Tsutsui W.M. A Companion to japanese histоry

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culture like his count erparts in China and Korea. Unifying such a fractured socio-

politico-cultural world was not only complicated by inter nal divisions, but also by the

parallels, forced or real, across Northeast Asian societies during the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries.

It was this tradition of the potential transcendence of the samurai class that

provided the matrix for the sociocultural changes and that led to the Meiji Restor-

ation, the birth moment of Japanese nationalism. Its origins may be found in the

samurai scholars of Mito domain, a collateral house of the ruling Tokugawa shogun-

ate, but one that nursed a long simmering sense of status inconsistency: Mito was

close to power, but allowed to write only history, not policy. Nonetheless, one Mito

samurai, Aizawa Seishisai, offered his New Thesis in 1825 in an effort to propose a

definition of Japan’s ‘‘national polity’’ (kokutai) on the basis of troubling encounters

with Russians off Japan’s northern coasts. Aizawa called for the samurai to unite in

protecting Japan’s kokutai. But what was this kokutai? Was it an early for m of

nationality? The term was open to all sorts of interpretations, and Aizawa’s contri-

bution was to shift its meaning from the shogunal governing structure to a sense of

cultural continuity located in the monarchy that would mark Japan as distinctive from

all other places. This return to the monarchy as the cultural core of Japan’s distinct-

iveness joined with the cultural exceptionalism of Motoori Norinaga and those who

shaped the ‘‘nativist’’ (kokugaku) movement against Chinese and foreign cultures.

Ultimately, this cultural distinctiveness became tied to calls to restore the monarch to

power, as ‘‘overthrowing the bakufu and restoring the monarchy’’ became the

rallying cry for disaffected samurai who, arme d with swords, would upset the political

order in the name of loyalty to the monarch. This they did in 1867.

The Meiji State and the Challenge of Nationalism

The movement that overthrew the shogunate effected a revolution, but it cannot be

called nationalist in its political inspiration or objectives. While anti-foreignism and

loyalty to the monarch were conjoined to a sense of nativism, those who participated in

the war for Restoration were largely samurai and the key players came from a handful of

western domains (chiefly, Satsuma and Cho

shu

). Few if any envisioned a new society in

which samurai privileges woul d be abolished and peasants elevated to equal status with

themselves. Even fewer could imagine the collective people of Jap an as sovereign, and

cultural differences and domainal loyalties rem ained pronounced among them. Nor

was it immediately clear that political reform would lead to a new, nationally central-

ized state. Rather, even before the fighting was over, tensions broke out among leading

participants as to whether the monarchical court (the Meiji monarch was only 14 years

old at the time of the Restoration), or whether the samurai from Satsuma, Cho

shu

Tosa, or other domains would take over leadership of the realm. It was only in the

immediate years after the Meiji Restoration of 1867 that the new direction towards

centralization and a constitutional state became clear, a direction that was not entirely

the expectation of those who had fought to ove rthrow the shogunate.

Centralization of the political realm can be explained as a combination of two

pressures, internal and exter nal, both of which were largely beyond the control of the

new leadership of Japan. First, and most pressing, was the need to have a legitimate

530 KEVIN M. DOAK

government with authority over the entire territory in order to negotiate with the

Western powe rs that had forced unequal treaties on Japan in 1854. O

kubo Toshi-

michi was a key player in forcing through centralization of Japan’s political structure

during the 1870s and in elevating the monarch as an absolute ruler in line with

Prussian advic e. O

kubo was the leading statist of the early post-Restoration years, but

he was no nationalist. His death in 1878 at the hands of a disgruntled samurai angry

at O

kubo’s centralizing policies is a stark reminder that the Meiji state was not the

result of nationalism. The second force promoting centralization of the government

was the need to find a new principle to unite the disparate political forces within the

domestic realm. The Restoration had displace d the old bakuhan order, its reliance on

Neo-Confucianism, and its social hierarchy based on the caste system. Yet, in the

immediate aftermath of revolution, there was a real risk that Satsuma and Cho

shu

might simply replace the Tokugawa in a new shogunal government. Pressure from

other domains and the court ensured that this would not happen. Instead, some

leaders in the new gover nment, especially Inoue Kowashi, considered a variety of

Western models of a centralized, monarchical nation-state along with new concepts of

the Japanese people as a single national community.

Evidence of this growing nationalism is available from the outset of the new Meiji

government. Even before the new governmental structure was determined, social

reform policies registered aspirations for creating a new national body. In 1870,

commoners were allowed the dignity (previously reserved for samurai) of using a

surname and the following year they were allowed the privilege of marrying into

aristocratic famil ies. If one sign of nationalism is the effort to extend the dignity of

aristocrats to all members of the national community, then the Japanese people were

well on the way to becoming a nation. By 1872, this process of abolishing the social

estates of the ancien re

gime was well under way, with additional laws opening

education to all people and permitting freedom of occupation and travel within the

country. At the same time, some samurai, sensing their declining privileges, intro-

duced republican theor ies of nationalism and sought to assert their voices in the

development of the new nation. Key actors were affiliated with the old Tosa domain,

an ally of Restoration but a relatively small domain and thus easily marginalized by

Satsuma and Cho

shu

. Former samurai from this domain, such as Itagaki Taisuke and

Goto

Sho

jiro

, submitted a petition in 1874 for the establishment of a popularly

elected legislature. This act dramatized and intensified the belief of many samurai

activists that their aspirations for a ‘‘new world’’ that would arise from the Restor-

ation were being undermined by the evolving ‘‘despotism’’ of the new government .

Those anti-government activists associated with this petition formed the core of

what would later be known as the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement (jiyu

minken undo

). Initially composed of samurai and some urban intellectuals, the

movement soon encompassed rural people as well and claimed a membership of

200,000 by 1881. That year it forced a promise from the government to establish a

legislature within ten years, but the movement declined after 1882, when members

grew increasingly violent and the government began to suppress it through force. Yet,

throughout the first two decades of the Meiji period, when government and society

were in formative stages, the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement voiced a range

of political theories that contested the right of the state to determine political affairs

without the sanction of the nation. At the same time, it was theorists within the

NATIONAL IDENTITY AND NATIONALISM 531

movement who played key roles in articulating what the nation was and how it might

function in the new Japan. It was these political theorists who began to identify with

the position of kokumin, and they made a shar p distinction between this emerging

sense of nation and what they often called the ‘‘despotic’’ government.

The response by the government was to focus on state-building in the belief

that the state would create the nation. In its earliest days, the provision al government

(the Dajo

kan) included senior councilors like Eto

Shimpei and Inoue Kowashi,

who were influenced by nationalism and sought to build a true nation-state. As

minister of justice, Eto

had tried to introduce a French republican legal system with

an emphasis on civil rights. But when that failed, he left the government and joined

the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, ultimately dying in an armed revolt

against the government in 1874. For Eto

, the state no longer held out promise of

forming a republican nation (kokumin), so he abandoned it. His choice contrasts

nicely with that of Inoue. Inoue adopted a more gradualist approach, continuing

to believe that legal refor ms would transform the state into a nation-state. But even

he abandoned this position after the 1881 political crisis. The political crisis of that

year was a result of a rift in the government between the national (kokumin ) faction in

the government and the statist (kokka) faction. The former was represented by

kuma Shigenobu, who supported the People’s Rights petition for a popularly

elected assembly, and the latter by Ito

Hirobumi who advocated a Prussian-

style constitutional mon archy. Ito

’s faction prevailed, and O

kuma and many of

his supporters left the government. Inoue stayed in the government with Ito

, how-

ever, since he believed it was important to establish the legal structure of the new

government, a government of laws rather than of mystical monarchical privilege.

Inoue believed that the nation (kokumin) could be incorporated into the new

monarchical state, even without popular sovereignty or an elected assembly, as the

nation was the particular position of the people as defined by the scope of law in the

new state.

By remaining within the government, Inoue provided an exam ple of the

priority of law and structure in the shaping of the new state. But the ultimate

settlement of the legal system of the state, in the form of the Meiji constitution of

1889, made it clear that sovereignty rested with the monarch and the people were

reduced to his ‘‘subjects’’ ( shinmin), not codif ied as a nation (kokumin) with national

rights.

The imperial constitution was aptly named: it rejected the concept of a

nation-state for a monarchical empire in which territory was more important

than the sovereignty of the nation (kokumin). Karat ani Ko

jin has summed up this

achievement succinctly: ‘‘the Meiji Restoration created a state, but it was not able to

form a nation.’’

The Meiji constitution then did not resolve the nationalist longings of the Japanese

people. Instead, it exacerbated the gap between the elitist monarchical state and those

who had hoped that, in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration, Japan would become a

true nation-state (kokumin-kokka ). Even as the nature of the impending constitution

became clear, leading nationalist intellectuals organized groups and publications to

contest ‘‘the superficial Westernization’’ of the constitution and to promote what

they felt was the cultural essence of the nation (kokusuishugi). Tokutomi Soho

was

the prime mover behind the for mation of the Society of Friends of the Nation

(Min yu

sha) in 1887, and Miyak e Setsurei and Shiga Shigetaka were key players in

the formation of the Society for Political Education (Seikyo

sha) the following year.

532 KEVIN M. DOAK

The Society of Friends of the Nation published its views in its journal Kokumin no

tomo (Friends of the Nation) – the name was directed inspired by the American radical

journal The Nation) – and in its newspaper, the Kokumin shimbun (National News).

The Society for Political Education made its views known in its journal The Japanese,

and members of the Society were on close terms with Kuga Katsunan who founded

his journal Japan in 1889. Although one can find some differences among these

Societies and their journals (especially after Tokutomi lent his support to the state

around the Russo-Japanese War), in general they intoned a nationalism that was

critical of the pro-Western cultural policies of the Meiji state, its apparent weak

diplomacy vis-a

-vis the Western powers, and its indiffer ence to the cultural, social,

political, and economic rights of the nation. The overall thrust of this populist

nationalism was toward a greater incorporation of the people into the state: not as

subjects of the emperor, as the Meiji constitution defined them, but as the true

cultural core of the Japanese nation.

Empire and Nationalism: An Uneasy Relationship

If the Meiji constitution was not designed to create a nation (kokumin) but to

suppress nationalism (kokuminshugi) in favor of loyalty to the monarchical state,

this new state nonetheless remained concerned with methods of incorporating the

people’s hearts and minds as loyal subjects. The state had powerful tools at its

disposal: the bureaucracy, compulsory education, and the draft. By the end of the

nineteenth century, the education system and the civil service hierarchy had largely

been formal ized, and ‘‘the civil bureaucracy had emerged by 1900 as the primary

instrument of decision making and the primary structure of political leadership

selection.’’

This step effectively insulated the government from the pressures of

nationalism that often came from the political parties as they promoted the legacies

of O

kuma Shigenobu and the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. Under the

Meiji constitution, conscription became a universal duty of men and the right to

service by proxy was abolished. These mechanisms for incorporating the people into

the state were tested in 1894 when Japan went to war with Qing China over

hegemony in Korea. In some respects, the Sino-Japanese War was an ideal oppor-

tunity for the state to absorb and control the forces of nationalism. It was a war

propelled by nationalism, insofar as it represented the application of the principle of

nationalism to a region that had been organized by the Sinocentric claims of dynastic

hegemony. And this sense that Japan was fighting to liberate Koreans (and by

extension, all Asians) from Sinocentric hegemony to their own nationalism was a

heady intoxicant for many Japanese. As the influential Christian intellectual Uchi-

mura Kanzo

wrote in Friends of the Nation, ‘‘Our goal is to wake up China and show

her what her calling is, to set her to work cooperating with us in the reformation of

the Orient. We are fighting for the realization of eternal peace.’’

This sense that

national unity and purpose could best be realized through the state’s acti ons in the

region changed the dynamics of Japanese nationalism, as now the state could be

idealized as the agent for social justice in the region, and not merely seen as oppress-

ing the Japanese people at home.

NATIONAL IDENTITY AND NATIONALISM 533

A new state-centered nationalism was on the horizon. In May 1897, after the

victory in the Sino-Japanese War and the Triple Intervention by Russia, Germany, and

France which forced Japan to return many of its war spoils to China, Inoue Tetsujiro

and Kimura Takataro

formed the Great Japan Society and published their journal

Nipponshugi. In this journal, they outlined a new nationalism called ‘‘Japanism’’

(Nipponshugi). As Oguma Eiji has pointed out, this ‘‘Japanism’’ was directed against

Christian nationalists like Uchimura who were still uneasy with a monarch that was

increasingly laden with Shinto

religious significance .

In this social Darwinist climate,

it was easy to believe that a nation had to either expand or be colonized, and

expansion required the power and legitimacy of a state. No longer was the state

seen as the embodiment of a foreign culture; rather, the state seemed the only hope

for the protection of the Japanese people against the encroachments of Western

imperialism. Takayama Chogyu

was the most influential advocate of this nationalist

reconciliation with the monarchical stat e. He returned to the concept of kokutai and

reinterpreted it as the core of modern Japanese nationalism, a nationalism that found

its full expression in the monarchical state. Thus Takayama argued it was time ‘‘to

return to a correct statism (kokkashugi) . . . that is fully mindful of the special qualities

of our national popular sentiment and its development.’’

This statist ‘‘Japanism’’

abandoned the empathy for the weak and the plight of the people that had informed

the earlier cultural nationalism and its protest of environmental pollution and labor

exploitation (for example, the Ashio copper mine incident, the Takas hima coal mine

incident). Instead, ‘‘Japanism’’ increasingly connected nationalism with the pride of

the strong and unleashed this ar rogance in Japan’s relations with others in East Asia.

Along with this return to the concept of a ‘‘national polity’’ (kokutai) located in the

monarchy in order to shore up domestic support for the state’s wars in Asia, Japanism

also advocated ethnic assimi lation as a method of supporting the state’s colonial

ventures, especially in Korea and Taiwan. This inevitable concern with assimilation of

different ethnic peoples under the jurisdiction of the Japanese empire raised the

question of the relationship of ethnicity to national identity, both for non-Japanese in

the region and for the Japanese themselves. The issue of ethn icity and national identity

was complicated, however, by the strong arguments put up by Christians like Watase

kichi, who accepted ethnic nationality (minzoku) as a distinctive social identity but

argued that it should be subordinated to a higher religious principle, not to a political

institution like the state. Watase’s main concern was the state’s effort to redefine the

monarch as a national ethical figurehead after the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Educa-

tion. Inoue Tetsujiro

, a founding member of the Japanist group, used the Rescri pt for

his attacks on Christians as ‘‘un-Japanese.’’ Japanist ideologues found themselves in the

awkward position of upholding the monarch as both a tribal chieftain for the ethnic

Japanese and a principle of unity for colonized ethnic groups. This position was most

clearly expressed by ethicist Yumoto Takehiko, who argued that ‘‘our state is composed

exclusively of the Yamato nation (minzoku), and even if one maintains that it gradually

came to include other ethnic nations (i-minzoku), these all became Japanize d and did

not retain their own ethics or morality as distinctive ethnic nations.’’ This cont radiction

(between empire as the space of ethnic assimilation and empire as rooted in the

monarch as the ethnic chieftain of the Yamato nation) was never resolved during the

imperial period, but efforts to address it continually brought anthropological and

ethnological theories to the center of debates over nati onal identity.

534 KEVIN M. DOAK

An unintended consequence of Japanism’s effort to find a more solid foundation

for national identity in the ethnic nation-state and the greater attention given to the

concept of ethnic identity in nationalist debates was the unlea shing of this concept of

ethnicity from the state. Minzoku became the preferred lens through which to

understand nationalism among those who drew from the Freedom and People’s

Rights Movement and its effort to address the concerns of the weak and the dispos-

sessed. Nationality, in this ethnic sense, went precisely in the opposite direction from

that in which the Japanists had tried to direct it: it became dislodged from the political

state, a kind of free-floating national identit y whose unfixity was precisely a measure

of its radical possibilities, both domestically and throughout the emerging empire.

The best example of agents of this ethnic nationalism in the empire is that loosely

affiliated group of activists, frustrated pol iticians, thugs and ne er-do-wells known as

the ‘‘continental adventurers’’ (tairiku ro

nin). A rather amorphous group, it in-

cluded members of right-wing organizations such as the Gen yo

sha and the Amur

River Society, the Christian liberationist Miyazaki To

ten and the socialist Kita Ikki.

Many traced their intellectual and political lineage back to the Freedom and Peop le’s

Rights Movement. Miyazaki’s older brother Hachiro

, for example, was a leader of the

People’s Rights Party in Kumamoto and the Gen  yo

sha was formed in 1881, during

the height of that movement, by Hiraoka Ko

taro

, a survivor of the Satsuma Rebel-

lion. He was joined by To

yama Mitsuru who had spent time in jail for his participa-

tion in the Hagi Uprising of 1876. Hiraoka was elected to the lower house of the Diet

just as the Sino-Japanese War broke out, and he is a good reminder that party

politicians, especially those who trace d their lingeage to the Freedom and People’s

Rights Movement, often were quick to work independently of the state in their pan-

Asianist agendas. But it was the formation of the Amur River Society in 1901,

drawing on many members of the Gen yo

sha, that marked a significant shift towards

intervention in Asia in the name of ethnic nationalism . Founded in 1901 by Uchida

Ryo

hei, the Society announced, as one of its guiding principles, the encouragement

of ‘‘the Asian ethnic nations (Ajia minzoku) and their resistance to legalism, which

they felt had restricted the people’s freedom.’’

While the Amur River Society was

not opposed to the annexation of Korea (largely due to their opposition to growing

Russian influence in the region), they strongly championed pan-Asianism and ethnic

nationalism in China and the Philippines. Needless to say, their pan-Asianism was

deeply influenced by their anti-Western culturalism, and their support for ethnic

nationalism often was combined with a belief that constitutions and states were

unwelcome impositions of Western political ideas on traditional Asian cultures.

Anti-imperialist nationalism also had a domestic face, and it did not always look to

the right. Socialists led the charge against imperialism at home, and it should be

noted that almost all the leaders of Japan’s first socialist party were Christian.

Socialism and Christianity often were conjoined in the Meiji period – both in their

anti-imperialism and in their support for a nationalism of the dispossessed, a nation-

alism that often turned to ethnic nationality rather than the state for its ideal

community. The Russo-Japanese War, particularly the arguments leading up to it,

served as a catalyst for bringing socialists and Christians together and changing the

context of Japanese nationalism. In August 1903, pan-Asianists Konoe Atsumaro and

yama Mitsuru criticized the government for not moving quickly enough to de-

mand that Russia withdraw its troops from the region and for neglecting Japan’s

NATIONAL IDENTITY AND NATIONALISM 535

divine mission to bring peace to East Asia by liberating Manchuria from Qing China.

Forming the Anti-Russia Society, they sparked a nationalist movement around the

country. They were joined by Tokutomi’s National News and Miyake’s The Japanese

in advocating war with Russia. Opponents of the war included the Christian Uchi-

mura Kanzo

, socialist Ko

toku Shu

sui, and anarchist Sakai Toshihiko, all journalists for

the Yorozu cho

. When the editor of Yorozu cho

, Kuroiwa Ruiko

, came out in favor

of the war, this anti-war group broke off and started their own newspaper, the

Commoner’s News. This newspaper, and the Society of Commoners behind it, gave

rise to a new form of populist nationalism which invoked the concept of the nation

that had appeared first in the 1870s in conjunction with the dissolution of the Edo

period caste system. Whether socialist or Christian, its supporters envisioned the

nation in terms of an egalitarian social body and not in terms of the glories of the

military or the imperialist state. As Sakai noted, ‘‘our reverence and attachment to

Tokutomi and the Min’yu

sha was almost complete.’’

By this, Sakai meant their

attraction to Tokutomi’s earlier nationalism (kokuminshugi), not his later advocacy of

the war and support for the imperialist state.

The Russo-Japanese War forced a deeper divide in Japanese nationalism. Som e

populist nationalists like Tokutomi felt that it was time to unite nation with state in

the pursuit of international power and recognition. Others wer e pulled into populist

nationalism by their opposition to the state’s militarist expansion. As we have seen,

this new emphasis on the people as the true nation, along with the sustained inter-

ethnic social relations that empire created, had introduced the concept of minzoku

into early twentieth-century nationalist rhetoric. But this concept of the people as an

ethnic group had ambivalent uses. In the hands of statists, it was used as a tool for

cultural integration into the state and its projects, as we have seen with Takayama. But

after 1905, it was increasingly used by domestic critics of the state: by defining the

people as neither imperial subjects (shinmin) nor memb ers of the state (kokumin),

they used ethnic nationality to situate the Japanese as a cultural national body

independent of the constitutional state. This form of ethnic nationalism often

added an element of pan-Asian, or at least anti-Western, sentiment to its cache.

Shirayanagi Shu

ko illustrates well the subsequent adventures of this ethnic national-

ism.

Shirayanagi began as an activist working with the Commoners Society, along

with Ko

toku and Sakai. He tur ned to historical studies to identify the essence of the

Japanese nation, suggesting that its origins well predated the recently constructed

Meiji state and its Western constitutional form. Most importantly, he identified the

subject of his national history as that of the minzoku, not the state. This advocacy of

ethnic nationalism, while it would seem to have its origins on the political left,

actually took Shirayanagi (and quite of few other post-Marxists) to national socialism

in the 1930s.

While the origins of the national socialist and ‘‘ultra-nation alist’’ movements of the

1930s can be traced back to the rise of this populist nationalism in the early twentieth

century (or in some senses, even back to the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement

of the late ninete enth century), the most immediate historical factor in shaping ethnic

nationalism was World War I. Until recently, historians have neglected the impact of

World War I on Japan, deeming it a ‘‘European war.’’

Unlike the Russo-Japanese

War, it was not the fighting, nor the enhanced prestige gained through the war, that

was most influential on Japanese nationalism. In fact, Japan played a minor role in the

536 KEVIN M. DOAK

hostilities. Rather it was the broader influence of the concept of ethnic nationalism,

both as a cause of the Serbian uprising and as conceived by Woodrow Wilson as the

solution to a lasting peace. Kamei Kan ichiro

, a personification of this shift towards

national socialism, put it best when he reflected at the height of World War II, ‘‘the

word minzoku (ethnic nation) first appeared in print in actual world politics after the

Versailles Treaty.’’

Kamei’s point needs to be qualified: there were discussions on

minzoku and minzokushugi in publications on world politics and political theory in

Japanese journals prior to 1919.

Yet, he has a point, as the tremendous flood of

articles and books on ethnic nationalism that appeared in Japanese after 1920 is

underscored by later historians who do not share Kamei’s political biases.

The effects of World War I on Japanese domestic politics were not limited

to ideological ones. Just as the aftermath of the war spawned Mussolini’s Fascist

movement and the early forms of Hitler’s national socialism, in Japan too populist,

right-wing nationalist groups began to spring up, often with fatal consequences

for the political elite. One example is the Society of Those Left Behind (Yu

zonsha).

Formed in 1919 by O

kawa Shumei and Mitsukawa Kametaro

, the Yu

zonsha drew

on this new concept of nationality to advocate Asian liberation abroad and reform

of the state at home. The Society published Kita Ikki’s Outline Plan for the Reorgan-

ization of Japan in 1923, the book that inspired the 1936 military coup attempt

by radical officers in the imperial army. Soon after, the Society dissolved due to

differences between Kita and O

kawa. But it would be a mistake to conclude that

the influence of the se men and their revolutionary nationalism died out with the

dissolution of the Society. Such groups were legion in the interwar period, and

individuals moved in and out of them, frequently belonging to several different

groups at the same time.

Defenders of the imperial state did not sit idly by and watch this gathering threat.

They organized to defend the state, most notably in the National Foundation Society

(Kokuhonsha), which Baron Hiranuma Kiichiro

sponsored in 1924 after an assassin-

ation attempt on Emperor Hirohito. The Society amassed 200,000 members from

the bureaucracy, military, and business worlds and sought, as its name indicates, to

reassert the true foundations of the Japanese state. It identified this foundation in the

spirit of the kokutai, which did not clarify much, except to signal a repudiation of

more novel concept s of national identity and an identification with those who had

turned to ‘‘kokutai’’ in earlier moments of national crisis. From Aizawa to Takayama,

the concept of ‘‘kokutai’’ had established a tradition of nationalism associated with

the political body rather than with the people as the nation, and it was mobilized in

this service again. By the middle of the 1920s, there was more than a theoretical

concern over the potential dangers from those who would act in the name of ‘‘the

people,’’ now often conceived and mobilized as ‘‘a mob.’’ Socialism was growing

strong (and had influenced Namba Daisuke, the would-be assassin of Emperor

Hirohito), and the power of the mob had made itself felt in the widespread attacks

on Koreans and Chinese following the 1923 Kanto

earthquake. With the death of

Matsukata Masayoshi in 1924, Saionji Kinmochi was the last surviving genro

(elder

statesman), the parties were at the height of their power and, after universal manhood

suffrage went into effect in 1928, the Minseito

(People’s Government) party replaced

the Seiyu

kai (Friends of Constitutional Government) party in office. By the end of

the decade, the effects of the Great Depression were ravaging Japan’s already weak

NATIONAL IDENTITY AND NATIONALISM 537

economy, Marxist movemen ts were strengthening their hold over Japan’s laborers,

and fears of another revolution were running high.

The imperial state was far more successful in suppressing leftist movements than it

was in suppressing radical nationalism. An important turning point was 1933. In that

year, two members of the central committee of Japan’s Communist Party, Sano

Manabu and Nabeyam a Sadachika, announced from prison their abandonment of

Marxism in favor of national socialism and support of the state. Their declar ation was

heavily couched in the language of ethnic nationalism: what made the difference was

their belief that the Japanese state was now willing to support nationalism premised

on ethnic identity. This idea reverberated through leftist circles, and many Japanese

leftists followed Sano and Nabeyama. Two of them, Hayashi Fusao and Kamei

Katsuichiro

, joined with the cultural conservative Yasuda Yoju

in celebrating the

Japanese ethnic nation as an eternal ideal. Calling themselves the ‘‘Japan Romantic

School,’’ these intellectuals, writers, and poets did more than anyone to garner

popular support for Japan’s role in World War II, not because they had found respect

for the constitutional monarchical state, but because they idealized the war as the

expression of the will of the ethnic Japanese people as resisting imperialism.

For

these romantics, it was a war against modernity: both the modernity represented by

the external enemy (the West) and the modernity which they felt had seeped into

their souls, corrupting the essence of their primordial ethnic culture. Once again, the

imperial state did not just sit idly by and watch. In 1937, while the Japan Romantic

School was at the height of its influence, it counterattacked with the release of

Kokutai no hongi (The True Meaning of Kokutai). This volume adopted the primor-

dialism of the romantics’ nationalism, only to substitute the imperial lineage as the

core of Japanese national identity and loyalty to the monarch as ‘‘the way of the

subject.’’ This was a concerted ideological effort to influence understandings of

national identity: the first 300,000 copies were disseminated to teachers in Japan,

from elementary to university levels. By 1943, the Cabinet Printing Bureau had sold

nearly two million copies of the book. Yet, because of its difficult literary style,

Kokutai no hongi did not put an end to the tensions between state and nation in

modern Japanese nationalism. At best, it represented an intensive effort by the state,

at one of its strongest moments, to achieve national unity around itself through

mobilization and indoctrination. But with the defeat in the war and the destruction

of the imperial state, whatever unity Japanese nationalism had achieved under its aegis

was quickly dissolved.

Redefining National Identity in Postwar Japan

Japan’s defeat in World War II and its subsequent occupation was a major watershed

in Japanese nationalism, second only to the events surrounding the Meiji Restoration.

To call this moment a watershed in Japanese nationalism is not to underestimate the

force of prewar nationalist ideas and actors who moved almost seamlessly into the

postwar years. Continuity, especially in ideas and actors, was significant. But the

context of Japanese nationalism had changed in fundamentally important ways. In

the first place, the terms of surrender meant that the Meiji imperial state cease d to

exist. After September 2, 1945, when General Umezu Yoshiro

and Shigemitsu

538 KEVIN M. DOAK

Mamoru signed the surrender documents on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, the

Japanese state no longer existed as an independent polity. This is not to say that the

bureaucracy ceased to function: it played a key role in maintaining certain govern-

mental services under the US occupation. But until the occupation ended in 1952,

the previous discourse that sought to invest national identity in the state (kokka)orto

codify the people as imperial subjects (shinmin) was seriously compromised by the

lack of an independent Japanese state. Moreover, until the postwar constitution went

into effect in 1947, the Japanese people still were unable to claim the formal status of

nationals (kokumin). What was left was the noti on that they were members of an

ethnic group (minzoku) and that this ethnicity was the core of their national identity,

a national identity that could not be affected by political events like military defeat or

foreign occupation and which did not require codification in laws and constitutions.

Ironically, the chronological order in which these three key concepts of Japanese

nationalism were established (kokka, kokumin, minzoku) was reversed from the order

in which they had been introduced in the Meiji years. Now, a consciousness of ethnic

identity (minzoku) came first, then in 1947 the legal codification of being members of

a constitutionally defined sovereign nation (kokumin), and finally in 1952, a nation

with its own independent state (kokka).

Events and ideologies converged in augmenting this sense of ethnic nationalism in

the early postwar years. The end of the imperial state meant the end of the multi-

ethnic empire. Korean subjects were now ‘‘liberated’’ to their own ethnic national-

ism, although the implications this ethnic nationalism posed for where they should

reside were not alw ays attractive. Many chose to remain in Japan, where they had now

lost their rights as Japanese subjects and became in many ways ‘‘stateless’’ people.

Similarly, Taiwanese were liberated from Japanese colonialism, only to turn to their

own nationalist wars between Mao Zedong and Jiang Jieshi. Japan was being recre-

ated as a mono-ethnic nation-state, and this ideal was represented in the Nationality

Act of 1950, which relied heavily on the principle of ius sanguinis in determining

Japanese nationality.

At the same time, Marxist intellectuals were enjoying unparalleled prestige, as the

only consistent critics of the war. Released from priso n and protected by the occup a-

tion, they led the way in criticizing the emperor as bearing the brunt of responsibility

for the war, and many demanded no t merely his abdication but his execution. Yet, as

Oguma Eiji has noted, ‘‘the pursuit of the emperor’s war responsibility in the

immediate postwar was not a rejection of nationalism but a searching for a new

national identity.’’

This new national identity was one which equated the Japanese

people with ethnic identity and whic h called for the removal of the emperor (along

with the military and financial ‘‘cliques’’ and all ‘‘reactionary’’ politicians and organ-

izations) as a traitor to the ethnic nation. For Marxi sts like Nosaka Sanzo

,To

yama

Shigeki, Ishimoda Sho

, and others, ethnic nationalism was an att ractive means of

aligning the Japanese with the rest of Asia in the global war of Mar xism against the

capitalist imperialism of the West. An influential non-Marxist intellectual who joined

this discourse was Takeuchi Yoshimi. Takeuchi was a cultural conservative and Sin-

ologist who after the war outlined a national identity for the Japanese that would

draw from the tradition of ethnic nationalism and find its expression not in the

political form of the state but in culture, especially through what Takeuchi called

‘‘national literature.’’ He was not alone among conservatives who turned to

NATIONAL IDENTITY AND NATIONALISM 539