Nation-Empire

Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies

Sayaka Chatani

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501730771
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

By the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands of young men in the Japanese colonies, in particular Taiwan and Korea, had expressed their loyalty to the empire by volunteering to join the army. Why and how did so many colonial youth become passionate supporters of Japanese imperial nationalism? And what happened to these youth after the war? Nation-Empire investigates these questions by examining the long-term mobilization of youth in the rural peripheries of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Personal stories and village histories vividly show youth's ambitions, emotions, and identities generated in the shifting conditions in each locality. At the same time, Sayaka Chatani unveils an intense ideological mobilization built from diverse contexts—the global rise of youth and agrarian ideals, Japan's strong drive for assimilation and nationalization, and the complex emotions of younger generations in various remote villages.

Nation-Empire engages with multiple historical debates. Chatani considers metropole-colony linkages, revealing the core characteristics of the Japanese Empire; discusses youth mobilization, analyzing the Japanese seinendan (village youth associations) as equivalent to the Boy Scouts or the Hitler Youth; and examines society and individual subjectivities under totalitarian rule. Her book highlights the shifting state-society transactions of the twentieth-century world through the lens of the Japanese Empire, inviting readers to contend with a new approach to, and a bold vision of, empire study.

Part 1

THE SO-CALLED INNER TERRITORIES

1

NATIONAL TRENDS

Among the many semi-governmental institutions that Japanese bureaucrats supervised in the pre–World War II era, the seinendan (village youth associations) were among the most impressive successes in terms of their scale. By the 1920s, almost every village had a seinendan, which included virtually all eligible people—young men between their early teens and late twenties who had completed elementary school. Their national network spread like a cobweb, and county-, prefecture-, and nation-level federations regularly organized sport and training events.

For state officials eager to reach the rural masses, the seinendan were both a means and a goal. Unlike uniformed youth groups in other countries, the seinendan were deeply rooted in village communal life. They organized labor sharing during farming seasons, took charge of seasonal festivals and volunteer work, imposed rules and regulations on their members, disseminated news, and gathered spontaneously after a day of farming. Traditionally, the village youth associations were also where young men entered the age of sexual interests and conduct, reaffirmed male dominance in village society, and enjoyed a great degree of autonomy that was tacitly approved of by other villagers. In the twentieth century, the seinendan received more supervision from officials and functioned as the major venue of top-down mobilization of farm youth. The state depended on village seinendan groups to discipline youth, who were often labeled as impressionable and immature, and create ideal Japanese subjects. Through the political and economic upheavals of the 1930s, seinendan members carried the heavy burden of agricultural production increases, unpaid infrastructure maintenance, and military service, and with devotion they lived up to the reputation as the bastion of nationalistic ideology. The influence of the seinendan in rural life was so widely recognized that they even challenged the centrality of academic instruction provided by the school system.

Institutions like the seinendan, locally grounded and nationally controlled at the same time, were indispensable in state officials’ pursuit of nation building, not only in Japan but also in colonies such as Karafuto, Taiwan, Nanyō, and Korea. In their minds, the development of the seinendan was analogous to the consolidation of state domination. The government began promoting village youth associations after the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–1905, during which many villages observed youths’ substantial day-to-day support for the war. After World War I, the army urged the government to standardize the associations under the name of seinendan and established the Seinendan Chūōbu as their overall headquarters. By the late 1910s, the scale of the seinendan reached its height, numbering eighteen thousand groups and 2.9 million members; these figures remained roughly steady until World War II. In 1921, the seinendan constructed the building of the Japan Youth Center (Nippon Seinenkan) in Tokyo with donations created by the labor of seinendan members across the country. Legally a public foundation that collected financial contributions, managed investments, and operated hostel facilities, the Japan Youth Center became the new headquarters of the seinendan, and it has been providing the largest amount of funding for regional and national seinendan activities ever since. In April 1925, the seinendan network was turned into the Greater Japan Seinendan Federation (Dai Nippon Rengō Seinendan), which officially incorporated the seinendan federations in Taiwan and Korea in 1938.¹ It was renamed the Greater Japan Seinendan (Dai Nihon Seinendan) in 1939 and was merged with similar national organizations of younger boys and young women to form the Greater Japan Seishōnendan (Dai Nihon Seishōnendan) in 1941.²

Behind the familiar story of state-led mass mobilization were, of course, diverse motivations embraced by everyone involved. Even the government’s desire to control village youth was far from monolithic, as different ministries, such as Home, Education, Agriculture, and Army, envisioned their own goals. Intertwined with officials’ interests was the enthusiasm of intellectuals and social activists who applied ideas of developmental psychology, imperial youth mobilization, and agrarianism to seinendan training programs. What miraculously unified the diverse voices was the unique and capacious concept of “rural youth” (nōson seinen). This term connoted healthy, masculine, and patriotic national “pillars” (chūken) and became an essential symbol in everyone’s rhetoric. Soon it became a weapon for young farmers themselves. By internalizing the symbolic power attached to rural youth, young men in remote hamlets imagined a new community extending beyond the village and even the nation, and they sometimes challenged established authorities.

The success of the seinendan in becoming a national movement thus owed much to the fluid discourse of rural youth. By embodying the image of model rural youth, the seinendan made it possible for various groups to pursue contradictory sets of interests—creating strong soldiers while deemphasizing the presence of the army, keeping young people in the remote countryside while fostering their desire to connect with the global community of modern youth, and teaching them self-discipline while allowing them to rebel against the establishment. This multidimensionality and flexibility contained in the function of seinendan institutions attracted almost all factions of national leaders, village notables, and young people themselves.

Yamamoto Takinosuke’s Inaka seinen

Despite the intensive state oversight, the seinendan always maintained an image as grassroots institutions. The main reason for this was their rural and communal character inherited from pre-Meiji hamlet youth groups (often called wakamonogumi or wakarenchū). But the bottom-up image also was attributable to Yamamoto Takinosuke, a young country dweller who founded the national seinendan movement at the turn of the twentieth century. His career as the “mother of the seinendan” started in 1896, when he was a twenty-four-year-old schoolteacher in Hiroshima. He gave birth to a massive movement by self-publishing a small book, Inaka seinen (Rural youth).³

Yamamoto’s life at the time of writing the book was typical of that of aspiring young men in the countryside. Like many others, he had failed the conscription exam, probably because of poor vision.⁴ Poverty forced him to abandon his dream of either continuing on to middle school or going to Tokyo. Instead, he had to settle for working at a village administrative office and elementary school. Inaka seinen begins with a lament about the life of youth in the countryside, expressing Yamamoto’s growing frustrations after six years of trying to inject life into local youth groups. In his writing, rural youth became a distinct category separate from their urban counterparts: “Although [the youth of the city and the country] are both youth, one kind is embraced warmly and the other is abandoned on the street. The so-called ‘rural youth’ are the ones who have been abandoned. They are without school name or diploma…. Even though they constitute the majority of the youth of the nation, they are neglected and left out of the discussion.”⁵

Yamamoto was reacting against what he viewed as a growing focus on students in urban areas. The late 1880s and early 1890s saw the burgeoning of commercial magazines targeting urban youth. The scholar Kimura Naoe argues that seinen (youth) became a new category as an alternative to sōshi, the mob-like youth who had engaged in violent political demonstrations during the Freedom and Popular Rights movement of the 1880s. The most influential source of the new understanding of seinen was the popular journalist Tokutomi Sohō and his magazine, Kokumin no tomo (The nation’s friend). This magazine was named after the American publication The Nation, which Tokutomi read avidly while attending Dōshisha English School in Kyoto.⁶ In 1887, it featured a series of articles titled “The Youth of New Japan and the Politics of New Japan,” which Kimura calls “a manifesto for the magazine.”⁷ In these articles, Tokutomi, only twenty-four years old at the time, envisioned high school and college students as the engine of a new Japanese politics. He claimed that youth had been principal agents in historic events, including the Meiji Restoration, and that their energy should not be misguided as had been the case with the violent sōshi.⁸ The voice of Kokumin no tomo echoed around the country and reached far beyond urban intellectuals. Many young men formed associations in cities and provincial towns, ranging from small groups of ten to fifteen people to large organizations with thousands of members. They produced youth magazines, many of which imitated the design, format, and language of Kokumin no tomo.⁹

Yamamoto was one of many inspired by the new discourse on seinen. Less than a decade later, however, when he wrote Inaka seinen, the widening gap in status between urban and rural youth made this discourse appear hypocritical. “Most of the so-called youth magazines published in the cities have no argument, use beautiful and well-crafted language, and yet do not convey sincerity or inspiration,” Yamamoto complained. “They use the phrase ‘for the sake of the youth of the whole nation,’ but they consider only their [urban] consumers…. No one is really passionate about inspiring the youth in the countryside.”¹⁰

Despite his frustration, Yamamoto still perceived “youth” as an identity of utmost importance that should transcend the urban–rural social divide. He called on the reader neither to detest nor to fear urban youth. The real cleavage was between the young, “progressive reformers by nature,” and the old (rōbutsu, literally “old things”), who were backward, conservative, corrupt, and indecisive.¹¹ To fulfill their responsibility together with urban youth, rural youth needed reform and guidance. In his eyes, they lacked a national consciousness and were “wasteful, lazy, weak, sly, obscene, servile, undetermined, reckless, and irresponsible,” although he blamed the social circumstances of farm villages for making them that way.¹² Yamamoto proposed reorganizing traditional hamlet youth groups, which had existed for several centuries but which he thought had lost their ability to educate and train young people. Simple but concrete guidelines—rising early, climbing mountains, taking cold baths, wearing only cotton clothes, reading newspapers, and avoiding early marriage—would bring new life to rural youth.

In his conclusion, Yamamoto earnestly encouraged village youth to discipline themselves and develop a region-wide community. “I believe in a great new movement of the nation in which, from the corners of the Kurile Islands to the tip of Taiwan, hundreds and thousands of rural youth groups and millions of strong village youth will unite, communicate with one another, mutually associate, and mutually collaborate.”¹³ Even though Japan was still fighting battles to conquer the mountains of Taiwan, Yamamoto’s book already presented the blueprint of an imperial network of rural youth. Through his writing, the birth of the seinendan movement was embedded in the imagination of Japan’s nation-empire.

Agrarian Nationalism

Yamamoto’s activism is usually considered the starting point of a nationwide movement to revive old hamlet youth groups and transform them into modern seinendan. But the main reason why the seinendan gained wide support and grew rapidly over the next half-century was that many leaders in Japan’s modernizing society viewed developing strong rural youth as crucial. One important group among these leaders was the advocates of agrarian nationalism. Although the origin of anti-urban pastoralism can be traced to earlier eras, rapid modernization and industrialization during the Meiji period raised new concerns about social changes. As a flip side of urban supremacy widely embraced by Meiji leaders, many bureaucrats, urban intellectuals, and landlords developed various strains of agrarianism (nōhonshugi). They believed that urban culture and industrial capitalism corroded national spirit, that agriculture was the basis for prosperous and harmonious nation, and that the purity of the nation was preserved in the countryside.¹⁴ One of the most influential agrarians, Yokoi Tokiyoshi, a professor at the Tokyo Agricultural College, emphasized the moral, ethical, and physical strength of farmers. He argued:

In my opinion the vitality of a country is fostered by its middle-class families; it is particularly well developed among farm families. Such qualities as innocence, sincerity, obedience, vigor, fortitude, trustworthiness, earnestness, and robust health are appropriate for soldiers and for defending the country. Don’t farmers excel in these qualities above all? Although you cannot make a country out of land alone, the country must not become separated from the soil. Therefore the farmers, who have the closest connection with the land, love it the most and thus love the country the most.¹⁵

Already apparent in this passage from 1897 was the view of farmers as the basis of the nation’s military strength. Yokoi even argued that the Way of the Farmer was the heir to Bushidō, the Way of Warrior.¹⁶ Army officials had already identified the simple way of life in the countryside as preferable to urban living styles for preparing healthy and obedient soldiers, and Yokoi’s agrarianism corroborated their belief. Not all agrarians agreed with Yokoi, but as the army grew confident in its power to influence domestic and international politics after victories in international wars—in 1895 against Qing China, 1905 against Russia, and 1915 against German troops in China—agrarians and army officials increasingly shared common interests and goals. By the early 1930s, when Japan launched its aggression on the Chinese continent and established Manchukuo in northeast China, agrarianism provided the ideological basis that facilitated Japanese farmers’ support for imperial expansion. Katō Kanji, the main...