Contemporary Japanese Thought

Since when have retrogressive “masturbatory views of history,” as represented by the “liberal view of history,” come to dominate bookstore shelves? They became noticeable around the time of the Gulf War. In fact, Fujioka Nobukatsu, the leading proponent of this “liberal history,” begins both his Kingendaishi kyōiku no kaikaku [Reforming modern history education] (1996) and Ojoku no kingendaishi [A modern history of shame] (1996), with prologues describing the impact of this war.

For example: “Many Japanese, relying on the idealism of the Constitution’s Article Nine, were able to steep themselves completely in sentimental pacifism.” Or again: “The Gulf War was a shocking event that showed that the ideal of ‘pacifism’ as contained within Article Nine, and upon which ‘peace education’ was based, failed in the face of the reality of international politics.” In short, according to Fujioka’s recollections, the Gulf War was a sensational event that exposed the defects of Japan’s “postwar democracy.”

What, then, are the fatal defects of “postwar democracy?” Fujioka lists five:

These represent the defects of “postwar democracy” as rejected by Fujioka.

What emerges when we invert this defective “postwar democracy”? Fujioka wants to say only this: that Japan should “free” the Leviathan of the State from the chains of “postwar democracy,” especially the peace Constitution at its foundation, thus allowing the nation to become a major player in post–Cold War international politics, as based on the clear determination of State will.

What is required for this to occur? As perhaps suggested in Fujioka’s fourth defect of “postwar democracy,” it is the “remaking” of national consciousness.

Why is this requirement important? To borrow the words of Shiba Ryōtarō, for whom Fujioka expresses great admiration, if the modern State consists of an equivalence between the State and the nation or people, then this equivalence represents “a State wherein the nation or people identifies itself with the State, and also where the people regard each other as homogeneous.”¹ It is thus necessary for such a people to actively identify with the State and transform itself in such a way that it “willingly fights for the nation.”

For Fujioka, a concrete image of this kind of State is conveyed in an episode in Shiba’s novel depicting the Russo-Japanese War, Saka no ue no kumo [Clouds above the hill], which provided the decisive impetus behind Fujioka’s allegiance to the “Shiba view of history.” Referring to the heroic efforts of the workers who repaired Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō’s flagship Shikishima in time to face the Russian Baltic fleet, Fujioka writes, “In addition to the soldiers at the battlefront, the lowly shipyard workers also worked desperately for the sake of the nation at this time of crisis. Postwar Japanese, fundamentally robbed of the idea of the ‘State,’ can no longer recognize that spirit for what it was.”² Following the trauma of the Gulf War, it is this idea of the State that Fujioka wishes to recapture.

According to Fujioka, however, postwar Japan’s inclination toward economic value alone has resulted in such spiritual decline that it has forgotten the idea of the State and even lost sight of the public sphere itself. It is precisely such mind control that, propelling this “spiritual dismantling of the State,” becomes the perverted, masochistic view of history that “humiliates, disdains, and disparages one’s own nation and ethnicity.” In concrete terms, this represents the “Tokyo Tribunal cum Comintern view of history.”

Indeed, Fujioka appears to define the “liberalism” of the “liberal view of history” in terms of a historical reexamination that is free of all dogma and prejudice. In fact, he has sought to balance and criticize several versions of Hayashi Fusao’s affirmation of the Greater East Asian War, which is considered to be the opposite extreme of the “Tokyo Tribunal cum Comintern view of history.” Yet a look at Ojoku no kingendaishi, published after Kingendaishi kyōiku no kaikaku, clearly reflects Fujioka’s unequaled disdain for this latter view. It is not at all clear whether such a view of history exists and what it exactly means. In essence, it refers to all “anti-Japanese” historical views that hinder the self-formation of the people qua Japanese and deny pride in one’s own national history.

As is clear here, Fujioka has since the Gulf War focused the most actual point of debate on the question of the people’s historical memory. This is amply reflected in such statements as the following: “The most important thing produced by the people is their own national modern history education,” and “The main hero of modern history is the nation’s people and the State they produce. Modern history is above all the narrative of the life of the people and their State.”

Bergson referred to memory that could not be externalized into information devices as “pure memory,” the ability to recall and recognize. If it is precisely this recollecting memory that holds special meaning for man, then historical memory also depends on such ability to recall and recognize. Unlike habitualized memory, which can be externalized, pure memory represents a creative (re-creative) act that first becomes possible within the actuality of the “here and now.” Despite its status as a discourse of successive clichés, the “liberal view of history” has succeeded in expanding the repercussions of debate because it confronts us with the most actual problem of historical memory. In other words, it necessarily forces each of us to reconfirm the meaning of the “here and now.” This process is accompanied by the danger of reconfirming one’s own position within the discursive space of the postwar period, where perspective arrangements have collapsed. Awareness of this danger can be called “geopolitical vertigo,” but this phenomenon is in no way unique to Japan.

In more global terms, geopolitical vertigo is not unrelated to the dramatic post–Cold War economic and ideological “deterritorialization” of the geopolitical world order that was established under American hegemony as well as the incipient destabilization of the sociospatial triad (sovereign states, territorial unity, and communal identity) that characterized the interstate system. For this very reason, there has come about an opportunity for the emergence of a kind of fundamentalism.

One scholar of geopolitics has formulated these twisted relations as follows:

This implosion of the geopolitical order of the Cold War starkly fore-grounded the degree to which the post–World War II world order had come apart and placed the meaning of the “West,” “Europe,” and “United States” as sociospatial identities in crisis, thus provoking the experience of vertigo we have noted. But every deterritorialization creates the conditions for a reterritorialization of order using fragments of the beliefs, customs, practices, and narratives of the old splintered world order. Out of the experience of vertigo, newly imagined visions of state, territory, and community are projected in an effort to restabilize and reterritorialize identity amid global flux.³

In the United States, the representative discourse would be Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” As can also be seen in Huntington’s recent essay, “The Erosion of American National Interests,”⁴ this is nothing other than a project of global “reterritorialization” that projects the Kulturkampf against the “inner enemy” and “unwanted ‘other’” that threatens America’s traditional national interests and identity. The unity and communal identity of the American State are being defined once again by inciting antagonisms of cultural essentialism.

In Japan, it is the attempt to create an “official history” as the people’s past record that represents this project of reterritorialization. The term “official history” is a key word in the appeal of the Society for the Reform of History Textbooks, of which Fujioka is a leading member. It is also noteworthy that writers and essayists of a relatively younger generation have echoed the desire to rescue the memory of the people or nation, now identified with that of the State, from the ruins of the past and decorate it with the laurels of “official history.” It is clear that the desire for “official history” seeks to redefine the people by drawing a line between “citizen” and “noncitizen.” To use an extreme expression, this implies the beginning of a “civil war” fought over historical memory.

I would like to reconfirm that, fifty years after the war, Japan’s discursive space has deteriorated to the point of this chilling spectacle. This is in no way a mere accident, however. Rather it must be understood as developing from the origins of the postwar period.

Carol Gluck, the American scholar of Japan, points out that Japan’s “postwar” represents a composite of several different postwars,⁵ the most dominant narratives of which are the “postwar as mythical history” and the “postwar as inversion of the prewar.”

The “postwar as myth” is the myth of an absolute discontinuity, a “zero hour” marking a rupture between wartime and postwar that began exactly at noon, August 15, 1945, with the emperor’s radio address announcing the surrender. This “August revolution theory” claimed liberation from the prewar, antifeudal militarist system and all its spiritual supports, which led Japan into a devastating war. The postwar was thus considered an “anti-past” wherein such prewar phenomena were inverted.

Inheriting this type of postwar narrative, the “progressive postwar,” which extended from communism to leftist liberalism, came to bear the burden for democratic reform and the ideas and movement of pacifism. The “postwar of the middle-class,” which initially sympathized with this postwar but clearly parted ways with the arrival of high economic growth, came to envelop the vast majority of the nation. This signified a democracy that consisted of a homogenous middle-class society. The goal of equality in material and social wealth in fact accelerated the liberation of “private” life and fixed the image of a single “lantern-type society” that was bloated with no neck or base. It was precisely this large-scale devotion to Americanism that, to borrow the words of Maruyama Masao, represented the postwar version of modern Japan’s aporia, consisting of a polarization between nationalism and the liberation of an apolitical sensibility. The inclination toward economic value alone that Fujioka laments as the cause of spiritual deterioration, in which the idea of the state is forgotten, generally corresponds with this point.

This movement toward a monologic Americanism didn’t take place across the board, however. In being filtered through the various negotiations of daily life, its penetration proceeded by mixing with “Japanese phenomena.” Conversely, “Japanese phenomena” were rediscovered in being affected by Americanism, thus widening the scope of cultural nationalism. The postwar of the middle class leveraged the representation of the Japanese people = nation as a monolithic image into defining new gender roles and marginalizing heterogeneous minorities, especially those from the former colonies. In this sense, postwar nationalism, having lost its prewar core as the “national polity,” disintegrated and flowed back to its old social haunts, losing its direct centripetal attraction to the state while maintaining the idea of ethnic homogeneity.

It was the international conditions at the time that made possible this middle-class postwar—in other words, the “postwar as Cold War.” By choosing “subordinate independence” under the United States, Japan placed itself in the international environment of a “peace within walls.” Despite the fact that fierce fighting and civil wars were waged repeatedly throughout the region outside these walls, from the Korean War to the end of the Vietnam War, the postwar middle class was able to enjoy the prosperity of “private” life. This arrangement marked Japan as an economic power to the extent that “the United States, so manifestly ‘the winner’ of the Far Eastern War in 1945, could by the 1970s be seen as having been in certain senses the greatest of its long-term ‘losers.’”⁶ Yet the distortion between Japan’s “subordinate independence” and the peace and prosperity centered on “private” life remained unresolved.

The overlapping of the end of the Cold War and the fiftieth anniversary of Japan’s postwar era, along with the recognition that modernity as a goal was not a mirage but an already accomplished reality, at once brought this distortion to its breaking point. At the same time, the mythological nature of the first type of postwar was laid bare.

John Dower, the American historian of the “Fifteen-Year War,” has discussed the positive inheritance from the empire that aided Japan’s postwar recovery, while in Japan there has emerged a “revisionist” reading (that of Yamanouchi Yasushi) of the 1930s that clarifies the historical relation between the forced “modernization” of the wartime mobilization system and postwar system society on the basis of world-historical contemporaneity.

These discussions suggest that modern warfare, especially world war and its wartime system, forcibly brings about systemic change, regardless of the war’s purpose or ideology. Relating this point to the history of wartime and postwar systems surrounding modern Japan and Asia, from the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars to World Wars I and II, the historian Mitani Taichirō makes the following observation:

The thesis that “war is the extension of revolution” appears to possess a generality that applies to all modern wars. Japan is perhaps no exception to this. In modern Japanese history, war has in many senses produced revolutionary effects upon the prewar system, both domestically and in terms of international relations. Domestically, these effects have appeared in the form of democratization and militarization (and conversely, demilitarization); while internationally, they have appeared as colonization (and conversely, decolonization) and internationalization⁷

In this regard, Shiba Ryōtarō’s commonly appealing view of history that sees the “season of evil” stretching from 1905 (the Russo-Japanese War) to 1945 (the surrender) as the “demon child” of modern Japan represents an attempt to reedit modern Japan’s path through numerous wartime and postwar systems into a comfortable national history.⁸

For Shiba, the forty years that transformed the shape of the Meiji state were merely the “demon child carelessly conceived by the legal system under the Meiji Constitution.” In this sense, the postwar signified a reversal of that history of insanity and a return to the healthy and transparent nationalism of the Meiji state. In a certain sense, Shiba’s historical view as a “national writer” can be said to represent the most popular form of postwar historical narrative. He breaks down the myth of the postwar’s beginning into easily digestible pieces. That is to say, both the emperor and the people or nation are seen as victims of militarism, while the postwar comes to correspond with the Allied story of a peaceful government being established in accordance with the “freely expressed will of the people” through “the revival and education of the Japanese people’s democratic tendencies.”⁹

At the same time, this story also fits perfectly with the emperor’s so-called declaration of humanity that took place in early 1946, before MacArthur’s Constitution draft was announced. The declaration, as if tallying up with the Allied story line as described by the GHQ, begins with the “Charter Oath” of 1868 and declares the composite of the discontinuity and continuity of 1945 in the following fashion: “The binds uniting us and the people have always been tied with mutual trust, respect and affection, not with mere myth or legend. They are not founded upon the fictional concepts of the Emperor’s divinity, the superiority of the Japanese people over others or the fate to rule the world.”¹⁰

The third opening of the country that was the postwar was thus converted into a national history that completed the second opening left unfinished by the Meiji state. As a result, the memory of the beginnings of colonial rule and the “Greater East Asian War” were clearly elided. The war was renamed the “Pacific War” and an “adroit moral equation” established, in which the attack on Pearl Harbor and the nuclear bombing canceled each other out. It was inevitable that this historical narrative, which highlighted parts of the past while obscuring others in the background, would bring about a “striking amnesia of the (colonial) empire.” This forgotten memory remained frozen within the Cold War, abandoned for fifty years of the postwar period.

It is clear that the myth of a beginning to the postwar period and the national history of Japanese modernity turn a blind eye toward a broader perspective that includes both the wartime and the postwar systems, a perspective that would rupture their narratives. As is amply reflected in the words “one hundred million hearts as one” and “one hundred million people,” language used in the two edicts declaring war and surrender, the wartime system could not have operated for even one instant without mobilizing the nearly one-third of the one hundred million “imperial subjects” comprising other colonized ethnic groups. In this sense, postwar national history has barely maintained itself by excluding these alien ethnic groups and forgetting the history of that exclusion.

In the case of Japan, the domestic effects of decolonization were relatively small, as compared to demilitarization. In other words, the problems endemic to decolonization were dissolved into the general problems of demilitarization. Moreover, the process of decolonization overlapped with the course of the Cold War. The political and economic reconstruction of Japan that followed the change in Occupation policy came in response to the demands of the Cold War. This in turn influenced the decolonization of Japan’s former colonies and occupied territories. According to the strategic necessities of the Cold War, decolonization was frozen to the extent that it would not hinder Japan’s role in the Cold War. Now, with the end of the Cold War, we should understand the unfinished process of Japan’s decolonization (i.e., the second stage of the decolonizing process) to have begun.¹¹

This problematic proposed by Mitani is directed toward those cracks that have formed within the frozen memory of the war.

What, then, would a historical narrative be like that is able to respond to this problematic?

I have in my hands now the three volumes of Senjika zainichi Chōsenjin shiryō shū [Wartime resident Korean documents], published in 1997. It contains the records of a resident Korean organization’s print media that began in January 1935 and ran until the height of the “Greater East Asian War” in October 1943.¹² This was distributed not only within Japan “proper,” but also to the main cities of the Korean peninsula, “Manchuria,” and regions of China. With the exception of the main official newspapers of the Korean peninsula, the Japanese Keijō nippō [Seoul news] and the Korean Mainichi shinpō [Daily News], it was quite rare for Korean print media to be allowed to publish for such a long time. In keeping with the official policy of creating imperial subjects out of Koreans, the paper frequently carried stories of the Harmony Association’s activities and announcements of wartime mobilization policies from the governor-general’s office, thus making its “pro-Japanese” position obvious to all. Clearly, the newspaper did not represent the voice of the wartime Korean people.

Despite the newspaper’s support for imperialization policy in certain sections, it is by no means impossible to read the frustrated ethnic consciousness and anguish of resident Koreans in other sections. There is, for example, the following record of impressions on the part of those Korean youth who enlisted as Imperial soldiers (November 25, 1939). In between the headings of “Peninsular volunteer soldiers’ impressions of Japan proper” and “Taking to heart the joy of being born in the Empire,” the following explanation is inserted:

This is the moving record of impressions of Japan proper as formed by three hundred Korean volunteer soldier trainees who crossed the far sea and entered the imperial capital early on the sixth. These are the scarlet letters of patriotism in which the emotions of our vigorous peninsular youth, whose crimson hearts are enveloped in khaki uniforms, are hastily recorded.

The purpose of our travel to Japan proper is entirely different from a school trip. One purpose is to worship at Ise Shrine and worship the Imperial Palace from afar. Another is to present ourselves to the people of Japan and achieve an ever stronger unity between Japan and Korea. We prayed for the hallowed divine nation Japan and for its continued prosperity, and ever more firmly confirmed our desire to repay the sacred debt of the Emperor’s benevolent gaze that is bestowed equally upon us. We worshipped the east every morning at our training center and recited our oath as imperial subjects as if standing before the Emperor, thus strengthening our conviction as subjects…. In respectfully worshipping before the Nijūbashi Bridge, we simply wept tears of gratitude.

To be certain, the fervent desire to become “Japanese” could not arise without the forceful and oppressive reality of the colony. Yet it cannot be denied that the desire of the colonial “peninsulars” to become ever better “imperial subjects” was based not only on mere coercion but also on voluntary motives.

In reality, however, one can glimpse almost everywhere in the Tōa shinbun [East Asia news] interviews in which “Japanese from Japan proper” confessed their discrimination as well as articles in which “peninsulars who had become good imperial subjects” were “confused” and greatly disappointed by the discriminatory language on the part of these Japanese. There can be seen an anticipatory resolution to die as “Japanese” as well as the daily discrimination that so unavoidably affected Koreans. In seeking to overcome this antinomy by becoming more “Japanese” than the “Japanese from Japan proper,” a fierce desire to imitate was laid bare, as in the unrequited love of the Korean volunteer soldiers. While the tone of Tōa shinbun encouraged the policy of imperialization, in reality “radical and fierce views that even policymakers couldn’t voice” were expressed as well.

To be sure, here the possibility emerges that “peninsulars” could be more patriotic “Japanese” than those “Japanese from Japan proper.” This possibility was continually betrayed, however, and the imagined community of “Japanese” could do nothing but idealize the “Japanese from Japan proper.” “Peninsulars,” who were not “Japanese from Japan proper,” came to repeat an infinite process of ekstasis in pursuit of that unattainable ideal of being “Japanese.” The blatant and undeniable reality of ethnic discrimination was such that the “Japanese from Japan proper” never believed the “peninsulars” could become “Japanese,” which means that it was precisely these “Japanese from Japan proper” who were the prisoners of that “Japanism of Japan proper”¹³ in their status as “Japanese.” No doubt the unattainable ekstatic desire leading to the anticipatory resolution to become “Japanese” grew ever stronger on account of this discrimination.

The wartime empire accomplished its integration when this desperate leap to become “Japanese” on the part of the “peninsulars” became their own autonomous desire. Viewed ideally, however, there always existed the possibility of a rupture in this notion of “Japanese.” Such possibility was also the instant of exposure in terms of how much this “Japanese interiority” was protected by an arbitrary boundary. For any “Japanese nationalism of Japan proper” that equated the notion of “Japanese” with that of “Japanese from Japan proper” would necessarily have caused the integration of the empire to fail. The monoethnic national history of the postwar would thus have been unable to come into being as the ideal of an imperial nation.

In this connection, the Ministry of Education’s Jinjō shōgaku chirisho I [Elementary school geography, vol. 1] of March 1938, the plainest account of the imagined geography of the “Japanese” people, opens its first chapter, “The Great Japanese Empire,” with the following words: “Our Great Japanese Empire lies in the east of the Asian continent and consists of the Japanese islands and Korean peninsula.” As regards the people, it provides the following explanation:

The people number approximately one hundred million. While most are ethnically of Yamato origin, Korea holds about twenty-three million Koreans and Taiwan about five million ethnic Chinese and some one-hundred thousand natives. Hokkaidō also contains a small number of Ainu, as does Karafuto along with some other natives. Approximately one million people of Yamato ethnic origin have immigrated to other countries.

In terms of regions, “Honshū is divided into the five regions of Kantō, Ōu, Chūbu, Kinki, and Chūgoku. To this is added the regions of Shikoku, Kyūshū, Hokkaidō, Taiwan, and Korea.” The nation is divided into eleven regions in total.

This geographic space as imperial “icons for the people” supported both the aforementioned “impressions of Japan proper on the part of the peninsular volunteer soldiers” and the imaginary geography of the “Japanese people” who were their contemporaries. Such assimilation of the “peninsulars” into “Japan proper” by worshipping at Ise Shrine and the Imperial Palace were state rituals that deeply inscribed these “Japanese” icons into their bodies. When a subject desiring “rebirth” as “Japanese” emerged among the “peninsulars” through these rituals, the psychological device supporting imperial integration succeeded in projecting outward the moment of its internal division.

Even if it was only a matter of principle, however, this was also the instant at which the internal fissures of national history qua the history and memory of the “Japanese from Japan proper” (i.e., the “Japanese people”) were necessarily revealed. The history of the war, therefore, was a succession of dangerous moments wherein the critical point of the national could be exposed.

Without question, the beginning of the postwar violently contracted the mixed composition of the people into a “Japanism based on Japan proper” while returning it to a composition that preceded the colonial empire. The aforementioned “Emperor’s Declaration of Humanity” represented the state’s manifesto of this contraction. If the “evil season” of forty years was the “demon child” for national history, as Shiba’s historical view would have it, then the “Japanese” who were abandoned at the “war’s end” as others—as nothing more than “peninsulars”—must also be forgotten “demon children.” The memory of these “demon children” lost its place in the face of that violent forgetting and “reterritorialization” of the national, and was thus forced to continuously wander about. The memory of “Korean B- and C-class war criminals” may perhaps be described as a grave-post for the beginning of that cruel postwar.

I sometimes recall a single photograph of my father’s younger brother, a person who may have followed a similar path in the postwar period as those war criminals. The faded photograph captures the tense expression of a “peninsular” wearing the armband of the military police and holding a Japanese sword. Next to him stands his wife, a “Japanese from Japan proper,” who is wearing a sad expression and carrying an infant. This was a final photograph taken during the “war’s end,” as people prepared for “suicide.” The “peninsular” survived and returned to the “peninsula,” leaving behind his wife and child in “Japan proper.” Amidst the upheaval, he lost contact with them and was forced to live the postwar period alone. Former “Japanese” who began to pursue a new history of liberation, civil war, and military rule had their memories of “Japan proper” completely erased and lived as ethnic-nationalists in the newborn nation-state. This episode is in no way uncommon, however; rather it represents the postwar experience of those “peninsulars” who were caught up in this tumult. The opportunity to ask my uncle about his memory of the war has now been lost forever. Only one thing is certain: that it was “Japanese” national history that obliterated that memory.

Might not the “season of evil” refer less to an imperial era than to one that intoxicates itself with the sweet narrative of national history and attempts to revive it by completely excluding the alterity of others? Whether one likes it or not, the memory of history is formed in a place that bursts through all nationality. Both the “Japanese from Japan proper” and the “peninsulars” must discover anew ways to narrate this memory in order to avoid “reterritorializing” the global “geopolitical vertigo” into yet another national history.

10. “Tennō no ningen sengen” [The emperor’s declaration of humanity] (January 1, 1946), in Nihonshi shiryō: gendai, pp. 162–163; and Yonetani Tadashi, “Maruyama Masao to sengo Nihon” [Maruyama Masao and postwar Japan], in Maruyama Masao wo yomu [Reading Maruyama Masao] (Tokyo: Jōkyō Shuppan, 1997), p. 137.