Empire of Hope

The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline

David Leheny

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501729096
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Empire of Hope asks how emotions become meaningful in political life. In a diverse array of cases from recent Japanese history, David Leheny shows how sentimental portrayals of the nation and its global role reflect a durable story of hopefulness about the country's postwar path. From the medical treatment of conjoined Vietnamese children, victims of Agent Orange, the global promotion of Japanese popular culture, a tragic maritime accident involving a US Navy submarine, to the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, this story has shaped the way in which political figures, writers, officials, and observers have depicted what the nation feels.

Expressions of national emotion do several things: they construct the boundaries of the national body, they inform and discipline appropriate expression, and they depoliticize messy problems that threaten to produce divisive questions about winners and losers. Most important, they work because they appear to be natural, simple and expected expressions of how the nation shares feeling, even when they paper over the extraordinary divergence in how the nation's citizens experience each incident. In making its arguments, Empire of Hope challenges how we read the relations between emotion and politics by arguing—unlike those who build from the neuroscientific turn in the social sciences or those developing affect theory in the humanities—that the focus should be on emotional representation rather than on emotion itself.

1

MAYBE THEY WILL SMILE BACK

In September 2011, about six months after the cataclysmic earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in the country’s Northeast, Japanese theaters screened a new film by director Fukasaku Kenta. Known mostly as the screenwriter of the unhinged thriller Battle Royale and the son of its legendary director, Fukasaku Kinji, he made in this case an adaptation of Hada Kōta’s book Bokutachi wa sekai o kaerukoto ga dekinai (We can’t change the world). The addition of an English-language subtitle, But We Wanna Build a School in Cambodia, makes the film’s story a bit less of a surprise than it otherwise might have been. Say what one might about the film—charitably, a middling cinematic achievement—it delivers what it promises. Its university-student protagonist, feeling aimless and uninspired by Japan’s options, enlists his friends in a possibly quixotic and poorly defined effort to build an elementary school in rural Cambodia. Although the film is, predictably, about the personal transformations of the young Japanese volunteers, particularly the one played by heart-throb Mukai Osamu, it features Cambodia as a place of almost unending poverty, illness, and misery, populated by good-hearted and decent people who deserve the same chances that the befuddled and largely talentless heroes have had. Indeed, the crux of the film’s ethics comes when Mukai’s character, facing challenges from cynical classmates, says “I just think if we go there with smiles, maybe the children of Cambodia will smile back.”

Figure 1.1. Tokyo Skytree, the world’s second-tallest structure, July 2012

There are, of course, many smiles in the film but also a plethora of tears, encouraging speeches, and even a belittling harangue, not to mention a despairing howl that features prominently even in the movie’s trailer. The kids, after all, do what they do not just because they want to help their new friends in benighted Cambodia but also because they want to find purpose for themselves in a country that had gone off the rails. That, of course, is a political topic, but nothing about the film feels particularly political, even when the kids are confronted by the AIDS pandemic, the legacies of the Khmer Rouge genocide, and the deep inequities that the film shows. Japan is by far Cambodia’s largest national donor of international aid,¹ and although aid activists and actors alike may emphasize humanitarian goals, no political scientist would view development assistance as divorced from politics. The movie, like the book on which it is based, is sentimental about its Japanese and Cambodian characters alike, and in its warm humanism it reminds readers both that the Japanese, by virtue of their wealth and education, have something to offer to the Cambodians, just as the Cambodians, through their decency and kindness, can remind their Japanese counterparts of what is important in life. And, as any competent melodramatic film will, it renders much of this through a complex range of showy emotions, at least among the Japanese protagonists. But the movie makes sense only because of its political subtext, one that positions Japan internationally and relies on an implicit story of what Japan had been and what it had become. This book explores the relationships among this story, these concerns about Japan’s international position, and the ways in which people describe Japan’s national emotions.

In international politics, people (or the nations they constitute) seem to have stunted emotional lives. As Todd Hall has noted, they are frequently angry, sometimes sad, and infrequently but significantly remorseful (as has Germany been with regard to the Holocaust).² In a remarkable amount of the public discourse, Chinese people are continually angry, with stories of Chinese rage that reappears each time a diplomatic dispute between China and another country, usually Japan, leads to protests and demonstrations.³ Of course, the attention to Chinese anger is not uninvited; James Fallows of the Atlantic famously wrote a short essay decrying the frequent use of the Chinese government’s statements that one thing or another had “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people,” and Jessica Weiss, a leading specialist on Chinese foreign relations, has written extensively about the Chinese government’s emphasis on the uncontrollable emotionality of Chinese protests as part of its bargaining strategies.⁴ In contrast, people in the United States seem anxious or fearful—odd, given their country’s vast wealth and global power. But anxiety is so prevalent as an expression of the US psyche that two political scientists have written an award-winning book analyzing how and under what conditions anxiety can be politically exploited by Republicans and/or Democrats.⁵ Usually, governments give voice to these feelings, which are tightly circumscribed. We regret the war (or our actions in it). Our nation grieves for the victims of an air disaster (even one that happened primarily to the luckless citizens of another country). We celebrate or are happy for the agreement reached between two rival powers. Confusion, melancholy, bemusement, and consternation, to name but a few feelings that adults have, seem out of the question. Queen Elizabeth herself may not be amused and may use the royal “we” to express it, but “we British are not amused” or “we French are mildly irritated” would seem to be odd statements to utter on the floor of the United Nations. Most of us have messier emotional lives than these collective depictions suggest; indeed, we might describe ourselves as “happy” or “sad” but wonder whether adjectives like that precisely capture how we feel about something or wonder why we do not feel exactly the way we think we should.

The feelings in We Can’t Change the World run the gamut, at least by the conventions of commercial cinema, but they are shaped profoundly by the story the film tells as well as the larger story against which it is set. After all, Hada’s autobiographical book would have sat quietly on the shelves without a cinematic adaptation had it ended with the Japanese kids’ giving up and not building the school or with the Cambodians’ angry rejection of the gesture. Which studio would have funded a movie promising only failure and despair for its good-hearted but ineffectual heroes? The inspiring we-can-do-it tale not only demands a certain structure but also imposes on it certain emotional demands; there has to be a pattern of enthusiasm and self-doubt along the way before the smiles truly set in.

And this story itself, even if it fits within a well-worn genre of films about determined youngsters who succeed against the odds, makes sense to the Japanese audience primarily because of the larger, implicit one against which it is set. After all, the key characters are recognizable only because they themselves are part of a larger story about Japan that has been told and reproduced for many years. Unlike earlier postwar Japanese (especially men) who faced many opportunities upon graduating from elite colleges, the film’s young protagonists are members of a generation that cannot count on a stable pathway into a collective effort to improve Japan’s economic success. They are largely unmoored, the beneficiaries of national wealth but the inheritors of a malfunctioning employment system and a national cultural environment that provides fewer obvious chances for meaningful pride in one’s achievements or for a sense of purpose. These are Japan’s Lost Two Decades, the ones that followed the long period of high-speed growth that almost allowed Japan to escape from America’s shadow and to become a regionally and internationally beloved leader; these are the two decades that ostensibly saw Japan’s regional and global status recede. Without this background, the characters’ decision to go to Cambodia in the first place, not to mention their plan to bring smiles to the people there, would make precisely no sense whatsoever.

This book examines the representation of emotion in Japanese political life and transnational engagement. It differs from many recent treatments of emotion and international politics in two ways. First, rather than taking emotion as a cause—as an independent variable—that drives people’s behavior or their rational calculations of interests, it instead places the focus on how and when people speak of national or collective emotions. As do Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison in an important article, this book argues that our analytical lens should be placed on a logic of representation rather than on feelings themselves.⁶ Partly for this reason, this chapter draws inspiration from recent works on sentimentality and affect in the humanities, which have mined the emotional worlds of literature, cinema, and art, taking the opportunity, for example, to examine how disdained sentimentalism in often-neglected works of literature or negative and seemingly minor emotional expressions in major works provide clues about silenced or marginalized political claims.⁷ Second, instead of addressing only those topics considered to be of obvious political or diplomatic importance, it suggests that the relevant representations of national emotion often come in incidents and forms likely to be viewed as everyday life. This is essential in part because when people invoke national emotions—we Japanese are angry, or we Americans mourn, or we Germans are thankful—they likely have political goals in mind, but if the language succeeds, it does so largely by creating the image of an affective community that is not fragmented by the messy, divisive stuff of politics. It is persuasive because it seems to deny politics itself. The recurrence of public emotionality, however removed it may be from actual people’s feelings, suggests the enduring appeal of highly sentimentalized stories of nations that create boundaries both for communities as well as for the things that their members can say about themselves.⁸ Amending Descartes, we might say that “we feel, therefore we are,” which makes the ability to speak authoritatively and convincingly about these feelings important indeed.

Interpreting Emotion in the Political World

Debates about emotion and politics have been productively traced to the classics of political thought, with recent scholarship suggesting that rigid distinctions between the passionate and the rational are intellectually and empirically misleading; they are also plagued by inattentiveness to the gendered nature of knowledge and its construction.⁹ After all, despite classical and modern entreaties to keep emotions out of politics—instead using our rational, calculating, and dispassionate minds to come up with sound policy and wise governmental choices—they are of course deeply embedded in the political world: from the enthusiasm of a political rally to the despair one might feel when grudgingly making one’s way to the polling station to place a vote between unappealing options only because it feels like part of one’s civic duty as a democratic citizen.

Several important developments have strengthened and called attention to this movement. First, increasingly rigorously produced findings from neuroscientific research have shown that people’s emotional worlds are deeply intertwined with their calculations and decisions, potentially making emotion central to political choice.¹⁰ Additionally, political science has started to embrace experimental methods like those ideally employed in psychology.¹¹ Perhaps topping all of this has been the entry of US politics into a particularly anxious/angry era, from the 9/11 attacks through the subsequent disasters of the Iraq war and the larger war on terrorism, and into the 2016 presidential campaign and the Trump presidency, which has focused attention on how fear, anxiety, and anger shape decisions. If rage and fear drive political choices in ways that justify a disastrous military intervention, the routinized use of torture, and the election of a seemingly unhinged television celebrity as the president of the United States, emotion would appear to be an essential focus for political science research: hence the wide interest. But by disciplinary necessity, these approaches strip emotion to a few basic possibilities—anxiety, anger, and the like—creating the brutal simplicity that maps more effectively onto causal models than into the stuff of actual human feelings.¹²

At the same time that political scientists convinced of the importance of emotion have tightened it into testable models, researchers in cultural history and the humanities have begun to rely on affect and emotion to enrich our current reading of the past and to rethink the restrictions of contemporary disciplinary debate. This has sometimes meant the jettisoning of theoretical language that aims to turn the messy stuff of immediate feelings (or affects) into the cognitively processed language of emotion, sometimes a rethinking of the modern condition through consideration of emotional demands reproduced in cultural products, and occasionally an avowedly theoretical emphasis on the cultural dimensions of affect itself.¹³ Some pathbreaking recent work on modern East Asian history has read emotional representation into important source material, seeking to understand the development of “public sympathy” in China and the relationships between Japanese settlers and local residents of Korea under the Japanese Empire.¹⁴ Daniel White’s excellent 2011 doctoral dissertation explores dimensions of Japan’s cultural diplomacy and soft power strategies (a topic that I approach from a different perspective in chapter 4) to highlight the theorized gaps between nonconscious and experienced affects and socially produced emotions. As do Jie Yang in her justly acclaimed study of mental health workers in China and Anne Allison in her influential account of recessionary Japan, White uses affect theory to uncover otherwise hidden features in his close ethnographic research.¹⁵ Although the “affective turn” in the humanities has invited criticism, particularly when it draws—often highly imprecisely and without appropriate context—from neuroscientific findings,¹⁶ it has produced creative and significant rethinking of how to interpret sources and materials. This matters in particular for those politically fraught circumstances when people are prone to make some radical claims about how entire communities or nations feel and how those feelings matter.

The chapters in this book explore how emotional rhetoric and representation have characterized notable moments in Japan’s late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century politics and diplomacy. They draw from the existing literature the view that emotion matters in politics, often in ways that cannot be boiled down to simple causal frames and analyses, and that paying attention to it would enrich and uncover material all too frequently obscured in the mainstream political science literature. In doing so the book focuses not on what Japanese people actually feel but rather on how emotions are represented in Japanese politics—and especially on how these representations make sense only against the background of an implicit national story. In her influential study Upheavals of Thought, political philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that rational thought and decisions are unintelligible without reference to emotion and that considering emotion in politics requires attention to narrative. After all, people’s attachments and needs are affected in part by the ways in which they order that which is meaningful in their own lives and journeys; it is in part for this reason that Nussbaum finds French novelist Marcel Proust to be especially useful as a guide to the ways in which love and desire develop and play durable roles in shaping people’s behavior.¹⁷

Unlike Nussbaum’s book, this one draws more inspiration from quotidian sources, using sentimental representations in public debate, popular culture, and media sensations. We Can’t Change the World is hardly a match for the artistic sweep and intellectual breadth of Proust, but it provides valuable clues—ones that will be echoed in later chapters—that can help to tease out what emotional references work in Japanese politics, why they do, and how they draw their power from a broad national story. After all, Abe Shinzō’s 2012 campaign phrase “Take Japan Back” provided the same kind of implied story line for Japan that Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” later would for the United States: that the country had lost its glory days and that its aspiring leader would somehow rebuild that greatness in the future.¹⁸ History, of course, does not work in consciously planned stutter steps, but that is beside the point. The slogans aimed to build on and to reaffirm national feelings of pride, of anxiety, of dread, and of hope, all wrapped not just in the momentary urgency of an emotional flush but rather in a longer story of what had happened, what is happening, and what (hopefully) will happen. The emotional rhetoric that each leader deployed made sense specifically against these background stories of an earlier time when the nation worked together as one, unlike the disorderly, menacing present. A good future would be one in which the nation—taken back, made great again—would be able to act collectively and smoothly as it had in the idealized past.

Peter Brooks’s now-classic notion of the “melodramatic imagination” provides several relevant clues for interpreting Japan’s representations of emotions by detailing the elements of melodramatic narrative.¹⁹ His principal concern was with the nineteenth-century novel’s articulation of class differences and anxieties through an identification of virtue as inn...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Conventions
• 1. Maybe They Will Smile Back
• 2. Souls of the Ehime Maru
• 3. Cheer Up, Vietnam
• 4. Cool Optimism
• 5. Staging The Empire of Light
• 6. The Peripheral U-Turn
• 7. Everything Sinks
• Notes
• Index