Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century

R. Jobs, D. Pomfret, R. Jobs, D. Pomfret, R. Jobs, D. Pomfret

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137469908
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Through a variety of case studies, Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century examines the emergence of youth and young people as a central historical force in the global history of the twentieth century.

Part I

Activities

1

Youth and Rural Modernity in Japan, 1900s–20s

Sayaka Chatani

At the turn of the twentieth century, social leaders in Japan and around the world saw the development of youth movements as having an essential role to play in the creation of modern society. In their eyes, youth represented the potentiality of modernity. An industrializing Japanese society ushered youth to the fore in a variety of ways. By the 1920s, elite students in the modern school system, highly trained in Western knowledge and destined for careers as bureaucrats, were referred to as ‘the engine of the nation’. Other students led socialist and communist movements as self-styled ‘vanguards’ of society. On the street, an increasing number of culturally subversive urban youth – sometimes called ‘moga’ (modern girls) and ‘mobo’ (modern boys) – embodied modern consumer culture and urban decadence. But while these archetypes of youth prevailed in big cities, the countryside also witnessed the rise of youth – pure, strong, and hardworking agrarian youth came to symbolize Japan’s masculine empire.

While the image of rural youth usually does not connote cosmopolitanism, the birth of ‘rural youth’ as a social category reflected a dynamic interaction between local and transnational contexts in many of the same ways that ‘students’ or ‘urban youth’ did. Although historian Louise Young claims that big cities, particularly Tokyo, were the face of modernity while rural areas became ‘modernity’s Other’, the majority of people in this era interpreted and experienced ‘modernity’ from the perspective of the countryside.¹ ‘Rural youth’ was the central protagonist in public imaginings of rural-based modernity.

The key institution responsible for fashioning ‘rural youth’ into pillars of the nation was the seinendan, or village youth association.² Because almost all rural villages had for centuries used youth associations in the organization of labor, reformers in the Meiji period (1868–1911) could quickly organize them into seinendan that bore ‘native Japanese’ characteristics. Although the Boy Scouts became popular among middle-class families in the cities in the early twentieth century, the much longer history and extent of village youth associations meant that they better served the goal of nation-building in the eyes of state bureaucrats. At the same time, like the Boy Scouts, the seinendan were participants in transnational movements. Their organizers eagerly incorporated Western models of youth training, and their members regarded themselves as a modern force. In effect, the seinendan played a similar role to the Boy Scouts in Mexico and the Girl Guides in British Malaya as discussed by Elena Albarrán and Jialin Christina Wu in this volume. They shaped a new nationalism and citizenship, linked transnational movements with national and local contexts, and established the category of youth as a new social identity.

Because the seinendan played a pivotal role in nation-building they attracted the attention of policymakers and bureaucrats. State officials expected village-level seinendan to revitalize the rural economy and spread national consciousness among the masses after the war against Russia in 1904–5. Between 1915 and 1941, the state centralized and strengthened the national network of seinendan.³ As the Japanese army expanded its conquest of China in the 1930s, youth in the seinendan, together with ex-soldiers in the reservist groups, came to be identified as a domestic stronghold, both of nationalist ideology and military personnel. With their close links to the military, ‘rural youth’ embodied by the seinendan were a predominantly male-gendered category.⁴ Indeed, the historian Richard Smethurst and many Japanese scholars have viewed the seinendan movement primarily in terms of its relationship with the military.⁵ For these scholars, the spread of the seinendan in the 1910s and 1920s indicated a growing militarism in the countryside while Japanese cities became key sites in the development of contentious liberal politics.

Is it possible to identify young men’s individual subject positions within the state-led seinendan mobilization? Should their participation in these institutions necessarily be viewed as a form of indoctrination by the state and the army? Tackling these questions brings the historian face-to-face with a number of methodological challenges. The voices of village youth are often submerged in the historical record beneath the clamor of nationalistic propaganda. The majority of seinendan members were young farmers who did not have the means to leave their home villages – they had no choice but to join the village seinendan, so pervasive and influential were these organizations at the local level. The difficulty in locating their voices has led many scholars to view these youth as obedient subjects fixed within tight and deeply conservative hamlet orders, easily manipulated by village administration and army officials.

I argue in this chapter that, on the contrary, the popularity of the seinendan derived from the hopes village youth harbored that they might alter their social statuses and allow for the achievement of a ‘rural modernity’ – defined fluidly in terms of the denial, transformation, or imitation of urban modernity. Rural youth were aware of the power of state propaganda and global trends, and they used both eagerly to pursue their own agendas. The intentions of village youth can be traced in their writings and private activities – particularly in the ways they defined the categories of ‘youth’ and ‘rural youth’, their decisions to adopt, or not, the state’s rhetoric, and their techniques of interpreting and utilizing transnational forces for their local and personal agendas. For many of them, the seinendan provided an alternative to the school-based career path. They reimagined Meiji’s popular idea of ‘risshin shusse’ (‘rising in the world’), which usually implied that urban careers based on a school diploma were something only hardworking rural youth could achieve. They turned nationalism and transnationalism, both considered specifically ‘youthful’ traits, into a weapon to fight social battles. They tactfully used the discursive value of rural youth to increase their political leverage with (and against) the social establishment. Like those to whom Richard Jobs and David Pomfret refer in the introduction to this volume, Japanese village youth viewed themselves as especially transnational. As possessors of this self-image, these young people embarked upon travels in a space of the transnational imagination and transgressed various bonds and borders in spite of their limited geographical mobility.

One example, that of a young man named Katô Einojô, who lived in a farming village named Aratanome in Miyagi prefecture in northern Japan, shows us how village youth invested in notions of the ‘rise’ of rural youth as a rebellious act. As a landlord’s son, Katô enjoyed wealth and status that were not available to the average village youth. He used it to attempt to create a group based on the generational identity of youth, named the Aratanome 4-H club. The club was a product of the complex interactions between Katô, the family and hamlet orders, and the national seinendan movement, within a wider, global context marked by the growing prominence of youth. As is generally the case with social histories, individual examples cannot be seen as ‘representative’ – but privately formed youth groups like the Aratanome 4-H club were certainly not unusual in other parts of Japan. Katô Einojô’s is just one story among many, but it reveals how young men in the countryside had the motivation and in some cases also the means to take advantage of state mobilization for their own benefit. By the 1920s, the discursive rise of ‘rural youth’ and the spread of the seinendan paradoxically created a space of freedom for village youth and provided them with a kind of moral capital which they deployed against urban youth and older generations.

Yamamoto Takinosuke’s Inaka seinen

The modern rural youth group movement in Japan started in the area around Hiroshima. In 1896, Yamamoto Takinosuke, a 24-year-old schoolteacher, self-published a book entitled Inaka seinen (Rural Youth). Like many of the young male population of his time, Yamamoto had evaded conscription, probably because of his poor eyesight.⁶ Poverty forced him to abandon his dream to continue his studies in middle school or to go to Tokyo. Instead, he had to count himself lucky to be able to work within the village-level administration and a local elementary school. Inaka seinen was a desperate lament about the life of youth in the countryside, giving voice to Yamamoto’s growing frustrations. In the previous six years he had striven to inject life into local youth groups:

Although [the youth of the city and the country] are both youth, one kind is embraced warmly and another is abandoned on the street. The so-called ‘country youth’ are the ones who have been abandoned. They are without school name or school diploma ... Despite the fact that they are the majority of the youth of the nation, they are neglected and left out of the discussion.⁷

Yamamoto was reacting against what he viewed as a growing imbalance between the attention devoted to youth in urban areas (particularly students) and in the countryside. The late 1880s and early 1890s saw the burgeoning of magazine publications targeting urban youth. The scholar Kimura Naoe argues that seinen (youth) became a new category in opposition to sôshi, the mob-like violent youth who had engaged in radical political demonstrations during the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement of the 1880s. The most powerful source for the new idea of seinen was Tokutomi Sohô and his magazine, Kokumin no tomo (The Nation’s Friend). In 1887, the magazine featured a series of articles entitled ‘The Youth of New Japan and the Politics of New Japan’, which Kimura calls ‘a manifesto for the magazine’.⁸ In these articles, Tokutomi Sohô, who was only 24 years old at the time, assigned responsibility to (college and high school) students to become the engine of a new Japanese politics.⁹ He named the magazine after the American publication, The Nation, which he read avidly while attending the Dôshisha English School in Kyoto. Tokutomi became a widely read journalist who introduced Western thought to Japan through magazines and other outlets.¹⁰ The voice of Kokumin no tomo echoed around the country and reached far beyond urban intellectuals. Many young men formed associations in cities and provincial towns, ranging from small groups of 10–15 to larger ones with thousands of members. They produced youth magazines, many of which imitated the design, format, and language of Kokumin no tomo.¹¹

Yamamoto Takinosuke was one of many inspired by the new discourse on seinen defined by urban intellectuals. Tokutomi and other young writers revamped the image of ‘youth’, which had been an inferior category within the rigid age hierarchy of the Confucian social order, into a protean force capable of shaping modern Japan. But by the time Yamamoto wrote Inaka seinen the widening gap in status between urban and rural youth made this discourse appear hypocritical: ‘Most of the so-called youth maga...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• The Transnationality of Youth
• Part I  Activities
• Part II  Mobilities
• Part III  Identities
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index