The Cultural Evolution of Postwar Japan

The Intellectual Contributions of Kaiz?’s Yamamoto Sanehiko

Christopher Keaveney

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781137366214
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137364111
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: History

Yamamoto Sanehiko's (1885-1952) achievements as a publisher, writer, and politician in the interwar period served as both a catalyst and a template for developments after the wars. While exploring the accomplishments the compelling figure, this study sheds new light on the social, cultural, and political changes that occurred in postwar Japan.

1

Written in Ash: The Education of a Reconstructionist

Yamamoto Sanehiko’s career developed in ways that were grounded in the peculiarities of the age in which he lived, an age that saw Japan ascend politically and economically to join the world powers only to set out on a path that led first to self-destruction and then to rapid recovery in the postwar period. No Japanese was able to survive that national trauma without exhibiting a capacity for flexibility and for imaginative self-reinvention. Thus, Yamamoto seems the very embodiment of a certain breed of entrepreneurs that flourished in the tumult of the interwar period. The achievements analyzed in this study bear testimony to the character of Yamamoto and that of his singular generation, exhibiting equal measures of circumspection, reckless abandon, and steely resolve.

In the Shadow of the Old Man: The Making of a Kyushu danji

Yamamoto Sanehiko was born and raised in Sendai township in Kyushu’s Kagoshima Prefecture, in the heart of what previously was the province of Satsuma, an area long known for its strong, dynamic, and idiosyncratic men, including a number who played pivotal roles in the Meiji Restoration and in the modernization of Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Kyushu danji has always been regarded in the Japanese popular imagination as an individualist who revels in going against the grain and whose most comfortable position in national political and social discourse is that of the supreme contrarian, the one who lives, and often dies, by his own set of rules.

The most famous exemplar of the Kyushu danji tradition was Saigō Takamori (1828–1877) who also constitutes perhaps the most revered example of a certain kind of hero in Japanese history defined by Ivan Morris in his groundbreaking 1975 book The Nobility of Failure. The tragic hero described by Morris is one who fights on behalf of a cause that is, from the outset, destined to failure. Morris moreover suggests that in a conformist society like Japan, “rash, defiant, emotionally honest men” have a paradoxical appeal.¹

The variety of hero described by Morris is most brazenly incarnated in the imposing figure of Saigō Takamori who led the infamous Satsuma Rebellion in 1877 against overwhelming odds in an ill-fated series of battles that came to mark the transition from the old Japan of the bushi and their values to the establishment of modern Japan. Morris notes that after Saigō’s death, rather than portraying him as the traitor that he was, the new Meiji government, in response to a public groundswell of support for the values and selfless sacrifice that Saigō and his followers came to represent, enshrined him and canonized him as an exemplar of a proud bushidō tradition.²

Yamamoto Sanehiko was the eldest of five children in a household ruled by an imperious father who was himself one such Kyūshu danji, and who regaled his favorite son with tales of such individuals, encouraging Sanehiko to seek greatness and remain uncompromising in the pursuit of his goals. That the father himself had achieved none of the greatness that he advocated for his son, and had relinquished many of his ideals in order to maintain the economically tenuous existence into which the family had fallen seemed only to galvanize Sanehiko’s desire to achieve greatness and to bring glory to his family, birthplace, and nation.

In Sendai Township as a boy, Yamamoto Sanehiko also met a number of men who had participated in the Meiji Restoration. He listened to their stories describing the exploits of those who had abetted Japan’s rapid growth during the Meiji period. His father, Shōnosuke, challenged Sanehiko to consider how he might contribute to Japan as the country engaged in expansionist activities and seemed poised to play a greater role on the world stage.³ The father’s message was not wasted on the son, who became determined at an early age to emulate these Satsuma men, particularly Saigō Takamori and Tōgō Heihachirō (1848–1934), a hero of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 and later the commander in chief of the Imperial Navy in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 who Yamamoto was to meet in England. Yamamoto Sanehiko, in the course of his long career, was to demonstrate the Kyushu danji’s penchant for boldly flaunting contemporary trends and conventional wisdom in the pursuit of audacious and grandly conceived plans.

Although Yamamoto Sanehiko’s family held considerable influence in the region until only a generation prior to his birth, historical changes and poor business decisions by his father had reduced the family to virtual poverty during Sanehiko’s youth. Sanehiko’s father often worked several jobs at once when Sanehiko was a boy, trying to keep the family afloat economically. His ancestral home was an impressive structure surrounded by an imposing stone wall. The cracks in that wall and the dilapidated state of the house came to symbolize to the impressionable boy the degree to which his family had fallen.⁴

Three generations earlier, at the time of Yamamoto Sanehiko’s great-grandfather, Shōheiji, the family had been influential landowners in the township of Miyanojō in western Satsuma, responsible for overseeing 60 households for the daimyō.⁵ In his grandfather Magogoemon’s time too the family, which had subsequently moved to the house in which Sanehiko was raised, continued to flourish. At that time, the family possessed extensive land holdings and a stable of horses. However, with the Meiji Restoration, the feudal system of land ownership and the hierarchical structures upon which the Edo period depended collapsed, and with that collapse the fortunes of the family began to deteriorate rapidly. Yamamoto Shōnosuke’s poor management of the family’s assets only served to accelerate the family’s economic decline.

Yamamoto Sanehiko’s father, like many of his class and generation, was unable to adjust to the new economic realities of the Meiji period (1868–1912). The frustrations on the part of Shōnosuke at not being able to respond to the rapid changes that accompanied the new era almost certainly contributed to an addiction to alcohol, and he often squandered his meager savings on drinking binges with others among his friends who were likewise caught between the old and new orders.⁶ The younger Yamamoto was to inherit from his father both the idealized vision of a grand familial past and a fondness for alcohol coupled with a mercurial temper.

Yamamoto Sanehiko’s elementary school bentō often consisted of chestnuts and potatoes, and white rice was a luxury that the family rarely enjoyed.⁷ When Sanehiko completed elementary school, the family’s penury threatened to prevent him from moving on to middle school. According to Yamamoto’s own memories of that period as recounted in the essay “Fubo no omokage” (Memories of My Parents), he pleaded with his parents to permit him to attend middle school, going as far as to express his willingness to eat one meal a day in order to help pay for school fees.⁸

In order to help offset the costs of his education and to help relieve some of the financial pressures at home, Sanehiko and his brother went around hawking small handmade items on the street, including chopsticks. Although the profits were small, they helped defray some of the costs of his education and, more importantly, convinced his parents of his desire to receive an education, and Sanehiko was able to pursue his middle school education in this way. However, in Sanehiko’s third and final year of middle school, the duress of the worsening financial situation at home, exacerbated by his father’s drinking, obliged Sanehiko to drop out of school, even though the principal indicated that he would personally pay any of the costs incurred by Sanehiko’s education.⁹

Sanehiko resolved to go out and earn a living so that he could support his family by sending home monthly remittances. He accepted a position to go to Okinawa to serve as an educator, as part of an initiative by the prefectural and national government to extend the national educational standards to Okinawa. At the age of 18, having never fully completed his junior high school education but having largely educated himself, Sanehiko left his family and boarded a ferry for Okinawa to serve as an instructor in an elementary school in the small coastal village of Kunigami located about 20 kilometers from Naha. While economic reasons were the immediate motivation for this decision, another ambition, so characteristic of the impulses that would guide much of his adult life, was also at work. In “Fubo no omokage,” Sanehiko relates that while walking over the bridge that led out of town toward the port and the ship that would take him to his post in Okinawa, he resolved that through his efforts in the next ten years he would become somebody and would endeavor to return his ancestral home to something of its former glory.¹⁰ It is a testament to the resolve of Yamamoto Sanehiko that he would in fact achieve that goal despite the formidable obstacles to his success.

In the end, Yamamoto served for one year as an instructor at the elementary school in Kunigami. One of Yamamoto’s students at the time who would later work for Yamamoto’s publishing house Kaizōsha compared the young teacher Yamamoto to the great Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) in his conviction that education should be a radically personal experience, appealing to the individual learner.¹¹ This teaching style and indeed this ideal of learning stood in stark contrast to the Meiji ideals of education that Yamamoto would have experienced in Kagoshima. As a young teacher, Yamamoto was expected to teach in all subject areas but particularly excelled in Japanese language instruction, geography, and in a subject area that was to remain an area of specific academic interest—history, both Eastern and Western. The former student who shared reminiscences of Yamamoto’s teaching noted that Yamamoto had a style that held the students’ attention like none of Yamamoto’s colleagues and declared that the young teacher had the capacity to truly excite the imagination of his students with a classroom manner that bucked the trends of the contemporary educational system with its emphasis on uninspired rote learning.¹² After Yamamoto had accepted a job offer in Tokyo and it came time to leave, his students wept as he addressed them for the last time and accompanied him to the pier to see him off.

While lasting only one year, Yamamoto’s period in Okinawa seemed to fire his already strong sense of destiny and propel him to his next stage of development. The experience of teaching in Okinawa was an important stage in Yamamoto’s personal and professional development for several reasons. First of all, it gave him independence and created a healthy distance from the overbearing father that enabled and indeed forced Sanehiko to find his own way. While reading voluminously in preparation for his lessons, Yamamoto was also completing the education denied to him by the financial straits that had bound him back home. In particular, his readings in history and politics would provide the foundation for the journalistic and political careers that lay ahead. The charisma that inspired the strong response among his students was indicative of a personal magnetism that would later be commented upon by the many people with whom he associated in the various spheres in which he was to make his contributions. It was as a teacher that Yamamoto seemed to first become aware of this capacity of his and first began to consider the fields in which such a charismatic personality might best help him realize the ten-year plan he had envisioned for himself.

From Educator to Educated: Foundations of a Life in Journalism

True to his goal of helping to begin the arduous process of relieving his family’s financial duress and contributing to a return of his household to some of its glory in the Edo period, Yamamoto took the one hundred yen that he had carefully saved while in Okinawa, after remittances, and presented it to his father upon his return, keeping only enough money for the train fare to Tokyo.¹³ Yamamoto saw Tokyo as the next logical stage in his individual journey to become a person of consequence. He went to the capital in 1904 at age nineteen with nothing other than a letter of introduction from his father to a politician named Ōura Kanetake (1850–1918) who would prove to be both a mentor to Sanehiko and a model of dazzling professional success, a local boy from Kagoshima who was in the process of attaining the highest political ranks.

Ōura hailed from Yamamoto’s ancestral town of Miyanojō in Kagoshima. Sanehiko’s father had served in the military with Ōura in Taiwan decades earlier, and the two men had maintained a friendship despite the different directions in which life had taken the two in subsequent years.¹⁴ For the younger Yamamoto, hungry to make a name for himself but disadvantaged in almost every respect, the timing of this introduction to Ōura could not have been better. The general elections of 1904 featured some irregularities that led some to suspect corruption, and Ōura, as both an outsider in Tokyo politics and an individual well respected as a man of principle, was enlisted to serve as a monitor for the elections.¹⁵ He acquitted himself admirably, and his political star was on the rise when Yamamoto Sanehiko called upon him seeking his advice and support.

Ōura was appointed as the Home Minister in 1907 in the Katsura cabinet, and this post carried responsibilities that left him little time for the type of mentorship that Yamamoto sought. And yet, Ōura seemed to welcome the opportunity to help his friend’s son and to embrace the role of Pygmalion and shape the destiny of the young acolyte. Ōura recognized the promise and ambition of his friend’s son. The enthusiasm with which Ōura embraced the task of mentoring the young man also suggests that Ōura saw in Sanehiko something of his younger self, the young man who came from Kagoshima to the capital with a burning desire to prove himself on the national stage.

Yamamoto served as Ōura’s personal assistant, helping with the minutia of his bureaucratic duties. At the same time, at Ōura’s insistence, Yamamoto began ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 Written in Ash: The Education of a Reconstructionist
• 2 The Comprehensive Magazine Kaizō: Giving Voice to the Opposition and Challenging the Status Quo in Interwar Japan
• 3 Shouldering Giants: The Presentation of Western Intellectual and Cultural Elite to Interwar Japan
• 4 Power to the People: Kaizōsha’s Enpon Gamble and the Making of a Publishing Revolution
• 5 Literary Interventions: Yamamoto Sanehiko’s Role in Sino-Japanese Literary Exchange
• 6 Embracing the Danse Macabre: The Politics and Political Career of Yamamoto Sanehiko
• 7 Last Man Standing: Courting Revival in Postwar Japan
• Epilogue: Yamamoto Sanehiko’s Interwar Legacy in Postwar Japan
• Appendix: Glossary of Selected Terms from East Asian Languages
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index