Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan

A Sociological Enquiry

Kosaku Yoshino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415071192
• eBook ISBN: 9781134910731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The debate about Japan's 'uniqueness' is central to Japanese studies. This book aims to illuminate that debate from a comparative and theoretical perspective. It also tests theories of ethnicity and cultural nationalism through the use of Japan as a case study.
Yoshino examines how ideas of national distinctiveness are `produced' and `consumed' in Japanese society through a study of intellectuals, teachers and businessmen. He finds that ideas of Japanese uniqueness, the nihonjinron, have been embraced more by those in business than in education. He looks at the Japanese perception of their own 'uniqueness' and at the ways in which ideas of cultural distinctiveness are formulated in different national and historical contexts.
This extremely readable book combines anthropology and sociology to present both a historical analysis of the roots of the Japanese sense of national identity and a discussion of the ways in which that sense is changing.

Chapter 1

Introduction

There are two main lines of enquiry pursued throughout this study. One is a general examination of cultural nationalism and national identity; the other is an analysis of contemporary Japanese society.

As a study of cultural nationalism, this book assesses some of the assumptions and theories concerning cultural nationalism, nationalism and ethnicity. Cultural nationalism may provisionally be understood as follows. Cultural nationalism aims to regenerate the national community by creating, preserving or strengthening a people’s cultural identity when it is felt to be lacking, inadequate or threatened. The cultural nationalist regards the nation as the product of its unique history and culture and as a collective solidarity endowed with unique attributes. In short, cultural nationalism is concerned with the distinctiveness of the cultural community as the essence of a nation. By contrast, political nationalists seek to achieve a representative state for their community and to secure citizenship rights for its members, thereby giving their collective experience a political reality. Cultural nationalism and political nationalism often stimulate each other, but the two should be distinguished for their different aims.¹

Two groups are normally prominent in the development of cultural nationalism: intellectuals (or thinking elites), who formulate ideas and ideals of the nation’s cultural identity, and intelligentsia (or social groups with higher and further education), who respond to such ideas and ideals and relate them to their own social, economic, political and other activities. Although both groups can, and indeed do, overlap in occupational category, an analytical distinction between the two is useful because, as will be seen, these two groups have different concerns. In this study I shall examine the roles of intellectuals and intelligentsia in the development of cultural nationalism and the relationship between these groups. It should be made clear at the outset that my emphasis will be on national identity and sentiment, not nationalist movements.

On the substantive level, our problem concerns Japan in the 1970s and 1980s. I have selected this period for enquiry for the following reasons. First, little, if anything, has been written on cultural nationalism in contemporary Japan or, indeed, on nationalism in Japan after the 1950s, except short articles in newspapers and magazines. This is in contrast to the abundance of literature on the previous periods. Confining ourselves to books in English, we find Delmer Brown’s Nationalism in Japan: An Introductory Historical Analysis (1955) which discusses the development of Japan’s nationalism (or ethnicism) from about the seventh century AD to the late 1940s; Maruyama Masao’s analysis of pre-war and wartime nationalism and of the impact of Japan’s defeat on post-war nationalism in Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics (1963); and Ivan Morris’s Nationalism and the Right Wing in Japan: A Study of Post-War Trends (1960), to mention a few. The second and main reason for selecting the 1970s and 1980s is that this period deserves special attention. The last two decades have witnessed a resurgence of cultural nationalism in Japan. This may be called Japan’s ‘secondary’ nationalism in the sense that, as Maruyama Masao put it, Japan ‘had completed one full cycle of nationalism: birth, maturity and decline’ (1953: 7–8) before the beginning of the post-war period in 1945. (The term ‘primary nationalism’ will be used to mean original nationalism throughout this study.) Among the various manifestations of contemporary Japanese nationalism, I shall concentrate on that which bears a close relationship with ‘intellectual nationalism’, or what is generally called the nihonjinron.

The nihonjinron, which literally means ‘discussions of the Japanese’, refer to the vast array of literature which thinking elites have produced to define the uniqueness of Japanese culture, society and national character. Publications on Japanese uniqueness reached their peak in the late 1970s but continued into the 1980s.² This study is also concerned with the 1980s because it is in this decade that the effects of the nihonjinron were strongly felt among wider sections of the population, as it takes time for thinking elites’ ideas to diffuse to other social groups. (This is not to suggest simplistically that the thinking elites’ nihonjinron precede the other social groups’ concern with Japanese uniqueness. There is, as will be seen, an interplay between the two.)

The nihonjinron should be distinguished from rigorous academic research on Japanese society and culture. Peter Dale remarks that the nihonjinron ‘are concentrated expressions of an intense tradition of intellectual nationalism whose broader impact on both our general way of interpreting Japan and specialist studies remains to be analysed’ (1986: ii). The content of the nihonjinron covers the whole range of Japanese culture, using as their illustrative materials everyday episodes, contemporary news, travelogues, folklore materials and so on. Since the competition for the nihonjinron market has been fierce, writers have used one attention-catching key concept after another to describe Japanese uniqueness in a way that appeals to the general educated public. In this sense Dale is quite right in characterising the nihonjinron as ‘the commercialised expression of modern Japanese nationalism’ (1986: 14).

The specific aim of this study is thus an examination of the nihonjinron (thinking elites’ ideas of Japanese uniqueness) and their role in Japanese society from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, a perspective which understands ideas in terms of the social, cultural and civilisational milieu which produces and consumes them. Given their pervasive impact on the intellectual life of the Japanese, a number of criticisms of the nihonjinron emerged among concerned scholars in the early 1980s.

Various criticisms of the nihonjinron will be assessed in chapter 9 after the content of the nihonjinron has been discussed and our empirical data have been examined, but a brief look at some of the literature may be taken here in order to point out certain limitations and to suggest where the contribution of the present work will lie as a study of the nihonjinron.

Sugimoto Yoshio and Ross Mouer (e.g. 1982, 1986) are two of the most conspicuous critics of the nihonjinron. The two sociologists devote themselves to showing the serious weaknesses of the nihonjinron as a social theory on methodological, empirical and ideological grounds. In particular, they point out the lack of rigorous methodology in the nihonjinron or their heavy reliance on convenient examples in the form of personal experiences and everyday episodes in support of one particular type of social theory, that is, the ‘consensus model’ or ‘group model’ of Japanese society, and indicate in turn the importance of the ‘conflict model’, which emphasises conflicts between different groups in Japanese society. The ideological implication of the conservative bias criticised by Sugimoto and Mouer is that it serves the interests of the ruling establishment in Japan. These themes are also dealt with by other scholars, albeit with differing emphasis. Kawamura Nozomu (1982), for example, concentrates on ideological criticism, arguing how the nihonjinron, which emphasise group cohesion and neglect classes, can serve as a dominant ideology in Japan. Cultural anthropologist Harumi Befu (1980, 1987) also writes profusely on the limitations of the ‘group model’ of the nihonjinron. He provides a symbolic anthropological interpretation of how the nihonjinron have developed to reassert a Japanese cultural identity threatened by Westernisation. Furthermore, Peter Dale (1986) has done a critical examination of the ‘unique’ characteristics of Japanese culture as discussed in the vast nihonjinron literature, both historical and contemporary. Aoki Tamotsu’s (1990) study of the changing emphasis in the post-war literature on Japanese uniqueness is also of interest.

There are also many other criticisms and reviews of the nihonjinron,³ but the existing literature is all seriously circumscribed in following two respects. First, they are chiefly concerned with the nihonjinron as an ‘academic’ issue, showing their limited academic value on methodological, empirical and ideological grounds. Although such a critique of the nihonjinron may be important in itself considering their impact on specialist studies, scholars have confined themselves to a mere critique and failed to offer a sociological analysis of what it is that has occurred, and between whom (i.e. from whom and to whom) in Japanese society.⁴ In particular, it has failed to pay attention to the ‘receptive’ or ‘consumption’ side of the nihonjinron. (This may apply to much of the sociology of knowledge literature in general in which the analyst’s focus is usually on the ‘producers’, not the ‘consumers’ of intellectual works.) Even Befu, who characterises the nihonjinron as ‘mass consumption goods’ (1987: 54–67) rather than academic works, fails to specify who he means by the ‘mass’ or who ‘consumes’ works on Japanese uniqueness. Which social groups have actively responded to the nihonjinron and why? What effect have the nihonjinron had on the other sections of the population? What sort of cultural nationalism have the nihonjinron fostered? This study attempts to examine these questions on the basis of mainly qualitative data obtained through my empirical research conducted among educators and businessmen.

There is another fundamental limitation in the existing criticism of the nihonjinron: namely, the lack of a comparative perspective.⁵ Those who criticise the nihonjinron’s emphasis of Japanese uniqueness have made a similar assumption that such an intellectual activity itself is unique to Japan. We are tempted to remind them of Nietzsche’s remark on nineteenth-century German intellectuals’ preoccupation with German uniqueness: ‘It is characteristic of the Germans that the question “what is German?” never dies out among them’ ([1886] 1990: 174). Such an intellectual concern is not confined to nineteenth-century Germany but is, as will be seen, a widely observed phenomenon. This study attempts, wherever possible, to situate the contemporary Japanese experience of the nihonjinron and cultural nationalism in a broader comparative and theoretical perspective. Hence, this is where our specific aim of analysing Japanese society converges with our more general aim to contribute to the study of national identity and cultural nationalism.

On the basis of the specific case study, the book takes up five main issues concerning national identity and cultural nationalism:

1 a comparison of the ways in which intellectuals (or thinking elites) formulate ideas of national distinctiveness in different national and historical contexts;

2 an examination of the relationship between culture and race in perceptions of national identity and in cultural nationalism;

3 an examination of the ways in which the two other educated sections of the population (educators and businessmen), regarded in this study as relevant in the context of cultural nationalism, respond to ideas of national distinctiveness formulated by intellectuals (or thinking elites);

4 a reassessment of the view that regards educators as playing the major role in transmitting and diffusing ideas of national distinctiveness and an assessment of the role of businessmen in cultural nationalism;

5 an exploration of the characteristics of ‘secondary’ nationalism in comparison with those of ‘primary’ nationalism.

Considering that our case deals with ‘secondary’ nationalism – and we understand ‘secondary’ nationalism as that type which preserves and enhances national identity in an already long-established nation-state – and that most theories of cultural nationalism are based on cases of ‘primary’ or original nationalism, our findings will be used as the basis upon which to modify and qualify the conventional theories rather than to refute them simplistically.

Several terms may require provisional definition. First, the term ‘nationalism’. Nationalism is not an easy concept to be defined in a few sentences.⁶ For scholars like Hans Kohn, nationalism is basically a subjective ‘state of mind’ (1955: 9); for others such as A.D. Smith (1971, 1973) it is primarily an ideological movement. Also, nationalism can be a latent phenomenon expressed mainly as pride in the nation’s history and way of life, or it may develop as a dynamic force demanding strenuous efforts and immense sacrifice on the part of the members of the nation. Whatever aspect of nationalism one refers to and whatever form nationalism may take, the common denominators of nationalism are the belief among a people that it comprises a distinct community with distinctive characteristics and the will to maintain and enhance that distinctiveness within an autonomous state. Nationalism may provisionally be understood in this broad sense for the purpose of the present study.

A second set of terms requiring definition is ‘intellectuals’ and ‘intelligentsia’, the two groups who normally occupy an important place in cultural nationalism.⁷ The intelligentsia may be defined as those ‘who possess some form of further or higher education and use their educational diplomas to gain a livelihood through vocational activity, thereby disseminating and applying the ideas and paradigms created by intellectuals’ (Smith 1981: 108). They may also be simply referred to as highly educated sections of the population. The intellectuals are those who are devoted to the formulation of original ideas and engage in creative intellectual pursuits, thereby constituting, in a sense, a small, creative segment of the intelligentsia and providing the intellectual leadership for the rest of the intelligentsia. I prefer another term, ‘thinking elites’, to intellectuals in discussing the contemporary Japanese scene, though I admit that ‘thinking elites’ may be a somewhat inelegant term. I use this term for want of a more appropriate alternative. It is debatable whether those who engage in the discussion of Japanese uniqueness are ‘intellectuals’ in the sense defined above. Those who have participated in the nihonjinron include elites of diverse types ranging from academics to journalists, diplomats and even business elites. These occupational groups are not ‘intellectuals’ in that they are not devoted to creative intellectual pursuits. Writers on Japanese uniqueness are not ‘ideologues’ either, because I do not suppose that the majority of them are aware what specific ideology they are propagating. They may more appropriately be called ‘thinking elites’ in the sense that they are a minority which has influence on others by virtue of thinking about a particular subject.⁸

It must be emphasised that I do not intend to furnish an inclusive account of cultural nationalism in contemporary Japan. My purpose is much more limited: to highlight that dimension of cultural nationalism that has resulted from, and resulted in, the nihonjinron and to f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Japanese names and works cited
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The nihonjinron: thinking elites’ ideas of Japanese uniqueness
• 3 Ideas of national distinctiveness: comparative perspectives
• 4 Theories of ethnicity and nationalism: a critical review
• 5 Modern Japanese society as Gemeinschaft: the holistic tradition in theories of modern Japan
• 6 Perceptions of Japanese uniqueness among educators and businessmen
• 7 The diffusion of ideas of Japanese uniqueness: the response of educators and businessmen to the nihonjinron
• 8 Leading business elites, nationalism and cultural nationalism
• 9 Explanations of the nihonjinron
• 10 ‘Resurgent cultural nationalism’ and ‘prudent revivalist nationalism’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index