Tsutsui W.M. A Companion to japanese histоry

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33 Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War; Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji; and Fletcher, The Search

for a New Order.

34 McCormack, ‘‘Ninteen-Thirties Japan.’’

35 Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 218.

36 Maruyama, ‘‘The Ideology and Dynamics of Japanese Fascism,’’ pp. 65–80.

37 Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy, p. 317.

38 Kasza, The Conscription Society, and Brooker, The Faces of Fraternalism. Brooker found

that Japanese efforts to mobilize society using traditionalist methods were more successful

than mobilization in Germany and Italy.

39 For example, see Kasza, ‘‘Fascism from Above?’’ and Wilson, Radical Nationalist in

Japan, which criticizes the idea that Kita Ikki was a ‘‘fascist’’ thinker.

40 Duus and Okimoto, ‘‘Fascism and the History of Prewar Japan.’’

41 Kato, ‘‘Taisho

Democracy,’’ p. 236.

42 Berger, Parties Out of Power, ch. 7.

43 Payne, A History of Fascism, p. 336.

44 Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 200.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Akita, George. Foundations of Constitutional Government in Modern Japan, 1868–1900.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Banno Junji. Democracy in Prewar Japan: Concepts of Government, 1871–1937, trans. Andrew

Fraser. London: Routledge, 2001.

Barnhart, Michael. Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security, 1919–1941.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987.

Berger, Gordon. Parties Out of Power in Japan, 1931–1941. Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1977.

Berger, Gordon. ‘‘Politics and Mobilization in Japan, 1931–1945.’’ In Peter Duus, ed., The

Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 6, The Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1988.

Brooker, Paul. The Faces of Fraternalism: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan.

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Dickinson, Frederick. War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914–1919.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999.

Duus, Peter. Party Rivalry and Political Change in Taisho

Japan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1968.

Duus, Peter, and Okimoto, Daniel. ‘‘Fascism and the History of Prewar Japan: The Failure of a

Concept.’’ Journal of Asian Studies 39:1 (1979): 65–76.

Fletcher, W. Miles. The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

Garon, Sheldon. The State and Labor in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1987.

Gluck, Carol. Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1985.

Gordon, Andrew. Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1991.

Gownder, Joseph, and Pekkanen, Robert. ‘‘The End of Political Science? Rational Choice

Analyses in Studies of Japanese Politics.’’ Journal of Japanese Studies 22 (1996): 363–84.

Hackett, Roger. ‘‘Political Modernization and the Meiji Genro

.’’ In Robert Ward, ed., Political

Development in Modern Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.

OLIGARCHY, DEMOCRACY, AND FASCISM 169

Hackett, Roger. Yamagata Aritomo in the Rise of Modern Japan, 1838–1922. Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Hastings, Sally A. Neighborhood and Nation in Tokyo, 1905–1937. Pittsburgh: University of

Pittsburgh Press, 1995.

Johnson, Chalmers. MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–

1975. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1982.

Kasza, Gregory. The Conscription Society: Administered Mass Organizations. New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1995.

Kasza, Gregory. ‘‘Fascism from Above? Japan’s Kakushin Right in Comparative Perspective.’’

In Stein Ugelvik Larsen, ed., Fascism Outside Europe: The European Impulse against Domestic

Conditions in the Diffusion of Global Fascism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Kato, Shu

ichi. ‘‘Taisho

Democracy as the Pre-Stage for Japanese Militarism.’’ In Bernard

Silberman and H. D. Harootunian, eds., Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taisho

Democracy.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974.

Large, Stephen. Organized Workers and Socialist Politics in Interwar Japan. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Large, Stephen. Emperor Hirohito and Sho

wa Japan: A Political Biography. London:

Routledge, 1992.

Maruyama Masao. ‘‘The Ideology and Dynamics of Japanese Fascism.’’ In Maruyama Masao,

Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, ed. Ivan Morris. Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1963.

Masuda, T. ‘‘The Emperor’s Right of Supreme Command as Exercised up to 1930: A Study

based especially on the Takarabe and Kuratomi Diaries.’’ Acta Asiatica 59 (1990): 77–100.

McCormack, Gavan. ‘‘Nineteen-Thirties Japan: Fascism?’’ Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars

14:2 (1982): 15–34.

Mitani Taichiro

. ‘‘The Establishment of Party Cabinets, 1898–1932.’’ In Peter Duus, ed., The

Cambridge History of Modern Japan, vol. 6, The Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1988.

Payne, Stanley. A History of Fascism, 1914–45. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

Paxton, Robert. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Knopf, 2004.

Peattie, Mark. Ishiwara Kanji and Japan’s Confrontation with the West. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1975.

Ramseyer, J. Mark, and Rosenbluth, Frances M. The Politics of Oligarchy: Institutional Choice

in Imperial Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Samuels, Richard. Machiavelli’s Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan .

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Shillony, Ben-Ami. Revolt in Japan: The Young Officers and the February 26, 1936 Incident.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.

Silberman, Bernard. ‘‘The Bureaucratic State in Japan: The Problem of Authority and Legit-

imacy.’’ In Tetsuo Najita and J. Victor Koschmann, eds., Conflict in Modern Japanese

History: The Neglected Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.

Silberman, Bernard. Cages of Reason: The Rise of the Rational State in France, Japan, the

United States, and Great Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Wilson, George. Radical Nationalist in Japan: Kita Ikki, 1883–1937. Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1969.

FURTHER READING

For an authoritative survey, see R. L. Sims, Japanese Political History Since the Meiji

Renovation, 1868–2000 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Valuable portraits of

170 STEPHEN S. LARGE

Ito

Hirobumi, O

kuma Shigenobu, Hara Takashi (Kei), Inukai Tsuyoshi, and Saionji

Kinmochi are presented in Oka Yoshitake, Five Political Leaders of Modern Japan

(Tokyo: Unive rsity of Tokyo Press, 1986). Further studies of the oligarchy include

Banno Junji, The Establishment of the Japanese Constitutional System, trans. J. A. A.

Stockwin (Londo n: Routledge, 19 92); Stewart Lone, Army, Empire and Politics in

Meiji Japan (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), which sheds new light on the complex

political relationship between Yamagata Aritomo and Katsura Taro

; and Shumpei

Okamoto, The Japanese Oligarchy and the Russo-Japanese War (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1970).

Two excellent studies which bear on the issue of democracy are Tetsuo Najita,

Hara Kei in the Politics of Compromise, 1905–1915 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1967), and Sharon Minichiello, Retreat from Reform: Patterns of

Political Behavior in Interwar Jap an (Honolulu: University of Hawai i Press, 1984).

For a nuanced discussion of democracy by a leading Japanese historian, see Matsuo

Takayoshi, ‘‘The Development of Democracy in Japan – Taisho

Democracy: Its

Flowering and Breakdown,’’ Developing Economies 4:4 (1966): 612–37. Contrasting

Japanese perspectives on the quest ion of fascism are Ishida Takeshi, ‘‘Elements of

Tradition and ‘Renovation’ in Japan during the ‘Era of Fascism’ ’’ in his book,

Japanese Political Culture: Change and Continuity (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction

Books, 1983), and Hayashi Kentaro

, ‘‘Japan and Germany in the Interwar Period,’’

in James Morley, ed., Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1971). Some intriguing Western per spectives are found in a recent

book, E. Bruce Reynolds, ed., Japan in the Fascist Era (New York: Palgrave Macmil -

lan, 2004).

OLIGARCHY, DEMOCRACY, AND FASCISM 171

CHAPTER TEN

Social and Economic Change

in Prewar Japan

Mark Jones and Steven Ericson

How did the big name processes of moder nity – political revolution, state formation,

industrialization, urbanization, imperialism, wartime mobilization – change the fabric

of society and the texture of daily life in prewar Japan? More specifically, how did the

peoples of prewar Japan (ranging from unceremoniously disenfranchised samurai of

the 1870s to struggling farmers of the 1890s to the brazen modern girl of the 1920s)

make sense of, contribute to, take advantage of, resist, or negotiate the dizzying

changes occurring around them? As these questions suggest, the social history of

prewar Japan cannot be divorced from economic, political, intellectual, and military

history. Yet a history of social change must make sense of macro-level change through

micro-level analysis. It must above all else be a human story, one that explains and

analyzes how individuals affected and were affected by the modern world taking

shape around them.

Over the past quarter century (1980–2005), Engli sh-language historians of prewar

Japan have clarified and complicated our understanding of the transformative pro-

cesses and human actors at the heart of the major social changes that occurred

between the Me iji Restoration (1868) and the beginning of Japan’s undeclared war

with China (1937). To be sure, they neither speak with one voice nor share a

common evaluation of modernity’s effect on the individual. Diverse as their works

are in topic and viewpoi nt, these historians nonetheless collectively represent a new

generation of interpreters of Japan’s moder n social transformation. Their scholarship

revises older schools of thought and breaks new ground in the study of prewar Japan’s

social history. To begin with, their stories are full of conflict, for these scholars

emphasize that Japan’s modernization, once thought to be smooth and successful,

was in fact fraught with debate and division, suasion and negotiation, coercion

and repression. Furthermore, their stories brim with a panoply of human actors

motivated by disparate interests, for these historians try to move beyond older

historical paradigms that posited two homogenous groups – the state and the people

– as the driving forces of social change in prewar Japan. In addition, their stories

are replete with new voices, as these historians turn to the lives of marginalized

or underexamined populations (et hnic minorities, female factory workers, members

of the middle class) to illuminate significant aspects of Japan’s modern social history.

Finally, their stories are filled with global comparisons and contrasts, as they try

A Companion to Japanese History

Edited by William M. Tsutsui

to und erstand Japan’s social transformation as an instance of the modern, one that

was not an example of Western influence and Japanese imitation but a story of

comparisons and commonalities in modern social experience within and across na-

tional borders.

Meanwhile, studies on Japan’s prewar economy have shifted over the last half-

century from the pioneering though yet to be superseded overviews of G. C. Allen

and W. W. Lockwood and subsequent works dealing with such macro issues as the

nature of entrepreneurship

to detailed analyses of specific modern industries and

enterprises.

Regardless of their research focus, however, economic historians

have continued to grapple with certain broad interpretive questions, including

the contribution of agriculture, the timing of Japan’s industrial revolution, the

role of the state, and the connection between militarism and industrialization.

Two recent books by David Ho well and Ka

ren Wigen suggest potential new direc-

tions, as they challenge conventional views of Japanese economic modernization

by addressing issues of uneven development from a regional, trans-Restoration

perspective.

State and Society

Hovering over the history and historiog raphy of prewar Japan is the state. After

the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese state not only moved to transfigure economic

foundations and political institutions but also committed itself to the wholesale

restructuring of society and the mobilization of the people, whether through the

institution of compulsory elementary education (1872) and military conscription

(1873) or through the abolition of status distinctions (1876). In Japan’s case, the

speed with which this transfor mation occurred begged for explanat ion; and,

during the 1960s and 1970s, two schools of historians emerged to investigate the

respective ro les of the state and the people in these rapid social revolutions. The

modernization school, largely populated by American and British historians, de-

scribed Japan’s modern metamorphosis in sunny, inspirational tones. ‘‘Japan is the

first of a class of nations that now occupies a large part of our attention: the

underdeveloped, non-Western society determined to modernize herself. So far, she

is the only one that has succeeded,’’ wrote one such scholar in 1965.

These

historians saw the state as a dominant and enlightened force in promoting Japan’s

modernization and the population as a pliant yet capable mass able to be guided

toward modern ways. A second group known as the minshu

shi (‘‘people’s history’’)

school, consisting mostly of Japanese historians, stressed the state’s repression of the

popular will in the course of enacting its social revolution from above . Minshu

shi

scholars, including Irokawa Daikichi, emphasized how the creative energies of the

people were quashed b y a government primarily interested in creating a submissive,

obedient citizenry.

Now, a newer generation of scholars is challe nging the work of these earlier

historians and, in the process, complicating our understanding of state–society rela-

tions. Nowhere is this trend clearer than in the field of educational history. In the

earliest efforts to explain Japan’s seemingly speedy and seamless modernization,

scholars such as Ronald Dore and Herbert Passin explored what they took to be a

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGE IN PREWAR JAPAN 173

significant part of the story: how the Meiji state created a literate, patriotic citizenry

through the newly instituted elementary educational system. Their work emphasized

the helpful ‘‘legacies’’ (Dore’s word) of a late Tokugawa ‘‘education boom’’ and

the relative ease with which the Meiji state was able to channel popular enthusiasm for

education into participation in the state-sponsored school system.

Brian Platt,

by contrast, challeng es the view of the state’s imposition of mandatory schooling

as a smooth, u ncontested process. By combining a trans-Restoration chronology

with local history methodology (a combination employed by an increasing number

of historians of nineteenth-century Japan), Pl att positions himself to evaluate,

in microcosm, the efficacy of the Tokugawa legacy and the ease of Meiji state

formation. In a rebuttal to one of the fundamental premises of modernization theory,

Platt judges the Tokugawa legacy as obstacle as much as aid. ‘‘Rather than ensuring

the success of the Meiji government’s educational project, this legacy altered the

terms of the dialogue through which the new system took shape,’’ he writes.

In other words, local schoolteachers and village notables in Nagano prefecture, albeit

undeniably enthusiastic about education, also came armed with their own under-

standing of proper schooling inherited from the pre-Restoration years. Often with

great detail and local flavor, Platt makes the important point that the Tokugawa

legacy was not black and white, neither entirely help nor entirely hindrance. It was,

nonetheless, a legacy that the Meiji government was unable to wantonly ignore or

override.

Moreover, Platt’s work contributes to an ongoing and important rethinking of the

dynamics of state–society relations, especially during the crucial decades of the 1870s

and 1880s. In Platt’s view, compulsory education and other social transformations

were neither simply the work of state officials nor the product of a unitary govern-

mental vision. In Platt’s narrative, the local engaged in an ongoing ‘‘dialogue’’ with

the national during the 1870s and 1880s, in large part because the views of Nagan o

villagers were not always consistent with post-Restoration statist visions of an effective

educational system. Here, however, Platt’s story is not how local communities were

overpowered by the Meiji state, as minshu

shi scholars had it, but, rather, ‘‘how local

people, brimming with their own ideas about education and their own memories of

crisis and restoration, negotiated the formation of the new order in their communi-

ties.’’

In the process, they became influential and willing participants in the nation-

building project.

Platt’s work builds upon the insights Carol Gluck offers in Japan’s Modern Myths,a

seminal contribution to the field of prewar social history. In simplest terms, Gluck

chronicles how the Meiji era witnessed not the birth of a singular, state-authored

blueprint of social transformation but, rather, the release of a cacophony of voices –

some associated with the state, others not; some critical of the state, others not – but

each with its own viewpoint. In Gluck’s hands, the Meiji era is no longer a time

characterized by top-dow n soc ial change; instead, it becomes a time populated by

diverse (and heretofore neglected) individuals and social groups, each striving to play

a vocal and active role in the remaking of Japanese society.

Mark Lincicome’s book, for example, studies one such group, a collection of early

Meiji schoolteachers, normal-school professors, junior-level Ministry of Education

bureaucrats, and education journalists who worked to introduce the principles of

‘‘developmental education’’ (kaihatsu kyo

iku) into the national elementary school

174 MARK JONES AND STEVEN ERICSON

curriculum. Echoing Gluck’s point, Lincicome shows how these teachers and educa-

tors, far from the pawns of the state, were driven by a multiplicity of concerns: a need

for professional respectability, a desire for autonomy from state bureaucratic man-

dates, and an eagerness to integrate the global cutting edge of educational theory into

Japan’s nascent school system. At the same time, these educators were by no means

opponents of the nation-building project, though their views differed markedly from

the dominant Ministry of Education view, which saw the educational system as a

molder of ‘‘little citizens’’ (sho

kokumin). While their often combative efforts to

introduce Pestalozzian, child-centered educational theory and practice lost out to

the Herbartian, morality-centered version, Lincicome’s story highlights the con-

tested nature of social change, the varied motivations of ‘‘the people,’’ and the

multiple visions of the modern that existed during an era once thought to have

been dominated by a monolithic state.

The Middle Classes and Modern Life

Gluck’s 1985 book also mirrored and engendered the emergence of another import-

ant trend in the historiography of prewar Japan: the decentering of the state as a

transformative force and the foregrounding of new social groups and individuals

crucial to Japan’s modern so cial revolutions. This trend figures most prominently in

the field of urban history. Scholarship by Earl Kinmonth, Donald Roden, Jordan

Sand, Barbara Sato, and others examines the making of urban society, in particular the

emergence of social icons, institutions, and ideologies that defined prewar Japane se

society and, moreover, became enduring features of the twentieth-century Japanese

social landscape. Their work centers on the emergence of a social group loosely

termed the middle classes, a subject of historical inquiry that, until recently, was

largely the province of scholars of postwar Japan. By unearthing the history of this

social stratum in the pre-1945 years, these historians not only open up new possibil-

ities for examining continuit ies between the prewar and the postwar years but also

flesh out our understanding of the mediators and mechanisms of prewar social

change.

These historians locate the emergence of modern social norms and ideals, whether

the twentieth-century incarnations of family and childhood, ideals of masculinity and

femininity, or practices of leisure and consumerism, in the urban milieu of so-called

prewar middle-class society. Their focus, temporally speaking, is the late Meiji and

Taisho

years (1890s to 1920s) and, geographically spe aking, Tokyo. Their human

focus is a new group of academicians and professionals who functioned as modernity’s

middlemen. Neither representatives of the state nor members of the everyday popu-

lation, these people were educated elites who became spokespeople fo r and shapers of

a new middle-class society. Whether public intellectuals, university profess ors, child

psychologists, or magazine editors, they investigated topics ranging from domestic

architecture to sexology to hygiene, often as discrete fields of study (or gaku);

disseminated their opinions to a larger public, often in the pages of mass circulation

magazines and books; and saw their views consumed by an emerging middle-class

population. In the process, these influential figures shaped the urban imagination and

transformed the way people thought, acted, and behaved. Jordan Sand, for instance,

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGE IN PREWAR JAPAN 175

details ‘‘the public construction of the private sphere,’’ as a cadre of early twentieth-

century intellect uals, architects, and reformers worked to redesign domestic interiors

and, in the process, reshape the notion of family and home for a new Japan. Similarly,

Sabine Fru¨hstu¨ck studies the work and words of Taisho

and early Sho

wa era doct ors,

eugenicists, and sexologists and recounts their role in the construction of modern

Japanese attitudes toward the body, sex , and sexuality.

Crucial to the influence of modernity’s middlemen were new urban institutions,

sites where communities and hierarchies were (re)produced, modern forms of know-

ledge disseminated, and modern identities fashioned. The mass media was an insti-

tution critical to the building and bounding of a middle-class society, and scholars

such as Earl Kinmonth, James Huffman, Barbara Sato, and Jordan Sand have begun

to examine the role of the mass media as both mirror and maker of social change.

Other urban institutions, from the cafe to the department store to higher schools,

also played an important yet underexamined role in stratifying society, creating social

groups, and offering individuals new sources of identity. For example, Donald Roden

analyzes how the prewar institution of elite higher schools (ko

gakko

) ‘‘eased the

transition from government by a hereditary feudal social class to government by a

new middle-class status group of academic achievers.’’

This new scholarship on a pre-1945 middle class, while tending to focus on

the words of its spokespeople, has nonetheless rendered a picture of prewar society

full of heretofore unrecognized opportunities for mobility – geographic, social,

economic, educational – among a widening swath of the population. This type of

work broadens our understanding of modern social change, for it highlights the new-

found prospects that modernity offered to the individual. Take, for example, Earl

Kinmonth’s book The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought. By focusing on the

emergence of the ideal of risshin shusse (‘‘success in life’’) and the iconic male

corporate worker known as the ‘‘salaryman,’’ Kinmonth makes the case that pre war

Japanese society was a land where meritocratic prin ciples mixed with dreams of social

mobility to produce a stratum of individuals committed to getting ahead in the world.

For these types, self-centered aspiration, not nationalist fervor, was the primary

motivator of individual action. More of this type of work – what Japanese historian

Amano Ikuo calls ‘‘the social history of education as credential’’ (gakureki no sha-

kaishi) – needs to be done, since indiv idualist striving through educational achieve-

ment became one of the hallmarks of the twentieth-century Japanese social

experience.

The field of women’s history has also brought to light women’s place as individual

opportunists within urban society. While earlier work by Sharon Sievers stressed how

Japan’s modern social transformation oppressed women, newer work on women’s

history, such as Gail Bernstein’s edited volume Recreating Japanese Women, strives to

recover women’s agency, while still recognizing the economic and social constraints

faced by women.

For example, Barbara Sato poses the question: ‘‘Was there not

room within the confines of the nation-state for urban women to find agency – be it

in the form of changing fashions; attitudes toward work, love, and sexuality; marriage

and the family; communication; or personal self-fulfillment?’’

Sato examines the

varied lives of Taisho

era housewives, working women, and modern girls and makes

clear how modernity opened new avenues for individual expression and social ad-

vancement.

176 MARK JONES AND STEVEN ERICSON

The Underside of Modernity

Furnishing a counterweight to the above scholarship is a group of historians who

focus less on the opportunities and more on the costs of Japan’s social transform-

ation. These historians attempt to understand how the lives of individuals and social

groups were rear ranged and ultimately reduced by industrialization, nation-building,

imperialism, and other modern forces. The title of Mikiso Hane’s book – Peasants,

Rebels, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan – makes clear the thematic

thrust and the human focus of their works.

Yet, even within this group of historians,

there is argument and dissent, as they quarrel over the quantitative and qualitative

effect of modernity on the lives of farmers, factory workers, and ethnic minorities.

The most vocife rous debate has occurred in rural history, a field once dominated by

Marxist and Mar xist-influenced historians practicing on both sides of the Pacific. The

Marxist story was, by and large, straightforward: The reforms of the Meiji govern-

ment, combined with the takeoff into industrial capitalism and the rise of a parasitic

landlord system, shifted the rural economy from a moral economy to a market

economy, leaving peasants in materially impoverished, spiritually immiserated circum-

stances, with little agency to exercise and with no paternal figure willing to minister to

their needs in times of distress. Cent ral to the Marxist argument was the rise of

tenancy disputes during the 1920s and 1930s , which were interpreted as the boiling

over of huma n rage against an exploitative landlord–tenant system. In his 1986 book,

Richard Smethurst challenged this argument, suggesting that tenancy disputes

should be seen, instead, as a sign of the ‘‘entrepreneurial dynamism’’ of peasants.

According to Smethurst, increased living standards and rising expectations among the

peasantry impelled them to behave as rational actors and to ask for more – from rent

reductions to improved contract terms – in the hopes that prot est would bring an

even brighter future. His book was met with reviews vitriolic in tone and thunderous

in moral outrage, as a number of scholars accused him of overgeneralizing from a

narrow case study, misrepresenting the existing scholarsh ip on the tenancy move-

ment, and neglecting the costs of modernization.

Yet scholarship on rural history that has chosen not to engage directly with this

polemical debate reveals a more nuanced, evenhanded picture of social change in the

modern rural sector. Edward Pratt’s book on the go

, the wealthy peasants once

thought to be the primary engine and beneficiary of socioeconomic change across the

nineteenth century, captures the slippery ground that village elites found themselves

negotiating in the wake of the Meiji Restoration. In Pratt’s view, the late Tokugawa

and early Meiji village was not a simple, unchanging world of rich peasants and poor

peasants. Even rich peasants had their problems. Increasingly subject to the whims of

international trade, the vagaries of a protoindustrial economy, and the intrusions of

an aggressive stat e, the social group known as the go

ultimately dissolv ed under the

weight of Japan’s transition to modernity.

Like Pratt, Kerry Smith illuminates

another epochal transformation in prewar rural society: the onset of the Great

Depression and the rise of the rural revitalization movement during the 1930s.

While standard accounts point to state directives and handouts as the primary agents

of revitalization, Smith, by grounding his work in a local history of Sekishiba village in

Fukushima prefecture, effectively shows how the rural was, in many ways, responsible

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGE IN PREWAR JAPAN 177

for its own revitalization and how the ideas and actions of the rural influenced

national policy, not the other way around. At the same time, Smith refuses to

homogenize the rural population, choosing instead to dissect the village’s various

populations and to examine their particular methods and motives for revi talization.

Such attention to the dynam ics of social change and the complexities of human

behavior makes for compelling social history.

The rural soil was not the only site where modernity’s underside was revealed,

negotiated, and resist ed. Social and political protest also emerged among city dwell-

ers, factory workers, and ethnic minorities, most noticeably in the years following the

Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Recent work by Michael Weiner and David Howell,

for instance, makes clear how protest against marginalization and discrimination was a

constitutive part of the lives of prewar ethnic minorities, including Ainu, Koreans,

Chinese, and Okinawans. ‘‘A critical aspect of the minority experience in modern

Japan has been resistance to racialized exclusions, exploitation and oppression,’’

writes Weiner.

For Weiner and other historical investigators of prewar popular

protest, quest ions regarding the protesters’ agency and mentality are paramou nt.

What social conditions motivated diverse groups to voice their outrage and demand

change? Were protesters able to effect change for themselves and others? Patricia

Tsurumi’s bleak account of female factory workers in the Meiji cotton and silk-reeling

mills details the hostile work environment faced by these wome n, who often found

themselves trapped, harassed, and raped within the confines of the modern factory.

Tsurumi, however, does not leave these women powerless. By analyzing the songs

they intoned on the factory floor, Tsurumi recovers their discordant words of protest

– though, as she herself notes, the only truly effective means of protest for these

factory girls was escape, often under the cover of nightfall.

Other works on popular protest by Michael Lewis and Andrew Gordon extend

Tsurumi’s work, both chronologically and thematically, by emphasizing the budding

social and political consciousness of early twentieth-century protesters and the in-

creasing efficacy of their efforts. In the works of Lewis and Gordon, protesters appear

not simply as individuals degraded by modernity but as peoples transformed, able to

combine a longstanding vocabulary of ‘‘Confucian benevolence and the responsibility

of social ‘superiors’ ’’ with new politically aware, socially empowered calls for govern-

mental attention to social welfare. The rice riots of 1918 marked an important moment

of transition, Lewis argues, as marginalized populations began to engage in ‘‘new

forms of political involvement’’ and to invoke their social right to political citizen-

ship.

The nation-building project had now transformed even the unenfranchised

into vocal, empowered agents for change. A ndrew Gordon makes a related point in his

sweeping study Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan. Gordon probes the

inner workings of the factory worker’s mentality (what he calls ‘‘the intellectual world

of factory laborers’’) and paints this modern figure as able to see modernity’s under-

side yet also unwilling to reject modernity. As Gordon writes, the factory worker was,

on the one hand, eager to identify ‘‘economic insecurity, epitomized by unemploy-

ment, and the indignity of low social status, as the essence of the ‘inhumanity of

capitalism’.’’ On the other hand, worker protests, whether in the form of strikes or

unionization ef forts during the 1920s, were ‘‘a call less to overthrow or replace

existing economic or social systems than to transform them and gain access to them

on dramatically improved terms.’’

These factory workers saw no contradiction

178 MARK JONES AND STEVEN ERICSON