Preface
This is a study of two modern Japanese intellectuals, one a professor of Western political thought, the other a journalist. Although the intrinsic interest of each of these lives emerges readily when they are set in context, I have deliberately chosen to study them together, and to focus on the imperial period (1868–1945), for reasons I wish briefly to delineate here. First, a word about the general approach I have taken: essentially, this book argues that the creation and development of the modern state in Japan simultaneously redefined both politics and society. In this process, a vast area of social thought and practice concerned with the national life, one that fed and transcended official and purely private activity, also emerged. This was the "public" sphere, whose emergence also produced the type of intellectuals I call "public men." Owing to the heavily bureaucratic character of Japan's political and institutional evolution, however, "publicness" soon ramified into positions distinctly "inside" and "outside." Public life pursued in large, especially official, organizations was accorded greater value and prestige; independent (and dissident) activity, while public, did not enjoy such approbation. Indeed, public tended to be identified with the state itself.
As a professor of Western political thought at Tokyo Imperial University, Nanbara Shigeru (1889–1974) was an insider. Hasegawa Nyozekan (1875–1969), as a critical journalist, was an outsider. With the crisis of early Showa[*] (1925–45), involving the repression of the left, depression, the collapse of party government, mobilization for and defeat
in total war, Nanbara and Hasegawa as public men were called upon to promote and adhere to an extreme cultural particularism. This was a task both found onerous yet curiously irresistible. Nanbara, a neo-Kantian in philosophy and a professing Christian, refused to yield entirely to the demands of orthodoxy, but his personal opposition remained just that, and depended for expression on his insider status. Hasegawa, the outsider, sought to defend a humanely anarchic, almost prepolitical, community against the demands of the state. But he was actually mobilized to a greater degree than Nanbara, since the state had both destroyed the left and effectively politicized the nation down to the level of the local community, even of the family.
In short, I attempt in the pages that follow to show how, for public men in imperial Japan, the intellectual content of public work and the mutually defining status positions of insider and outsider were interrelated. I believe that this is something of a new approach—though one by no means wholly original—to the intellectual history of modern Japan. In the course of writing this study, I found myself confronting certain methodological and philosophical issues concerning the relation of social being to consciousness. These, frankly, I would rather not address at once, preferring to let the results speak through the text that follows. "[Social] being determines consciousness" in any case seems to me an unhappy, if compelling, formulation. It leaves out the interpreter and his/her interests. The relation in question must emerge as a construction—though not an arbitrary one—of the interpreter. It is not something objectively given and waiting to be seized, ready-to-wear, from without. ("The Critique of Pure Reason ," Ralf Dahrendorf notes, "does not emerge by squeezing Prussian society.") At the same time, as will be clear, I believe that a social perspective on intellectual work is as necessary as close attention to text. My intent here has been to combine these approaches as the situation seemed to require it.
More germane to this preface, perhaps, would be some attention to my particular choice of protagonists. It would no doubt be possible to pair a number of public insiders and outsiders in ways that would shed light on the dilemmas and ambiguities of the public sphere in imperial Japan. Some such pairings are suggested in the text. But as indicated earlier, the choice of protagonists here was not accidental and needs some explanation.
As with many Western students of Japanese history since the 1960s, I got my first inkling of the importance of "problem consciousness" (mondai ishiki ) in Japanese scholarship through the work of Maruyama
Masao. It would be digressive to describe the impact on me of this work, and I shall also forgo a discussion of Maruyama's achievement in the context of contemporary Japan, since I intend to take up this question fully in a separate study. But Maruyama, as will become clear, figures prominently in my account, both in terms of substantive ideas and personal testimony about the period under study. The persuasiveness of the former is best determined in context, both here and, more important, in his own work. The historical testimony to which I refer is central because Maruyama happens to have had close personal ties to both of the subjects of this work. Hasegawa Nyozekan was a longtime associate of Maruyama's father, the well-known journalist Maruyama Kanji. Nyozekan was a frequent presence in the Maruyama household during the 1920s and early 1930s and, along with his father, had a decisive impact on the young Maruyama's views of Japanese society and politics, particularly his understanding of "Japanese fascism." Nanbara Shigeru, in a sense, took up where Hasegawa left off. As Maruyama's main academic tutor, and later senior associate at Tokyo Imperial, Nanbara was also in a position to wield considerable intellectual and moral influence over his pupil. All indications are that the personal tie was very strong, though Nanbara's intellectual influence on Maruyama, as may be surmised, was of a more theoretical and philosophical quality than that of Hasegawa. Nor did pupil follow teacher slavishly. Indeed, it seems that the differences between them have much to do with the temperament and social perspective inculcated in the young Maruyama by his earlier mentors; and that the particular power of Maruyama's mature work springs from his combining within himself the streams of insider and outsider publicness represented by his two teachers. It is for this reason that I follow the Nanbara/Hasegawa pairing only through 1945: their intellectual significance for Maruyama, as a key representative of the postwar generation, was greatest prior to 1945; and indeed, taken on their own terms, each can be said to have made his chief contribution to Japanese political and social thought under the imperial system. These are not, therefore, complete intellectual biographies. In sum, while Maruyama himself is not the central focus of study here, his presence, both in broad matters of substance and close historical perspective, has provided a kind of organic link between my accounts of the public lives of Nanbara and Hasegawa. There are two points I wish to stress, however. My treatment of Maruyama is not uncritical; I am not simply "taking his word for it" in shaping my interpretations here. Second, this work is intended to stand by itself, to yield insights of its own as a study
of the dilemmas of public life in imperial Japan. I hope I have not failed in either respect.[1]
Although this study concerns developments in the history of Japanese social and political thought, and deals specifically with the lives and work of a small number of public men, it is also meant to address a broader problem: the price of national identity in the twentieth century. In this sense, it is an illustration of the hard truth expressed in the statement of Simone Weil's quoted above as an epigraph. Indeed, Simone Weil's brief life and her writings stand as proof that modern human intelligence cannot do otherwise than believe in its strivings and accept its inevitable failures. This truth must be taken personally. Simone Weil is a limit case in this regard, and it is with this limit case that I would like to begin.
Simone Weil believed that fascism is preceded, not followed, by the state's denial to those subject to it of a personal and social need for the free expression of thought. She did not, of course, mean simple license for the tongue, but considered speech—words defined and intended to refer to some reality, as opposed to the "myths and monsters" of collective slogans and the seeming absolutes of political rhetoric. Essentially, then, fascism meant for Simone Weil the attempted reduction of rational life to absurdity. Leaving aside the question of whether fascism is the word best suited to describe this aspect of the modern state's behavior, there can be little argument that our century has seen enough of regimes that have made just such attempts. None, it would seem, is wholly exempt from the fear of public knowledge and discussion, or from the temptation to set and define the terms of public discourse in ways convenient to itself. That modern states do not, and cannot, succeed in the attempt to monopolize social rationality is beside the point. They all try, some on a national scale in the midst of crisis; others bit by bit, relying on local reproductions of the process of denial. In this respect, perhaps the most any people can achieve is to create and maintain a system that, in Robert Bellah's phrase, is "relatively less problematic" rather than wholly innocent of repression.[2]
Simone Weil darkly regarded the modern bureaucratic state as moving ineluctably toward centralization of all its functions, this by necessity involving two linked processes. The first, already sketched in, might be called the elimination of alternative rationalities from society in the
interest of managerial efficiency. The state, that is, is to become the end of a good life rather than a means to its attainment. Having mobilized the forces of instrumental rationality—the technological, capital, and organized intellectual resources of society—on its own behalf, the state marches, by fits and starts (as Max Weber also thought) on the "irrational," affective sphere, the realm of passion and compassion. This process essentially consumes, or destroys, local attachments, love of place, even of country; ultimately, it disallows all self-definition independent of the state. Simone Weil called this process "deracination": uprooting. She considered that all modern states were inhabited by more or less deracinated peoples, and urged (in a book written for de Gaulle's Free French), that a movement toward "rootedness" be fostered in France as the country fought to win back its independence. The central emotion of national rootedness was to be not a hunger for glory but compassion for one's country and people. It is no surprise to find that Simone Weil's program also called for post-liberation France to renounce all colonial possessions.[3]
The specter that haunted Simone Weil was the combined force of the bureaucratic state and the national, collective "we": power and its enabling ideology. To counteract this deadly combination, she sought to unite in her person the life of the intellect and of manual work. By this means she sought to demonstrate that deracination could be resisted; a life of conscious bonding to a community of work would be the model for an alternative mode of social being. Indeed, Simone Weil accorded to manual work a profound spiritual significance grounded in its painful, sacrificial nature.
Few have lived as Simone Weil did. Fewer still have died as she did: of voluntary starvation and chagrin at her separation from her country in its time of trial. The proposals she made to de Gaulle contain many contradictions and apparently undemocratic, elitist elements. The contradictions are as radical as her thought and way of life and death. Philosopher, mystic, and "revolutionary pessimist," she is, as noted, a limit case rather than a modal personality. Yet it is the limit case rather than the modal personality that inspires (and sometimes repels us). Many of Simone Weil's contemporaries throughout the developed world, both intellectuals and workers, have paid with their lives, or at least with their livelihoods, for statements not half as radical as hers. Many more have adjusted. By examining the relation of a number of Japanese thinkers to "power and its enabling ideology," this study seeks to show how
inescapable, universal, and yet unique, are the contradictions of that relationship.
No modern state could even attempt the total commitment of resources that has made possible the immensely destructive total wars of our time without the active support of those subject to it. To a degree this is an old story. "The king makes war," ran the medieval adage, "and the people die." In his own pathbreaking analyses of "Japanese fascism," Maruyama Masao cites David Hume: "Any government, however despotic, is based on people's opinions." And Maruyama comments further: "To be sure, the most despotic government cannot exist without a minimum of voluntary cooperation from the ruled."[4] We must leave aside discussion of Maruyama's questionable thesis that the academically unpedigreed "pseudo-intelligentsia" of Japan provided the backbone of support for fascism and war itself in that country. Our concern here lies rather with the broader question: How, and how well, does this mobilization work?
It is obvious, of course, that in everyday life, allegiance to the state is regarded as no paradox at all. It almost sinks beneath the surface of consciousness, just as our awareness of "nature" tends to become something of an abstraction, broken by intermittent sensation. Indeed, in a crisis, when it believes itself threatened by a foreign or domestic enemy, the state mobilizes the energy and resources of its people with an alacrity that seems, to most, only natural. Perhaps this is because people feel, not only that they are defending themselves, but that their own existence has been recognized by the state; that they can give not some alienated product of their work—their money—but their intelligent service and blood. In a democracy—and "we are all democrats today"[5] —mobilization becomes self-mobilization. In a larger sense, then, mobilization in crisis, while it entails an expansion of state power, also heightens the people's identification with the state; the people become the state.
Yet sometimes too great an accumulation of moral, political, and economic contradictions forces us to question the need for such mobilization. This is not necessarily the result of massive "failure" alone, as it was for the defeated regimes of 1945. It may also be the precipitant of long-standing social tensions within a still legitimate system, as in the confluence of the civil rights and antiwar struggles of the 1960s in the United States. At such junctures, an increasing and representative body
of people begin to look beyond the immediate "crisis" to examine the whole nature of the state's relationship to smaller social entities and to individuals. While the exact form of the question varies according to time, place, and tradition, the thrust seems to be common: Why is it "natural" to submit to and promote the power of the state at a given moment? Can there be too much obedience? What is the ultimate end in view? Must the expansion of state power diminish a society's capacity to set humane ends for itself, and the mobilization of social rationality contribute inevitably to the further expansion of that power until some catastrophe brings a temporary halt to the process? Must the growing purview of the state tend to the deracination and demoralization of a people?
The journalist Hasegawa Nyozekan posed this question in 1921. How is it, he asked, that as servants of state men are permitted, even praised for committing, acts forbidden to the common conscience? What is it in the nature of the collectivity that sanctions such a differential morality? Why is it that one cannot even claim membership in a "nation" without "the sacrifice of part of one's humanity"?[6] Over the succeeding decade, Hasegawa came to believe that the resolution of the paradox of national identity lay in the development of a truly international proletariat, and set about a critique of the state that sought to lay bare the ideological roots of modern patriotism and its violent tendencies. Thus in 1931 he dared to claim that Japan's invasion of Manchuria signaled the advent of fascism in his own country and to predict that it would lead to a "second World War." He insisted that only the proletariat could prevent such a cataclysm. Yet this same Hasegawa Nyozekan, writing in the late 1930s, professed to see Japan's war in China as a liberating force, and upheld Japan's right and duty to compel China to accede to modernization by conquest. Hasegawa, finally, was at no loss for words to explain, in terms of a misunderstood national character, why Japan had gone to war with the Western world. His intelligence had been mobilized.
Nanbara Shigeru, on the other hand, believed that the state was indispensable to the achievement of true freedom and humanity. This was a view befitting his position as a public servant in an imperial university. Yet Nanbara remained unshakably opposed to the "pseudo-religion" of the kokutai (Japan's emperor-centered national polity), according to which the emperor was the font of all values—goodness, truth, beauty, justice—in the lives of his people. He clung to an ideal state. And in his private poetic journal, Nanbara confessed his hopes that England, whose
utilitarian philosophy he scorned, would be victorious against Germany, his own country's ally.
In the end, Nanbara could only hope that a new Weltanschauung, grounded in individual Christian witness, would take shape and prevent a repetition of the events his country had set in motion. Japanese tradition alone, he felt, was philosophically and morally insufficient.
Both of these cases illustrate the daunting task of critical allegiance: to keep the comforting sanctuary that is one's nation from becoming a prison house, for oneself, for others. In this sense, this study may be read as a cautionary tale, whose focus on Japan is "accidental." Maruyama Masao himself, a brilliant and problematic disciple of both Nanbara and Hasegawa, looked beyond Japan for a formula to express the moral lesson of uncritical allegiance. In his essay "Politics and Man in the Contemporary World," Maruyama drew on the experience of Martin Niemöller, a German pastor and eventual prisoner of the Nazi regime. Niemöller crystalized his experience—the transformation of equanimity into opposition as Nazi attacks came closer and closer to the church—into two stark injunctions. First, Principis obsta : "Resist the beginning"; second, Finem respice : "Consider the end."[7] Niemöller's own awakening had come too late to prevent the evil that so seared his conscience. Ultimately, then, as Simone Weil thought, we may fail. Her example, however, and Niemöller's and Nanbara's, and Hasegawa's, shows us that we are bound, whatever the result, to continue our attempts to think through our condition. The alternative—to cease thinking altogether—permits no other choice.