Democracy in Post-War Japan

Maruyama Masao and the Search for Autonomy

Rikki Kersten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415117531
• eBook ISBN: 9781136160189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Democracy in Post-War Japan assesses the development of democracy through the writings of the brilliant political thinker Maruyama Masao. The author explores the significance of Maruyama's notion of personal and social autonomy and its impact on the development of a distinctively Japanese democratic ideal.
This book, based on contemporary documents and on interviews with Maruyama, is the only full-scale analysis of his work and thought to be published in English.

1 Introduction

Can Japan teach the world anything about democracy? To many people, the thought that Japan could resolve some of democracy’s inconsistencies and even add to the body of universal democratic thought is ludicrous. Surely, Japan is an authoritarian society, a ‘how not to’ example of a country that was a passive recipient of democracy after defeat in 1945.

The reality is very different. Postwar Japanese society, especially in the period between 1945 and 1960, was obsessed with the democratic idea. Far from reluctant converts of necessity or convenience, the opinion leaders of the day defined democracy with the full force of the self-consciousness, self-criticism and defiant idealism inherent in their historical circumstances. One of the most inspiring and creative of these definers of democracy was Maruyama Masao (1914–).

The first philosophical touchstone for postwar Japanese democracy was the war itself. The transwar generation of intellectuals such as Maruyama began by rationalising that the war had been a consequence of society’s lack of autonomy from the state. Intellectuals accordingly targeted the relationship between citizens and the state as the locus of postwar democratic reform. Distance between society and the state became a key criterion for Japanese democracy, and implied an inversion of political power from the state to society. The Occupation-initiated institutional reforms were merely the framework within which this democratic reform would take place.

But as the postwar era progressed from Occupation to independence after 1952, Maruyama’s concern switched to identifying obstacles to the development of autonomy in society. Through analysing postwar Japan and the history of Japanese political thought, Maruyama endeavoured to discover why autonomy was absent as a force in Japan’s political culture. By 1960 Maruyama and his peers felt that democracy was in crisis. Instead of autonomy, they found that the bogies from the past had assumed a democratic guise. According to their own criteria, intellectuals judged that democracy had failed in postwar Japan.

The most important questions to be answered are: what were Japanese thinkers looking for in their search for autonomy? To what extent was their disillusionment with postwar democracy due to their understanding of autonomy? An equally important consideration is how this has affected Japanese attitudes to their political system and its interaction with society today.

In postwar Japan between 1945 and 1960 we find democracy in the process of self-definition, not assimilation or distortion. It is through placing autonomy at the heart of democratic legitimacy that postwar Japan came to grips with democracy. The way they did this represents a significant contribution to universal democratic thinking.

The notion of autonomy is fundamental to democratic philosophy. In this sense the substance of postwar Japanese debates on democracy has much in common with intellectual discourse in late eighteenth century Europe. In the 1890s European attempts to locate the subject in history led to tension between idealist and materialist interpretations of the historical process. At issue was the extent to which man had the power to control human history, and to identify the forces influencing man’s actions. Social Darwinism, liberalism, Marxism and revisionism were the parameters of that European discourse. Liberal thinkers turned to individualism in order theoretically to reconcile man and his political/historical world. Marxists on the other hand used materialism to mediate between theory and humanism. Both approaches claimed a moral impetus behind their ideas about man and history that could be traced back to Kant.

The European liberal version of autonomy featured a number of complementary criteria: responsibility, self-determination, rationality, and value creation. Connecting the self with responsibility for his/her actions, plus the prerequisite that individuals be entirely free to determine the values which inform those actions, was intrinsic to the ability of the developed self to formulate a world view: ‘the individual subjects the norms with which he is confronted to critical evaluation and reaches practical decisions as the result of independent and rational reflection.’¹ Isaiah Berlin conveyed the essence of liberal autonomy as a special type of individualism:

I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of what ever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me … from outside.²

In post-World War II Japan, idealist–materialist tensions also emerged when intellectuals debated the role of the subject in history. For the survivors of war, determining the extent to which man could direct history – and assume responsibility for it – were elementary concerns. In Japan’s case it was Marxism which enabled some Japanese intellectuals to ease the idealist-materialist conundrum. They posited the humanism of the ‘young Marx’ as a theoretical bridge between idealism and materialism, much in the way that the revisionist Bernstein did in Europe. In a sense, the Japanese postwar experience was a struggle to reconcile these two opposed interpretations of society. The negative evaluation of Japanese democracy by the transwar generation of intellectuals can also be traced back to this philosophical sparring ground.

At the same time, Japanese ideas on autonomy in the postwar period incorporated much that was empathetic to European individualism. Koschmann has described the Japanese understanding of a kindred idea – subjectivity – as ‘an active force, or energy, that originated internally but was inevitably expressed in practice … it suggested firm commitment and a stance of independence in relation to potentially deterministic, external forces’.³ Koschmann’s definition only referred to the concept of subjectivity (shutaisei) which was debated in the late 1940s.⁴ I argue that the conceptual significance of subjectivity to Japanese democratic thought extended well beyond those confines. Shutaisei was the catalyst for an exploration of democracy in postwar Japan, and the conceptional well-spring of Japanese ideas about autonomy.

Japanese concepts of autonomy incorporated aspects of idealist individualism and Marxist materialism. Beneath the ‘isms’ of this discourse was a familiar and unresolved dilemma peculiar to democracy. As Maruyama often pointed out, democracy is a system founded on paradox. On the one hand, it extols the virtues of individualism. On the other hand, it employs institutional procedures which subjugate the individual to the rule of the majority. The dichotomy between democratic theory and democratic practice has dramatised the difficulties involved in reconciling the individual and the collective. This was especially true of postwar Japan, and as such the tussle Japanese intellectuals had with the ideals and reality of democracy adds an important dimension to an ongoing philosophical dilemma.

In addressing this problem, I will distinguish between two types of autonomy which crystalised gradually as the postwar era progressed: personal autonomy, and social autonomy. Maruyama insisted on personal autonomy as the cornerstone of genuine democracy. This was explored through the debates on modernism in the 1950s, where discussants identified the traits expected of ‘modern’ and by implication ‘democratic’ men. At the same time, Maruyama preserved a vision of democracy which featured social autonomy, meaning a pluralistic society in which multi-dimensional individuals preserved their mobility in society and used alternative collectives to criticise the public political realm. Personal autonomy featured a sharp distinction between the public and private realms. Social autonomy on the other hand facilitated the political engagement of society with the state.

Essentially, successful social autonomy was not possible unless it was premised on personal autonomy. However the affinity between social autonomy and the collective threatened to violate personal autonomy. Conversely, personal autonomy only fulfilled a democratic role when it connected with the public realm via active social autonomy. How these tensions were played out in postwar Japan up to 1960 is the key to understanding the philosophical questions shaping Japanese democracy.

To date the study of Japanese democracy has been hostage to historical context and ideology, denying its contribution to universal democratic thinking. It is essential that Japanese democratic thought be accorded this recognition, and not regarded as an intellectual tradition that is either ‘unique’, or derivative. Japanese democracy has been judged according to the success of the Occupation (1945–52), or treated as part of a larger debate on interpretations of the Japanese prewar past. American Occupation policy had a dual focus: institutional democratisation, and social democratisation. As Occupation documents reveal, often the Occupation stewards judged the success or failure of institutional reform according to the perceived penetration of ‘democratic values’ in society at large.⁵ And yet, historians who have praised the institutional dimension of Occupation democratisation have refrained from connecting this with the democratisation of the spiritual dimension.⁶ In either case, an appreciation of Japanese democracy is piecemeal at best.

Other historians who have judged that institutional democratisation was hampered or nullified by social factors have phrased their argument in terms of continuity from an ‘undemocratic’ past. Historians have asked: were the 1930s an aberration in what was otherwise a course of development headed in a democratic direction?⁷ If not, and the 1930s were the outcome of an authoritarian tradition dating from the Meiji era (1868–1912), then is postwar democracy the aberration?⁸ Maruyama has been identified with the school of thought that regarded authoritarianism instead of democratic potential as the substance of historical continuity. But this is far too simplistic.

A layer of complexity is added by the confluence of these debates on historical continuity, and the advent of the Cold War in Asia. American historiography on Japan has until very recently been split between what has become known as the Modernisation School, and a younger generation of scholars following in the footsteps of the leftist historian E. H. Norman. The former grouping promoted the idea of a value-free process of industrialisation and implied that Japanese democracy was a by-product of this process.⁹ The latter group identified industrialisation as the companion to authoritarianism in Japan, denying any link-age between Japan’s capitalistic advances and democracy.¹⁰ The ‘1930s aberration’ thesis was usually put forward by the Modernisationists, while the ‘authoritarian’ thesis was the argument typical of the second group. In the early 1960s when the Modernisation studies began, the debate between the Kōza and Rōnō schools¹¹ of Marxism on the nature of Japanese capitalistic development had reappeared in Japan. Combined with the Cold War atmosphere of the 1950s, this prompted the American Modernisationists to phrase their theories in anti-Marxist terms. It will be seen that the Japanese version of the modernisation debate differed greatly from that of the American scholars. It is time for the Japanese voice to be given due consideration when evaluating ideas on democracy in postwar Japan.

This study of Japanese democratic thought relies heavily on Japanese writings and stresses the context in which they were written. From a contemporary perspective, many of the issues covered in those writings may seem dated. But as the vagaries of Japanese democracy continue to demonstrate, they are far from irrelevant to contemporary concerns. This study provides a better-informed foundation for us to understand the disputes in Japanese politics which are only peripherally treated by the English-speaking media. It is above all an attempt to communicate the Japanese voice.

The Japanese voice of the early postwar years burst out as a cacophony of commentary and analysis. Subjective engagement with politics and society was the order of the day. The debate culture (rondan bunka) of the postwar period featured intellectuals who had formerly isolated themselves from popular fora and who emerged postwar to set the agenda for public debate on the issues of the moment. This appeared to many to be the very stuff of democracy. Though the restraints of Occupation censorship were in evidence during the first half of the period under consideration (notably with issues such as the atomic bombings and the American initiative behind institutional democratisation) the sense of freedom amongst postwar scholars was self-evident.

Postwar Japanese democratic thought has other features which have prevented a straightforward analysis by outside observers. The ‘round table discussions’ (zadankai) used in Japanese academic-populist writing has discouraged serious scholarship. Zadankai involve a group of hand-picked participants sitting around a table discussing the designated topic, which is recorded. The participants then have the opportunity to edit their own remarks, and the transcribed discussions are usually edited by the publisher as well. The style of debate is also ‘unacademic’ in Western terms, with vague terminology, a sense of academic hierarchy amongst the participants and the artificial structure of discussions frustrating the in medias res value of the exercise. This is partly due also to the nature of the Japanese language, which relies on connotation rather than more explicit analytical discourse. When one adds to this the complicated sentence construction and multi-layered suggestion typical of Maruyama’s writing, one has felt frustrated rather than enlightened about Japanese democratic thinking.

But this attitude fails to appreciate the value of postwar academic discourse, value which begins with the fact that it was a deliberate attempt to integrate the wider community into the discussion. It is through coming to terms with the nature of this discourse that one can understand the significance of the concepts and ideas being discussed. The style of discourse is the first clue to the substance of the discourse itself. This is exemplified in the debates on democracy in postwar Japan. The problem-consciousness (mondai ishiki) behind these debates made it plain that when discussing democracy it was not institutions that were at issue, but political culture. Like some Occupation administrators, Japanese intellectuals who wrote on democracy postwar were concerned with a democratic tradition, defining a democratic spirit, and establishing a democratic value system ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Defeat and democracy in postwar Japan: The war responsibility debate
• 3 The search for autonomy: Maruyama Masao and the Japanese past
• 4 Maruyama, Marx and the shutaisei debate
• 5 Modernisation: the acquisition of autonomy
• 6 Fascism: the antithesis of democracy
• 7 Pacifism, autonomy and the logic of democracy
• 8 Democracy in crisis: the security treaty crisis of 1960
• 9 Conclusion
• Bibliographies
• Maruyama Masao: critical bibliography
• Index