Mise-En-Scène

Professor Nanbara Shigeru, holder of the chair in political science in the Law Faculty of Tokyo Imperial, is not known to have published a single volume in the over ten years he has occupied that position. True, he may periodically publish an essay in the Kokka Gakkai zasshi , but the fact that his name is unknown in intellectual circles generally is enough to show that he has failed, even pro forma, to make the scholarly contribution one would expect of a professor in the area of Geisteswissenschaften [seishin kagaku ], especially politics, at an imperial university. One can only agree that he is the epitome of a "scholar out of touch with the life of our people" that Minister of Education Hashida [Kunihiko] has criticized.^[1]

Nanbara was anonymous and he knew it. He may also have sensed that his anonymity could not last. "Like a snail hunched in his shell," one of his waka reads, "a life hidden away I would lead."^[2] But notoriety came, albeit in a paradoxical way. In 1939 Minoda Muneki, at one time professor of logic at Keio^[*] University, and leader of the rightist Genri Nihonsha, began another in his series of attacks on the Law and Economics Faculties at Tokyo Imperial University (Todai^[*] ), in which Nanbara, among others, was singled out. The words quoted above are Minoda's, and so perhaps are to be taken with a large grain of salt. (Nanbara probably took them with aspirin.) What had Nanbara done to warrant this attack? If he was anonymous, why not let sleeping dogs lie? Or was anonymity dangerous? To answer, let us first look at what Nanbara was, where and when. Having set the scene, we shall explore his thought.

This was not Minoda's first attack on an imperial university. His group, whose name translates loosely as "The True [or Fundamental] Japan Society," was founded in 1925. As such it was one of a welter of right-wing nationalist groups that sprang up in the wake of the Taisho^[*] political crisis, the domestic movement for democracy, and socialist and labor agitation—with the success of the Russian revolution looming close in the background.^[3] These developments, as is well known, brought together a motley and unstable alliance of old nationalists, represented both by bureaucratic statists such as Hiranuma Kiichiro^[*] , and China-ronin^[*] adventurists a la Toyama^[*] Mitsuru; with newer groups propagating a national socialism marked by its virulent anticommunist (and later antiliberal) emphasis. There was among both types a sharing of bureaucratic, political, business, and military patrons, as well as (at a lower level of prestige) of academic epigones—not to mention duplication of

membership, especially among students, so as to give the illusion of strength in numbers. Power behind the scenes was not a problem.

The overlap and sharing of patronage just alluded to may be illustrated briefly with a look at the career of Minoda himself, and at the emergence of the Genri Nihonsha. As noted, Minoda was a former academic. His main ideological influence was Uesugi Shinkichi (1878–1929), a nationalist constitutional scholar and chief antagonist, from within Tokyo Imperial, of Minobe Tatsukichi's organ theory of the state. (The significance of Minobe's work, its ascendancy and ultimate renunciation, will be discussed presently.)

Ironically, Uesugi could claim "no disciples in any position of academic importance" at the time of his death, and it was left to Minoda, his "self-appointed successor," to carry on the struggle against Minobe's theory. The consequences for liberals and liberal thought were obnoxious, to say the least. With the depression, Manchurian incident, and collapse of party government, the field for effective right-wing agitation had opened far more dramatically than during the years after 1918. A nonentity, Minoda seemed suddenly to command attention. He had powerful friends, in the House of Peers especially, a powerful anti-Todai^[*] animus, and followers who were quite happy when push came to shove. The anti-Todai vitriol was obviously given fuller play than would have been possible under Uesugi's direct leadership, or had Minoda truly been "the heir to Uesugi's mantle as a scholar and teacher."^[4] But Minoda knew himself to be an outsider.

In a sense, Uesugi was responsible for the whole mess. His efforts from the rostrum to provide a "theoretical basis for the merger of Japanistic and socialistic thought" had led him to take the further step of mobilizing rightist students at Tokyo Imperial in a campaign against "dangerous" (Marxist and anarchist) thought; this won for him the "extra-academic" favor of Hiranuma. Uesugi's vehicle was the Kokoku Doshikai^[*] (Association of Comrades of the Imperial Land), founded in 1920, with the patronage of Hiranuma, then public prosecutor general. The group, to which Minoda belonged, scored an early success in bringing about the expulsion of Morito Tatsuo from the Economics Faculty. But for our purposes, the spin-offs of the Kokoku Doshikai in the rightist movement are more significant than its own achievements. These spin-offs, as Frank O. Miller notes, followed two distinct lines. The first was the Kokuhonsha (National Foundation Society), which "stemmed directly" from the Kokoku Doshikai. Founded in 1924, it was to be-

come the centerpiece of Hiranuma's "fascistic" activities. Not surprisingly, as Miller notes, "the role of academics generally, and the influence of Uesugi specifically, was submerged in the organization under the weight of the numbers, prestige, and influence of bureaucratic, business, and military members."^[5] Such ties, in the relatively liberal atmosphere of the time, led to verbal attacks on Uesugi as the "running dog of the clan clique and bureaucracy" and an "academic sycophant"—criticisms duly noted in the Justice Ministry's 1940 report on the right-wing student movement.^[6]

Passing over the "satellites" of the Kokuhonsha, in which Uesugi's direct influence was diminishing, let us turn to the "second line" of succession, those organizations where his legacy was perpetuated more directly. These were groups, based still largely in the universities and higher schools, which saw their role as one of direct combat against "leftist manifestations in the academic community," and who formed the overlapping contacts with the distinctly outsider movement for national socialism associated with Okawa Shumei^[*] and Kita Ikki. Miller is unambiguous in his designation: Uesugi's direct legacy thrived in the form of fascism.

It was from among the members of this "second line" that the Genri Nihonsha was founded in 1925 by Minoda and Mitsukawa Kametaro^[*] , another academic follower of Okawa's^[*] and a battler against the minponshugi of Yoshino Sakuzo^[*] . Minoda by 1927 found himself at the head of an umbrella group of Uesugi-style academic watchdog organizations and set to work "grinding out a steady parade of extremely antiliberal, Japanistic diatribes under the banner of the Genri Nihonsha."^[7]

Minoda's efforts first paid off in 1933. In this year the Genri Nihonsha, in concert with the Kenkokukai (originally sponsored by Uesugi to "provide a meeting ground between bureaucratic and national socialistic circles") began the campaign that resulted in the dismissal of Takigawa Yukitoki from the Law Faculty of Kyoto Imperial. Probably the first organized attack on a liberal, as opposed to a socialistic, heresy, Minoda's campaign prompted Education Minister Hatoyama Ichiro^[*] to demand Takigawa's dismissal on the grounds that the interpretations of the laws of rebellion and of adultery set forth in his Keiho tokuhon^[*] (Reader in criminal law) desecrated the national polity. Despite protest, the threat of mass resignation (one actually carried out by a small minority) of the entire faculty, and student demonstrations at Kyoto and elsewhere, Hatoyama succeeded.

Assured, then, of the support (direct or indirect) of high officials, Minoda continued. I shall defer for the moment discussion of the theoretical issues involved in the Minobe case—these are the subject of Miller's full and lucid analysis, and of a host of other works. Still, we must note Minoda's role at the forefront, not only of the revival of the old Uesugi-Minobe controversy, but of its function as a channel for the infusion of rightist energies into a deadly serious political attack on the socalled "liberal-genro^[*] bloc."^[8] As discussed earlier, this was the term used by conservative polemicists—supported by Hiranuma and various military claimants—to designate elites such as the surviving genro Saionji Kinmochi, privy seal Makino Nobuaki, and Ichiki Kitokuro^[*] , professor of law at Tokyo Imperial, holder of various posts in the Home Ministry and House of Peers, and finally imperial household minister. My purpose here is not to privilege the political struggles with which the Minobe case was embroiled, but rather to point out the degree to which, by their nature, Tokyo and the other imperial universities were bound to become the focus of attention and attack whenever ideological questions concerning the state and its sovereignty arose. Long-term structural shifts in the power configuration within the imperial system necessarily involved the universities—especially Tokyo Imperial. Not only was it the chief training ground for officials and thus involved in terms of the career interests and prestige of its alumni (interests and prestige resented by outsiders such as Minoda); in a far broader sense, the university owed its life to the state. Article I of the University Ordinance of 1886 makes this connection explicitly: "It shall be the purpose of the Imperial University to teach the sciences and the arts and to probe their mysteries in accordance with the needs of the state." Thus the classic tension between state service and expertise in Western learning—and by extension its free pursuit—was inherent in the relationship.^[9] For every one who stressed the need for scholars to follow their own light wherever it led, there were always others, such as the lawyer and Hiranuma crony Takeuchi Kakuji, who thought quite otherwise. Writing at the time of the Morito case, Takeuchi argued that "Tokyo Imperial University should become the quarantine office for imported [ideologies] . . . . If a thought is harmful, it should be treated as a harmful thought. For an ideology which is both harmful and harmless, the university should remove the harmful portion, and import the profitable part." There was no end to danger involved when a professor became infected by such ideologies (in Morito's case, the anarchism of Kropotkin), and then

passed the radicalism on to his students.^[10] But who was to decide the question of "harmfulness" versus "profitability"? How? The question was as political as any. Indeed, how could politics and learning help but be intertwined—not so much in the sense of any cheap sellout to power for reasons of individual ambition, as of a far more deeply rooted sense of belonging to, dependence on, and identification with a cultural apparatus that had been called into existence as (to borrow Thomas Huber's term) a "service intelligentsia"?

We are in a position now to explore a little more specifically the links between the basic tension of the university-state relation, the Minobe affair itself, and the issue—to be discussed at length—of "academic autonomy" under the imperial system.

Minobe's "organ theory," as we have already seen, was widely accepted in academia. The emperor himself had no objection to it, and regarded Minobe as an individual of the highest caliber.^[11] The theory was elaborated in self-conscious response to—and in order to further—the "trend of the times" away from feudal subjection and toward individual liberty: "It can be said that the most important ethical imperative of modern constitutional government is that each individual be respected for himself, and that each be permitted as far as possible to give expression to his capacities. The history of modern cultural development is the history of the liberation of the individual."^[12] In terms of the governing of the state, liberty meant not only autonomy and decentralization among state institutions, but also much fuller participation of hitherto effectively excluded social groups in the polity. As with the state itself, then, "liberty," too, had a corporate aspect. Minobe saw no constitutional obstacle to a vast broadening of the actual influence of the Diet; indeed, he regarded the establishment of the Diet as the key accomplishment of the constitutional system. Nor did he see any reason to refrain from broadening the franchise itself, with the impact that such broadening would certainly have on the Diet. There could be no question that a more representative system made for freer individuals. But how did Minobe justify such claims? It was only to be expected, he argued, that "time, place, and historical conditions" would be salient in determining the development of organs of the state duly recognized in the text of the constitution . Minobe vigorously rejected claims that the kokutai , interpreted to mean unlimited imperial prerogative, constituted a principle of historical immutability. Clearly, amendment of the text of the document had to follow prescribed procedure. But not everything in the "historical constitution" was written; and as was obvious,

the historical constitution was hardly immune from change. Of far greater moment, in Minobe's view, was the promulgation itself. Not the "national polity," but the constitutional arrangement of state organs, determined the form of government.^[13]

From this universalist institutional perspective—one animated by a belief in the "trend of the times" toward greater individual freedom—Minobe sought to establish the principle that "the state is a corporate body in which the emperor as monarch of the Japanese Empire . . . occupies the position of supreme organ." Governmental authority within this body, however, "exists for the common purpose of the entire nation and that is all that is implied when we say that the emperor is the supreme organ of the state."^[14] Having to all appearances won this point, it was not difficult for Minobe to proceed to interpretations that sought to make licit criticism of the exercise of prerogative by state ministers; restrictive constructions of articles that, in his view, had served to aggrandize the power of certain organs over others in the name of inviolability; and so forth. The key to the whole lay in Minobe's application to the Meiji constitution of the "universal" category—revealed so far only in the West—of auto-limitation; a principle that by definition could not allow the unchecked autocracy that in Minobe's estimation was the hallmark of the former feudalism and of contemporary bureaucratic despotism. The emperor, not to speak of less exalted state organs, was bound by the constitution of the state.

In so arguing, Minobe was trying to free discussion of the state from the stranglehold of the orthodox identification of kokutai with unlimited imperial prerogative—and the de facto bureaucratic power of those who "assisted" the throne in its exercise. For Minobe, kokutai referred to "that unique and unbreakable faith of the Japanese people in the divinely sanctioned character of the Japanese monarchy as the unifying principle of the nation from the founding of the state ."^[15] It was not a license for despotism.

It was and remains obvious that, as Miller shows, the differences in practical terms between Minobe and his opponents amounted to the former's embrace of government by a parliamentary, as opposed to bureaucratic, cabinet.^[16] In this conflict, a host of ideological—even theological—issues, pursued for their own sake, became entangled with crucial questions of political power. Nor were these issues merely derivative; in some ways, they provided the conceptual language and symbols that made it possible to wage those struggles as they were actually waged. Herein, I think, lies the political significance of the Minobe case. Is it

so surprising that the organ theory enjoyed the support of "antifeudal" segments of the political and official elite? Is it so surprising that those who objected to the ascendancy of these elites used and benefited from attacks on that theory to silence its academic proponents and displace the political configuration it stood for? Indeed not.

Nor is it surprising, in view of the relationship of Tokyo Imperial to the state, that the stormy political weather of the years after 1931 had serious, if ambiguous, effects on the institution, and on the intellectual work pursued within it. There can be no question that the official attack on and renunciation of organ theory (not merely the banning of Minobe's work) constituted a purge of liberal thought—understood as those intellectual currents that fostered the broadening of representation within the polity by nonrevolutionary means, and that placed the parliament at the center , if not the zenith, of the political system. In this connection, the Minobe case is to be understood as one in a long chain of events in the history of politics and learning in a strong, "late-developing" capitalist state.

This history has been represented as a struggle for "university autonomy"—which it in part was. (If this were all it was, one would have to pronou4nce the struggle a clear failure.) But this is to draw the issue too simply. Autonomy from what? For what? For whom? Who was the enemy? Who the ally? Such questions are not always easy to answer. This said, let us look briefly at the issue of "university autonomy" as it arose at Todai^[*] early in the twentieth century. As we shall see, it was in the context of a widening struggle over this issue, and of attacks from many quarters on "liberals" in the academy, that the names of Minoda Muneki and Nanbara Shigeru were eventually to be linked.

We have seen that old-line bureaucrats such as Hiranuma Kiichiro^[*] resented the assertion by subordinate bodies that ministries need not control every aspect of their operations. This was the case in education, where roughly since 1905, but particularly in the wake of the university reforms of 1918–19, Todai and its junior partners among the imperial universities had won a semblance of autonomy. This was a prized possession, analogous, one might say, to the expanded influence enjoyed by the Diet—also in the teeth of bureaucratic opposition. The years after 1918 coincide, at Todai, with the ascendancy of Onozuka Kiheiji (1870–1944), founder of Japanese political science, head of the Law Faculty, and after 1928, university president. (I shall have more to say of Onozuka later.) Accounts of these years, with some self-congratulation, speak of a "golden age" of liberalism and tolerance. Minobe's organ theory had

indeed won acceptance as the standard interpretation. His texts were used not only at Todai^[*] but at other imperial universities and major private institutions. Thus a conservative, but resolutely parliamentary, order seemed well founded, and the Hogakubu^[*] its collective theorist and supplier of administrators.

What did university autonomy signify? It referred largely to procedural matters. In the area of appointments, Byron Marshall notes, Todai presidents were chosen virtually in-house, since the university made a practice of submitting the name of a single faculty member for approval by the Ministry of Education. Full professors in each department voted for the chairman. Recruitment and promotion were similarly conducted, "on the understanding that the University Council [Hyogikai^[*] ] and President would merely rubber stamp departmental decisions." "In the first decade following the 1918 reforms," Marshall continues, "there were no frontal offensives by the government on the new provisions for appointments. . . . Only after the political climate turned hostile to intellectual dissent in the 1930's did officials of the Education Ministry directly challenge the status quo, and then only twice, with unsatisfactory results."^[17] However, procedural autonomy did not guarantee freedom of scholarly inquiry, and it is important not to confuse the two. Or to miss the connection: usually a challenge to the former arose because the latter was being "abused." The question was whether the defense of autonomy alone, at the cost of freedom of inquiry, really meant anything.

Meiji-era ordinances designed to keep the faculty from making public statements on political issues or foreign policy remained on the books. There was, to be sure, some latitude in their application. But any expression of opinion even remotely endorsing socialism, Marxism, or anarchism, or objectionable for some other reason, would surely prompt ministry officials to pressure the administration into silencing the offender. Although it was permissible under civil service regulations to exert such pressure, the technique frequently galvanized a faculty to protest, either through its head, or via resignation en masse, until a settlement—usually a compromise—was reached.

For bureaucratic opponents of the "long leash" approach to supervision of the university, such a situation was unacceptable. They had long since recognized the need for more dependable methods of curbing the academy's independence and ridding it of dangerous intellectual elements. Hence the solution: "Elite factions within the government committed to silencing academic dissenters resorted to the . . . insidious tactic of employing criminal indictments for violation of the Peace Pres-

ervation and Press Laws."^[18] Once hit upon, this method was used to great effect, and consistently, through 1939. The fact that its use required (and enjoyed) cooperation between the Justice and Education Ministries is of course the key point: a criminal charge was grounds for immediate and indefinite suspension. It was a simple and effective weapon for officials unreconciled to the idea of an independent academic body.

It is important to note the sequence in which this legal tactic was employed. Marxists and socialists (at least those so regarded) were the first target. The earliest case comes from 1920, in the so-called Morito incident. Involved was a study by Morito Tatsuo, a young Todai^[*] economist, of Kropotkin's social thought. The article, which did not advocate anarchism, was published in the department's journal, edited by Ouchi Hyoe^[*] . Both Morito and Ouchi^[*] were suspended (and eventually convicted) after ministry officials caught sight of the article and banned the journal's distribution. The precedent had been set. I shall have occasion below to discuss these years in detail. For now my interest lies in the period after 1933, especially 1935–40. For it was then, after the decimation of the organized left outside the universities, and the arrest of many leftist students and faculty (from 1928 to 1933) that the law was turned on liberals (along with the remaining academic Marxists, who were thought to constitute a vestigial "front").

Hardly anyone in the university system was prepared to make a fullscale defense of avowed Marxists as such. This is not to say that other defenses were not attempted. ("Ouchi Hyoe is not a dogmatic Marxist but a scholar," Nanbara Shigeru told a court in 1944.)^[19] But the presence alone of such people brought unfavorable official attention to the university, and that posed a threat to its procedural autonomy. By and large, Marxists, when they were not actually arrested and/or expelled—as in the second "Popular Front" incident of 1938—were silenced by suggestion. Their histories were known to the authorities in any case, so publication, without prior public recantation (tenko^[*] ), was impossible except when the subject could be considered innocuous. Admittedly, there were cases of academic Marxists publishing "daring" material. Some, like the economist Uno Kozo^[*] , fell through the cracks. But they were the exception that proved the rule: Marxism was anathema.

So far, "so good." After 1933 there were hints that "liberals"—I use the term to indicate that they were regarded, or branded, as such—would be next to take center stage. The Takigawa incident was such a

sign, of direct rightist influence in higher education, especially on those charged with its national supervision. But the full implications of this shift in focus by Japan's "academic vigilantes"^[20] became clear, as we have seen, only with the Minobe affair of 1935. Again, let us note that with the campaign of public vilification of Minobe by Minoda Muneki's organization, the influence of "outsider" ultranationalist groups on educational policy grew more and more pronouned. Genri Nihonsha worked the street, university corridors, and the halls of power to create and sustain antiliberal feeling. The organ theory itself might now seem an arcane issue, but it served well, for reasons suggested above, to concentrate the energies of those unreconciled to the Taisho^[*] rearrangement. Bureaucratic opposition from Hiranuma Kiichiro^[*] has been noted. To this we must add military resentment of the theory on the grounds that it impugned the emperor's right of supreme command (tosuiken^[*] )—which of course threatened the military's special prerogative and untouchability in the Diet. So, too, for certain segments of the peerage. It was in the House of Peers that the Genri Nihonsha associates Kikuchi Takeo, Eto Genkuro^[*] , and Mitsui Takayuki initiated the attacks early in 1934. The resulting government-sponsored "Movement to Clarify the National Polity" was no less than a bloodless purge. Ironically, in its wake a number of Minobe's former students became his prosecutors and judges, still others the censors of his works. It should be noted, however, that although Minobe himself had resigned from Todai^[*] in 1934, the Law Faculty continued to be known in rightist circles as the "Grand Temple of the Organ Theory." So the fight, for some, was not over.

Minoda and his stable of propagandists never really let up. After all, humbling Minobe did not mean that his disciples had been vanquished, or that other attempts, in the name of "scholarship," to desecrate the kokutai might not be forthcoming. Clearly, Minoda and the Genri Nihonsha, while they aroused the hostility and ridicule of many (but not all) at Todai, represented only one in a confluence of threats to the university. It did not do to be too openly contemptuous. Minoda had friends in high places. Some of them, as we have seen, made their homes in the House of Peers, others in officialdom. Yet another was General Hayashi Senjuro^[*] , prime minister from February to June 1937, who concurrently held the education and foreign affairs portfolios. It will be recalled that the hallowed formula Saisei itchi ("Worship and governance are one") was the slogan of Hayashi's brief administration.^[21] It suggests the ten-

dency of the orthodoxy that emerged in the years after the "de-Minobization" of constitutional theory, and also the direction further attacks on Todai^[*] would take.

At this juncture two clarifications are in order. It would be misleading to portray Todai—even just the Law Faculty—as quaking in fear. Though they had proven its obvious vulnerability, Minoda and his ilk remained resentful of the enormous prestige and exalted status of the institution. Todai insiders might still be confident that their home would outlast the fulminations of Genri Nihonsha or any other outside pressure group. It would be equally wrong, however, to imagine that the university was inhabited by complacent opportunists. Minoda himself might be a passing threat. But the real danger was the more worrisome as it came closer to home. Attacks by the right served to bring to the surface internal, and factional, conflicts within the departments of the university. This was manifestly the case at the time of the "Hiraga purge" of 1938–39—which brings us to the formative years of Konoe Fumimaro's New Order, and particularly the role played in it by his education minister, General Baron Araki Sadao. In July 1938, Byron Marshall relates,

Araki summoned the President and department chairmen of Todai to an unprecedented meeting with the upper echelon of the Ministry bureaucracy with the clear intent of browbeating them into abandoning university election procedures on the grounds that they had no legal basis and were contrary to Imperial prerogative in appointment of government officials. Led by Law Professor Tanaka Kotaro^[*] the professors offered a spirited rebuttal, repeating most of the arguments familiar since the Tomizu incidents three decades earlier. Minister Araki, faced with the threat of unified resistance by all imperial university faculties, chose not to press the offensive any further.^[22]

Araki's moves, however, were only part of a larger "housecleaning" (shukugaku ), the chief precipitant of which lay in the badly divided Department of Economics. Factions there dated from the department's formation in 1919, and broke down to some degree, but not entirely, along traditional right-left lines.^[23] There were "hard" and "soft" elements on both sides, as well as uncommitted faculty, not to mention nonvoting junior members and researchers who were affected by what happened. The atmosphere was so thoroughly saturated with factionalism, every issue so politicized, that for all intents and purposes the Economics Faculty was paralyzed.

This situation was, of course, an invitation to the ministry to intervene. The Minobe affair and continuing rightist agitation had mean-

while convinced high university officials that only drastic measures would preserve the status quo. When it became necessary to replace President Nagayo Matao, who had been instrumental in the earlier rebuff to Araki, the university was open to pressure. Named to replace Nagayo was Hiraga Yuzuru, an eminent naval architect from the Department of Engineering. Hiraga, to put it charitably, was no diplomat. He insisted that the chief instigators of divisiveness in the department be punished, hoping that ultimately with the department quiescent, the university as a whole could make its proper contribution to the war effort. Hiraga singled out two men. One was Hijikata Seibi, a strong nationalist and leader of the anti-Marxist faction. Hijikata had (his later protests notwithstanding) been responsible for the expulsion from Todai^[*] of Yanaihara Tadao, a colonial economist and pacifist critic of the government's China policy. In an effort to break the leftist faction, which Yanaihara supported, Hijikata called for a vote of censure against the latter, in view of the banning of certain of his stinging articles on the China war. This had been only the latest in a series of such moves led by Hijikata. On the other side, Hiraga sought the suspension of Kawai Eijiro^[*] , a devotee of T. H. Green and an anti-Marxist, but vociferous, critic of Japanese fascism and its epigones. Kawai, ironically, had only just broken his modus vivendi with the Hijikata faction in anger over the treatment of Yanaihara. Kawai's works had recently been banned for violation of the press laws. In Hiraga's eyes, the grounds necessary for suspension existed, and he ordered the requisite inquiry by the University Council. A special commission led by Tanaka Kotaro^[*] —a highly astute academic politician—found nothing ideologically "wrong," but objected to the stridency of Kawai's tone. Hiraga capitalized on this judgment to urge Kawai's resignation. Kawai refused, pending legal indictment and a faculty vote. In January 1939 Kawai was brought to the Justice Ministry for the first "of a long series of interrogations as a prelude to formal indictment."^[24] Hiraga thereupon invoked his authority as president to suspend the offender, without waiting for a faculty vote. At the same time, he suspended Hijikata. In short order Hiraga also accepted the resignations in protest of a considerable number of faculty on both sides of the issue and appointed himself chairman. He then persuaded a rump faculty to stay on and instituted a program of outside recruitment. The purge was over. Kawai was indicted, convicted, and forbidden to publish. Losing an appeal to a higher court in 1943, he was broken. He died a year later.

Nanbara Shigeru had defended Kawai throughout. A number of his

colleagues felt that Nanbara had lost sight of the larger issue.^[25] As Tanaka Kotaro^[*] had defined it, it was imperative to throw a sop to the authorities in order to preserve the university from further depredations. His strategy of appeasement carried the day. Realistically speaking, given the power of the ministry, especially with Araki at the helm, Tanaka played his cards well. Hiraga was nothing if not obtuse. His methods aroused intense resentment. And the purge was all over the newspapers, even the radio. Nevertheless, the troublemakers were gone. What Hijikata meant to the right is unclear. But it is obvious that Kawai, a "liberal" (in this case an unapologetic social democrat), was the main offering. His sacrifice kept Araki and the forces he represented out. Until the next time, when the pattern now established repeated itself: attack by the right / official persecution of an individual scholar / political settlement in the interest of university autonomy.

Just as Kawai Eijiro's^[*] fate was being decided, Nanbara Shigeru's number came up. His case deserves some examination in detail, since it both introduces his thought and ties together a number of thematic threads that the narrative has suggested. In mid 1939, as noted, Nanbara was singled out for attack by Minoda Muneki's Genri Nihonsha. Nanbara's sins were twofold. First, he had placed himself beyond the pale as a political theorist by declaring, in effect, that a scholar's first duty is to truth: "Let the truth prevail though the world perish," he had written in the Teikoku Daigaku shinbun .^[26] Whatever the claims of the political collectivity, be they legal, moral, historical, or emotional, they could not be substituted for the critical use of intelligence. In pursuit of a scholarly calling, it was the disinterested nature of criticism that rendered it true loyalty to the polity. The state need have no fear of truth. Minoda branded Nanbara's article "a piece of vacuous political theorizing" typical of the ivory-tower ultraliberals at Todai^[*] .^[27] In the new dispensation, Minoda claimed, truth inheres in the national community as part of "life"; it cannot exist apart from it. Those who speak of disembodied "truth" or "justice" engage in rank subjectivism, which in a time of national emergency is tantamount to disloyalty.^[28]

There is more to the story. The Genri Nihonsha had in fact grasped the full significance of Nanbara's piece. It was intended as a specific repudiation of the theories of Otto Koellreutter, a German legal scholar then lecturing in Japan.^[29] Koellreutter himself had recently replaced the Catholic Carl Schmitt as the leading legal light of the Nazi regime. Schmitt, he claimed, was really a neo-Hegelian who "viewed the state as the sole authority to whom one owed a political obligation." Koellreut-

ter dixit : not so. It is the Volksgemeinschaft to which loyalty is due. Politics is "the will of the community."^[30] And although Koellreutter's biologism did not necessarily sit well with his Japanese audiences, his trumpeting of community possessed an undoubted appeal in the Japanese academic world. It could not but reflect the chauvinism characteristic of the period as a whole, in particular the influence of völkisch theory that accompanied the increasingly close diplomatic and political ties between Japan and Germany. In this process the signing of the AntiComintern Pact in 1936 only prefigured the full-blown commitment (on paper) represented by the Tripartite Pact of 1940.

Nanbara had boycotted a luncheon given in Koellreutter's honor in the Law Faculty on 1 June (1939), preferring to "eat by [him]self this cold and rainy noon."^[31] By 1939 there were few others who found the mere presence of a Koellreutter more than they could stomach. This is not to deny the deep antagonism and contempt many at Todai^[*] felt for the openly fascist fringe in Japan. Yabe Teiji, a younger colleague of Nanbara's, was also the chief theorist and scribe for Konoe Fumimaro's New Order Movement. His diaries for the period do not lack for denunciations of fascism and expressions of disgust and ridicule aimed at Minoda and his student clones. Germany he took more seriously.^[32]

Nanbara's second offense came closer to home, involving as it did the teaching of East Asian political thought at Todai. Since 1931 the Law Faculty had been lobbying the Ministry of Education for permission and funds to establish a chair in that subject. Coincident with the "Movement to Clarify the National Polity" in 1935, the Faculty of Literature at Todai as well as the Law Faculty at Kyoto Imperial had instituted lecture courses that were regarded as little more than vehicles for the propagation of the "national morality" that went back to Inoue Tetsujiro^[*] (1854–1944). Nanbara had from the first been involved in the effort to establish the chair, but one, he was determined, that would present an independent and critical viewpoint. Permission was finally given, likely on the assumption that Law would follow the example of other departments and do its bit in the further heightening of national narcissism.^[33] Instead, the course proved an embarrassment. After long negotiations Nanbara had persuaded Tsuda Sokichi^[*] (1873–1961) of Waseda to give the lectures. He was proud of his choice and regarded Tsuda's agreement as a great coup.^[34] Tsuda was the author of Bungaku ni arawaretaru waga kokumin shiso no kenkyu^[*] (Studies in Japanese thought as revealed in literature, 1916–21), which sought to depict the "texture of life as it was lived" (jisseikatsu ) among the social classes that in each

period have "played [the] dominant role in the development of Japanese culture."^[35] His work was for this reason viewed with sympathy by Marxists of the 1920s. The problem however lay in his rationalist demystification of ancient Japanese history and myth, and in his views of the relationship of Japanese to Chinese culture. In his Shina shiso^[*] to Nihon (Chinese thought and Japan, 1938), for example, Tsuda denied that the Buddhism and Confucianism propagated by "bookish" theorists actually represented a constitutive element in the daily life and mentality of the Japanese. What would first appear to be ideal fodder in the ideological struggle with the materialistic West (since it gave scholarly weight to the uniqueness of Japan) was actually inimical to it. For in denying any organic relation between Japanese and Chinese culture at the level of jisseikatsu , Tsuda had undermined the entire pan-Asian thrust of Japanese ideology.

In any event, Tsuda gave six lectures. At the conclusion of the final lecture he was forcibly detained by rightist students (and protected by the young Maruyama Masao, who intervened physically) and "questioned" for two hours. In its November 1939 issue, Genri Nihon attacked Tsuda, and Nanbara for complicity, in an article entitled "An Unprecedented Disgrace to Learning on the Eve of the 2,600th Anniversary of the Founding of the Empire." Two months later, Tsuda and his publisher, Iwanami Shigeo, were brought up on charges of "desecrating the national polity," a violation of Article 26 of the Publications Law.^[36] The prosecution received a few lines' attention in the Tokyo Asahi , and none (so as not to grant the story any more attention?) in the 100,000 daily circulation Teikoku Daigaku shinbun , despite the petition drive among sympathetic faculty members in their defense.^[37] Though convicted and sentenced to terms of three and two months' imprisonment, respectively, Tsuda and Iwanami were acquitted on appeal in 1944. Their successful appeal, however, should not obscure the larger point. Criminal indictment against individuals was an alternative used by the government, with the Justice and Education Ministries cooperating, to the less effective attempts to manipulate the in-house procedures of university departments or "brow-beat them" into submission. The earlier victories for university autonomy won by Onozuka Kiheiji and defended by his Law Faculty successor, Tanaka Kotaro^[*] , against higher-ups in the ministry, were rendered hollow by this new tactic. What is more, the use of the legal system against "liberals"—the Marxists having been hounded out of the universities—seemed to follow attacks on them by

"fanatical" right-wingers such as Minoda. Surely the sequence was not accidental.

Nanbara understandably felt responsible for the treatment Tsuda had received. At the same time it confirmed his belief that an unholy alliance of conservative bureaucrats with militarists masquerading as civil officials was systematically attempting to seize control of the university. These feelings he did not keep to himself.^[38]

Such were Nanbara's perceptions of the situation. It is difficult to say how far the unholy alliance could have gotten in this attempt to eliminate dissent. The outbreak of the Pacific war brought a sense of crisis—and a national consensus for survival—so socially pervasive that much of the struggle over academic freedom was put on hold. The "liberals" in the Law Faculty remained in place, clinging to the rock of their official positions. Had the Pacific war begun later than it did, Maruyama Masao has suggested, a more total Gleichschaltung could have taken place, and Nanbara's work would also have been banned.^[39]

The situation, of course, was highly anomalous. Unlike the Economics Department, which had been gutted and rebuilt from without, Law remained intact after the Minobe affair. In effect, it became an island of extremely circumscribed freedom, enjoyed, so to speak, by a small number of individuals sitting at the apex of the system's hierarchy. After 1945 this anomaly came to be regarded as the continuation of a "tradition" of tolerance. But it was just as obviously a matter of time before the Law Faculty as a whole would have fallen victim to the same pattern. In any case, this was the little island on which Nanbara Shigeru worked. For as long as he could, he lived inside his shell on this island. But as should be clear, once forced to confront those who had pried that shell open, Nanbara stood his ground. Let us now pick up the biographical thread from the beginning.