Christian Uhl
Takeuchi Yoshimi’s (1910–1977) commentary for the first-ever collection of sources on Asianism (Takeuchi 1963a) is regarded as the point of departure for any serious analysis of the subject in present-day Japan. Yet, at the same time, the essay is itself an example of Asianist thinking.
Born in Nagano in 1910, Takeuchi studied Chinese literature at Tokyo Imperial University. A trip to China in 1932 stirred his interest in contemporary China. He was the only student in his 1934 cohort to graduate with a thesis on a contemporary subject—the writer Yu Dafu (1896–1945).
Takeuchi’s opposition to traditional Japanese scholarship of China (kangaku) as well as to modern, Western-style Sinology (Shinagaku)—both positivistic, philological disciplines devoted to classical studies—manifested itself in the establishment of the Chūgoku Bungaku Kenkyūkai (Society for the Study of Chinese Literature). From 1935, it published its own journal, Chūgoku Bungaku Geppō (Chinese Literature Monthly). After a spell in China between 1937 and 1939, Takeuchi returned to Japan to work as a researcher at the Kaikyōken Kenkyūjo (Institute for the Study of the Islamic World).
At the end of 1941, Takeuchi published a manifesto that enthusiastically endorsed the attack on Pearl Harbor and hailed the declaration of the “Greater East Asian War” against the United States, the foremost Western imperialist power, as an act of atonement for Japan’s aggression in China that marked its abandonment of the policy of imperialism. But by mid-1942 he had begun to show his dissatisfaction with the war situation by, for example, refusing to involve the Society for the Study of Chinese Literature in the First Conference of the Writers of Greater East Asia, a major government-sponsored propaganda event (see II:25). In 1943 Takeuchi’s discontent led him to dissolve the Society and close down its journal. As a result of this act of defiance, Takeuchi was conscripted and sent to China. It was while he was there that his first book, Rojin, on the Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881–1936), a work that formed the cornerstone of his postwar career as a literary critic, was published in Tokyo in December 1944. Throughout the late 1940s and the 1950s Lu Xun enjoyed great popularity in Japanese intellectual circles, a vogue that amplified the influence of Takeuchi, who was recognized as the leading translator and interpreter of the Chinese writer’s works. Moreover, Takeuchi caught the attention of the postwar reading public with his outspoken comments on various issues outside Chinese literature. In particular, he launched an uncompromising critique of the intellectual mainstream—for example, in his 1948 essay “‘Kindai’ to wa nani ka” (What Is “Modernity”?) and in his 1951 appeal for the creation of a “national literature” that would reflect the particular historical experience of the Japanese people instead of merely imitating the intellectual fashions imported from the West. And in 1959 he vocally opposed the revision of the U.S.-Japanese Security Treaty on the grounds that it would ally Japan with the United States, its former enemy, against China, the victim of Japanese aggression.
When in 1960 the government rammed the treaty revision through the Diet, Takeuchi resigned in protest from his university post and, together with Hashikawa Bunsō (1922–1983), founded the Chūgoku no kai (China Society) and launched Chūgoku (China), a journal dedicated to a “reconsideration of the problem of Sino-Japanese relations from a Japanese perspective.” In the final years of his life Takeuchi devoted himself mainly to translating and annotating the Collected Works of Lu Xun, published in six volumes. The Complete Works of Takeuchi Yoshimi, which do not include his translations of Lu Xun and other modern Chinese writers, were published in seventeen volumes between 1980 and 1982.
His essay “Japan’s Asianism” (Takeuchi 1963c: 94–156) was originally published under the title “Ajiashugi no Tenbō” (A Panoramic View of Asianism) as a commentary for the volume on Asianism in the series Gendai Nihon Shisō Taikei (Anthology of Modern Japanese Thought) (Takeuchi 1963a). It was the first academic attempt to address Asianism in a systematic and comprehensive way. The essay is a challenge to the unprepared reader, as it requires detailed knowledge of modern Japanese history. Moreover, Takeuchi’s interpretation of the subject is based on philosophical premises that are not made explicit in the course of his argument and presuppose knowledge of his previous writings. Takeuchi himself acknowledged that, in order to stand as an independent work, his essay would require revision (cf. Takeuchi 1966: 428).
Takeuchi’s main purpose in writing “Japan’s Asianism” was to dissociate Asianism from fascism and thus to make possible a study of the subject that, he believed, would be more objective than the prevailing views of postwar scholars—notably Maruyama Masao, who considered Asianism to be one of three ideological pillars of Japanese fascism (Maruyama 1964). By arguing that the Asianist ideology of wartime Japan was, in fact, merely the hollow shell of a once rich and promising ideal, Takeuchi criticized Marxist, as well as liberal and modernist historiographies, which in various ways were all inspired by notions of progress and, as he complained, contaminated by the “poison of historicism.” In the narrative offered by the “progressive” model, imperialist “Greater East Asian ideology” represents the apex of the evolutionary account of Asianist modes of thinking that, finally, with Japan’s defeat in 1945, were all together overcome by the triumph of reason. Takeuchi challenged this model by means of a nongenealogical and discontinuous counternarrative, a method that is also represented in the structure of Takeuchi’s Asianism reader, which is divided into four sections—“prototypes” (genkei), “feeling” (kanjō), “logic” (ronri), and “rebirth” (tensei). According to Takeuchi, the idea of Asian solidarity emerged out of the political contradictions of early modern Japan, and the dominant characteristic of the Asianism of that period (the 1880s) was its oscillation between solidarity and aggression, which makes these aspects difficult to tell apart. This distinction became possible only later, in the years between the Sino-Japanese (1894–1895) and the Russo-Japanese wars (1904–1905), when the intellectual world split into leftist and rightist wings and the idea of Asian solidarity became the exclusive property of the latter. After Japan’s defeat in 1945, Asianism was “reborn” because it was inseparably connected with the unsolved problems of modernity in Japan, or its “aporias,” as Takeuchi put it elsewhere—that is, the impossibility of reconciling the contradictory notions of East and West, tradition and modernity, “national essence” (kokusui) and (Western) “civilization” (bunmei kaika), and so on (cf. Takeuchi 1958a: 146; 1958b: 65).
This is the message that Takeuchi conveyed in his concluding remarks concerning the ambiguous legacy of Saigō Takamori (1828–1877). Saigō played a crucial part in the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate and was a leading member of the Meiji government. But after his plan to invade Korea was rejected, he retired from politics and in 1877 led a rebellion against the central government. This “reactionary” rebellion, however, also marked the beginnings of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, which some historians see as the first democratic revolutionary movement in the history of modern Japan. Takeuchi considers “Saigō’s contradiction” as the first instance of the subsequently recurrent tension between the idea of “people’s rights” (minken) and the “authority of the state” (kokken)—or, at a later stage, as a clash between the advocates of “Europeanization” (Ōka) and those who wanted to preserve “national essence” (kokusui).
Takeuchi characterized Japanese culture as a culture of “honors students.” Its leaders, Takeuchi contended, are always anxious to be at the top of the class, the rest of which consists of a multitude of poor students—that is, the backward common people: “‘It is our mission to guide these backward people, just as it is our mission to guide the backward Oriental people.’ Such thinking represents the logical development of the honors student complex.
. . . The roots of Japanese fascism lie in the very structure of Japanese culture” (Takeuchi 1948a: 150–51; 1948b: 67–68). “Japan is turning into Europe, becoming as European as possible; [this Europeanization] was conceived of as the path of its emergence . . . from being a slave to becoming a master.” Takeuchi insisted, however, that master and slave were identical (Takeuchi 1948a: 158; 1948b: 72).
Takeuchi described an alternative attitude towards modernity when he defined what he called “Lu Xun’s method.” Lu Xun, Takeuchi noted, “never gave way and was not servile to anyone. He confronted the new era, then purified himself through ‘resistance’ and finally extracted this self from that era. . . . Yet this Lu Xun . . . was no different from before. Although some speak of progress in his thinking, such progress is really quite secondary to his unyielding self-assertion” (Takeuchi 1944: 10–11). The important notion here is that of “resistance” (teikō), a stance that is identified with what he calls a “literary perspective” (bungaku no tachiba), and it is Takeuchi’s definition of “literature” that also brings to the fore his romantic mode of thinking. “Literature,” in Takeuchi’s terminology, signifies the subjective, emotional, immediate, sensuous, and concrete attitude toward the world and represents an individual’s (or, in the case of “national literature,” a nation’s) self-expression and self-assertion. As such, the “literary perspective” is opposed to “scientific thinking,” which is objective, reflexive, methodical, abstract, and universal and belongs to what Takeuchi, in contrast to “literature,” calls “politics.” This distinction between “literature” and “politics”—which was inspired by Nishida Kitarō’s dialectic of “individual” and “universal” (Uhl 2009)—is also the key to a proper understanding of a second pair of concepts, “feeling” (kanjō) and “logic” (ronri), which form the core of Takeuchi’s interpretation of Japanese Asianism. It was as a result of the lack of “resistance” (to Europe and the “world-historical process of modernization”) that, in Japan, “feeling” and “logic” finally disintegrated, thus allowing the ideal of Asian solidarity to turn into an empty, abstract political ideology that supported European-style imperialist aggression against Japan’s Asian neighbors. In other words, the problem does not lie with Asianism as such but with Japan’s “honors-student” road to modernity that is oblivious to its own past.
The disintegration of “feeling” and “logic” in Japan was, according to Takeuchi, the result of an assimilation of European modernity, “which is not mediated by negation” (Takeuchi 1942: 427). However, to assume that for Takeuchi the East represents “feeling” and the West “abstraction” would be to fail to appreciate the complexity of his thought. Nowhere in his writings does Takeuchi conjure any kind of dualist essentialism. Instead, he regarded the East–West dichotomy as one of the “aporias of modernity,” which he tried to grasp as a dialectical contradiction, the poles of which are mediated by “Oriental resistance.” According to Takeuchi, “Europe and the Orient are contradictory notions, just as are the notions of the modern and the feudal.” Europe, he insisted, “made the Orient possible,” and the Orient made Europe what it was. “Without Oriental resistance Europe would be unable to realize itself. . . . In order for Europe to be Europe, it had to invade the Orient.” Oriental resistance was a reaction against this penetration, and yet, as Takeuchi points out, it was precisely through such resistance that Asia succumbed to accelerating modernization. “Europe’s invasion of the Orient resulted in the phenomenon of Oriental capitalism.
. . . For Europe this was accordingly conceptualized as the progress of world history and the triumph of reason.” Now, however, in other areas in Asia, though not in Japan, “it seems as though, through its continuing resistance, the Orient is creating something non-European, which is mediated by, and at the same time transcends the European” (Takeuchi 1948a: 130–33, 136; 1948b: 55–56, 58).
Since Takeuchi made no attempt to formulate a positive definition of Asia, to distinguish his stance from what is commonly understood by the term “Asianism” we should perhaps qualify his view as “utopian”—in the literal sense of the word “utopia,” meaning “a place which does not exist.” With this in mind and in light of Takeuchi’s conviction that rescuing the past always requires a radical negation of the past, we are better equipped to get to grips with passages like the following: “The Orient must re-embrace the West, it must change the West itself in order to realize the latter’s outstanding values on a greater scale. Such a rollback of culture or values would create universality. . . . When this rollback takes place, we must have our own values. And yet perhaps these values do not yet exist, in substantive form. Rather I suspect that they are possible as method. . . . This I have called ‘Asia as method,’ and yet it is impossible to state definitely what this might mean” (Takeuchi 1960a: 115; 1960b: 165).
Source (translation from the Japanese original by Christian Uhl)
Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Nihon no Ajiashugi” (Japan’s Asianism), reproduced in Takeuchi Yoshimi Zenshū (Complete Works of Takeuchi Yoshimi), vol. VIII. Chikuma Shobō, 1980, 94–156.
What is “Asianism”?
In order to speak about Asianism one must first define the term. If one was dealing here with universal concepts such as democracy or socialism that are within the scope of common understanding, then there would be no need to begin with a definition. One could simply delve straight into the heart of the matter. However, the term “Asianism” is distinctive and in addition has numerous meanings. It means something different to everyone. So we have no choice but to narrow it down, as a first step.
Having said that, I have no intention of providing a final definition here, because I find it impossible to do so. . . . My final definition will probably not be settled on even when this volume is going to press. . . .
In my understanding, “Asianism” does not have any real content, but rather must be regarded as a tendency inherent in various distinct modes of thought. . . . While we can determine whether a certain way of thinking or a certain thinker at any given time was Asianist or not, clearly such evaluations change with changing circumstances and, for this reason, it is not possible to overlook the concrete situation at a time and to give a general definition.
. . . I believe that all attempts to define [Asianism] as a concept are inevitably bound to fail. No matter how many definitions one produces, Asianism . . . does not lend itself to being grasped as an idea which fulfils a real function. Of course, one may say that this applies not only to Asianism, but in a sense to all kinds of thought. But in the case of Asianism this is a distinguishing characteristic.
Asianism is neither synonymous with expansionism nor with a policy of aggression. Neither is it completely synonymous with nationalism. . . . Nor is it the same as left-wing internationalism. But it occurs together in part with all of these and, in particular, it overlaps to a large extent with expansionism. Or, to put it more precisely: genealogically speaking, Asianism was the product of nascent expansionism after the Meiji Restoration. Expansionism, however, did not immediately lead to the development of Asianism. At first, it contained two opposing currents of thought: that of strengthening the authority of the state and that of strengthening people’s rights. Later on, the two opposing currents became Europeanization and adherence to the national essence. Asianism arose from the tensions between these ill-matched twins.
I have gone to great lengths to show how difficult it is to define Asianism. However, . . . we have to acknowledge that an emotional disposition, a feeling, which can only be called Asianism, and certain modes of thinking which are grounded in this feeling, are apparent throughout the history of modern Japan and are emerging all the time. Now, contrary for example to democracy, socialism, fascism and the like—that is, to “officially sanctioned” ideas—Asianism as such contains no values of its own. . . . It always arises in association with other ideas. For that reason, it is not possible to trace the specific historical development of Asianism. The idea that it is possible to present a history of Asianism is based on a bias that is itself probably the product of the poison of historicism.
The Intellectual Emptiness
of Self-Styled Asianism
The idea of the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” during the Second World War in a sense marked the inevitable outcome of Asianism. In another sense, however, it represented a departure from Asianism, or rather a deviation from it. If one assumes that Asianism as a concept has any substance, and that it has developed historically, then one must conclude that the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” was clearly the inevitable outcome of Asianism and that it perished as a system of thought with Japan’s defeat. And, as a matter of fact, this view was predominant in the postwar period.
As I have tentatively noted above, because Asianism . . . always appears as a tendency in association with systems of thought that possess their own individuality, it does not have an independent existence. However, even making allowances for this, one must recognize a certain commonality inherent in its aspirations toward solidarity among peoples of Asia (regardless of whether it is used to serve aggression or not). This is the key attribute of Asianism in my minimum definition. And if that is the case, then the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” was clearly a form of Asianism.
However, if one looks at the reality of it, it is possible to say that the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” was a pseudo-idea that could only have arisen by suppressing all other systems of thought including Asianism. If an ideology is not productive, it cannot be called a genuine system of thought, and the ideology of the Co-Prosperity Sphere generated absolutely nothing. The bureaucrats who were proponents and propagators of this ideology, imposed by fiat from above, . . . simply spread the cloak of the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” over everything. They held a “Greater East Asian Conference,” issued a “Greater East Asian Declaration,” [see II:27] and the like, but none of that had any real content.
The stifling of all thought was first directed at leftist thought, then was extended to liberalism and finally was gradually applied to the right wing. The ensuing crackdown affected both Nakano Seigō’s Tōhōkai (Society of the East [see II:1]) and Ishiwara Kanji’s Tōa Renmei (East Asian League [see II:22]). Because the idea of the Co-Prosperity Sphere owed its existence to the suppression of what could be regarded, in various degrees, as Asianist thought, from a certain point view it could be regarded as the extreme stage in depriving Asianism of any thought content. . . .
Re-Definition of the Problem
Here I must once again return to the subject of the [pan-Asianist] Genyōsha [see I:3]. That is because the question remains of explaining why in the twentieth century Asianism was represented only by the Genyōsha-Kokuryūkai [see I:3 and I:10]. . . . Some may of course argue that this view is wrong. Even I do not claim that all varieties of Asianism completely disappeared, with the exception of those represented by the Genyōsha-Kokuryūkai. The Miyazaki Tōten variety (as expressed in his My Thirty-three Years’ Dream [see I:11]) has always persisted as a sentiment. The owner of the Nakamuraya [a restaurant in Shinjuku], [Christians and nationalists] Sōma Aizō [1870–1954], and his wife Kokkō [1876–1955 (I:24)] are a good example of this. Iwanami Shigeo [1881–1946] also represents an emotional Asianism that is not associated with Japan’s expansionism. At the time of the China Incident [the initial stages of the war with China] he refused to pay his special tax to the military knowing full well that he would incur their wrath. However, when the Pacific War broke out, he stated at a gathering: “If it is to destroy the Anglo-Americans, then I am for it, too.” . . . This kind of feeling was pervasive . . . among the masses, together with a feeling of contempt for the Chinese and Koreans, and it persists in a vague way down to this day. But this feeling has not been raised to [the level of] thought. In other words, there was no encounter between Miyazaki Tōten and [Okakura] Tenshin [I:7 and I:8]. The fact that this did not happen is the question I would like to address here.
As Asianists, Kita Ikki and Ōkawa Shūmei [see I:27 and II:4] represented a new kind of Asianism that emerged at the stage of imperialism. Kita took part in the Chinese revolution and dreamt in a unique way of the revolution’s taking a course in opposition to Sun Yat-sen [see II:5]; once his dream was destroyed, he turned his energies to the reorganization of Japan. Ōkawa, on the other hand, although employed by the South Manchurian Railway, showed little interest in the China question. More accurately, he left China in the care of his people (behind the scenes he was also the leading orchestrator of the Manchurian Incident) and concentrated personally mainly on India and the areas west of it. . . . He was one of the pioneering [writers] who introduced Ghandi, Nehru, Pahlevi, Ibn Saud and Atatürk to the Japanese. He began to study Islam early on, and he did not limit himself to study alone but also helped to send Japanese students to Egypt’s Al-Azhar University. In short, emotion separated itself from logic in the Asianism of that period, or, in other words, Asianist logic capitulated completely to the logic of aggression. All that remained were the most obnoxious parts of the Kokuryūkai’s ideology. The question is why this happened and when. . . .
From the middle of the Taishō period [1912–1926] until the beginning of the Shōwa period [1926–1989], with right and left wings opposing each other, the right had the monopoly on Asianism while the left assumed the opposite position of proletarian internationalism. And then, with nationalism as an insurmountable problem, many defected from the left. What they returned to was in many cases Asianism or Saigō Takamori. . . .
One has to ask why Asianism was monopolized by the right in the period marked by a clear split between right and left. This surely had its origins at the end of the Meiji era, when Kita Ikki vacillated between the [socialist] Heiminsha (Commoner Society) and the Kokuryūkai. . . . Among the thinkers of that time, the disciple of Rousseau, Nakae Chōmin [1847–1901], and the Genyōsha’s Tōyama Mitsuru [1855–1944; see I:3] had a relationship of mutual respect. They adopted an identical stance on the People’s Rights Movement and the revision of the Unequal Treaties, and there was almost no difference between their views on East Asian politics. Although Tōyama was a supporter of imperial rule, Nakae did not reject the monarchy. And in supporting the war against Russia toward the end of his life, Nakae . . .
followed the same route as the Genyōsha-Kokuryūkai. That was not the case with their respective disciples, Kōtoku Shūsui [1871–1911] and Uchida Ryōhei [1873–1937], in whose time [political] thought underwent a major split. . . .
After the Sino-Japanese War, Uchida travelled on foot from Vladivostok to Petrograd [sic] and back to investigate the domestic situation in Russia. He concluded that Russia was a despotic and barbaric state where freedom was suppressed and he realized that, as a result, it faced an imminent collapse. Back in Japan, he wrote Roshia Bōkoku Ron [On the Ruin of Russia], which, however, was banned immediately. . . . This took place in 1901, the same time as Kōtoku published his Teikokushugi [Imperialism], which, however, was not banned as it advocated pacifism. The government of the day held the view that war with Russia would be premature.
The Russo-Japanese War was a victory of civilization over barbarism—this is a logical extension of Fukuzawa Yukichi’s understanding of civilization. However, this understanding contains also the seed of the later war-time idea of the “honorable death of one hundred million Japanese [ichioku gyokusai].” Japan at that time was a fully developed nation-state, and if the Russian threat was existential, then the affirmation of the war was surely legitimate. The problem here, however, lies with the question of the quality of “civilization.” During the Tokyo War Crime Trials [1946-1948] Uchida was posthumously charged with having been a man who opposed civilization. . . .
It is a fact that backward Japanese capitalism persisted until 1945 by repeatedly taking a form that concealed its internal defects through expansion overseas. Although the basic root of this phenomenon lay in the weakness of the people, on this fact hinges the most important question regarding Pan-Asianism at present—namely whether it is possible to discover occasions in history that could have prevented this form of capitalism from appearing. . . . It is, after all, problematic to discuss the new question of “Asian nationalism” that suddenly emerged after the war as if it was completely separate from the Asianism of the past, whether represented by Okakura, Miyazaki, Uchida or Ōkawa. . . .
The Dual Character of Saigo¯ Takamori
Probably because it is not sufficient to consider the problem of Asianism only within the parameters of the situation in the 1880s and the 1900s, we are ultimately forced to return to the even older dispute about the invasion of Korea. In other words, things boil down to the historical assessment of Saigō Takamori.
[The Canadian historian E. Herbert] Norman adopts a hostile attitude towards Saigō. This attitude is not limited to Norman, but is shared by Japan’s progressive historians. In contrast, as we have already seen, the right extols Saigō as a symbol and sometimes makes him into an absolute. . . . But it is necessary to point out here that they do not limit their praise to the expansionist aspect of Saigō. . . .
It was not Saigō who was the counter-revolutionary, but the Meiji government that ousted him which had embraced counter-revolution. It was not the rightist faction of the Shōwa period that came up with this view, but it had already been formulated by Meiji nationalism. And it was only because the left failed to adopt it that it was taken up by the right. . . .
The question whether to regard Saigō as a counter-revolutionary or as a symbol of permanent revolution is not a question that can be easily settled. And yet Asianism cannot be defined in separation from this question. This means that the question can be approached from the opposite direction by means of Asianism. This is how I perceive our present intellectual position.