Japan Story
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1997 Ainu Cultural Promotion Law.
1998 Law to Promote Specified Non-Profit Activities.
1999 Law Regarding the National Flag and National Anthem.
2003 Miyazaki Hayao’s Spirited Away wins the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film.
2004 Japanese Ground Self-Defence Forces are sent to help with reconstruction in southern Iraq – the first independent deployment of troops outside Japan since the end of the Second World War.
2006 Basic Law on Suicide Countermeasures.
2007–8 The global financial crisis begins.
2008 A Diet resolution officially acknowledges the Ainu as an indigenous people of Japan.
2009 Images are broadcast across Japan of a ‘New Year’s Village for Contract Workers’ (toshi koshi haken mura) in Tokyo’s Hibiya Park, comprising tents and tarpaulin shelters.
2010 China overtakes Japan to become the world’s second largest economy, after the United States.
11 March 2011 Japan’s ‘triple disasters’: earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Fukushima.
2012 A series of anti-nuclear rallies and protests take place across Japan.
2013 State Secrecy Law passed. The host city for the 2020 Olympics is announced: Tokyo.
2014 Okinawan and Ainu delegates join the first UN-backed World Conference on Indigenous Peoples. Government committee set up to investigate hate speech, dealing in particular with discrimination against Chinese, South East Asians and people of Korean descent living in Japan. Japan ratifies the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
2015 ‘Robear’ unveiled. The district of Shibuya in Tokyo becomes the first local government in Japan to offer official status to same-sex couples, via ‘proof of partnership’ certificates.
2016 ‘Drop Dead Japan!’ viral blog post reveals anger at inadequate childcare provision in Japan. Law on the Promotion of the Elimination of Buraku Discrimination.
2017 Abe Shinzō election victory brings constitutional revision within sight. The abdication is formally announced, planned for April 2019, of Emperor Akihito.
Bibliographic Notes
PROLOGUE: HARUMI AND HEISAKU
The encounters of Heisaku with Harumi are based on Setouchi Jakuchō’s autobiography (Shishōsetsu, 1985), an interview with Setouchi conducted by the author in October 2012, interviews with the son of Kosawa Heisaku, Kosawa Yorio (conducted 2007–2010), and on the private archives of the Kosawa family accessed by the author. On Denenchōfu, see K. T. Oshima, ‘Denenchōfu: Building the Garden City in Japan’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 55: 2 (1996). On the persistence of the ‘special Japan’ story, see Harumi Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of ‘Nihonjinron’ (Trans Pacific Press, 2001) and (for modern psychological speculations) Nancy Rosenberger (ed.), Japanese Sense of Self (Cambridge University Press, 1994). On Japanese modernity: Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton University Press, 2001); Susan Napier, The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature (Routledge, 1995); Roy Starrs, Modernism and Japanese Culture (Palgrave, 2011); and Kevin Doak, Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity (University of California Press, 1994); James Phillips, ‘Time and Memory in Freud and Heidegger: An Unlikely Congruence’, paper given at the 7th International Conference on Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology, Heidelberg University, September 2004. Natsume Sōseki’s quote comes from his novel Kōjin (1912) (‘The Wayfarer’), and is reproduced in Susan Napier, The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature (Routledge, 1995). Kamei Katsuichirō’s words are taken from Kamei Katsuichirō, ‘A Note on Contemporary Spirit’, translated in Richard F. Calichman (ed.), Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan (Columbia University Press, 2008).
1 JAPAN GOES GLOBAL
On Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s expedition to Japan, see Commodore Matthew C. Perry (compiled by Francis L. Hawks), Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan (1856; abridged edn, Big Byte Books, 2014); Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies (ed.), Meiji Japan Through Contemporary Sources, Volume Two: 1844–1882 (Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1970). On early modern Japan, see Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 2002); James McClain, Japan: A Modern History (W. W. Norton & Company, 2002) and ‘Japan’s Pre-Modern Urbanism’ in Peter Clark (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History (Oxford University Press, 2013). On Dejima and Rangaku, see Donald Keene, The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720–1830 (revised edn, Stanford University Press, 1969); Marius Jansen, ‘Rangaku and Westernization’, Modern Asian Studies, 18 (4), 1984; Tatsushi Ueshima, ‘Japan’, in Robert William Thurston, Jonathan Morris and Shawn Steiman (eds), Coffee: A Comprehensive Guide to the Bean, the Beverage, and the Industry (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013). On the attack on Laurence Oliphant, see Margaret Oliphant, Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant and of Alice Oliphant, His Wife (Harper & Brothers, 1891). On technological aspects of Japan’s transition from Tokugawa into Meiji: Thomas C. Smith, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750–1920 (University of California Press, 1988); D. Eleanor Westney, Imitation and Innovation: The Transfer of Western Organizational Patterns to Meiji Japan (Harvard University Press, 1987); David G. Wittner, ‘The Mechanization of Japan’s Silk Industry and the Quest for Progress and Civilization, 1870–1880’, in Morris Low (ed.), Building a Modern Japan: Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Meiji Era and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); E. Patricia Tsurumi, Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan (Princeton University Press, 1990) and ‘Problem Consciousness and Modern Japanese History: Female Textile Workers of Meiji and Taisho’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 18:4 (1986). On Japan’s postal system, see Andrew Cobbing, The Japanese Discovery of Victorian Britain: Early Travel Encounters in the Far West (Routledge, 1998). On women workers in Britain’s General Post Office, see ‘Women in the Post Office’,
2 BLOOD TAX
On radical and campaigning women in modern Japan, Sharon L. Sievers, Flowers in Salt: the Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan (Stanford University Press, 1983); Fukuda Hideko’s autobiography Half of My Life, translated excerpts from which appear in Mikiso Hane (trans. and ed.), Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan (University of California Press, 1993); Fumiko Horimoto, ‘Pioneers of the Women’s Movement in Japan: Hiratsuka Raichō and Fukuda Hideko seen Through their Journals, Seitō and Sekai Fujin’, MA thesis (University of Toronto, 1999); Sharlie Conroy Ushioda, ‘Women and War in Meiji Japan: the Case of Fukuda Hideko (1865–1927)’, Peace & Change: A Journal of Peace Research, 4:3 (October 1977). On Fukuzawa Yukichi and jiyū debates, see Douglas Howland, ‘Translating Liberty in Nineteenth-Century Japan’, in Journal of the History of Ideas, 62:1 (2001). On rural and viol
ent discontent, Eiko Maruko Siniawer, Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860–1960 (Cornell University Press, 2008); Stephen Vlastos, ‘Opposition Movements in Early Meiji, 1868–1885’, in Marius B. Jansen et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 5: The Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press,1989); R. W. Bowen, ‘Rice-roots Democracy and Popular Rebellion in Meiji Japan’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 6:1 (1978); Marius B. Jansen, ‘Ōi Kentarō: Radicalism and Chauvinism’, Far Eastern Quarterly, 11:3 (1952); Daikichi Irokawa, ‘Japan’s Grass-roots Tradition: Current Issues in the Mirror of History’, Japan Quarterly, 20:1 (1973). On samurai, Saigō Takamori and the Satsuma Rebellion: C. L. Yates, ‘Saigō Takamori in the Emergence of Meiji Japan’, Modern Asian Studies, 28:3 (1994); Oleg Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai (Oxford University Press, 2014); John Rickman, ‘Sunset of the Samurai’, Military History, 20:3 (2003); Edward J. Drea, Japan’s Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall, 1853–1945 (University Press of Kansas, 2016). On the Japanese press, see James L. Huffman, Creating a Public: People and Press in Meiji Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 1997). On Chiba Takusaburō, see Daikichi Irokawa, The Culture of the Meiji Period (1969; English trans. Princeton University Press, 1985); Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 2002); and Daikichi Irokawa, ‘Japan’s Grass-roots Tradition: Current Issues in the Mirror of History’, Japan Quarterly, 20:1 (1973). The figures for government arms during the Satsuma Rebellion come from Rickman, ‘Sunset of the Samurai’ and Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan. The quote from the American captain comes from Elizabeth Tripler Nock, ‘The Satsuma Rebellion of 1877: Letters of John Capen Hubbard’, Far Eastern Quarterly, 7:4 (1948). The words of Fukuzawa Yukichi and Itō Hirobumi on Japan’s rural population are reproduced in Huffman, Creating a Public: People and Press in Meiji Japan. The Egypt comparison comes from Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan. ‘Persimmon-coloured’ comes from Fukuda Hideko’s autobiography, Half of My Life, reproduced in Mikiso Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Gallows.
3 DANCING CABINET
For the Rokumeikan, see Pat Barr, The Deer Cry Pavilion: A Story of Westerners in Japan, 1868–1905 (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968); Toshio Watanabe, ‘Josiah Conder’s Rokumeikan: Architecture and National Representation in Meiji Japan’, Art Journal, 55:3 (1996); Dallas Finn, ‘Reassessing the Rokumeikan’, in Ellen P. Conant (ed.), Challenging Past and Present: The Metamorphosis of Nineteenth-Century Japanese Art (University of Hawaii Press, 2006); Mock Joya, ‘Women of Japan: Introduction of Western Fashions’, Japan Times, 3 March 1928. The venue for the infamous party (at which Itō was rumoured to have tried to seduce a young married woman) is disputed: some writers place it at the Rokumeikan (Barr, The Deer Cry Pavilion; Sievers, Flowers in Salt); others locate it at Itō’s home (Finn, ‘Reassessing the Rokumeikan’; Joya, ‘Women of Japan’). On Tokyo, see Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City: Tokyo From Edo to the Earthquake (Alfred A. Knopf, 1983). On Kanagaki Robun: Donald Keene, A History of Japanese Literature: Volume 3: Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984). Also on Japanese literature, see Joshua S. Mostow, ‘The Revival of Poetry in Traditional Forms’, in Joshua S. Mostow (ed.), The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature (Columbia University Press, 2003). On new fashions of the age, see James McClain, Japan: A Modern History (W. W. Norton & Company, 2002) and Seidensticker, Low City, High City. On early modern Japanese intellectual life, see Harry D. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (University of Chicago Press, 1988) and Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 2002). For modern Japanese intellectuals: on Kuga Katsunan and Miyake Setsurei, see Bob T. Wakabayashi (ed.), Modern Japanese Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1998). On Home Ministry interventions in electoral politics, see Gordon M. Berger, ‘Japan’s Young Prince: Konoe Fumimaro’s Early Political Career, 1916–1931’, Monumenta Nipponica, 29:4 (1974). On saving the Imperial Rescript and portraits in times of crisis, see Linda K. Menton, The Rise of Modern Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2003). On food culture, see Naomichi Ishige, The History and Culture of Japanese Food (Routledge, 2001). The Doodle San ditty is reproduced in Pat Barr, The Deer Cry Pavilion. ‘A beautiful woman’ is from Jogaku Zasshi magazine, reproduced in Donald Keene, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852–1912 (Columbia University Press, 2002). ‘Like luggage’ is from the Tokyo Nichi Nichi newspaper, reproduced in James L. Huffman, Creating a Public: People and Press in Meiji Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 1997). For the ‘fashionable crazes’, see Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan, For the Use of Travellers and Others (John Murray, 1905). ‘Rhymes too readily’ is the observation of H. Paul Varley in Japanese Culture (University of Hawaii Press, 2000). ‘Conducive to a spirit of bravery’ is quoted in Mostow, ‘The Revival of Poetry in Traditional Forms’. For an English translation of the Man’yōshū, see 1000 Poems from the Manyōshū: The Complete Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai Translation (Dover Publications Inc., 2005). ‘Contemptible imitation’ is quoted in Keene, Emperor of Japan. ‘Only values are fact-gathering and technique’ is quoted in Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan. For the waka poem, note that in the Japanese original, the final line provides an example of jiamari: excess syllable(s), which were a feature of some waka.
4 HAPPY FAMILIES
On Hiratsuka Raichō, see Hiratsuka Raichō, Genshi Josei wa Taiyō de atta. An English translation is available: Hiratsuka Raichō and Teruko Craig (translation and notes), In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: The Autobiography of a Japanese Feminist (Columbia University Press, 2006); Hiroko Tomida, Hiratsuka Raichō and Early Japanese Feminism (Brill, Leiden, 2004); Sharon L. Sievers, Flowers in Salt: the Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan (Stanford University Press, 1983). On women, the state and radicalism, see Sharon E. Nolte and Sally Ann Hastings, ‘The Meiji State’s Policy Toward Women, 1890–1910’, in Gail Lee Bernstein (ed.), Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945 (University of California Press, 1991); Vera Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan: Gender, Labour, and Activism 1900–1937 (Cambridge University Press, 1997); Sievers, Flowers in Salt; Tomoko Seto, ‘Spectacular Socialism: Politics and Popular Performance in Shitamachi Tokyo, 1904–1918’, PhD thesis (University of Chicago, 2014); Tomoko Seto, ‘ “Anarchist Beauties” in Late Meiji Japan: Media Narratives of Police Violence in the Red Flag Incident’, Radical History Review (October 2016); Helene Bowen Raddeker, Treacherous Women of Imperial Japan: Patriarchal Fictions, Patricidal Fantasies (Routledge, 1997). On Shimizu Shikin, see Leslie Winston, ‘Beyond Modern: Shimizu Shikin and “Two Modern Girls” ’, Critical Asian Studies, 39:3 (2007); Rebecca L. Copeland, Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2000); Fumiko Horimoto, ‘Pioneers of the Women’s Movement in Japan: Hiratsuka Raichō and Fukuda Hideko seen Through their Journals, Seitō and Sekai Fujin’, MA thesis (University of Toronto, 1999). For domesticity, Iwamoto Yoshiharu, and the account of the ‘family meeting’ see Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930 (Harvard University Press, 2005). The Kosawa family material is drawn from the private archives of the Kosawa family, accessed by the author, with thanks also to Ikuta Takashi and Takeda Makoto (see Takeda Makoto, Seishin bunseki to bukkyō [‘Psychoanalysis and Buddhism’], Shinchōsha, 1990). On the Emperor, the imperial system, and its rituals and celebrations, see Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 1996); Norio Makihara, ‘The Birth of Banzai’, Japan Forum, 23:2 (2011); Donald Keene, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852–1912 (Columbia University Press, 2002). On Ebina Danjō, see the memoir of Ōsugi Sakae, reproduced in Wm. Theodore de Bary, Carol Gluck and Arthur E. Tiedemann (eds), Sources of Japanese Tradition, 1600 to 2000, Volume Two, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2001). On Christian so
cialists, see Bob T. Wakabayashi (ed.), Modern Japanese Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1998). ‘The home is a public place’, reproduced in Nolte and Hastings, ‘The Meiji State’s Policy Toward Women, 1890–1910’. ‘The flesh of her thighs’ is from Tanizaki Junichirō (translated by Paul McCarthy), Childhood Years: A Memoir (University of Michigan Press, 2017). ‘Lord[ed] it over their wives and children’ is from Shimizu Shikin’s contribution to Ueki Emori’s Tōyō no fujō (Women of the Orient, 1888), reproduced in Copeland, Lost Leaves. ‘Ha!’ is also reproduced in Copeland, Lost Leaves. ‘The moment that any woman dies’ is reproduced in Hiratsuka Raichō and Teruko Craig, In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: The Autobiography of a Japanese Feminist. ‘The first enemy’ is reproduced in Horimoto, ‘Pioneers of the Women’s Movement’, MA thesis. ‘Terrible toothache’ and ‘Ah, you men’ come from Sievers, Flowers in Salt. The speculation about a Japanese Emperor seeing Mount Fuji for the first time comes from Keene, Emperor of Japan. ‘Is your objective anarchism’, in the Yomiuri Shinbun newspaper, is reproduced in Seto, ‘Spectacular Socialism. Kanno’s evidence to prosecutors and writings to friends comes from Mikiso Hane (trans. and ed.), Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan (University of California Press, 1993).
5 CONTESTING THE COSMOS
On the 1465 ‘Kanshō Persecution’, see Mark L. Blum and Shin’ya Yasutomi (eds), Rennyo and the Roots of Modern Japanese Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2006), especially Chapter 7. On Buddhism, modernity and the state in Japan, see Helen Hardacre, ‘Creating State Shinto: the Great Promulgation Campaign and the New Religions’, Journal of Japanese Studies, 12:1 (1986); Martin Collcutt, ‘Buddhism: the Threat of Eradication’, in Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman (eds), Japan in Transition: Tokugawa to Meiji (Princeton University Press, 1986); Christopher Ives, Imperial Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen’s Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics (University of Hawaii Press, 2009); H. Paul Varley, Japanese Culture (University of Hawaii Press, 2000); Judith Snodgrass, Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian Exposition (University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Jason Ananda Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2012); Gerard Clinton Godart, ‘ “Philosophy” or “Religion”? The Confrontation with Categories in Late Nineteenth Century Japan’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 69:1 (2008); James Edward Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton University Press, 1990) and ‘Strategic Occidentalism: Meiji Buddhists at the World’s Parliament of Religions’, Buddhist-Christian Studies, 11 (1991); Winston Davis, ‘Buddhism and the Modernization of Japan’, History of Religions, 28:4 (1989). On Inoue Enryō, see Gerald A. Figal, Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (Duke University Press, 1999); Miura Setsuo, ‘Inoue Enryō’s Mystery Studies’, International Inoue Enryō Research, 2 (2014); Jason Ananda Josephson, ‘When Buddhism Became a “Religion”: Religion and Superstition in the Writings of Inoue Enryō’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 33:1 (2006); Gerard Clinton Godart, ‘Tracing the Circle of Truth: Inoue Enryō on the History of Philosophy and Buddhism’, Eastern Buddhist, 36:1–2 (2004). On Christians in Japan, see Thomas W. Burkman, ‘The Urakami Incidents and the Struggle for Religious Toleration in Early Meiji Japan’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 1:2–3 (1974); Mikiso Hane, Pre-Modern Japan: A Historical Survey, 2nd edn (Westview Press, 2014); Stephen Turnbull (ed.), Japan’s Hidden Christians (Curzon Press, Surrey, 2000); Kiri Paramore, Ideology and Christianity in Japan (Taylor & Francis, 2009); James M. Hommes, ‘Baptized Bushidō: Christian Converts and the Use of Bushidō in Meiji Japan’, Journal of the Southwest Conference on Asian Studies, 7 (2011); John F. Howes, ‘Japanese Christians and American Missionaries’, in Marius B. Jansen (ed.), Changing Japanese Attitudes Towards Modernization (Princeton University Press, 1965); George M. Oshiro, ‘Nitobe Inazō and the Sapporo Band: Reflections on the Dawn of Protestant Christianity in Early Meiji Japan’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 34:1 (2007); George E. Moore, ‘Samurai Conversion: the Case of Kumamoto’, Asian Studies, 4:1 (1966); Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Routledge, 1997); Mark Mullins, Christianity Made in Japan: A Study of Indigenous Movements (University of Hawaii Press, 1998); Saburo Ozawa, Bakumatsu Meiji Yasokyōshi Kenkyū [Studies in the History of Christianity in the Bakumatsu and Meiji Periods] (Nihon Kirisuto-kyōdan Shuppankyoku, Tokyo, 1973); H. Byron Earhart, Japanese Religion: Unity and Diversity, 5th edn (Wadsworth Publishing, Boston, 2013); Emily Anderson, Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan: Empire for God (Bloomsbury, 2014). On the Russo-Japanese War, see Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 2002); J. Victor Koschmann, Authority and the Individual in Japan: Citizen Protest in Historical Perspective (ISBS, 1978); Nobuya Bamba and John F. Howes (eds), Pacifism in Japan: the Christian and Socialist Tradition (University of British Columbia Press, 1978); David Wells and Sandra Wilson (eds), The Russo-Japanese War in Cultural Perspective, 1904–05 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). On Yosano Akiko, see Laurel Rasplica Rodd, ‘The Taishō Debate over the “New Woman” ’, in Gail Lee Bernstein (ed.), Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945 (University of California Press, 1991). ‘In matters of electricity’ is reproduced in Hommes, ‘Baptized Bushidō: Christian Converts and the Use of Bushidō in Meiji Japan’. ‘Oh my brother …’ is an excerpt from Yosano Akiko’s poem ‘Kimi, shinitamō koto nakare’ [‘Brother, Do Not Offer Your Life’] (1904). The translation used here appears in Steve Rabson, ‘Akiko on War: To Give One’s Life or Not: A Question of Which War’, Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, 25:1 (1991).