Asada Akira

A Left Within the Place of Nothingness

How would you characterize the current situation of the Japanese Left?

We are in a difficult position of political stagnation, even a certain historical impasse. The Japanese Left suffers from two major legacies of its own past: the residual Stalinism of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), and the simplistic anti-communism of the sixties generation. To understand the first, one needs to look back at the origins of the JCP. The party, founded in 1922, was led in the mid-twenties by Fukumoto Kazuo, an intellectual of considerable theoretical gifts, trained in Germany, where he studied Lukács and was close to Karl Korsch. According to Fukumoto, the principle the party should follow was ‘separation–connexion’—it needed first to take its distance from any easy trade unionism by developing a genuine class consciousness, and then to return to build a mass basis in the working class. In 1927 the Comintern cracked down on this ‘left extremism’. Bukharin declared that the immediate battle in Japan was against feudalism; and when the JCP, a few years later, again started to speak of the need for a socialist revolution, the Comintern issued a second set of theses, in 1932, reiterating the priority of anti-feudal tasks. In the background was the Koza–Rono debate among Marxist historians. According to the Koza school, the Meiji restoration was only a transition of power within feudalism, and the next upheaval should be a bourgeois revolution. According to the Rono school (including the famous theoretician Uno Kozo), the Meiji restoration was a bourgeois revolution, and the next upheaval should be a socialist revolution. At least on the character of Japanese society in the early twentieth century, the Rono school had a better understanding. But it was unilaterally criticized by the Comintern and excommunicated from the party. In this way, the party lost brilliant intellectuals in those years.1

The outcome of the interventions from Moscow was to impose a very rigid Stalinism on the JCP, which has remained a stubborn trait of the party to this day. But the peculiar character of the JCP isn’t just a product of this inheritance. Equally important was the repression it suffered in the thirties, when its entire leadership was arrested and imprisoned, and after a long public trial received huge jail sentences. The Japanese state went to great lengths to secure public recantations from Leftists, and was generally very successful in ‘turning’ prominent Marxists into professed converts to the Imperial regime—the phenomenon known as tenko. But some of the Communist leaders resisted. Under extreme pressure, they refused to convert, and so had a great moral authority when they were released after the war. We must admire their courage, under extreme militarist oppression. But after the Second World War, their ethical aura became a substitute for political intelligence. Personal courage is one thing; political responsibility is another. The JCP became a gramophone record of moralizing self-righteousness. ‘Our brave comrades didn’t yield under the worst pressures—that’s the proof we are right.’ Nothing could be more sterile as an attitude.

Was the intellectual life of the JCP essentially killed off in the thirties?

You couldn’t exactly say that. The most important post-war leader of the party, Miyamoto Kenji, was a leading literary critic in his youth, who won a major prize for his analysis of Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s novels—relegating Kobayashi Hideo, possibly the nearest Japanese equivalent to a Walter Benjamin, to second position in the competition. This was in the twenties; Kobayashi was outraged by the result. In the thirties Miyamoto was imprisoned in the remote countryside of Hokkaido, where he held out against his jailers unflinchingly. After the war this earned him such moral glory that he was all but deified within the party. By 1958 he was general secretary, and for the next twenty years ruled the JCP with a mailed fist. Official doctrine was still frozen by Stalinist insistence that Japan was not capitalistic enough and that the main enemy was a feudal-imperial system. So after the war the JCP continued to downplay any direct attack on Japanese capitalism. But now it avoided talking about the emperor system too, as it had once done; instead it concentrated its fire on American colonialism and imperialism. The result was that in domestic practice it became more and more moderate, but in theory it remained as dogmatic as ever—indeed, eventually criticizing both the Russian and Chinese parties for changing too much. There was one significant attempt to break this mould, when younger cadres like Ueda Koichiro and his younger brother Fuwa Tetsuzo tried in the late fifties to develop an Italian-style strategy, inspired by Togliatti, of structural reforms within the parliamentary system. Miyamoto crushed this revolt with great violence, and the youngsters were forced to criticize themselves. Fuwa was brought to heel and eventually chosen as heir to Miyamoto, since he had committed himself to continuing Miyamoto’s policies, while no doubt inwardly knowing they led nowhere. So the Communist Party became more and more solitary, more and more self-righteous, cast in the petrified image of Miyamoto, with his iron will and heroic past. A sad story.

In the West, student radicalization came in the late sixties, with a counter-cultural ferment sometimes preceding it by a few years. In Japan, the whole movement started a bit earlier?

Yes, the ingredients were much the same, but the mixture arrived sooner. Politically, a powerful critique of the JCP’s outlook was available from the late fifties, when Iwata Hiroshi—a pupil of Uno Kozo—published a book called World Capitalism. It is almost Wallerstein already. For Iwata, what the Left had to fight was not the remnants of Japanese feudalism, or just American hegemony, but Japanese capitalism as an integral part of the world capitalist system. His theory had a big impact on a trotskisant youth, providing it with an intellectual weapon against the JCP’s stageism. It was an emphatic assertion of the capitalist modernity of the country. Another kind of criticism of the party came from the opposite direction. Here the key figure was Yoshimoto Takaaki, a poet and literary critic who brought a purified notion of ‘the masses’ to the fore—not so much in the sense of Luxemburg’s critique of Lenin, but rather in a rejection of doctrines imported from Moscow. Instead of such foreign conceptions, the Left should listen to the mass of the Japanese people themselves, starting from their needs and concerns. This line appealed strongly to the romantic strain in the cultural underground at the time, where many young people were reading Feuerbach more than Marx.

The Japanese New Left arose out of the confluence of these different elements. They made a potent concoction, which set off a protest movement well before its counterparts in the other capitalist countries. Already in 1960 the JCP looked outmoded, as the party was outflanked by the Zengakuren—the national student organization, now ‘captured by Trotskyists’, as the JCP saw it—in huge mass mobilizations against the renewal of the Security Treaty with the US.2 This was also the period of the last big struggle of labour against capital in Japan, the great miners’ strike against Mitsui. By the late sixties a very powerful front of revolutionary youth had built up, which mounted another spectacular battle over the Treaty in 1970. But by then, the movement had become more and more subjectivist and romantic, either pursuing an illusory unity with the masses or seeking a quasi-erotic communality of its own, in a Feuerbachian or Marcusean spirit.

This was a common pattern in Europe and America, too?

Yes, but there was a specific Japanese twist to it. In the West, the radicalization came out of—or gave rise to—issues that later found expression in new social movements: the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain, early forms of ecological concern, the beginnings of second-wave feminism. In Japan, although the campaign against the war in Vietnam was very strong, these elements were all much weaker. The romanticism of the movement was more martial and male chauvinist. So when its impetus was frustrated, it turned more quickly and disastrously to internal violence. In 1972 the terrorism of the United Red Army consumed itself, when its adherents killed each other in a pseudo-military camp on Mount Asama. The shock of that episode effectively gave the quietus to the Feuerbachian, Luxemburgian turmoil of the sixties. The following year, the oil crisis brought the very rapid growth of the previous two decades to a close. It was the end of an epoch.

How far did international developments affect the different strands of the Japanese Left in this period—it was the time of the Sino–Soviet dispute, the Cultural Revolution in China, the invasion of Czechoslovakia: very big developments in the external environment?

This was background music, more than direct influence. When the Sino–Soviet split occurred, the JCP refused to align itself with the Russians —Miyamoto purged those loyal to Moscow. But two years later, in 1966, he also broke with the Chinese. Here you could say that the self-righteousness of Japanese Communism, an insufferable feature within the country, did include a nationalist reflex that eventually served it well—since, by the nineties, it could say: we didn’t allow ourselves to be told what to do by the Russians, let alone the Chinese or the Americans, so why should we be affected by the fall of the USSR or the turn of the PRC to the US? At the time, of course, the Japanese Communists were, in practice, closer to the Soviet than the Chinese line, while the student movement was closer to Maoism. But the Cultural Revolution never had the same degree of appeal for Japanese youth as it did for French or Italian. We were too close to China to be unaware of the atrocities committed during the Cultural Revolution, so Maoist influence remained relatively limited. The Japanese Left remained essentially divided between a Stalinist-style Communist Party and a heroic-romantic New Left. For twenty years of very rapid economic progress, from 1950 to 1970, Japan had an extremely active leftist movement, first led by the JCP, then relayed by the students. But by 1973 everything came to a halt, as we entered the dismal seventies.

What was the intellectual legacy of this period?

During the sixties, the Communist Party put a lot of effort into criticizing gauchisme—the spread of what it saw as Trotskyism. In reaction, the New Left became more and more hostile to the JCP. An obdurate Communist Party and a romantic protest against its authoritarianism left a deep impasse, when the time of upheaval was over. Of course, the JCP continued to be an active force in electoral politics at the local level. Here in Kyoto, for example, they elected the governor down to the end of the seventies. You could compare Kyoto to Bologna, in those days.

In an old city like this, but also in other towns across the country, the party was always effective in organizing small shopkeepers, artisans, doctors or teachers—and willing to form municipal coalitions with the Socialists, who themselves elected governors in Tokyo and Osaka. Naturally, the JCP did not stand on any revolutionary platform, but defended a certain petty-bourgeois egalitarianism. Sometimes this led to curious results. Here in Kyoto, the party opposed affirmative action to help the buraku—Japanese outcasts—on the grounds that special measures in favour of them would consolidate, rather than dissolve, the class division on which their oppression was based; whereas the most powerful LDP politician from Kyoto, Nonaka Hiromu—now secretary-general of the LDP, and the brains of the present government—would attack its ‘bourgeois arrogance’ and champion the special rights of the weak, in order to corner buraku votes. By this time, the JCP’s national vote was not much more than 5 per cent, but it gained a reputation for honest administration, untainted by corruption, that no other party enjoyed. It still held some influence in the universities, where party economists often held chairs. But over time its intellectual influence became more and more marginal.

Meanwhile, the radicals of the sixties became increasingly anti-communist, and decreasingly anti-capitalist. By the late seventies, we had our equivalent of the nouveaux philosophes, talking just like their opposite numbers in France of the death of Marx, the evils of communism, the coming of a new consumer democracy. The rhetoric of the masses, which had played such a large part in their outlook in the sixties, went into political reverse. Since the mass of the Japanese population were no longer poor or discontented, but now declared themselves to be a comfortable middle class, former gauchistes argued that, to keep faith with the masses, intellectuals should duplicate this complacent posture. By the eighties, many had become pillars of a new conformism. Today, however, the masses are expressing more frustration than self-satisfaction, as the realities of world politics and world history have closed in on the country again, with the end of the Cold War and the crisis of Japanese capitalism in the nineties. The Japanese public now feels under pressure from America, which insists that Japan must behave in all respects like itself, and from China, Korea and other Asian countries, demanding that Japan apologize properly for its war crimes.

In this new situation, intellectuals from the sixties are lending their voice to nationalist resentments. For example, the critic Katoh Norihiro has recently made a name for himself by attacking the divided mentality of post-war Japanese intellectuals, and their successors who remained on the Left. These people, he maintains, always started ‘from the outside’, repressing the memory of our dead fathers or grandfathers, while trying to be nice to our Asian neighbours—yet remaining inwardly split. Whereas what we should be doing is ‘starting from the inside’, by mourning the death of our own ancestors in the war, before facing or negotiating with the Other in Asia. Katoh does criticize the Yasukuni national shrine, where various war criminals are buried, so this is a relatively benign form of nationalism. But the argument that we should mourn our own war dead before facing others is nonsense. Thousands of Koreans and Taiwanese, as you know, were forcibly recruited into the Imperial Army and killed as Japanese soldiers.

As in the tremendous scene of the funeral of a Taiwanese soldier who fought for the Emperor in New Guinea, in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s film The Puppet-Master?

Exactly: just what Katoh’s schema is completely blind to. This generation wants the status of victims. With the US, this can more or less work. ‘They are crushing us with their enormous global power’—okay. But with Asians, we were not victims, we were aggressors, and they are not ready to take responsibility for that. This talk of ‘starting from the inside’ is a sort of pre-emptive strike against doing so. It extends to a general hostility to any ideas held to ‘come from the outside’. So others—not Katoh himself, but from the same generation—reject feminism, saying this is an import of crazy notions from American Jewish women; or environmentalism; or the more recent peace movements. The thought is: the masses have become mildly nationalist, so we will articulate what they feel. The result is increasing resistance to any ideas that are not home-grown. I had some experience of this myself when I published a book in 1983 on post-structuralism.

So what’s your own relation to this generation?

Born in 1957, I entered university in 1975. At Kyoto, there was still a certain student movement, and most of the sixties figures there had not yet turned away from their radical past. I could see the romanticism, the fanaticism and phallocentric militarism that were still part of the campus atmosphere, and I was against them. But by the early eighties, when I published my book Structure and Power, the situation had changed completely. Now too many soixante-huitards had buried Marx and were basking smugly in what was being hailed as the richest consumer society in the world. They still proclaimed themselves radical, however. My book was the first systematic introduction of certain strands in French philosophical thought, starting with a consideration of Lacan and Althusser, and then moving on to an account of Deleuze and Guattari, whose rather crazy rereading of Marx I enthusiastically set to work in an analysis of contemporary capitalism—especially its patterns of consumption. I wasn’t so interested in Deleuze’s philosophy as such, the ontology of the virtual; more in the example he and Guattari had given of reading Marx in a much less authoritarian way than the Stalinists did in Japan. My intention was to bring home the need to study Marx afresh, and open a new way of looking at the contradictions of Japanese and world capitalism.

The fate of the book was ironic, however. French philosophy was becoming fashionable just then, and it sold very widely. But it was typically received as an anti-radical manifesto. There’s no denying I was quite critical of the legacy of the sixties in so far as it had become—as I saw it—anti-modernist and anti-Marxist. So when I discussed a certain postmodernity, I did not intend to invite any complicity between Japanese pre-modern mentalities and postmodern consumerism, but to point to a possible step up from—beyond—modern capitalism. The book, however, was read in a Baudrillardian key, as a paean to the decentring of the subject, the ubiquity of the simulacrum, and so on. I can’t acquit myself of all responsibility for this, since I did touch on Baudrillardian themes, but this strand of the book was extrapolated out of any proportion. The first reaction of the sixties generation was to seize on this, and denounce the book as a manifesto for a demoralized new consumerism. Their second reaction—which you can hear today—is that it was a last remnant of the bad radicalism they had put behind them: a dinosaur of the Marxist heritage, doomed because it was ‘imposed from the exterior’.

What explains the wider reception of Structure and Power?

In the course of the eighties, Baudrillard became a popular author in Japan, and his ideas were taken up in some unexpected circles. For example, the owner-manager of the Seibu department store, Tsutsumi Seiji, a versifier himself, adopted an explicitly Baudrillardian marketing strategy for his enterprise, renaming his store Saisons, lecturing stockholders on the role of simulacra in his business and cultivating parodic advertising styles. He set a trend at a time when Japanese capitalism was coming out of the depressive seventies, and needed to activate consumption with a certain semiotic mise en scène. In this kind of context, there was a predisposition to read an introduction to post-structuralism as a welcome mat for over-consumption. To the extent that I also dealt with contemporary trends in Japanese society, you could say the object of my analysis tended to recuperate it.

Did you feel yourself part of a collective post-sixties generation at the time, or more of an isolate?

Well, I published the book when I was very young, at any rate for a gerontocratic country like Japan—I was twenty-six at the time. So I was expected to represent everything new: new theory, new art, new architecture. That’s obviously impossible, but I survived. On the one hand, I had some ties to figures from an older—pre-sixties—generation, particularly the critic Karatani Kōjin and the architect Isozaki Arata. Since the nineties, Karatani and I have been editing a journal, Critical Space, which has tried to make bilateral connexions between the Japanese and Western critical heritages from the 1920s to the present, with a programme of reciprocal translations: an enormous task, on which we’ve only just started. So I never felt alone in that sense. On the other hand, my own cohort are coming into view with a number of significant interventions. For example, when Katoh argued that the reintegration of the Japanese psyche required mourning for our dead forebears, Takahashi Tetsuya—a student of Derrida’s—criticized him sharply. So you might say that my generation is now ready to go into battle. And the younger generation will follow. I don’t feel at all isolated within it.

This is not to suggest that the intellectual landscape here is particularly encouraging. There is a lot to do battle against. For twenty years, from the mid-seventies to the mid-nineties, the dominant atmosphere in Japan was one of cynicism. It was the hour of Baudrillard. After the bloodshed of 1972, no one really paid attention to serious political programmes. There was no feminism, no ecology worth speaking of, nothing to succeed the ferment of the sixties. But in the nineties this changed. The younger generation are frustrated by the stagnation of the country, and are not allergic to—at any rate—reformist agendas. But they are also very naive, with little or no memory of the history of the Left or New Left in Japan. This is a dangerous innocence, because we are now confronted not just with the mild kind of pseudo-nationalism advocated by Katoh, but with a much tougher strain represented, for example, by the comic-strip writer Kobayashi Yoshinori, who has been hugely successful in winning a mass public.3 His slogan is ‘gomanism’—a word he has coined from goman, meaning ‘arrogant’. What Japan needs is a new arrogance, which he at once personifies and cleverly makes fun of. So he declares that we Japanese had good reasons to go into Asia, to combat Western colonialism, that the Nanjing massacre is a myth and so on. This is naked nationalism, but ingeniously configured as a high-spirited parody of itself—so it’s all the more dangerous. Too often, responses to it on the Left limit themselves to a moralizing reaction, of a kind widespread among intellectuals after the war, when Max Weber was held up as the thinker to read—the ethic of responsibility as our guideline. That’s fine, but it’s not the same as a political response. The risk is that today, the younger generation will react to reborn nationalism in the same way, with a hand-wringing moralism—focusing on responsibility to Others, in the sense of Levinas or Derrida—rather than with a robust alternative politics.

Doesn’t that require more accurate discrimination of the Japanese war record, certainly than that current in the West? The standard complaint is that Japan hasn’t properly acknowledged its war guilt in the way Germany has done—and there is constant pressure on it to do so. But aren’t the two cases quite distinct? Japan waged savage wars of conquest and aggression against Korea and China, with an abundance of atrocities. But its war with the United States, Britain and Holland was another matter—an inter-colonial struggle, in which it was entirely on a par with its enemies. Typical American attitudes, in particular, to the Pacific War are grotesque—it never occurs to those who wax indignant about Pearl Harbour to ask what they were doing in Hawaii in the first place. Once the struggle of imperial powers was unleashed, the US committed incomparably greater war crimes against Japan—the fire-bombing of Tokyo, the nuclear devastations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—than vice versa. Official apologies should be forthcoming from Washington, if anywhere. The nationalist Right has always played on this duality—covering up the mass slaughters of civilians by Japan in Korea and China with the mass slaughters of civilians by America in Japan. The Left can’t dismantle this construction unless it refuses to have any truck with self-serving Western hypocrisies about the war—it has to make its own distinctions.

Yes, but the difficulty is that Japanese consciousness often remains paralysed by the duality. On the one hand, we were cruel aggressors; on the other hand, we were helpless victims. The polarity of Nanjing and Hiroshima—our crimes, and their crimes, against humanity—can lead either to schizophrenic outbursts, or to a sentimentalizing evasion of the complexity of the past. Attitudes to America continue to be deeply ambivalent, because we were, after all, liberated from the militarist regime by defeat, and there was an initial strand within the American occupation, coming from the New Deal, that genuinely tried to democratize Japanese society—though it was rapidly displaced by hard-line restorationism, when the labour movement here proved too insurgent.

On the other hand, no one could forget the deliberate exterminism of the fire-storms over Tokyo and the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But once Japanese conservatives—most of them with an unabashed fascist or colonial past—were put back in power by the US, nationalist feelings were, for obvious reasons, directed by the Right against Asia, not America. Yoshida, the architect of the first post-war order, said the American army was a watchdog, guarding us against socialism, so that we could devote our energies to high-speed economic growth. It is only very recently, partly because of long-term economic success, followed by the current sense of impasse and frustration, that conservatives have emerged willing to ‘Say No’ to America, as well as China or Russia. Ishihara, the current governor of Tokyo Prefecture, is the first important Japanese politician to be openly anti-American, as well as rabidly anti-Chinese and anti-Korean. This is a new xenophobia: he is potentially a very dangerous figure.

He was a long-time member of the Liberal Democratic Party—does he represent a real departure from the traditions of the party?

There have been successive attempts to create a new ‘national’ settlement in Japan, through institutional reforms engineered from the Right. This was Nakasone’s project in the eighties. He had made his name as defence minister, and presented himself as a strong ruler, the Japanese counterpart to Reagan or Thatcher. In practice, he proved quite skilled at dividing the Socialists from the Communists at the local level, and splitting the trade unions by a series of ostensible privatizations of the railways, telecommunications and so on, that supposedly divided state monopolies into three or four companies, but actually left them in place, while balkanizing the unions. He broke various long-standing taboos against the symbols of militarism, paying his respects to the Yasukuni shrine, and so on. But his bid to push through a revision of the Constitution to allow Japan formal war-making powers was a complete failure. He ended up on the margins of the party.

In the early nineties Ozawa Ichiro, the strongman of the largest LDP faction, again tried to bulldoze the path to a more nationalist (but, like Nakasone’s, pro-American) stance, this time linked to schemes for restructuring the electoral system along US lines. But Ozawa’s style was too brutish and abrasive for the etiquette of the LDP, and when he walked out of the party he came to grief even more quickly. Finally, Obuchi Keizo—who defeated Ozawa in the struggle for control of the old Tanaka faction—succeeded where the others had failed, setting up a parliamentary commission for revision of the Constitution, and reinstituting the old imperial flag and anthem. Nakasone despised Obuchi, saying he was a walking void—to which Obuchi replied, ‘Yes, I am a void, and that’s why I arouse no opposition.’ He was much more effective than the others in clearing the way for a right-wing revisionism. Nakasone made a lot of noise, but didn’t get very far. Obuchi seemed to have no nationalist agenda, but it was under his empty reign that a package of very dangerous bills was passed. Mori Yoshiro, who succeeded Obuchi after his sudden death, is not so clever as his predecessor, but much more nationalistic. In a few years, we could be seeing a major rearmament programme, and Japanese troops once again being sent abroad—naturally, under ‘UN auspices’.

The social background of this creeping tide of nationalism is fairly obvious: the strains of a decade of economic stagnation, and the discredit of a corrupt and ineffectual political system, which has been unable to reform itself. The new nationalism is a displaced expression of frustration with all this. Ishihara promises to propel this dynamic to a further stage. Though he did a spell as a backbencher in the LDP, he is actually a genuine outsider to the system. By origin he is a writer, not a politician, who first made his name in the sixties with a novel considered advanced for the time—a tale of adolescent rebellion, with outspoken sexual scenes (boy’s erect penis breaking through paper partitions, etcetera), which still enjoys esteem. But real fame came with the biography he wrote of his younger brother, the most popular Japanese actor of his generation, whose early death made him a legend. Ishihara eventually became bored with the LDP and, when he returned to politics in the nineties, he did so with all-out attacks on the establishment, as well as on foreigners. He often doesn’t watch what he says, but he speaks a far more literate and lively language than any other politician in the country, and has skilfully orchestrated populist as well as nationalist themes, as governor of Tokyo—for example, not only calling for the closure of American bases, but imposing taxes on the local banks, a long-standing proposal of the JCP which he coolly took over. At the level of prefectural politics, he is enormously popular. He has intellectual support in the younger generation, from critics like Fukuda Kazuya, and boundless ambition. One can imagine him playing the role of a Berlusconi in Japan.

In the event of an intensification of the economic crisis, with the collapse of major banks and deep recession?

Exactly. This is the prospect that worries the dovish wing of the LDP most. The present finance minister Miyazawa represents this tendency. When he was premier in the early nineties, he saw more clearly than his colleagues the dangers building up in the banking system, and tried to develop a Keynesian programme to pull Japan out of the recession, putting public money into the banks but demanding the resignation of their managers. In the event, the bureaucrats and bankers thwarted him. Miyazawa also saw the degree to which the LDP depended on the Socialists to act as an idealistic brake on the momentum of both capitalism and nationalism in Japan—he called it less a two-party than a one-and-a-half-party system. Now the brake is so much weakened, the vehicle is no longer under traditional control. The fear of this group is that Ishihara could get his hands on the wheel.

What happened to the Socialists?

During the seventies and eighties, they moved steadily to the right—distancing themselves from the Communists, while losing support in the trade unions, and stagnating electorally. But at the end of the decade they were suddenly handed a historic opportunity, when the Takeshita government was engulfed in a massive corruption scandal and the Showa Emperor died. In the elections to the Upper House in the fall of 1989, they won a stunning victory—at a stroke jumping from ten to nearly twenty million votes, well ahead of the LDP. Much of the party’s success was due to the fact that it had the first popular leader it had ever produced, who was also the first woman to lead a major political party in Japan—Doi Takako. In a country that had not known any effective feminist movement, she became a sort of symbol—incarnating, quite unconsciously, all that we had missed: a women’s movement, a new peace movement, an ecological movement. The LDP panicked, and did everything they could to bring her down. Suicidally, the Socialist bosses—elderly power brokers, threatened by her rise—helped them. Within a couple of years she was ousted as party leader, and the JSP was duly trounced in the general elections of 1992, losing twelve million votes.

But the political crisis—the decline of the ‘system of 1955’, which stabilized LDP hegemony for thirty-five years—had not gone away. Not only did the economic situation worsen in the early nineties, but the Cold War came to an end. Japan was in a situation very like Italy, where the Cold War had also allowed decades of rule to a faction-ridden Christian Democracy, in which everything was permitted—no matter how corrupt—so long as the Left was excluded from power. In both countries there was a popular revulsion against the system, and a demand that public life be cleaned up. In Japan, Ozawa engineered a split in the ruling party, forming a coalition with forces of ‘reform’ outside it, under an aristocratic former governor from Kyushu, Hosokawa Morihiro.4 The Socialists joined the Hosokawa Cabinet, the first non-LDP government in four decades. There was much talk of a fresh start in Japanese politics. But the new government soon proved as conventional as the old, and even more ineffectual. Within a year, the Socialists had changed sides and restored the LDP to power. Miyazawa had caught the cruel truth of the JSP perfectly. The Socialist Party lost all credibility, and has never recovered from this debacle. It was a second suicide. Its voters abandoned it en masse for the Communist Party, which is now a larger electoral force.

Could it be said, then, that unlike Christian Democracy in Italy, the LDP has survived the disarray of the early nineties, and is firmly back in the saddle again, once more without any real opposition—that nothing has really changed in Japan over the past ten years?

No, that would be an overstatement. It would be more accurate to say that the system of 1955 has been greatly weakened, but not yet replaced. All attempts to reform the system so far have been fiascos. Ozawa failed; Hosokawa failed; Hatoyama—leader of the current opposition Democratic Party, but son of a famous LDP oligarch—is failing. The LDP has not won, but the reformers always lost. The story of the nineties is that the LDP kept on sinking, but its opponents sank even more. That’s true of the Left as a whole, taking the strength of the JSP and JCP together. It’s true, however, that in absolute numbers the JCP did rather well—becoming the fourth largest party in the country, with nearly 12 per cent of the vote. Intellectually, it is a bit more open than it was, and since—whatever its limitations—it is the only real opposition in Japan, one has to support it. But there is little to be cheerful about. It was ironic to see the whole organization in suspended animation, waiting for Miyamoto to die. The man who criticized the emperor system became the emperor of the party, whose subjects could not move while they await his interminable death.5

Viewed comparatively, one of the most striking features of Japanese capitalism is its management of income distribution. The standard Anglo-Saxon objections to the Japanese model, now relentlessly pressed by the US Treasury, the IMF and media orthodoxy, focus on state regulation, rigged prices, absence of shareholder value. But the same critics are usually forced to admit that, for better or worse, along with these has gone a greater degree of relative social equality. Westerners can sense this very quickly, in the typical lack of dramatic residential contrasts in the big cities: the general absence of slums, ghettoes or zones of luxury that are standard features of metropolitan areas in Europe or the States. Deliberate state policies were certainly necessary to ensure this compression of social differences. What were their origins? Should this abnormal repression of market logic be attributed to the post-war fear of the Left, which was acute in the late forties, or to wartime requirements of national cohesion?

This had already started in the late thirties and forties: one ideological context was the famous debate involving the Kyoto School of philosophy on ‘Overcoming Modernity’.6 The underlying question it posed was: how could Japan compete with the West without simply imitating it? Modernity was American capitalism, Russian Communism, German totalitarianism. The most influential answer was: by adopting a kind of organic corporatism that would separate ownership and control of capital, making management independent of self-interested proprietors, capable of serving the imperial polity in a devoted and selfless spirit. The military regime, determined to mobilize all the nation’s resources in the industrialization drive during the war, took a series of measures to block social polarization. So in the early forties, a great deal of legislation was passed to prevent conventional forms of rent-extraction or profit-taking: tenant-protection laws, housing regulations, food rationing. There were elements in the tradition of Japanese feudalism that favoured this outlook, expressed in the judicial adage of the Tokugawa authorities: ‘Side with the weak and crush the strong’. The whole system was designed in such a way that it could function without classic capitalist owners. The American Occupation, by breaking up the old zaibatsu, reinforced this legacy.7 Once the post-war labour movement had been defeated, this organicist corporatism, sketched out during the war, could come into its own, with further developments like lifetime employment, and function fairly smoothly down to the seventies. Now, of course, it is an obstacle to a rational capitalist purging of the system, despite a decade of crisis: the social interests vested in it are too great for politicians or bureaucrats to attack frontally.

You imply that the ideas of the Kyoto School were of more than arcane significance in the thirties and forties—that philosophical debates could have national resonance?

Yes, although perhaps one shouldn’t overestimate the influence of the Kyoto School itself. Its founder, Nishida Kitaro, in a sense gave theoretical expression to a mentality that was very widespread in Japanese culture. The basic opposition he articulated was between being and nothingness, or a centred structure and a seemingly acentric field. Nishida’s key concept was mu no basho, or ‘the place of nothingness’, which he identified historically with the imperial court, envisaged as sort of empty cylinder containing Japan, while actual power was exercised by successive shogunates. Nishida then advocated this notion as the groundless ground for peaceful co-prosperity between nations, between human beings and nature, in the twentieth century. The intellectual roots of the idea lie in Zen thinking, but it could also be described as a kind of negative Hegelianism—instead of a contradiction between two entities, there would be an empty-centred synthesis, within the place of nothingness. The Kyoto School was held in high esteem in the Imperial Navy, which despised the crude totalitarian nationalism of the army, and prided itself on knowing Nishida’s arcanum of the empty structure. In the post-war period, a number of prime ministers have claimed allegiance to this tradition, among them Ohira and Nakasone. But perhaps the best example was Takeshita Noboru, who has just died. For the last fifteen years of his life he was the most powerful politician in Japan. Takeshita had certainly read Nishida. He may not have understood much of it, but he incarnated one of its principles: that you have to negate yourself, to become an empty field that can peacefully embrace all opposites. Takeshita was a master in the comportment of humility that is all-powerful. And Obuchi was his best disciple in this regard.

On the other hand, the ‘Overcoming Modernity’ debate itself—it was organized by the literary journal Bungakkai in 1942, soon after the Pacific War had started—involved a varied range of participants. The Kyoto School was represented by Nishitani Keiji, who became the leading exponent of its ‘second generation’ after the war, when he gave it an increasingly esoteric Zen cast. But there were also the so-called Japanese Romantics, advocates of a ‘groundless leap’, which had some affinities to Carl Schmitt’s decisionism. Their idea was that you have to make a leap without knowing where you are going; no one knows what to decide, but you have to decide. The famous writer Yasuda Yojuro exemplified this outlook—and today Fukuda, a passionate supporter of Ishihara, tries to fashion himself as a postmodern Yasuda. Then there was a third tendency, intermediate between the other two, represented by the critic Kobayashi Hideo—Miyamoto’s rival in the twenties—and his colleagues. They had read Marx, they knew Valéry and the modern Western canon, so they were not unaware of the difficulties of overcoming modernity when the modern itself was not really rooted in Japan. But Kobayashi tried to elude the problem by advocating a flight from the contingency of history into the timeless realms of beauty and art. He never took an unequivocal stand on the political issue.

If the Nishida School offers a striking example of the role of an arcane philosophical doctrine in affairs of state, would it be correct to think of the Uno School in economics as an opposite case after the war—a recondite Marxism with no impact outside the academy?

Not quite. Before the war, Uno was a professional economist working in a statistical research institute as a specialist in agricultural problems. He developed his main ideas in the thirties, but published them only after the war, when he got a chair at Tokyo University. For a long time he dominated the field of Marxist economics, without belonging to the Communist Party. They could never abide a theoretician with an independent mind—so they excluded Fukumoto, a Lukácsian Marxist, and they couldn’t accommodate Uno, whose work is essentially a Hegelian systemization of Marxian economics. Uno’s theory is divided into three parts, with very little empirical dimension. The first is a study of ‘principle’—that is, pure capitalism; the second is a study of ‘stage’—competitive, monopoly, imperialist, etcetera; the third is a study of ‘situation’—conjunctures. But there’s no real articulation between them. Still, though Uno’s theory was more academic than it might have been had the Left offered a political home for it, his ideas were not without practical influence. For, ironically, generations of Japanese bureaucrats and managers were taught by professors of Marxian economics at Tokyo University—the obligatory point of entry into the Ministry of Finance and other key institutions—where they received an education from the Uno School which was very useful to them. Instead of just mathematical apotheosis of market mechanisms by neoclassical economics, they were alerted to the weak links in the capitalist system—its inherent tendencies to instability and crisis. For even if Uno’s formalism can sometimes look more Ricardian than Marxian, it is still a theory of the overall structure of production and distribution, not of a homogeneous market which exists nowhere in reality. You can’t understand the mentality of Japan’s economic bureaucracy, and its lack of inhibition in steering investments and controlling markets, without this intellectual background.

What about the traditions of Japanese liberalism? Are there any successors, for example, to a figure like Maruyama Masao in the field of political theory, who looked back to the example of Fukuzawa Yukichi in Meiji times?8

No, after Maruyama there was no comparable figure. Like Uno, he left a school of disciples at Tokyo University, preaching a Weberian Protestant outlook to very small circles. Curiously, there was some revival of Maruyama’s ideas in the nineties, because his writings were still relevant to questions of responsibility for war crimes. But Maruyama didn’t publish much in his last years, and his legacy has otherwise receded. The most significant Japanese liberal of the post-war period was Ishibashi Tanzan, who was prime minister for a couple of months in 1956–57, then fell ill and resigned. He was an economist by training, and a genuine disciple of Adam Smith. He was also a natural politician, who before the war advocated the independence of Korea and Taiwan on the grounds that colonies were a costly and irrational burden to capitalism. A very interesting figure. You could say he was the last symbol of a middle way in Japan. After Ishibashi there was no politically influential liberal, and after Maruyama no intellectually influential one.

You’ve mentioned literary critics a number of times. How would you describe the role of such criticism, and literature at large, in Japanese culture?

For a whole historical period, at least down to the end of the seventies, it was the main arena into which public discussion of intellectual or political issues flowed. Other disciplines always remained more confined to the academy (the Kyoto School was an exception—more typical was the narrow neo-Kantian instruction at Tokyo University). Literary criticism, by contrast, was always crucial to the definition of collective meanings in the wider culture. The position enjoyed by Kobayashi, whose career stretched from the twenties to the seventies—he died in 1983—was quite typical. Of course, the role of critics was closely connected to the importance of creative writers. In the generation after Kobayashi we had Yoshimoto and Etoh, the one a more populist, the other a more liberal critic. Etoh, in fact, started out by rejecting everything Kobayashi stood for. He attacked any notion of ‘overcoming modernity’, arguing that modern subjectivity was precisely what Japan needed. But then he went to the States, where he was treated as more or less a yellow monkey from a defeated country, and unfortunately discovered Erickson’s psychology of identity. So when he came back he started talking about national identity, and how Japan could recover it from American distortions—in this regard, you could say Katoh is essentially repeating what Etoh said many years ago. Etoh ended up very conservative. But at the beginning he was close to the writer who became Japan’s best-known novelist when he won the Nobel Prize, Oé Kenzaburo, and to Ishihara, in his days as a novelist. For a time the three formed a kind of post-war troika.

In those days, relations between literature and politics were at the centre of intellectual life in Japan. Debates about them reached a peak in 1960, the year of huge turmoil over the Security Treaty with the US. In the aftermath of the demonstrations, however, a seventeen-year-old youth assassinated the chairman of the Socialist Party. Shocked by the killing, Oé wrote two novels in quick succession about the psychosexual genesis of right-wing fanaticism—Seventeen and A Political Boy Dies—while another writer, Fukazawa Shichiro, published Furyu Mutan, a Kafkaesque comedy, which refers to a decapitation of the heir to the throne. The far Right was outraged by both productions, and one of its thugs broke into Fukazawa’s house and murdered a maid who was there. Oé, who was himself being harassed anyway, was traumatized by this event. Soon afterwards, he had a disabled son, and went to Hiroshima. From then on, he shifted from political themes to more general issues of individual and collective trauma, and possible salvation. He’s a great writer, but the break is quite marked in his work, which has deepened, but narrowed. So far as the consequences are concerned, today we still can’t read A Political Boy Dies or Furyumutan—they remain unavailable, in what amounts to a state of de facto censorship.

The next comparable pairing of critic and writer would be Karatani Kōjin and Nakagami Kenji, who seemed like twins in the eighties. Karatani started out as a rebellious son of Yoshimoto and Etoh. He is a stunning literary critic, with an intellectual range that has made his Origins of Modern Japanese Literature the most widely read study of the subject both in Japan and probably abroad. I got to know him in 1980 or 1981, when he came to Kyoto to teach a course on Marx and Capital. Nakagami, on the other hand, was a buraku novelist who came out as such, depicting the naked structures of power in which Japanese civil society trapped its outcasts;9 but also the interconnected differences between men and women, Japanese and Koreans or Taiwanese. He was a kind of Genet of the accursed glory of the buraku. After Oé, it was Nakagami who spotlit really acute political problems in Japan. His fiction is available in French, and should be translated into English. He died at the age of forty-five in 1992, leaving a huge vacuum. Karatani identifed so much with Nakagami that after his death he couldn’t find another novelist to write about in the same way, and moved to more general theory.

Better known in the West, of course, is the very different figure of Murakami Haruki, whose works are very popular in the States. Murakami, who started out as a translator of American minimalist fiction, belongs to the sixties generation, but he never refers to anything political directly. Rather he traces subtle changes of sentiments that may be motivated by social turmoil, yet are not reflective on it, in an interiorizing gesture. So after Nakagami’s stark contradiction of powers, we have Murakami’s highly sophisticated space of subjectivity. Katoh, as you might expect, is a critic very close to Murakami. They both represent a certain return to interiority, after political disillusion.

Abroad, modern Japanese culture is perhaps most often identified with the splendours of Japanese cinema—Mizoguchi, Ozu, Kurosawa—which are much, much better known than its literature. What has happened since this classic era?

The representative figure of the next generation was Oshima, a pure product of the sixties. He was active in the student protests against the Security Treaty in 1960, went into movies, where he was very conscious of the example of Godard and the French nouvelle vague, and made political films. His early documentaries, on death by hanging and other subjects, are extraordinary. But over time his output has become more and more marginal, as the industry itself has declined. What you see now, increasingly, is an export product—Oshima playing to the Western gaze, offering images of Japan designed for orientalist expectations. This is already very clear in Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, where he exploits the exotic stereotype of the Japanese soldier as a modern samurai, complete with repressed homosexuality and suicidal urges. His latest movie Gohatto—‘Taboo’—involves much the same thematics. For anyone who knows his films of the sixties, the difference is stunning. Gohatto is set in the last days of Tokugawa rule, among a guard unit loyal to the Shogunate, on the eve of its overthrow by the Meiji conspirators: a supremely political hour in modern Japanese history. But Oshima discards all of this for a study of homoerotic tensions among the young samurai soldiers, as the appearance of a beautiful boy in their midst brings explosive sexual undercurrents to the surface. The film is in a sense thoroughly reactionary, since after much psychodynamic turmoil, the boy is killed and the homosocial order, with all its misogyny, is restored. Of course, the film will be seen abroad as a great samurai movie, with fantastic scenes of fighting. I was afraid it would be given the grand prize at Cannes, but fortunately even the French cinephiles were not so blind.

This trend actually goes back to Mishima, for whom the original homosexual image was purely Western—Saint Sebastian. Mishima’s last performance, his suicide at a Self-Defence Force building, was likewise played out for the Western gaze. He wanted to be remembered as the last samurai who committed suicide, before the eyes of the world. But today this export culture has become much more widespread. Another striking example is Kitano Takeshi, whose films are very popular in Europe just now. He started out as a stand-up comedian on television, and his early movies were very interesting, not unlike Buster Keaton. But after a number of commercial failures, he too opted for satisfaction of the appetites of Western orientalism. So in his recent hit Hana-bi we get Mount Fuji, cherry blossoms, fireflies in the snow, the last suicidal voyage of a doomed couple—all these beautiful clichés. So Japanese and so finely done, etcetera: Kitano as our genuine native artist, for the admiration of the West. The phenomenon isn’t confined to the cinema, of course. If you look at photography you see the same thing. Who is supposedly the leading Japanese photographer these days? Araki Noboyushi, who started out as a guerrilla against censorship in the seventies and eighties, then won a reputation as a vanguard Japanese artist in Europe and America, and is now reimported to Japan as a representative figure of our contemporary art. He produces images of sadomasochistic anarchy, which he calls ‘Ararchy’: for example, women in kimonos in bondage. If he were a Westerner, he would have been severely criticized by feminists—and indeed he is, to a certain extent. But as he is Japanese, his sin becomes his charm. There are many more interesting photographers in Japan, but for Manhattan or the Rive Gauche Araki is the quintessential Japanese camera.

What are the less exocentric forms?

You could say that rather than anything coming from young cinéastes, it is animation directors and games creators who are the real avant-garde in Japan today. This is a huge industry, some of whose products have conquered world markets, but without consciously targeting them. You are dealing with a more endogenous output. Animation remains a subcultural zone, though a gifted individual director like Miyazaki Hayao has generated something like high-cultural works out of it, by transmuting legend—on which this area always feeds—into ideology. You may have seen his powerful ecological fable Princess Mononoke, a big success in Japan. Unpredictable inventions, or strange trouvailles, bubble up from this commercial underground. The Pokémon craze is a good example. A young guy called Satoshi Tajiri, a conceptual designer, collected insects when he was a kid, and when Nintendo produced Game Boy, he thought of an exchange system of small monsters. Pokémon has characters, and a narrative, but the important thing is the exchange network that enables the swapping and hybridizing of its bizarre micro-creatures. It is the originality of this scheme—of course, it also taps into the common children’s passion for collection—that has caught on. Still, one should not be under any illusions. Most animation and allied forms just recycle archetypal images, usually much more Jungian than Freudian, and all too clichéd stories.

You once offered your own fairy tale, of three kinds of capitalism—elderly in Europe, dominated by transcendental traditions; adult in America, with inner-directed individual responsibility; and infantile in Japan, powered by ‘the nearly purely relative competition exhibited by other-oriented children’.10 So one should take the Pokémon/PlayStation syndrome as another manifestation of Japan’s ‘infantile capitalism’?

Surely. You could also take as another expression of the same phenomenon the huge popularity of the manga, the Japanese comic book. This has ancient origins in narrative scrolls of the Edo period and earlier. But the modern manga has had a complex history in the post-war period, when it has always been somewhat polyvalent. There were ideological manga fomenting student protest in the sixties, and deviant manga for girls challenging sexual norms in the seventies and eighties. Today you can find ecology or gender criticism in them, just as you can Kobayashi’s ultra-nationalism. The form lends itself to subversive parody and burlesque. But, of course, the bulk of production has always been more conventional, instilling all kinds of conformism—baseball manga for boys, romances for girls. The output is enormous, and multilayered: adults read manga in great quantities. The combination is the same you find in the animation or computer games industries: flashes of quirky creativity amid overall regression. Just what you would expect from an infantilized culture.

The other area where Japan has registered in a big way internationally is architecture. What’s been the trajectory here?

Up to the end of the sixties we had a genuine modernist architecture, dominated by Tange Kenzo, who could be described as our Philip Johnson. But in the seventies one of his students, Isozaki Arata, a contemporary of Hollein and Eisenman, started to develop all kinds of unbuilt projects which anticipated what were to become postmodern forms. In 1983 he got his chance to erect the Tsukuba Centre Building just outside Tokyo, which set a paradigm for postmodern collage. Lots of commissions, at home and abroad, followed and Isozaki became the great practitioner and theoretician of Japanese postmodernism. Since the heyday of the architectural boom of the eighties, however, there has been a tendency to return to a less critical, more artisanal approach. Ando Tadao was probably the key architect of the nineties, with a series of famous minimalist structures. He adopts the stance of a taciturn craftsman, whose impeccable finish will impress you more than any construction dreamt up by ambitious theoreticians. Today, with the bursting of the bubble economy, there are fewer commercial opportunities for architects, although quite a few mega-projects are still being funded by the state to pump up the market. Tange, who became a convert to postmodernism like Philip Johnson, has produced some of the worst of these gigantic schemes. His new City Hall in Tokyo is an act of aesthetic suicide. The newest wave of architects, on the other hand, pays no attention to theory or philosophy at all. They look more like techno-barbarians playing with computer-generated images. In the Western tradition, design was regarded as inferior to art, whereas in Japan it is our natural way of proceeding. Today we have every refinement of interior design, of fashion design, of architectural design. What we are short of is original art.