, as Japan’s diplomatic isolation worsened and the likes of Nishida and Suzuki – along with those who interpreted their work – got caught up in nationalistic drift. Uesugi and Kakehi’s students included young men not just at Tokyo University but at the Army and Navy colleges. Kakehi had even devoted time, in November 1926, to personal tuition for a particularly privileged young man – who a month later became the Shōwa Emperor. Both Uesugi and Kakehi worked with ultranationalist discussion, pressure and propaganda groups opposed to liberal interpretations of Japan’s constitution and to party politics, whose rise they feared and detested.

  Japan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau viewed such groups as potentially revolutionary – whether from right or left, hostility towards the status quo could not be tolerated – and so kept a close eye on them. They were right to worry. Here was a ready-and-waiting reservoir of support and coherent ideology, should violent political activists need to draw on it: in planning and preparing their attacks, and later in court, if and when they answered for them. The young military officers who assassinated Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi at his home in 1932 travelled there direct from the Yasukuni Shrine, where they were seen ‘doffing caps, clasping hands, and bowing towards the unseen mirror of the Sun Goddess’. One bought charms at the shrine and handed them around, a means of warding off police bullets.

  And yet you didn’t have to be a theorist or a theologian or a thug to feel included by the grand philosophical ideas of this age. Many were premised upon who you already were, by virtue of blood. Others appealed as earnest and ambitious attempts to gather in everything that seemed to threaten Japan and to lay it all at the feet of some higher principle, whether Amaterasu, the Emperor or ‘absolute nothingness’. Nor did these great cosmic tamings of the country’s troubles all boil down to forms of xenophobia. Suzuki’s lauding of Japan and the Japanese was largely a matter of pride in his country, a sympathetic understanding of the spiritual emptiness felt by friends living in the West, and a frustration with lingering misrepresentations there of Buddhism. And yet his words and the practices he championed could be – and were – taken up by warmongers, from ‘Buddhist’ justifications for violent aggression to meditation retreats for army officers. Nishida was attacked from the left after the war for his supposed nationalism, and from the right during it for taking too enthusiastic an interest in European thought.

  There was, then, hardly a straightforward progression from philosophy to a lust for foreign blood. But ideas that were at once inspiring and capacious possessed enormous potential power, taking the complexity of Japan’s situation in the 1920s and 1930s – the mixed blessings of a mass society, unsettled politics, fluctuating economic fortunes and uncertain international standing – and giving it graspable contours. It might not be enough to make a person want war, but it could help them to accept it when it came. Many would find themselves swept up, to look back in later years with a mixture of fondness, puzzlement and grief.

  In 1937, as the war in China spiralled out of control, sublime ideas found their way into mainstream politics. The government published a booklet entitled Kokutai No Hongi (‘Fundamentals of Our National Polity’). Written and revised by scholars including the philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō, it blamed European Enlightenment thought – and individualism especially – for the present world crisis, and for the confusion into which many Japanese had innocently fallen. People should ground themselves firmly, it said, in the Japanese spirit: a constant force in history, from the Sun Goddess down to the present times. And they should shake off the shackles of their ‘small selves’, in favour of the larger life to be found in the Emperor. Such was the real meaning and magnificence of the kokutai.

  More than two million copies of Kokutai No Hongi were printed, including for use in schools. It became just one element in broad-ranging and intensive efforts by bureaucrats and government-sponsored intellectuals to work out how Japan might survive the very hot diplomatic water into which the military had plunged the country. The general governmental trend was towards reining in energy-sapping contests – from party politics to unfettered capitalism – and tightening state control of the economy. A Cabinet Planning Board was established in 1937 to coordinate economic policy, after which a wide range of further powers were gathered in by the state – concerning labour allocation and wage levels, prices and profit levels, industrial production, power generation, transportation, and the use of important land and buildings. An ‘Imperial Rule Assistance Association’ (IRAA) was established in October 1940: civil and military arms of government were to be united in a national party-like body, headed by the Prime Minister and reaching right down to the municipal level. Diet politicians, weary of being threatened by bureaucrats with their own extreme unpopularity in the country, and seeing in the IRAA a route to rehabilitation, gave their blessing, formally dissolved their parties and joined the new organization instead.

  And yet none of this ever went as far as Rōyama Masamichi of Tokyo University would have liked. Part of a constitutional research group established in 1933, Rōyama advocated complete Nazi-style top-down control in Japan. But territorialism amongst Japan’s bureaucrats, and criticism of the IRAA as effectively a new shogunate – and thus a competitor with the Emperor – helped to ensure that this much-hyped new body found itself effectively absorbed into the Home Ministry. The essentials of Japan’s Meiji Constitution remained unchanged: the Diet continued to meet, populated by much the same people as before and used by business leaders, as ever it had been, to push for the interests of private enterprise against an overweening state. Japan ended up with watered-down statism, rather than full-throttle fascism.

  Nevertheless, these years after the start of the war with China saw an impressive degree of political and cultural pressure applied throughout the country, bringing people ever more closely into the bureaucratic embrace. The Japan Federation of Labour met in Tokyo in the summer of 1940, and amidst cries of ‘Banzai!’ for the Emperor officially disbanded itself. Labour disputes from then on were settled by discussion under the auspices of an Industrial Patriotic Federation, on whose board sat a number of Home Ministry officials. Ichikawa Fusae’s League for Women’s Suffrage was persuaded to suspend its call for the vote, and was offered instead a sought-after law giving financial aid to struggling mothers. And where Hiratsuka Raichō once invoked the Sun Goddess as a symbol of women’s radiant creativity, Ichikawa and a newly formed League of Japanese Women’s Organizations now called for Amaterasu to be worshipped as part of a wider programme of reverence for the imperial family, sensible family budgeting and pragmatically modest dress.

  Campaigners who had previously fought the government on a range of issues found themselves writing articles or touring the countryside to try to persuade people to save their money. Strategists had concluded that savings were an easier sell to the public than higher taxes, and they were useful for the war effort because they provided financial institutions with the funds they needed to buy government bonds.

  With the raw material to keep up the fight in China falling into place by 1940, what the government needed was a sense of where a conflict that couldn’t be stopped might ultimately be going. Two years before, Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro, a
one-time student of Nishida Kitarō at Kyoto University, had announced as his foreign policy aim a ‘New Order in East Asia’: regional stability achieved via cooperation between Japan, Manchukuo, and a China free of Chiang Kai-shek – who was in political hock to the West and so not to be trusted. Now, in the summer of 1940, his Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke proudly announced the creation of a ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ (GEACPS).

  War had broken out in Europe the previous autumn, so the potential availability of British and French colonial possessions in South East Asia had now to be factored into Japan’s resource-seeking calculus. GEACPS was also the natural fulfilment of what the philosopher Miki Kiyoshi – like Konoe, once a pupil of Nishida Kitarō, and now a government adviser – called a need for ‘grand ideas’ to match the ‘grand deeds’ of Japan’s armed forces on the continent. The state needed a story it could sell to parents sending their children off to war, and this, it was hoped, would fit the bill.

  Early hopes for GEACPS, as something more than a fig leaf for Japanese imperialism, were revealed in later dismay. Both Miki and Nishida decried its swift appropriation by advocates of military expansion. Nishida reportedly told army leaders that a ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ that didn’t meet the needs of people in the region was merely a ‘coercion sphere’. Idealists had hoped that GEACPS might answer a dilemma posed by Fukuzawa Yukichi, one of modern Japan’s founding fathers, all the way back in 1885: should Japan leave Asia for the warm and sophisticated embrace of the modern Western world – or should it aspire to lead it? Given an ever-widening chasm of misunderstanding and mistrust between Japan and the West, the latter option increasingly seemed the obvious and even urgent course of action.