Nationalisms in Japan

Naoko Shimazu

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134146338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Nationalisms in Japan brings together leading specialists in the field to discuss how notions of 'nationalism' in modern Japan impinges on all aspects of social, political and cultural understanding of the Japanese nation or the Japanese state. This book is clearly presented and jargon-free, and encompasses a chronological period of roughly two hundred years, beginning with a discussion of some of the early Japanese national thinkers of the Mito School, and ending with a contemporary discussion of the official visits made by Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro to the highly controversial Yasukuni Shrine. This wide chronological period allows for important observations about the evolution of nationalism, suggesting that Japan actually houses multiple 'nationalisms'.

Presenting new insights and understanding, this is a valuable addition to those working on modern Japan and nationalism.

1 Japanese national doctrines in international perspective

Erica Benner

Historians agree that international factors played an important role in stimulating national thinking in Japan. Foreign pressures inspired emulation and resistance, helping to foster one of the most striking features of Japanese nation-building: its speedy pursuit of one of the most effective programmes of ‘modernization’ ever undertaken while harking back to archaic myths and traditions as the basis for a renovated national identity. By comparison with Western national doctrines, the impact of international threats, incentives, and models on Japanese nationalism is easy to trace. Differences between indigenous ideas about politics and society and those imported by Westerners were often more conspicuous than, say, those between the French invaders of German or Italian states during the Napoleonic Wars. Even moderate Japanese nationalists expressed frank anxieties about preserving Japan’s independence in international conditions that they saw, by and large, as beyond their control. Early European and American national thinking is often couched in an idealistic language of constitutional liberties, popular sovereignty, or cultural Romanticism. If taken at face value, some authors’ reasons for defending nation-building policies may appear to have little to do with international safety and status. By contrast, concerns about ‘foreign relations’ are not hard to detect behind the diverse positive ideals – cultural integrity and continuity, technological development, political reform, social progress and justice – advanced by Japanese nationalist authors. However sharply they differed in their other ideological commitments, a wide cross-section of scholars, educators, policy-makers and publicists can be identified as ‘national’ thinkers in at least one sense. All argued that a primary goal of modern politics should be to preserve Japan’s independence, in the minimal sense of avoiding control by foreigners.

Beyond this minimal agreement, Japanese national thinkers diverge on crucial issues of principle and strategy, and exhibit very different types of concern about international relations from one decade or century to another. From the early nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, liberal and democratic reformers confronted champions of strong state authority. Defenders of rational scientific and political principles challenged contemporaries who wanted to base Japan’s modern Constitution on myths of imperial divinity, ancestor worship, and divine national election. Proponents of colonial expansion confronted those who preferred to restrict Japan’s nation-building to its existing territories. Faced with these disparate positions, historians are rightly wary of generalizations about the origins or content of Japanese nationalism. The notion of independence from foreign control may at first seem a promising starting point for giving some general meaning to the umbrella phrase ‘Japanese nationalism’. But it is not always clear what is gained by calling the desire for independence national. Is there something about Japanese national ideas that took shape under Western influence during the nineteenth century that differentiates them from age-old patriotic or xenophobic arguments about why people should defend their native country from foreign encroachments? Such ideas, after all, can be found in virtually every country in ancient as well as modern times. Is there a more specific set of values that distinguishes national thinking from simple patriotism and anti-foreignism, and which forms a common ground among liberal, conservative, authoritarian, populist, and imperial concepts of nationhood?

Starting with these conceptual questions, this chapter offers a framework for looking at the development of Japanese national thinking in a comparative perspective. The first section identifies a distinctive set of core national values that emerged in several European countries from about the sixteenth century onward. It suggests that in Europe and later in Japan, the evolution of national ideas from older patriotic and xenophobic attitudes was connected to concerns about international defence and standing. However, very different perceptions of international pressures can be distinguished in particular countries and across national contexts. The section outlines four broad patterns of perception and response that informed different types of national thinking from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. The next four sections compare examples of each pattern from various Western countries and Japan. By focusing systematically on the international dimensions of national ideas, my aim is not to depreciate the role of domestic political or economic or socio-psychological factors, but rather to identify a wider basis for cross-national comparisons.

The international roots of national thinking

At first glance, the differences among various national doctrines may appear more conspicuous than any common national values.¹ Nevertheless, a closer study of arguments made in different times and places suggests a broad common ground among republican and authoritarian, ethnic and political, anti-expansionist and imperial forms of national doctrine. This ‘core doctrine’, as I see it, upholds two sets of values. The first is the value of external sovereignty or collective independence for the national body. The national idea seeks to establish clear boundaries around the national entity. It seeks to affirm – symbolically, legally, and in some cases militarily – its right to control internal affairs and interactions with other polities, economic actors operating across territories, or supranational corporations. The second set of values is less obvious, but constitutes a clearer difference than the first from older forms of patriotism or independence-seeking. It involves a new way of conceiving the relationship among members of the nation, and holds that it is desirable to foster or preserve a strong continuous identity between rulers and ruled, and among different sections of the ruled.²

The call for identity among all the members of a nation is different from the older demand for loyalty or allegiance to one’s country, people, or ruler. The demand is now for conscious awareness – more than a vague ‘sense’ – of sameness or we-ness across classes and regions. The demand for this kind of identity seems to have been rare before the sixteenth century in Europe. Previously, ordinary people were expected (now and then) to fight and die for their country without having the audacity to think of themselves as sharing important forms of communal identification with their superiors. Allegiance was mainly personal or dynastic. It was owed to a monarch or lord and his heirs and based on well-defined reciprocal obligations. Patriotism, or love of country, was mainly local. Its focus might be a large region or a small locality or a city. The primacy of dynastic loyalties and intense patriotic particularism, as well as stratified models of social order, had to be called into question before ideas of national sovereignty could be thought. National identification thus has a vertical as well as a horizontal dimension: members of nations identify with each other, not just with their government or with symbolic characteristics of their ruling dynasty. Further, national identity places a high value on distinctness as well as on sameness. Distinctness is often regarded as the necessary counterpart of strong identity: people identify strongly with their own nation only in so far as they see it as distinct from others, and ascribe value to this difference. The demand for strong identity involves seeing nationality as among one’s primary identities. Finally, the word continuous suggests that national consciousness should last beyond periods of crisis, such as war or invasion. This last criterion distinguishes developed national doctrines from the transient, socially uneven expressions of national consciousness sometimes found in medieval or even earlier documents. In the Middle Ages, people from all classes and regions of a kingdom might rally eagerly to defend crown or country against a particular threat, thereby exhibiting a negative solidarity which in some cases may have reflected some sense of a shared English or French or Spanish identity. But there is little evidence that this sense evolved into a conscious awareness of national belonging for the vast majority of people, let alone that it carried any clear political meaning beyond the time of crisis.

These elements, I suggest, form a very thin common ground shared by most varieties of national doctrine. It is thin in the sense that it has no specific constitutional, cultural, or ethical content. The appropriate basis for national identity – democratic or authoritarian, traditional or modern, constitutional or cultural – is left wide open. Nothing in the core values stipulate that one form of government is inherently better than others at achieving strong continuous identity among rulers, ruled, and different sections of the ruled. Some branches of national doctrine treat democracy as the best means of fostering this kind of identity, but, for others, traditional authority or ideas of ethnic unity do this more effectively. Any of these types of national doctrine can form around the core. What diverse doctrines have in common is a shared constitutive norm: that is, a norm describing in broad terms the way that any viable community should be constituted, particularly in relation to other communities and polities. Criteria for deciding boundaries and membership are among the main constitutive values. Shared communal identity based on clear, exclusive boundaries is at the centre of this ideal, but particular strands of national thinking must specify its source and form. Proponents of widely different political programmes may all use national language and, in a given context, agree on core national goals while sharply disagreeing about the policies most likely to realize them.

Why did this constitutive norm emerge when it did, and why did it gain such wide appeal? From the sixteenth century onward, many historians and philosophers expressed growing concerns about the emergence of a European order based on a tiny club of Great Powers’ whose military build-ups and competitive expansionism threatened the survival of weaker city–states and kingdoms. Faced with new patterns of competition, expansion, and defensiveness, many writers began to call for the formation of more unified and clearly bounded polities. The same concerns stimulated the gradual articulation of norms of sovereignty, self-help, and non-intervention, which were designed to maintain international pluralism and to check the imperial ambitions of stronger powers. Yet by the late eighteenth century acute observers feared that however well ordered they might seem in some periods, relations among European states were becoming increasingly competitive and unstable. Polities were constantly anxious about expansionist neighbours, and often sought pre-emptively to expand their own territories or control of overseas trade. After the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, rulers throughout Europe began to undertake more intensive nation-building measures. In particular, mass military conscription and mass public education – based partly on state-monitored curricula – sought to forge a sense of shared cultural and political identity across classes and regions. Such wider and deeper identifications were seen as a more reliable source of support than abstract allegiance to a sovereign or his dynasty.

International insecurities were not, of course, the only motive for pursuing such policies. They were also stimulated by social and economic considerations, and by a variety of domestic political agendas. In Europe and beyond, authors of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationbuilding programmes often explained their motives without mentioning international pressures. Yet the developments just sketched were among the basic preconditions for the emergence of the modern idea of the nation. To understand the value that nation-builders place on strong, distinctive forms of identity, the international sources of national doctrine must be brought to the foreground. It then appears, inter alia, as a doctrine about how communities should constitute themselves if they wish to increase their chances of non-absorption in an international environment based on competitive, often expansionist, states.

However, perceptions of international pressures were not monolithic or unchanging. The diversity among national doctrines can be explained in part, though certainly not in toto, as responses to external pressures that were perceived in different ways by different authors in different times and places. Indeed, sometimes the same author came to see the same pressures in different ways, and revised his nation-building proposals accordingly. Drawing on a wide range of arguments, four distinct, partly overlapping patterns of national thinking can be discerned between the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Each offers an analysis of the international conditions confronting a given country or group of countries, then recommends particular strategies of internal nationbuilding and international action in response to the conditions described.

The first pattern gives mainly defensive reasons for strengthening national boundaries and identities. It was developed by authors who wrote on behalf of countries that appeared unable to defend themselves from foreign incursions by military or diplomatic means. Seeing the international environment as hostile and beyond their direct control, they argued that vulnerable polities could only hope to defend themselves through radical cultural reform. Such defensive strategies typically seek to foster ethnocentric definitions of the nation as their chief weapon against foreign pressure. As Max Weber argued in his classic text on the subject, the belief in common descent is among the main hallmarks of ethnic conceptions of political community.³ According to Weber, the formation of such beliefs is generally triggered by conflict with another group, or by some other experience that creates an interest in ‘monopolistic closure’ of a group’s boundaries. On this view, ethnocentric nationalism has a largely non-rational content. The belief in common descent and the moral importance placed on ethnic identity cannot be rationally vindicated, and are often patently based on fictions. However, their non-rational content is an essential component of a rational strategy of self-preservation, in so far as the threats perceived are not themselves entirely imaginary. Belief in the unique, exclusive, unchanging essence of ethnonational identity is treated as source of strength which, when effectively mobilized, can compensate for political or military weakness.

The second pattern of national thinking also starts by describing the international environment as essentially threatening, since some polities claimed the right to set the terms of international transactions, placing all others at a disadvantage. But instead of trying to compensate for weakness by cultivating ethnic national identities, this strategy advocates cautious engagement with the dominant powers. Arguments of this type are made on behalf of countries which, in the judgement of a given author, had fair chances becoming major players if they undertook reforms aimed at meeting the standards of Great Power membership. Proponents accept involvement in an international order based on sovereign, competitive states as a somewhat unwelcome necessity. At the same time, they eagerly embrace foreign standards of modernization or ‘civilization’, and welcome the opportunity to improve their nation’s technological, economic, and constitutional expertise. But they remain sceptical about their nation’s capacity to use or reshape the rules of international competition to its advantage, and doubt that established Great Powers will accept their nation as an equal even if it succeeds in meeting all the publicly acknowledged criteria for equal recognition. They therefore remain preoccupied with establishing a militarily strong state. Their national doctrines often combine a commitment to universal standards of ‘modernization’ with a defence of the dignity and particularity of national traditions, and seek to balance the spirit of reform with strong authoritarian elements.

In contrast to these first two patterns, the third perceives the dominant international norms and practices as unthreatening and subject to rational control. What less confident authors portray as a corrupt and unjust ‘state of war’ among nations appears for proponents of this view as simply the ‘state of nature’: neither just nor unjust in itself, but capable of being tamed by nations whose power is combined with superior virtue and reason.⁴ They advocate a benign, self-assured nationalism based on a just internal constitution on the one hand, and enlightened international leadership on the other. The universally beneficial goal of enlightened leadership is to tame the violence and uncertainty found in current international relations by establishing more predictable relationships ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Japanese national doctrines in international perspective
• 2 Reading the diaries of Japanese conscripts
• 3 Internationalism and nationalism
• 4 Japanese nationalist extremism, 1921–41, in historical perspective
• 5 The making of Ainu moshiri
• 6 The battle for hearts and minds
• 7 The national politics of the Yasukuni Shrine
• 8 Conclusion