Nation and Nationalism in Japan

Sandra Wilson, Sandra Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135024451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia giapponese

Nationalism was one of the most important forces in 20th century Japan. It pervaded almost all aspects of Japanese life, but was a complex phenomenon, frequently changing, and often meaning different things to different people. This book brings together interesting, original new work, by a range of international leading scholars who consider Japanese nationalism in a wide variety of its aspects. Overall, the book provides many new insights and much new thinking on what continues to be a crucially important factor shaping current developments in Japan.

1	Rethinking nation and nationalism in Japan
	Sandra Wilson

Though nations and nationalism surround us, there is no single way of understanding what they are. Some theorists cite a list of important characteristics – for Anthony D. Smith, for example, a nation is a ‘named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members’.¹ Others place less emphasis on substantive criteria and more on feelings and beliefs. Thus, it is the sense of connection among members of the nation who will never know or meet most of their compatriots that is important;² or, more specifically, shared feelings of ‘fraternity, substantial distinctiveness, and exclusivity, as well as beliefs in a common ancestry and a continuous genealogy’.³ Yet clearly, the modern world is made up not just of communities based on such feelings and beliefs, but of ‘nation-states’, where each nation-state maintains ‘an administrative monopoly over a territory with demarcated boundaries (borders), its rule being sanctioned by law and direct control of the means of internal and external violence’.⁴ ‘Nationalism’ can be understood on one level as the ideology that produces and maintains such nation-states.⁵

By whatever definition, a consciousness of nation has been widely considered to be very important to modern Japan, especially during the pre-war period. Japan’s relative cultural homogeneity, apparently natural geographical boundaries, isolation from much of the outside world between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries and its ancient imperial house have seemed to indicate the inevitability of national consciousness. Rampant nationalism, too, has been one of the most widespread shorthand explanations for Japan’s disastrous involvement in the Second World War. At the same time, however, reference to the Japanese case is almost entirely missing from the contemporary theoretical literature on nation and nationalism. Perhaps the reason is that Japan conforms to none of the best-known models of nationalism, in particular because it is Asian but was not colonised, and because Japanese nationalism after the Meiji period can scarcely lay claim to a positive image. Though orthodox interpretations of late-nineteenth-century ‘nation-building’ have often cited the nationalism of leaders and people as an important factor in successful modernisation, for the ensuing decades there was no attractive story of liberation from colonial oppression, or winning of independence or self-determination for a subjugated people, but rather a story chiefly associated with conquest, subjugation of other peoples, war, and after 1945, the vexed issue of remilitarisation. For Japanese historians, the subject is painfully associated with partially unresolved wartime issues, so that nationalism often seems to represent what Miroslav Hroch has called in another context ‘an antiquated deviation, a historical error’.⁶

Writings on modern Japan have accordingly tended to emphasise a particular type of nationalism. Much valuable work on the Meiji period has revealed the efforts of political and bureaucratic leaders and others to inculcate nationalism among the people, somewhat counterbalancing the impression that nationalism was virtually inevitable for modern Japan. One doubtless unintended result, however, is an inference that the project of creating a ‘sense of nation’⁷ was largely complete by the end of Meiji; and that thereafter, the only really significant development up until 1945 was a greater leaning towards militarism. After 1945, nationalism in this view was discredited and largely abandoned, excepting the activities of some fringe groups, and perhaps the economic nationalism famously practised by the Japanese state. Japanese nationalism after 1868, in this rendition, is first and foremost an ideology, transmitted principally through compulsory education and conscription of adult males. Furthermore, it is a largely static phenomenon, relatively coherent and monolithic, in that it is exclusivist, and centred on a set of core ideas about what constituted the Japanese nation and the essence of Japanese identity, including the assertion that the Japanese had always existed as a separate people, that the imperial house had continued unbroken for over two thousand years, that the Japanese people possessed unique attributes and pure blood, and had a unique mission to lead Asia. This version of Japanese nationalism is also a top-down creation centred on state and emperor and, increasingly, the military, with the addition of a few mad ultra-nationalists outside government. Ordinary people are certainly involved, but mostly as a passive populace manipulated from above, and often as misled masses charging towards war.

Nationalism is certainly in part an ideology, and as such it may be particularly conspicuous when national identity is felt to be threatened, inadequate or lacking,⁸ as in Japan between 1868 and 1945. Yet nationalism is much more than a political project or a doctrine, as recent writers have clearly recognised. Rather, it is a ‘way of talking, thinking, and acting’,⁹ as integral to life in a stable democracy as to participation in a movement seeking a new state to represent a particular ‘nation’.¹⁰ At its most basic, nationalism can be understood as a form of discourse – a discourse which links a variety of projects, policies and movements undertaken in the name of the nation.¹¹ Thus, it is not ‘a latent force that manifests itself only under extraordinary conditions, a kind of natural disaster which strikes spontaneously and unpredictably’. Rather, it is ‘a discourse that constantly shapes our consciousness and the way we constitute the meaning of the world’, claiming, implicitly or explicitly, that ‘the interests and values of the nation override all other interests and values’, ultimately accepting the nation as ‘the only source of legitimacy’ and operating through a series of binary divisions – ‘between “us” and “them”, “friends” and “foes”’.¹²

The chapters in this volume are based on such an understanding of modern nationalism. Taken as a whole, they therefore suggest a more fluid and flexible type of Japanese nationalism than that which has appeared in many previous writings. They further suggest that Japanese nationalism has existed and continues to exist in some variety, rather than in a single dominant version, with different concepts of nation competing in the public domain; and that a wide range of agents has been involved in the negotiation and transmission of discourses of the national interest. These agents include many people in the articulate elites inside and outside of government. But they also encompass a great variety of ordinary and anonymous people who participated in nationalist discourses as much through their actions as through any written or spoken manifesto. If nationalism is accepted as a basic way of thinking, talking and acting, then its basis is much broader than has previously been acknowledged in the case of Japan. It is as much relevant to nameless members of the middle and working classes, for example, as to national leaders and political groups on the right and the left. The ‘nation’, in our view, has been constructed by many hands, not necessarily under any guiding plan or with a common intent or understanding. The linking factor among a variety of projects, policies and actions is, again, the discourse of the ‘national’ interest. The chapters in this volume also treat Japanese nationalism more as a process or series of processes than as an established dogma, though dogmas have undeniably played their part. The process has never reached an end-point, though critical milestones can certainly be identified, they do not indicate a linear path or known direction, and the discourses of nationalism continue to unfold.

As will be clear from these introductory remarks, Japanese nationalism is considered here as a phenomenon that has much in common with other nationalisms. The Japanese case is unique in the sense that, all cases are unique – specific ideas, movements and projects spring primarily from particular historical and cultural conditions in Japan. For reasons already mentioned, moreover, the Japanese case is in many ways an unusual one. On the other hand, as Frank B. Tipton’s concluding chapter demonstrates, there is much to be learned from a comparative perspective. In Tipton’s view, while Japan’s claims to nationhood in the mid-nineteenth-century were better developed than those of other countries, in subsequent periods the trajectory of Japanese nationalism was surprisingly similar to that of other nationalisms.

ESTABLISHING THE ‘NATION’

In hindsight, Japanese nationalism may indeed appear as inevitable. In Frank B. Tipton’s terms, Japan was in fact ‘a far better candidate to become a modern nation than virtually any other contender’ in the middle of the nineteenth-century, owing to its relatively clear geographic boundaries, comparative linguistic uniformity, common elite culture and established central government. Yet, for most of the Japanese population at that time, nationalism was far from an established orthodoxy, and membership of the ‘nation’ was certainly not taken for granted. Local allegiances were more pressing than national ones for most people, status distinctions were overriding, and knowledge of the emperor was sketchy and confused.¹³ Nationalism thus had yet to be created, implanted and propagated among the people, for many of whom it was an unfamiliar and perhaps unattractive idea. Much work was done during the Meiji period to change this situation.

Among the educated classes the idea of Japan as a distinctive community already had a long history by the time the new Meiji leaders came to power. The notion that Japan and the Japanese were of divine origin, and hence different from and superior to others, was propagated well before 1868. There was a well-established distinction between Japan, on the one hand, and China and India on the other. By the late Edo period, further distinctions were claimed – the noted scholar Hirata Atsutane, for instance, specifically asserted Japanese superiority over the peoples of Cambodia, China, Holland, India, Russia, Siam and other places.¹⁴ The bakufu itself had a certain sense of national identity, as seen, for example, in the edict of 1636 closing Japan, in which Japanese people were forbidden to travel abroad, and much later when the bakufu dispatched a mission to the Paris Exposition of 1867.

In this sense, ideas about nation were by no means new in the modern period. It was the conditions of post-1853 Japan, however, which ‘fundamentally transform[ed] the pre-existing ethnic identities and [gave] new significance to cultural inheritances’.¹⁵ The perception of national identity that might already have been fairly familiar in the samurai class became an urgent practical issue with the intrusion of the West into Japanese affairs from the 1850s onwards – the threat from external nation-states thus did much to destroy more local and regional allegiances in Japan. Throughout the Meiji period, nationalism permeated all areas of Japan’s high culture. Amongst the educated classes, it rapidly became common sense; it was not at all controversial, except occasionally in terms of its application. The discourse of national interest in fact was a common thread linking widely diverging political positions, right through to the liberalism of Ōi Kentarō and the socialism of Kōtoku Shūsui.¹⁶

The nationalism of the mid-nineteenth-century, however, though crucial to the overthrow of the Tokugawa regime and the establishment of the Meiji nation-state, was by and large the nationalism of a small elite. As noted above, it was greatly overshadowed at that time by more local loyalties – to villages or to domains, rather than to any ‘national’ entity – and by considerations of social status. Regional consciousness was so strong, according to one analysis, that opposing sides in the battles of the Meiji Restoration saw each other not only as enemies, but virtually as different ‘ethnic’ groups, with different cultural characteristics including regional dialects that seemed like different languages to the other side. Moreover, the upper class before the Restoration was considered so distinct from the middle and lower classes as to be barely part of the same ethnic group.¹⁷ In the early 1870s the journalist Kurimoto Joun found proof of a lack of national consciousness in the causes for which people died:

Granted, in Japan from ancient times a great many people have died for their own sake, for the sake of their families or their village or their district; or for an employer or a lord. But so far we have heard of no-one who has died for the country (kuni). Even if there are some who have died directly for their country, their deaths resulted from the spirit of dying for a ruler (kimi), and so the idea of the word ‘kuni’ does not yet exist in the hearts of our people.¹⁸

In the early years of the Meiji era, the Japanese population was by no means convinced that the new national system of government was preferable to rule by domain, especially as it was evident that the conventional forms of protection provided by the old regime were now gone.¹⁹ Uprisings occurred in a number of places, some of them armed uprisings, revealing a substantial level of anxiety about the new conscription system and other government initiatives. Ordinary people, in other words, did not automatically see service for the ‘national’ good as a natural or obvious obligation. In the mid-1880s, while some observers were beginning to make hopeful statements about the unity of the people, the political activist Ōi Kentarō, on the other hand, believed that the national consciousness of the Japanese was still ‘extremely languid and obstinate’.²⁰ According to Takashi Fujitani, ‘Not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did nearly all of the people living in “Japan” realize that it was commonsensical and natural to possess a national identity and to feel a sense of responsibility to the national collectivity’.²¹ As late as 1943, when external perceptions of an overpowering Japanese nationalism were at their height, the scholar D. C. Holtom pointed instead to ‘strongly diversifying, not to say disintegrating, tendencies’, noting that ‘The particularism of a feudal regime that was split into rival clans and pocketed behind mountain barriers and secluded on separate islands has not even yet been fully transcended’.²²

Given the relatively strong feeling of national identity common to the elite levels of Meiji society, in a context where the unequal treaties with Western countries significantly infringed Japan’s sovereignty and autonomy, it became an urgent task for Meiji leaders to encourage the rest of the population to identify with the nationstate, and in particular to become more willing to make sacrifices for it. The problem about dying for the country raised by Kurimoto Joun, the journalist quoted above, was solved with the establishment in 1869 of the monument later renamed Yasukuni jinja, a shrine dedicated to the proposition that Japan’s soldiers did indeed die for the sake of the nation. Yasukuni thus played its own important part in the elaboration of the meaning of ‘nation’ in Meiji Japan, as Beatrice Trefalt demonstrates in her chapter in this volume. Some of the key strategies by which the state sought more generally to encourage a sense of national identity are well known: the formal levelling of society by abolition of the old class system; the implementation of conscription and universal education, through which a bigger section of the population than ever before was exposed to official dogma; the inscribing of nationalist orthodoxy into crucial texts like the constitution and the Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890; in fact, the invention or reproduction of ‘a countless array of national symbols, rites, practices, and ideas, an entire system of meaning through which the people might imagine the nation’,²³ of which the most important is the monarchy itself.²⁴ Frank B. Tipton’s chapter in this volume reminds us that such strategies on the part of Japan’s rulers were broadly similar to those elsewhere, with primary schools in particular playing a significant role in spreading ideas of nation in many countries. Even the Imperial Rescript on Education, infamous in most accounts of Japanese nationalism, in a sense had its counterpart in the American Pledge of Allegiance.

The ideal of sacrifice for the nation upheld by Yasukuni Shrine was unequivocally a male one. More broadly, nationalist ideology and nationalist practice were gendered from the start in Japan, as they were elsewhere.²⁵ Women and men were expected to participate differently in the national project. In fact, though there was no shortage of exhortations to women as to how they should serve the nation in their own supposedly distinctive way, the most important of the ‘national’ enterprises generally assumed a male subject, starting with conscription, proceeding to voting, for those wealthy enough, and culminating in actual participation in wars. In cases where women were encouraged to participate in the same national projects as men, as in universal education, the content differed, with primary schools being prime places for the inculcation of ideology about the proper behaviour and attit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on names
• 1 Rethinking nation and nationalism in Japan
• 2 The politics of pragmatism and pageantry: selling a national navy at the elite and local level in Japan, 1890–1913
• 3 Picturing political space in 1920s and 1930s Japan
• 4 Substantiating the nation: terrorist trials as nationalist theatre in early Shōwa Japan
• 5 Between samurai and carnival: identity, language, music and dance among the Japanese expatriate community in 1930s Brazil
• 6 In a house divided: the Japanese Christian socialist Abe Isoo
• 7 Saving for ‘My Own Good and the Good of the Nation’: economic nationalism in modem Japan
• 8 War, commemoration and national identity in modern Japan, 1868–1975
• 9 English and nationalism in Japan: the role of the intercultural-communication industry
• 10 Japanese nationalism in comparative perspective
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index