Hasegawa Nyozekan (1875–1969)

Signature
of Hasegawa
Nyozekan.
Courtesy of
Chuo^[*
] University.

An Interesting Misprint

Sometime early in 1937 Hasegawa Nyozekan took in a film, Atarashiki tsuchi (New land), made in Japan by the German director Arnold Fanck.^[1] What he saw did not please him, and he took the opportunity to explain why via a short piece in the March 1937 issue of Kaizo^[*] .^[2] Indeed, "did not please" is an understatement. The film, in its composition and argument angered and disturbed Nyozekan so much that he found himself trying to rationalize in print an unexpected burst of national chauvinism. The crux of the matter was this: a key scene depicted a young German woman, a journalist, lecturing the young Japanese hero on the meaning and proper expression of "Japanese morality." Thanks to this act of enlightenment-from-without, the man "recovers his Japaneseness" (Nihonjin o torimodosu ).

Leaving aside the merits or otherwise of this "too obviously propagandistic" film, let us follow Nyozekan through his somewhat unpleasant "self-discovery." Plainly, he felt, Germans had no business attempting to teach the Japanese anything about being Japanese. Even if they had, the film failed to capture any sense of Japan. The scenario was so implausible that the "Japanese technicians who accepted [it] without the least resistance" ought to have been ashamed of themselves as artists and as Japanese. It could not show that what the young woman inexplicably understood and what the young man, even more inexplicably, had lost sight of in himself was in fact "Japanese" at all.

But all this, Nyozekan admits, is a rationalization of his visceral anger. The film awoke a "fierce nationalism" (jikokushugi ) in him. "I do not call it 'Japanism'. This is not out of modesty, but only because my 'nationalism' is, purely and simply, 'my-country-ism' [oragakunishugi ], and nothing more." That is, it was a relative matter, a cultural identification anyone might feel. Still, this pure and simple feeling did not seem consonant with the gut-level anger it produced. It challenged Nyozekan's conviction that the Japanese were, above all, tolerant people.

We have never, like barbarians or the ancient Chinese, been so stupid as to regard outsiders, ipso facto, as barbarians. Whoever is excellent in any way, foreign or not, such people are to be respected. As the saying has it, "Where three so act, there I find my mentor" [San nin okonaeba waga shi ari ]. From my youth, I have been proud, as a Japanese, of our modesty in being willing to learn from other peoples.

A revealing statement: can one, without falling into self-contradiction, be "proud of [one's] modesty"? We shall see that in some ways this self-

contradiction is a recurring motif in Nyozekan's thought. There is certainly some truth in what Nyozekan says; Japan is a composite culture, formed largely in the absence of violent impositions from without. Nevertheless, to represent such tolerance as the only posture ever assumed by Japan toward the outside world is, of course, quite absurd. This is something Nyozekan seems to realize: Hence his professed bewilderment and shock at his own outburst. But there it was.

Nor was Nyozekan willing to yield on the basic point. This particular expression of pride in the Japanese national character (Nihonteki seikaku —a phrase, incidentally, of Nyozekan's invention)^[3] has a history. "Nyozekan has become a nationalist in his old age," the novelist Masamune Hakucho^[*] had asserted, it seems. Not so, Nyozekan countered. "My preference for things Japanese is not new."

But now this "Japanese character," so open, so tolerant, so locally rooted and unmetaphysical, was belied by Nyozekan's own feelings. What was more (to return to the film), Nyozekan suspected that a German audience, steeped in the highfalutin idealistic nationalism of their homeland, would view the film as a validation of their own selfsatisfaction and sense of superiority. This suspicion made Nyozekan feel even worse. It was "un-Japanese" to react with such angry emotion; something "new to me in my life as a critic." Compelled to acknowledge these feelings, Nyozekan at the end of his reflections ventures to attribute his reaction to "the work of my liberal sentiments."

Liberal? The word would seem to make little sense in this context. But in Japan, as in Prussia, the dominant pattern of political autocracy and state-directed industrialization had tended to produce an identification by default of liberalism with "internationalism." It is true that Japan's industrial revolution of the 1880s owed much of its impetus to the transfer of state-run industries to select private hands—and to drastic deflationary measures; and that compared to the 1930s, Japan's economy operated with less state intervention and planning of priorities. At the same time, a basic collusive pattern remained, and in any case, the ultimate legitimation of profit seeking lay in "service to the nation." This claim became problematic with the rise of forces in the military and the civil bureaucracy opposed to the assertiveness of political parties and apparent domination of the political system by a Diet with close ties to private business and industry. These latter were put on the defensive; their "liberalism" had come to be associated with bourgeois internationalism, and was attacked from all sides as a prop of the parliamentary status quo, a futile, corrupt, and antinational enterprise that

ignored the masses and catered to the interest of the elite. For some, liberalism spelled intellectual anarchy and fed directly into the Red threat. Such views, of course, placed liberal values in the worst possible light. Free trade, a rational interest politics, and cultural tolerance were more common and positive formulations.

Indeed, even when liberalism as a mode of political and economic organization "wore thin," its cultural values—freedom of speech and association, of conscience, of scholarly inquiry; in short, liberalism as a "moral category"—commanded the allegiance of many. Thus Hasegawa Nyozekan in 1935: since genuine laissez-faire (as opposed to state protection) had never really taken root in Japan, the country should have little trouble moving to the next historical stage of economic organization, that of dirigism (toseishugi^[*] ). But in order to grasp this situation, scholars and journalists had to be free to analyze and criticize what they saw happening.^[4]

This, admittedly, is not a very convincing argument for the inviolability of conscience, and it is typical of Nyozekan, as we shall see, in its utilitarian premises. (But remember that it was in part a rhetorical tactic to argue in such terms.) A modification of this argument, that "cultural" liberalism remained valid as a guardian of "objectivity" in a reactionary political situation, was advanced by a number of Marxists, among them Tosaka Jun and Nagata Hiroshi. It is ironic, as Maruyama Masao has remarked, that these theorists, who had so recently attacked claims to a "value free" approach, were now compelled to retreat into the bourgeois citadel of "objectivity" in order to continue thinking as Marxists. But one must also admit that their reading of the situation has a certain plausibility. Theory and practice would have to be mediated by such categories for the time being; to think otherwise was to court disaster.^[5] (It is to be noted, however, that when "practice" was extended to include state service, the argument ran into real problems.)

Why then would Nyozekan have ascribed his "unworthy" chauvinism and intolerance to his liberalism? In fact, he did not. A small note at the bottom of the last page of the next issue of Kaizo^[*] explains that the characters for liberalism (jiyushugi^[*] ) had inadvertently been printed in place of those for nationalism (jikokushugi )!

Given the history of the journal as the very emblem of mainstream Taisho^[*] democratic thinking,^[6] perhaps the error was merely a typographer's reflex. But the editor's explanation, in its sheer matter-of-factness, unwittingly reveals, as no manifesto could, the displacement in self-image and public personae of Japan's public men during the first two

decades of the Showa^[*] era. Conceiving a new justification for their activity, the adoption of new paradigms and rhetoric had become the key to intellectual survival and to the performance of their preferred social roles. "Liberalism"—economic and political liberalism particularly—had been superseded. To be sure, there was disagreement among public men as to the nature and fate of the beast. Had liberalism been an error, a historical misprint? Or had it simply been overcome by the development of its own logic—that with the capitalist system in crisis, the state now had to step in and maintain that system; that social equity, as determined by the state, took precedence over the free pursuit of economic benefit? Had liberalism, furthermore, lost its ideological usefulness? Its critics, as we have seen, adduced many reasons for saying that it had, reasons that reflected the range of ideologies from Marxism to "godpossessed" Japanism. The feeling predominated that liberalism was best the subject of a postmortem, or at least of worried consultation among its sympathizers.

Our concern for the moment lies not with liberalism per se, but with the question of how and when the intellectual orientation of certain public men shifted. From what, to what? What was affirmed, what denied? We saw that for Nanbara Shigeru, whose private Christianity acted on a strong "Meiji" nationalism, the passing of continental liberalism meant, in essence, the end of individualism as a social and ethical philosophy valid for Japan as well as Europe; or, alternatively, of individualism to the extent that it was merely synonymous with selfishness and calculating privatism in economic and social life. Nanbara, indeed, had used the nationalism and professedly anti-individualist Christianity of Uchimura Kanzo^[*] as a kind of shield against overcompromise with communitarian Japanism. The intellectual and spiritual cost of Nanbara's insider calling should by now be clear, as should the degree to which "insideness" provided him with a self-definition that he refused on any account to renounce. Hence the question of tenko^[*] never arises for Nanbara. For Nyozekan it does. Why?

In Nyozekan we treat a figure generally considered one of the "great liberals" of the prewar period. What then was the substance of his liberalism? Does the label accurately describe Nyozekan's development as a thinker? Does it do justice to his public life?

We must approach Hasegawa Nyozekan differently than we did Nanbara Shigeru. A preliminary list of contrasts will suggest the reason. Nanbara was, as we have seen, virtually anonymous outside the minicosmos of the Todai^[*] Law Faculty until 1945, and only grudgingly gave

up his snaillike existence. Nyozekan, born in 1875, was universally known for his journalism and political progressiveness by the middle years of the Taisho^[*] period. His semiautobiographical efforts of a decade earlier had attracted the interest and criticism of no less a figure than Natsume Soseki^[*] .^[7] While still in his forties, Nyozekan had begun to publish a serial autobiography, and much of his social commentary is personal in tone. He was, in short, a public personality, and fully aware of the fact.

Nanbara was a proud country boy, Nyozekan an "Edo urbanite," the son of a Fukagawa lumber wholesaler. Nanbara in his youth followed the stereotypical path to "success" from Ichiko^[*] , through Todai Law into bureaucratic service. Nyozekan (here the difference in their ages becomes a factor) was privately educated in various Tokyo juku and at the predecessor of today's Chuo^[*] University. Nanbara, though he returned permanently to the academy, considered himself all his life a public servant (which technically he was), "a shepherd of the people." He devoted himself to studies in German political philosophy, which, he passionately hoped, would in small part elevate the political consciousness of his country and aid in the creation of a humane nationalism enlightened by personal—not institutional—Christian witness. (The contradiction with Nanbara's anti-individualism is only apparent: "institutions" could easily become self-justifying and privatized, resulting in what we may call "ecclesiastical individualism." Thus a church supported by diffuse, individual witness was in fact to be preferred.) Nyozekan the public man refused any direct participation in politics, especially in the activities of the state, which—until 1933—he felt called upon to dissect rather than to assist. Over the years, however, he was associated with a number of groups that questioned the status quo from a leftist, though not communist, position. But it is important to keep in mind Nyozekan's watchword, which seems to have been a product of the years between 1895 and 1905. This was danjite okonawazu , literally, "[Be] resolute in not taking action." As with so much in Nyozekan's thinking, it involves an ironic twist—in this case on a more conventional phrase from the ancient Book of History : "Act resolutely [Danjite okonau ], and neither the spirits nor the gods will hinder you."^[8] This position, no mere tactic, clearly bears on matters of intellectual substance, where the differences from Nanbara are no less telling. Nanbara's overwhelmingly idealist mind-set, with its concomitant ahistoricity, has been discussed earlier. His neo-Kantian political philosophy was virtually innocent of any concern for power. Nor did Nanbara convey in his writing a sense

of the subject of politics: the life and movement of society as it interacts with the state. Nyozekan by contrast took "life," especially the complex and dissonant life of society as an organism made up of real individuals, as the chief category of his thought. He knew about power from the receiving end. The milieu of his childhood and journalistic career taught him this lesson. To all questions he took what he called an antimetaphysical, Anglo-Saxon empirical approach; this in contrast to Nanbara's Germanic value philosophy.

Too mechanical a parade of contrasts, however, does injustice to the subtleties and ambiguities found in both thinkers. Let us focus therefore on Nyozekan. Some general comments on his "style" are called for to get us rolling.^[9] All of Nyozekan's writing radiates warmth, openness to ideas, and ingenuousness and good-heartedness that make reading him a pleasure. This is obvious in his autobiography, and in his fiction and drama—the former to be discussed presently, the latter lying beyond the scope of this book. Nyozekan could be acerbic, even stinging, in his combination of wit and social commentary. The best example of this may be Shinjitsu wa kaku itsuwaru (Thus the truth deceives, 1924), the first of many collections of short lead essays and sketches from his journal Warera . Nor, finally, did Nyozekan shrink from passionate polemic. His best work in this vein—for instance on the problems of the Japanese labor movement in the years after World War I—is quite moving.

The range of Nyozekan's concerns is evident in the sheer mass of words he produced: the (so far) definitive bibliography runs to a hundred pages; it is estimated that his complete works would fill fifty volumes. Not a rigorously analytical thinker, Nyozekan chose rather to adopt provocative attitudes and make intelligent (and sometimes idiosyncratic) criticism. He was not a man of system—though, as in his posthumously published Kokka kodo^[*] ron (On the behavior of states, 1970), he could certainly sustain and elaborate an argument. Overall, Nyozekan preferred free association and sometimes grandiose generalization to close analysis and demonstration.

Still, a number of constant themes run like a ground bass through Nyozekan's work. Earlier we saw that "life" in society was the greatest of these. Its key complement was perhaps the idea of progress, or better, of evolution toward meaningful complexity through cycles of social/institutional destruction and creation. At the same time, and related to this "dynamic materialism," there is a sense of the need for, and appreciation of, restraint, whether personal or social. Indeed, to some degree Nyozekan's social and ethical philosophy seems to boil down to making

a virtue of necessity. All this brings us back to the remark on "style." Style, discipline, and tradition all mattered. "Being there"—at home, attuned to one's surroundings, mattered. It conveyed an awareness of limitations, of what was necessary and possible in a situation and what was not. Nyozekan liked to refer to himself by the names of various animals, some of which are very revealing.^[10] In his autobiography, he is a "mosquito larva"—an insignificant member of the mass. In the farewell piece he wrote for his beloved journal Warera (1919–30) he is a "cantankerous donkey" who, despite the pressure of changing political and intellectual fashion, will not be moved. Finally he is a musasabi —a giant flying squirrel. The image comes from Xunzi:

He is good jumper, but can't reach the roof; a skillful climber, but can't make it to the top of the tree; an easy swimmer, but can't cross the stream; a deep digger, but can't cover himself up; a fast runner, but can't outrun a man.

In sum,

Five skills you possess
Yet not in one are you accomplished.
Flying squirrel, how can you brag?^[11]

It was with the flying squirrels among his countrymen that Nyozekan sympathized and identified, their attitudes he professed to share and sought to represent, their collective action he aimed to stimulate, and, when necessary, criticize. This basic position had its political, social, and moral moments, which it is the purpose of the following pages to examine. How did Nyozekan come to form his attitudes? What sort of public career took shape around them? What made him both "public" and an "outsider"?

Uptown and Down:
Nyozekan's Youth

Nyozekan begins his autobiography, Aru kokoro no jijoden (1950), with a description of his "life in the womb"—a description, that is, of the world that formed him, the world into which he was eventually born. This was a complex of communities—the family and its business, schools (especially teachers), in general the separate realms of "life" and "thought" in the first two decades of the Meiji era. Formally, Aru kokoro treats only the years up to Nyozekan's first journalistic venture in 1903, when he signed on at Kuga Katsunan's Nihon . Not surpris-

ingly, however, in view of his preference for pithiness and disdain for single-mindedness, Nyozekan digresses frequently, ranging from remarks on Heian art to Meiji crowds to postwar advertising. From his early youth, Nyozekan had aspired to be a historian. Though this desire was frustrated, history remained a lifelong avocation, and many of his digressions turn into mini-essays on the "stage" of world history through which Japan was passing during the period under discussion. The frequency of such digressions tends to derail whatever narrative Nyozekan may have had in mind. In fact, despite the straightforwardness of the chapter titles, one feels that Nyozekan's sense of history, as a personal matter, was associative rather than linear. This quality constitutes Aru kokoro 's chief interest but lies beyond the scope of my immediate concern, which is to use Aru kokoro to provide a general setting for Nyozekan himself.

At the same time, it must be borne in mind that Aru kokoro is a self-interpretation, a work of "art," a reconstructed life. It is not a recitation of facts about Nyozekan, but a retrospective on his own development, and, as seen through his eyes, that of modern Japan. At times, indeed, Nyozekan seems to project onto his own youthful self attitudes he held in maturity, so that their emergence is attributed to a certain period because they affected Nyozekan's later view of that period. This is very much the case with the reconstruction of his early childhood and schooling. Perhaps this is in the nature of autobiography. In any case, we may say of Nyozekan that he had seen much. And despite his "wretched" memory and scant concern for the trappings of conventional narrative such as names and dates, the autobiography is a pointed and richly textured memoir. It is at the same time premised on Nyozekan's (professed) insignificance as a life in history rather than one who made history.

Aru kokoro may also be read as an attempt by Nyozekan to explain, in retrospect, his decision to stay out of any struggle for personal power and influence. Many intellectuals of the prewar years felt compelled, after 1945, to make such explanations in the face of charges, direct or implied, of "war responsibility." This in turn is a problematic represented by the term tenko^[*] , now a metaphor (of diminishing explanatory power) for the intellectual experience of the generations in question.^[12] Nyozekan relies for explanation in part on the cultural milieu into which he was born: witness the first two chapters of Aru kokoro , "Taiji jidai" (In the womb) and "Watakushi no umareta koro no jidai" (The age I was born in).

What then was Nyozekan's generation? What was the "womb," the

seimeitai (life-world) that formed him? Viewed broadly, the most salient feature of Nyozekan's account is a sense of "not fitting in" (zure ) either temporally or spatially, with the world that surrounded him. Or rather, the world that formed him was no longer the world he lived in, except in his mental habits and "style." This zure was not merely an individual, personal concern, but, he implies, one imposed by generation and geography on entire sections of the nation. For this reason, because he was decidedly not alone, Nyozekan felt no impulse to retreat into or champion his own sensuality as the only "real" or "valid" thing in life. The point is important in view of the apparent ubiquity of precisely this attitude among many creative writers of the late Meiji period. The pioneer in enunciating this sensual or aesthetic individualism was a near contemporary of Nyozekan's, Takayama Chogyu^[*] (1871–1902). Chogyu^[*] had created a sensation with this proclamation in "Biteki seikatsu o ronzu" (On the aesthetic life, 1901), which signaled his abrupt turn, under the influence of Nietzsche, from the idealist Japanism he had hitherto espoused.^[13]

Unlike Chogyu, Nyozekan felt himself to belong to the "open" generation of early Meiji, genuinely individualist, spontaneously patriotic, unrestricted in the expression of curiosity about the world and its deep concern for the fate of the national community. For this generation, "Restoration" remained a valid ideal and charge, an attitude Maruyama Masao, with indirect reference to Nyozekan's intellectual genealogy, terms "nationalism from below."^[14] This generation, Nyozekan asserted, did not suffer, as succeeding generations did, from the effects of sclerotic bureaucratism, institutionalized nationalism, and rigid specialization. Echoing the lament of the journalist Yamaji Aizan, Nyozekan mourns the advent of the "age of the specialist," dominated by conformist functionaries for whom the only knowledge of any value pertained to bureaucratic obligation and would further their "success."^[15]

Nyozekan goes further, pointing to the sheer waste of talent involved in this abnormal attachment to official pedigree. The careers of two of his middle-school teachers provided him with poignant examples. Hirase Sakugoro^[*] and Makino Tomitaro^[*] were two self-taught botanists whose work, while winning both of them international recognition, was nearly ignored in Japan because it had been pursued outside the academic establishment. Both Hirase and Makino remained for long years in low-level teaching jobs. Finally, Makino, at least, won the patronage of a wealthy Kobe industrialist, who built a research center for him. In

his inaugural speech Makino was unable to hide his bitterness toward academia—thirty years of neglect!—and as a result of his outburst the prefectural governor, who was to have given a congratulatory speech, flew into a rage and left. To Nyozekan the governor typified the bureaucratic mind in all its narrow defensiveness. And at the same time his behavior confirmed Nyozekan's unpleasant suspicion that the universities, too, had become the breeding ground of a buzzing "column of mosquitoes"—petty men whose positions allowed them to mask their selfishness and insularity with their "public" titles. It comes as no surprise to find that Nyozekan closes this vignette by concurring with the novelist Tsubouchi Shoyo's^[*] opinion that the bureaucrat is indeed the lowest form of life.^[16]

Nyozekan never ceased, then, to be uncomfortable with, and critical and at times disdainful of, the "successful" Meiji state. At the same time, he never fell into despair over the oppressiveness of his society. He did not see himself, as did the poet Ishikawa Takuboku (1886–1912), as a suffocating victim of jidai heisoku : a sense of claustrophobic desperation that overwhelmed the poet as one by one avenues of outreach, to both local and global experience, were blocked or arbitrarily channeled by the heavy hand of the state.^[17] Instead, since his mentality (Nyozekan claimed) had been formed independently of the ethic of risshin shusse , of "making it big," Nyozekan could choose to adopt the attitude of a witness, of a bystander already present , rather than that of the victim of a system whose existence preceded his own. This, indeed, was the privilege of zure —one that, combined with the individualistic nationalism imparted by his middle-school teachers, yielded its own brand of elitism.

Nyozekan's zure was a matter not only of "when" but of "where." Here lies the key to Nyozekan's ambivalent self-image. The "where" of Nyozekan's youth was formed by the magnetic poles of "downtown" (shitamachi ) and "uptown" (Yamanote). On the one hand there were Fukagawa, his birthplace, from Tokugawa times the home of Edo's lumber dealers and carpenters, a world of craftsmen and merchants; and Asakusa, shitamachi 's raucous entertainment district, where all classes of society mixed. On the other lay Hongo^[*] , Koishikawa, and Kanda, where he went to school. For Nyozekan these districts represented "Yamanote" culture. To be sure, Hongo, Koishikawa, and Kanda were none of them geographically part of uptown Yamanote—the site of former daimyo residences, and still the preferred home of Tokyo's

crème de la crème . But they pointed to Yamanote in the sense that the "Western" education offered in their schools led to a style of life found uptown rather than down. Between these two magnetic poles, and in response to events in his public career, Nyozekan's intellect and emotions oscillated, and, oscillating, evolved. Let us look a little more closely at these two orientations.

Hasegawa Nyozekan Manjiro^[*] was born on 30 November 1875, in Fukagawa, Tokyo. His ancestors had "for generations" worked as carpenters-by-appointment at Edo Castle (and presumably to various daimyo ). His father, Yamamoto Tokujiro^[*] , a lumber wholesaler (zaimoku don'ya ) and builder, seems by the time of Nyozekan's birth to have amassed a sizable fortune.^[18] (Nyozekan claims that his father's greatest pleasure was building houses.) He was in business with an ex-samurai, a former retainer of the Hitotsubashi house—Hitotsubashi, of course, being one of the collateral houses of the Tokugawa. By Nyozekan's account, the man, "an ignoramus," lived on the considerable prestige of the name of his former masters. The partnership brought great mutual benefit, and several years after his birth Nyozekan moved with his family (parents, elder brother, grandparents, and great-grandmother—"always a guest in our house") to Asakusa. There his father, having sold his business, turned to the management and expansion of the Hanayashiki, a public garden first laid out in 1853. At the hands of Yamamoto Tokujiro1, it grew into a hugely popular amusement park, with a zoo and open theater in addition to the original peony and chrysanthemum garden.^[19] The partner, along with these business successes, also seems to have been exposed to a dose of English liberal thinking (how this squares with Nyozekan's description of him as unlettered I am unsure) and encouraged Hasegawa père to educate his children along these lines. In doing so, the partner apparently played on some strong feelings of dissatisfaction in his way of life with which Nyozekan's father was then contending. He felt it necessary somehow to put distance between himself and the deeply conservative world of the Edo builders and wholesalers. Here, by Nyozekan's account, was "a world unto itself," for which events in the political realm "were as a sheet of oil" floating on a vast sea. This sense of separation—but not irrelevance—extended even to the Restoration and to the popular rights agitation of the late 1870s and 1880s—to many minds the continuation of the Restoration struggle itself. Nyozekan claims that it was not until he went to middle school that the political significance of these events first impinged on his consciousness.^[20]

In Aru kokoro Nyozekan describes in quick strokes the workplaces and living spaces, the craft of the carpenters and labor of the lumbermen on the river Sumida. He shows clearly that custom and taboo, relating to the visible and invisible in everyday life, remained strong. Nyozekan's father thus hesitated to share his dissatisfaction with his fellow zaimokuya , expressing it instead by sending his two sons to school in Hongo^[*] , and refusing to allow his employees to read the "vulgar press," such as the early Asahi . He preferred to read aloud to them from the highbrow papers, those without furigana to assist their readers with the many Chinese characters.

Eventually, of course, Nyozekan's family did move out of Fukagawa. But the imprint of that densely cohesive society, though it may have faded, was never to leave Nyozekan. Its mark on him only sank beneath the surface, in fact, in his family's new surroundings in Asakusa. In addition, Nyozekan had an extraordinarily close tie to his great-grandmother. He recalls listening to her as she recounted (with the help of much sake ) her many acts of Buddhist piety, and was struck by her refusal to discuss the family's "shame": they had not always been townsmen (chonin^[*] ), but had fallen to that estate from warrior status.^[21]

In filling in the image of his early life, Nyozekan attempts to link it with the collective past of generations of Edo chonin . He shared their world, one of "escapist" thinking, of a detached, wry skepticism, even scornfulness, about the other world "out there." The chonin sought entertainment and "escape" in Kabuki, and especially in gesaku —the popular urban fiction that had developed during the mid Edo years, with its characteristic mixture of tales of love, passion, and morals, broad comedy, and general Edo with-it-ness. In many ways the entire ethos was one of comic defense, of laughing at what one was powerless to change. But this powerlessness was only political. It did not entail a lack of economic influence. Still, that influence was of a behind-thescenes variety, just as for the big merchants, "real" business went on in the back, or in restaurants and pleasure-houses, outside the formal, stage-set public structure of the shopfront. As play, Nyozekan insists, the chonin satire he knew as a child was most important as a valve for letting off steam, though to be sure playwrights and satirists were also the "unconscious" prophets of the end of warrior rule.^[22] In any case, this "urbanity"—the objective, satirical, skeptical, and escapist traditionalism—formed one of the intellectual/emotional magnets that drew Nyozekan's allegiance. It filled his earliest years, and reasserted itself decades later, after his bruising political confrontations as a journalist

with the police, the courts, and the government. Nyozekan freely admitted that in the 1930s, he "returned to the womb" of shitamachi "urbanity." The degree to which he represented a major intellectual current in doing so forms part of the larger question of tenko^[*] , and will occupy us further below.

At the intersection of the "downtown" of Nyozekan's infancy and early childhood and the "uptown" of his education and public career stands a key figure, the writer Tsubouchi Shoyo^[*] (1859–1935), whose publisher (the Banseido^[*] ) Nyozekan's father supported, and to whose juku in Koishikawa he sent his sons. Overall, Nyozekan counted among his teachers some of the best-known educators and publicists of the generation that had witnessed, or found lifelong inspiration in, the Restoration of 1868. Nakamura Keiu (1832–91), a member of the Meirokusha and translator of Samuel Smiles' Self-Help , ran a school in Hongo^[*] (the Dojinsha^[*] ), which Nyozekan attended; Sugiura Jugo^[*] (1855–1924) and Shiga Shigetaka (1863–1927), members of the Seikyosha^[*] , gave Nyozekan his first taste of nationalist sentiment. But first there was Shoyo^[*] , who stamped Nyozekan with the ambiguities and conflicts of his own life and career. Shoyo was the failed paragon of zure . Or such, at least, was the "text" an older Nyozekan read back onto Shoyo's life. Nyozekan attended Shoyo's juku in Koishikawa from 1885 to 1887. The lesson Nyozekan learned was taken from life. Shoyo and (later) he himself stood with their feet in two worlds at once. Shoyo with his gesakusha training had taken the "modern" novel as a model for the representation of reality. The problem was that his dislike of "modern" Japan—the trendy Westernizing craze of which the ballroom dancing at the Rokumeikan was the epitome—impelled him toward an "older" reality quite unsuited to the dictates of the novelistic ideology he espoused. The success of Shoyo's Tosei^[*] shosei katagi (The character of present-day students), Nyozekan points out, was owing not to the selfprescribed method of its author's Shosetsu shinzui^[*] (The essence of the novel), but to its congruence with the genre—gesaku —it sought to displace.^[23] Unable to bear this tension, Nyozekan feels, Shoyo took refuge in the consuming task of translating Shakespeare into Japanese, work that could be done entirely within himself. Here Shoyo could pursue activity that did not exacerbate the contradiction, of which he was all too aware, between his "modern" artistic credo and gesaku aesthetic preference.^[24]

In his maturity Nyozekan came to share the conviction of Shoyo that the breakneck, indiscriminate Westernization of the time was turning

Japan into a nation of crude, superficial power seekers. Was it really necessary to emulate the worst features of the West in order to win approval? For Nyozekan, however, the intellectual and emotional conflict was not contained within the sphere of artistic engagement, but arose between the urgings of "urbanity"—the independent observation of the world, especially that of affairs, of power, of politics—and activism, the actual quest for power and influence. Nyozekan's recognition of the existence of the activist realm, leaving aside the question of how he was to deal with it, he tells us, was the legacy of "uptown," his middle school years at the Kyoritsu^[*] (later Kaisei) Gakko^[*] and Tokyo Eigo Gakko^[*] in Kanda.

Nyozekan was not a diligent student. As often as not he failed his exams, read what he wanted, and chose to follow his own lights. This independence was partly the result of long battles with tuberculosis and associated illnesses, which forced extended periods of solitary convalescence, and no doubt overworked his imagination. They also compelled him to think of himself as a perpetual observer, certainly an attitude that remained strong in him. In any case, Nyozekan became a habitué of the Ueno Library by the age of fourteen. At this time he added to the Chinese classics he had studied as a child virtually the entire canon of Japanese classical literature, as well as "whatever came to hand" in English about history and science. It was at this time that Nyozekan first read Herbert Spencer.^[25] Nyozekan's father was unhappy with his son's precocity, and for a combination of reasons (not least some embarrassment over his egregious failure) withdrew Nyozekan from Keiu's Dojinsha^[*] and enrolled him in the Kyoritsu Gakko^[*] , a day school. The move was doubly significant. First it meant that Nyozekan was again living in Asakusa among the artists and tradesmen—animal sellers, noodle makers, geisha, and the like. The change from the "Yamanote" atmosphere of his boarding schools came at first as an unpleasant shock. Nyozekan recalls thinking that he had been cast onto a "human rubbish heap" (ningen no hakidame ).^[26] But as the years went by, Nyozekan spent more time selling tickets to the Hanayashiki, literally observing face-to-face the afternoon crowds coming for a few hours to walk in the sun and drink a little. He came to feel emotionally at home with the mixed humanity on the other side of the ticket booth. In the end, Nyozekan remained divided, committed to life in the wider world (mi no okidokoro wa Yamanote ), but never to cut his ties to the little universe of his childhood (kokoro wa shitamachi ).^[27]

Nyozekan's change of schools also meant the beginning of sustained

contact with teachers who, as much by the style as by the content of what they taught, were to form Nyozekan's first articulated political attitudes and commitments. Almost to a man, Nyozekan's teachers at his schools in Kanda subscribed to the "healthy," "open," "wholesome" Japanism of the "new generation" of the 1880s. Usually designated "national essentialism" (kokusui hozonshugi ), or simply "nationalism" (kokumin , as opposed to kokkashugi ), it is associated with Miyake Setsurei (1860–1945) and Kuga Katsunan (1857–1907), founder and close associate, respectively, of the Seikyosha^[*] . Nyozekan entered the Kanda middle school operated by another Seikyosha figure, Sugiura Jugo, just when Japanist opposition was beginning to crystalize over the issue of revision (as opposed to abrogation) of the Unequal Treaties proposed in 1889 by Okuma Shigenobu^[*] and others in the government.^[28] Nyozekan's teachers joined the agitation against indiscriminate Westernization at the expense of the "national essence"—the term used to signify what the newer word dento^[*] ("tradition") does today.^[29] Among these men were some of the founders of Katsunan's paper Nihon , including Sugiura, the principal, Kon Tosaburo^[*] , and Shiga Shigetaka, a prominent geographer. Shiga in particular had done much to convey to the "national essentialist" audience the message that "the West" was no monolith, but was itself made up of nations and peoples with diverse, conflicting, even violent, histories; people who were themselves struggling to maintain their own modes of life and language, their "essence." Japan was no different, and indeed might in some respects—especially in the continuity of its central political institutions^[30] and organic social development—be said to be at an advantage. This was particularly so in comparison with China, a nation Japan was within six years to challenge and defeat, to virtually universal acclaim, in war. Nyozekan had begun to read Nihon at the Ueno Library, "at first uncomprehending, just as I had read the Analects as a child." Along with Nihon he had begun to read the journal of the recently founded Historical Society, Shigaku zasshi .

In Aru kokoro Nyozekan describes the national essentialist position as reformist, opposed alike to the "unthinking" Westernization of Okuma^[*] , to radicalism à la Itagaki Taisuke, and to the reactionary Shintoism of the "Takamagahara" faction, which urged a return to isolation. It may be germane here to point out that, despite the justifiable contrast often drawn between the Seikyosha and the more thoroughgoing Westernizers of Tokutomi Soho's^[*] Min'yusha^[*] , Katsunan himself took great pains to place himself close to the Min'yusha, lest he and

the Seikyosha^[*] be painted as obscurantist reactionaries whose program seemed (superficially) similar to their own. Nyozekan himself was drawn to Katsunan's writing and conception of nationalism precisely because of its liberal content. A nation, Katsunan insisted, was its people, and relied on the people's spontaneous, but constant, efforts to live from the past, not in it. This effort and energy could not be produced by fiat. The state could only benefit from encouraging it, but could not produce it at will. The state was responsible rather for the protection of livelihood from external threat. It was in this context that the treaty issue arose. Japan, for Katsunan, was fully capable of protecting itself and maintaining its institutions. Further tutelage was sure to be debilitating. Abrogation now was a tough step, but it would spare all parties later strife. Above all, Japan deserved autonomy.^[31]

Nyozekan, then, admired the commitment of his teachers both for the principles that inspired it and for the individualism and high-mindedness that characterized their conduct. From them he learned contempt for conformism, for intellectual laziness, and for ambition devoid of serious national purpose. In the national essentialist intellectuals of the years before the Sino-Japanese war, he saw representatives of enlightened opposition , men of varied talents and professions who "could not sit still" while their nation's character was on trial. Not the hacks of today, Nyozekan sighs. Indeed, he asserts that Japan (in 1950) would benefit from greater caution, less extremism, in its reforms, an approach the Japanists of the 1880s—not the "national moralists" of the 1890s, and decidedly not the pawns of the military of his own time—appeared to him to represent. Of course, as Maruyama Masao pointed out in an essay on Katsunan's life and thought, in the atmosphere of the late 1940s when Nyozekan was looking back on his life, Japanism and national essence were scarcely distinguishable, in many minds, from ultranationalism and its catastrophic legacy.^[32]

Nyozekan's suggestion thus stands as a good example of the out-ofjointedness he regarded as the chief characteristic of his own outlook. It goes back, as we have seen, to the particular timing and geography of his youth. Nyozekan felt fortunate to have been educated during the first two decades of the Meiji period, when institutions in society had yet to be centralized and made to adhere to fixed and detailed regulations, such as those for moral education in the public schools, beyond the broad imperative of fukoku kyohei^[*] . His education in a succession of juku meant education as an individual by individuals. This outlook, which he never sought to overcome, left Nyozekan out-of-joint in the

company of people educated after the schools had been standardized and, he implies, politically compromised, in their curricula. One senses a mixture of disdain and pity in Nyozekan's description of a younger generation of Japanese emerging like parts on an educational assembly line, or pressed, molded, and pushed one after the other through uniform tubes, like jelly.^[33]

What was the problem? What had led Japan to transform itself thus? With what consequences? Clearly, the state had claimed a monopoly on patriotism, and had set about molding the young as it saw fit. Yet how could one resist this monopoly without placing oneself outside the pale as a Japanese? This was the problem Nyozekan's education led him to address. It is, in fact, the essence of the "public" problem as I have defined it. But did that same childhood and education, with their particular "where" and "when," hint at a method?

The Making of a Public Outsider

There was a way "out" of Shoyo's^[*] failure and "in" to the public world. This was journalism, on which Nyozekan had set his sights sometime before his fourteenth birthday.^[34] In this ambition he patterned himself after the multifaceted careers of his politically aware teachers. More directly, Nyozekan had the example of his elder brother, Yamamoto Shogetsu, to look to. Trained as a gesakusha , Shogetsu had gone on to become a journalist, first with the nationalist Yamato Shinbun and later with the Tokyo Asahi . Shogetsu also had contacts on a number of influential papers. But above all, Nyozekan admired Katsunan, the central figure at Nihon , eloquent spokesman for the humane and liberal nationalism of the new generation. Katsunan was, in contemporary opinion, one of the three "greats" among journalists of the day—the others being Tokutomi Soho^[*] and Asahina Chisen.^[35] A reminder, again, of zure : Nyozekan's kokuminron , like Katsunan's, is "prelapsarian," a product, that is, of the years before the Sino-Japanese War and Japan's definitive turn toward imperialism. Though there were few indeed who were disillusioned and radicalized by the events of 1894–95, it was among young and independently minded nationalists such as Nyozekan that the seeds of doubt found nurturing soil. Conversely, Japan's stunning victory brought even a Westernizing extremist like Tokutomi Soho into the nationalist fold. Japan had proven its right to conquest by exercising it. This was an attitude that Katsunan never adopted. He opposed expansionism and military influence in day-to-

day politics, and his follower Nyozekan kept the faith. For Nyozekan, Katsunan was everything a journalist should be: realistic in assessing politics, independent in viewpoint, unceasing in the effort to enlighten.^[36]

The decade from 1893 to 1903 (from age eighteen to twenty-eight) hardly seemed to promise Nyozekan the career he sought. Apart from the belligerent turn of political events, personal and family travail took their toll in these years. The Hanayashiki and other ventures went broke and had to be sold. The family sank into poverty. Nyozekan fell ill so frequently and so seriously that a doctor informed his mother that her son, even if he were to recover from his current illness, would never make it past his thirtieth birthday. (This news was kept from Nyozekan's father.) Meanwhile, Nyozekan attended a succession of schools of law, where between illnesses he read English and Japanese jurisprudence. He graduated from the Tokyo Hogakuin^[*] on 15 July 1898, fourteenth in a class of two hundred in the faculty of Japanese law (Hogo gakka^[*] ).^[37] Penal law and the empiricist Italian school of criminology (best represented by Cesare Lombroso and Enrico Ferri) were of consuming interest, and Nyozekan continued research in criminology on his own at Ueno. He had also begun to study Italian. One can see here further hints of the concern for "society" as the collective (but competitive and conflictual) relations of real individuals, to which Nyozekan gave primacy in the Critiques of state and society he wrote in 1921–22.

As with his earlier schooling, Nyozekan's higher education was necessarily eclectic—and for the same reasons. The schools he attended could not count on state support. The student body ranged in age and background from the young and green (Nyozekan) to scarred veterans of the internecine struggles of the early political parties and the popular rights movement. Most notable, he adds, was the strong personal motivation of his confreres to complete their studies, not in the interest of advancement along a preordained career path, but out of the desire to have an impact, whether via law, journalism, or politics, on their times. Unlike their counterparts at Tokyo Imperial University, none of them believed that choosing a career had to be synonymous with filling a bureaucratic cubbyhole. (Nyozekan's disdain for the academy was tempered somewhat by his close association after 1920 with radical young economists from Todai^[*] who had gathered under the protective wing of Takano Iwasaburo^[*] , a former economics professor and victim of department factionalism who headed the Ohara^[*] Institute. Nyozekan had in fact studied public finance under Takano at Tokyo Hogakuin.)

It was also in the late 1890s that Nyozekan first studied Marxism,

this under the auspices of the economist Tajima Kinji, a Kathedersozialist whose course he audited. Nyozekan's initial impulse was to set Marx and Engels aside in favor of the Chinese classics (the Analects, Book of Songs , and Dao de jing remained closest to his heart). But in due course he overcame this disinclination and read (in English) Capital , Engels's Socialism : Utopian and Scientific , as well as whatever anarchist, nonMarxist socialist, and nihilist writings came to hand at Ueno. In retrospect, Nyozekan found these latter of interest not so much for their applicability to the Japanese situation as because they illustrated the gap between the "real world" of Japan, and the vastly different environment that had produced the works he read. Japan was a poor, late-developing bureaucratic capitalist state, with semifeudal, territorial imperialist pretensions. On the other hand were wealthy, advanced capitalist powers now struggling with the consequences of their earlier territorialist approach to imperialism. In their own societies, these states faced strong labor movements, budding and multiform revolutionary organizations, and a sense of decadence and apocalypse among their intelligentsias. Japan on the contrary faced the shock of the new . Its capitalism was precocious, as was its labor movement. Its intelligentsia, though sincere in striving to approximate what it deemed the proper course, took its cues from the imported printed word rather than from the situation of its own society. The Japanese intelligentsia in consequence turned in on itself. It was self-consuming, suffering not only political repression but a self-imposed closure. The emergence, Nyozekan asserts, of a genuine revolutionary movement from the Japanese intelligentsia was historically "unnecessary." (We must bear in mind that this was a retrospective judgment, and that, indeed, the Russian revolution of 1905—not to speak of 1917—was hardly a gleam in the eye of history.) Thus Japanese nihilists, "more realistic" than their East European counterparts, could turn to literary nihilism, for which there was an audience, or to gangsterism, for which, in capitalist circles, there was a demand.^[38]

To return to Nyozekan's own career: during this same decade, 1893–1903, he began to contribute essays and short stories to a variety of publications. His early short story "Futasujimichi" (The crossroad) tells of a young pickpocket who commits a daring robbery to prove his love for a woman. It was published by Shincho gekkan^[*] in 1898, and its author applauded in Sohos^[*] Kokumin no tomo . The story, Nyozekan says, was the product of "sheer boredom," written during a periodic convalescence.^[39] He had not expected this success. Spurred on to further efforts, Nyozekan on Shogetsu's advice began to send work to the

Tokyo Asahi , and soon after this to the apple of his eye, Nihon , which began to publish his work in 1900. Again through Shogetsu, he arranged an introduction to the acting editor of Nihon in 1901, and was encouraged to continue his contributions. These included a partial translation of Kropotkin's autobiography and a critique (significantly) of the views of Shoyo^[*] and the Todai^[*] moralist Inoue Tetsujiro^[*] on suicide, discussion of which was rife after Fujimura Misao's celebrated plunge over the Kegon Falls in June 1903. All of this activity culminated in Nyozekan's signing on at Nihon late in 1903 as a "roving reporter." But instead of chasing down leads, Nyozekan was soon assigned to write feature stories, which better suited his talent. His duties in addition included translation of foreign press reports and preparation of Sunday supplements. In any case, at a monthly salary of thirty yen, Nyozekan realized what had been his greatest ambition. (For purposes of comparison, the starting salary for an official after passing the civil service examination was fifty yen per month; a college-educated bank employee made thirty-five; an elementary school teacher, ten to thirteen; a policeman, twelve.^[40]

For all that joining Nihon had been his single desire, Nyozekan's career there was short, lasting only until late 1906. At that time, Kuga Katsunan, seriously ill (he died at fifty the following year), withdrew as owner and editor, leaving the paper open to factional disputes that ranged Miyake Setsurei and Kojima Kazuo (who in particular had treated Nyozekan as a protégé), against the new owner, Ito Kinryo^[*] . Himself once a reporter, later a corporate executive, Ito fired Kojima, prompting a majority of the editorial staff to resign en bloc with the aim of shutting the paper down. But with two or three hands remaining, Nihon managed to publish, moving its headquarters to the old Hochi shinbun^[*] office. Meanwhile some of Katsunan's loyalists joined the Seikyosha^[*] monthly, which soon changed its name to Nihon oyobi Nihonjin . In this journal, Setsurei published a "declaration" denouncing Ito's^[*] purge. Katsunan finally called his employees to his sickbed and gave each three or four months' salary in compensation for their loss. Nyozekan, in any case, was out of a job.

This is not to say that Nyozekan's four years at Nihon were a disappointment. He worked in a number of departments and wrote a daily column, while continuing his study of penology and Italian until the press of newspaper work forced him to give these up.

Finally, at thirty-three, Nyozekan joined the Osaka Asahi , a post he obtained through the offices of a friend and colleague at Nihon , Ando^[*]

Masazumi. Nyozekan's association with the Asahi lasted until 1918. This decade, during which Nyozekan served under the prominent editor Torii Sosen (Teruo), saw the real rise of Nyozekan's journalistic star, along with that, for example, of his colleague Maruyama Kanji. Nyozekan's forced departure from the Asahi was a crucial moment in his public life and will be discussed presently. In many ways it was the precipitant of his own changing perceptions of Japanese society and coincided with that confluence of intellectual currents generally treated as "Taisho^[*] " thought.

Nyozekan's years at the Asahi do coincide roughly with the first half of the "Taisho" period—not the Taisho of imperial reign titles, but those years beginning around 1905 (some would say 1900) and continuing until 1918, the year of the Rice Riots. To many observers then and now, "Taisho" ushered in a season of national redefinition. The selfpossessed Meiji civilization had "broken up," the victim of its own success. Earlier I discussed some of the consequences of this breakup for the professional and affective lives of young, educated Japanese: a pervasive malaise and sense of uselessness, widely discussed at the time. This, of course, was a condition only a minority could afford, but as we shall see, Nyozekan came later in life to assign great intellectual importance to this discontent. Of no less moment were the broader social consequences of the breakup, suggested by the sometimes violent restlessness of workers and "petty bourgeois" in the cities and towns. Small property owners and business people in older urban centers (like Nyozekan's own Fukagawa and Asakusa) may indeed have felt themselves betrayed, and their aspirations smothered, by the obvious preferment given to later arrivals on the scene: those who had come to prosper in newer, more strategic industries and enterprises after first gaining an education in the higher rungs of the system. It is among those shunted aside and passed by, then, that the social roots of "Taisho democracy" may also be sought.^[41]

Heavy industry was riding high atop an economy dependent on agriculture and labor-intensive light industry. New wealth flourished. The army and navy were strong. Japan had an empire. The emperor's children (tenno no sekishi^[*] ) worked more and more in white collar. Their children went to elementary school, for a while at least. More and more went to middle school, fewer to high school or some technical institution. A talented, but not always wealthy, few went to university. Japan was growing its own middle class.

Yet the Meiji emperor had died. General Nogi had followed him of

his own accord: it seemed so right, yet so incongruous. Not every boy became a minister; not every boy had a job. And it seemed that the newly wealthy, like Daisuke's father in Soseki's^[*]Sore kara , made money while "serving the nation." Dangerous radicals like Kotoku Shusui^[*] were saying that the success of the empire was in fact a betrayal of the Restoration promise of a just society, rid of grasping factionalism and built upon univerally shared ideals. Instead, "civilization" had turned Japan into a nest of capitalist hypocrites. But increasingly, radical analyses of Japanese society focused not so much on the moral failure of power holders as the economic and social mechanisms that perpetuated the misery of workers and peasants and led Japan to build an empire on foreign toil. Such analyses often went hand in hand with the conviction that organized revolutionary change was necessary and desirable. Those who espoused such views met with harassment, censorship, sometimes torture, even murder. Sympathetic bourgeois intellectuals, academic and literary, faced surveillance and suspicion as they strove to link their energy with that of an emerging industrial proletariat. Police were always present in force at meetings, waiting for a speaker to utter any dangerous word associated with "socialism," whereupon the gathering would be broken up.

But what of workers themselves? What did the despised shokko^[*] want? How did they express themselves? In letters by workers to contemporary union newspapers, one theme seems to stand out. What workers resented was moral humiliation, the fact that low status seemed to equal low moral worth. This was proven to them every day, not only in marginal wages, but at any point where their dignity could be denied: compulsory uniforms outside the factory; body searches to which white collar workers were not subject; denial of opportunity despite manifest ability, solely on the grounds of a scant education. In sum, for workers, the "right to benevolence"^[42] was denied. Even the lowliest clerk or streetcar conductor could ride roughshod over a worker, apparently with impunity.

Underlying this consciousness of the "right to benevolence" was the strength of the village community sense newly urbanized workers brought with them. Even if, as in most cases, workers did not return to their villages to farm, their traditions of solidarity in struggle against authority remained with them. Thus it is not surprising that when, as early as the 1890s, but in great numbers after 1917, workers organized and struck for change, they voiced their demands in an amalgam of moral, economic, and trade unionist rhetoric. The "right to benevo-

lence" is only apparently a contradiction in terms; it represented real expectations and a firm demand for basic human dignity in the workplace and outside it.

Similarly, we find that the chain of urban violence that runs from the first years of the century to 1918—to the extent that its ideological character can be reconstructed—reflects a mix of "inconsistent" political positions: nationalist and belligerent in 1905, democratic and antioligarchic in 1912–13, anticapitalist and to some degree antimilitarist in 1918. Nor, finally, is it surprising that the spontaneous, ad hoc character of some "incidents," while never lost, gives way as the years pass to larger-scale, even nationwide, semicoordinated outpourings of popular anger. Perhaps none of the urban violence, from the Hibiya to the Rice Riots, including the highly political disturbances of 1912–13, could be construed as revolutionary. That did not mean that the government saw no danger of it becoming such. It had long since taken legal and administrative steps to cut off such a threat, relying on police and prisons to keep the peace.

The end of the war had indeed brought alarming news from Russia. Anomalous as it might seem to the theorists of revolution, socialism had come first to Russia. Could there really be any guarantee that Japan would not follow? But that is not really the point. Japan had its own grave internal problems that had to be resolved, regardless of what happened elsewhere. Russia's revolution, as I remarked earlier, was either terrifying or dazzling, but it was no more than a reminder that Japan's own "civilization" had brought heavy discontent in train.

Such, in sum, was the problem of Taisho^[*] that Hasegawa Nyozekan meant to make his own. The essence of journalism as he conceived it was to treat civilization in its daily ramifications. The form was Katsunan's; the problem his own. The historical "gap" that marked Nyozekan's life compelled him to take up the critic's pen; he would never seek power for himself. He resolved to remain public in his commitments and an outsider in his mode of approach—even, to anticipate somewhat, at a time when, as in the late Taisho and early Showa^[*] periods, the realm of "insideness" seemed to expand with the passage of universal male suffrage and formation of proletarian parties.

Nyozekan's choice was, of course, only one among a number open to his contemporaries. In fact the typology of Japanese intellectuals in this period, beginning with the account drawn by Tokutomi Soho^[*] in his famous Taisho^[*] no seinen to tekkoku no zento (The youth of Taisho and the prospects for the empire, 1916), is not so much sociological as psy-

chological. It is a typology of intellectual choices forced upon young educated Japanese by the "breakup of Meiji nationalism."^[43] In his autobiography Nyozekan presents his version. At the time his ambition to become a critic of civilization took definite shape, he recalls, there were three ways to go intellectually:

First there were those who sought to "live" the history of the "Japanese" age—to put it another way, to "live" the history of a modern state from which all things feudal had been swept away. This group made up the "nationalist type." Next there were young minds aflame with the demand for the "social liberation" that followed upon "political liberation" and corresponded historically to the end-stage of capitalism then in worldwide advance. These, in contrast to the nationalists, were the "internationalists." Then, third, was a group . . . that hovered, enveloped in a vague skepticism. They were a dismal crowd, so few as to seem nonexistent at the time. They were too much individuals, too innerly, to be jerked about [lit. "made to dance"] by the history of that period. In them, potentially, lay a dominant element that in the near future was to exert a decisive force on the history of the intellect and sensibility of all Japanese. The modern character, with its virtues and foibles, its strengths and weaknesses, of the Japanese intelligentsia from late Meiji to late Taisho^[*] , was the responsibility of this generation of young people, who underwent their "age of anguish" in these years.

Nyozekan, as may be surmised, placed himself in the first group, only to find himself, as his decade with the Asahi progressed, increasingly preoccupied with the "internationalist" concerns of the second.^[44] While never renouncing Katsunan's nationalism, he shifted his perspective from politics per se to society, which, it seemed to him, enveloped the state as one dynamic element within itself.

The Asahi , with Nyozekan holding a steadily more powerful editorial position, came to reflect this shift. Its reporters tried to enter the toliers' world,^[45] now finding its voice amidst the tinny blare of national self-advertisement. Indeed, for Nyozekan and Maruyama Kanji reminiscing some forty years after the fact, the Asahi had taken it upon itself to be "the conscience of the nation." Herein lay both the continuity with the nationalist layer of both men's thought and a new awareness of the function of criticism. The newspaper—with circulation now reaching the million mark—was in a position to "mediate" between state and society, to act as the advocate of society to the state.^[46] This might seem an unexceptionable statement of the role of any mass-circulation daily in a capitalist society, where a newspaper can not only expose state policies but also express (and coopt) popular disaffection by offering it an accessible organ. But for a journalist like Nyozekan, the paper's role was all

the more crucial in the virtual absence of political representation for society in the Diet. Suffrage was as yet in the process of gingerly expansion. Parties had no social program whatever. All material improvement in society had either to come from an enlightened bureaucracy or to be sought independently of the state, as for example in the "human construction" undertaken by Kagawa Toyohiko in the Kobe and Osaka slums. Attempting to promote legislation by organized social pressure such as labor unions, let alone taking violent direct action, could call upon any organization the fate that awaited "socialists" hostile to the national polity.

In this context we can readily understand why Nyozekan took the social role of the Asahi so seriously. At the same time, he had to be cautious. While certainly never the "organ" of the party, the Asahi did tend to maintain close ties to the Kenseikai and its allies, and took the corresponding anti-Seiyukai^[*] editorial stance. This was especially true of Nyozekan's colleagues Maruyama Kanji and Torii Sosen.^[47] The position the Asahi took on political questions, independently of their social concomitant, could and did affect its standing with the government. How far the paper was permitted to go in reporting on a given issue depended not only on the government's vaguely formulated idea of "dangerous" facts, but on how the paper assigned political responsibility in issues where the social good was ignored or flouted. A concrete example is called for here. This we have, one involving a confrontation with the state of decisive importance for the Asahi and for Nyozekan as a public man, and one, indeed, that demonstrates the dramatic emergence of "society" during the Taisho^[*] period. It came in August 1918.^[48]

The Rice Riots, as is well known, began at Namerikawa, a remote fishing village in Toyama Prefecture. Some fifty women stevedores, having protested in vain against the impossibly high price demanded by local rice merchants, finally seized the rice stores themselves on the early morning of 3 August. Women in neighboring villages followed suit. Reports of the demonstrations in the newspapers sparked protests, seizures, and demonstrations nationwide. Doubtless the root cause was a common one, but the specific issues differed from locality to locality, depending on the mode of livelihood, as did modes of protest. In order to suppress all the protests, raids on shops catering to the narikin , and later attacks on police and government officials and buildings, the government of Terauchi Masatake had had to call out some 92,000 troops and dispatch them to 120 locations in all but four of Japan's forty-six prefectures. After its outbreak in largely rural ura Nihon , the unrest had

spread within ten days to the major cities of Kansai—Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe, Nagoya—and thence to Tokyo. But the cities were merely more noticeable by virtue of the concentrated effects of the disturbances. In fact, shows of force and actual violence by local people were reported in 38 cities (shi ), 153 towns (cho^[*] ), and 177 villages (son ). Of all the cities, Kobe suffered the greatest damage, with the burning of Suzuki Shoten^[*] , a huge rice wholesaling and import firm with many subsidiary factories and other agencies. These, the Kobe shinbun^[*] , and a number of large moneylenders, all symbolic of the "plutocratic despotism" attacked in contemporary leaflets, were the object of intense hostility.^[49]

The root cause of the disturbances was, as noted, a common one. The massive outpouring of popular hostility took rice merchants, speculators, and profiteers as its primary targets. The basic demand was for a fair price: three years earlier a typical rice dealer would have charged less than twenty sen per sho^[*] . By 1918 the price had more than tripled. The wartime boom years, especially since 1916, had brought a huge inflation; "the real income of low-paid workers and farmers fell, and merchants', landlords', and industrialists' income rose sharply."^[50] The rice price had gone through the ceiling at the beginning of August, affecting that of all other commodities. The situation was only made worse by a heat wave. Merchants who complied with the demand for a price reduction, about half the total number, did not face the destruction of shops and stock that resulted from obstinacy.^[51]

The initial efforts of local police to stop the raids failed almost totally against crowds armed with bamboo pikes and stones. This failure may have been owing in part to the secret sympathy many police felt for the "rioters"; the quality of life on both sides was close to identical. And the Rice Riots were nothing if not an attempt to restore immediate, if not lasting, justice to lives pushed to their material limit. It is significant in this connection that a wave of strikes began at the same time as the Rice Riots themselves. Most notable for their militancy were miners in Kyushu. For the most part, their demands for a 30–50 percent increase in wages and a reduction in prices (paid in company stores) were met to some satisfaction. When refused, strikers, in some instances using dynamite, attacked and burned mine offices and the houses of company officials. It was not until well into September that these strikes, some including "pitched battles" with troops, ended. In general, government troops, presumably insulated from any sympathy for local people, were able in a matter of weeks to take the situation in hand, without, it is reported, any loss of martial discipline.

Once "peace" had been restored, with hundreds dead on both sides and thousands injured, the government began the legal mop-up.^[52] The number of prosecutions exceeded seven thousand, and sentences were severe, "running into years" for what was far and away the most common offense: "buying rice . . . at forcibly reduced prices." Life sentences were not uncommon.

With the situation "normalized," the government froze the rice price. Along with a nationwide official call for social relief—to which wealthy individuals contributed "for the first time in their lives"—this action brought some respite from the conditions that had been the immediate cause of the "riots."^[53] But, ironically, it was not until Japanese agriculture fell into a prolonged depression after 1920 that produce prices as a whole ceased their "vertiginous" four-year-long rise.^[54]

The quelling of the Rice Riots did not mean a return to the bad old days entirely. First of all came the fall, on 17 September, of the "transcendental" Terauchi cabinet and its replacement ten days later by the Seiyukai cabinet of the "commoner" Hara Kei. This may have been the signal event in the political history of the period. However, the government had also proven, "though no intelligent person had doubted it," that it was "strong enough promptly to crush any popular revolt, and that the soldiers could be depended upon to be loyal."^[55] This must have been a comfort to the government and to the Seiyukai^[*] , which had consistently "acted on behalf of the merchants," convincing the people that "the government was in league with the profiteers." This feeling "was in no way bettered" by the fact that funds gathered in zaibatsu -sponsored relief efforts "largely found their way into the pockets of corrupt local officials and dishonest merchants, or were used for bettering the conditions of policemen."^[56]

At the same time, the Rice Riots were the vox populi. As Matsuo Takayoshi observes, however, the people were unable "to extend the uprising into a movement demanding reform of the political system."^[57] And it is true that the demand had to be taken up by minponshugi publicists in newspapers and journals, and transformed into a program that called for the "drastic reform of the despotic political structure," including universal suffrage, freedom of labor unions, an end to the practice of appointing service ministers from the active list, abolition of the genro^[*] , and establishment of genuine party government. Political language indeed, but words that owed their force to workers and peasants now conscious of their latent power. "In the voice of the new intelligentsia," Wakukawa Seiyei wrote in 1946, the masses "heard the expression of

their own discontent and rancor. Some of the more intelligent peasants began to talk of class struggle. The hope of self-liberation was beginning to dawn among them."^[58] Indeed, following the Rice Riots there was a florescence of attempts to bring about this hoped-for self-liberation. The Yuaikai^[*] came into its own. The largest-ever strikes by Japanese workers up to that time came in 1921 and 1922. In rural districts peasant unions and a movement for reform of the buraku began their contentious and harried existence. Thus the events of August 1918 "swept away for good the self-contempt of the proletariat. . . . . [They] gave confidence to the working class, . . . conveying the gospel of 'power' to the masses." Thus Suzuki Bunji, whose Yuaikai was the main—and nonrevolutionary—beneficiary of the end of the toilers' winter years.^[59]

A final point about the Rice Riots will lead us back to Nyozekan and the Osaka Asahi . A connection is frequently made between the Rice Riots and the Siberian Expedition—the dispatch of troops to Siberia by Japan and the Western powers in hopes of putting an end to the Bolshevik regime and stabilizing the Powers' colonial holdings in the East. Another aim, for the Japanese government at least, according to the contemporary account of the journalist Tsurumi Yusuke^[*] , was to fire up patriotic sentiment. This had slackened noticeably amidst what Matsuo terms the "sundry contradictions born of wartime prosperity."^[60] By projecting domestic dissatisfaction into support for "the boys in Siberia" the government hoped to save itself from the fate that had befallen the tsarist regime. Its success was partial at best. Rather than being caught up in a mood of "national unity" (kyokoku itchi ), the masses displayed a decided antipathy to the expedition and distrust of the government's intentions. Though never taking up antiwar slogans, neither did they cheer the departing troops—a stark contrast to the raucous welcome home accorded the victorious army returning in 1905 at the height of popular demonstrations against the Treaty of Portsmouth. For Matsuo the "resistance" to the expedition reflected the awakening of the popular mind to the fact that (as Inoue Narazo^[*] put it at the time) "the police and the army protect the upper classes. The lower classes, they do not protect."^[61] A further point that might help to account for the unpopularity of the expedition is the effect it had on rice prices. It was rumored that the government had been buying up the rice market in order to provide for the anticipated needs of the expeditionary force, so that when in August agreement in ruling circles to dispatch troops was made public, the news came as confirmation. This was the proverbial last straw.

These and other long-term factors in the breathtaking rise in the rice

price had been the subject of articles in the Osaka Asahi for months.^[62] It was against this background that the government in fact banned reporting on both the Siberian expedition and the Rice Riots: on 30 July it prohibited six Tokyo and fifty local papers from reporting on the proposed dispatch of troops; on 14 August reports and comments on the Rice Riots were banned from the press. The newspapers mounted a concerted protest, and the government, via the Home Ministry, relaxed the ban, agreeing to provide these media with "regular official reports for publication."^[63] But this decision hardly satisfied the newspapers, and on 17 August the Osaka Asahi and Mainichi jointly sponsored a mass rally at the Osaka Municipal Auditorium to protest the Terauchi government's suppression of free speech. The meeting drew 173 representatives from fifty-three newspaper organizations. A "Reporters Accuse" (Dangai kisha ) meeting on 25 August brought together 166 representatives of eighty-six Kansai news organizations, which passed a resolution of censure against the cabinet. The Osaka Asahi report on page two of the evening edition was pulled, and became the trigger for what was subsequently known as the "Osaka Asahi ," or "White Rainbow" incident.

The government charged the principals in the story with violation of the Press Law. In itself, the "incident" apparently revolved around reporter Onishi Toshio's^[*] use in his account of the phrase hakko hi o tsuranuku^[*] from the "Exemplary Biography of Zou Yang" in the classic Book of History :

Those gathered at the meeting sat down to eat, but were unable to relax, enjoying neither the flavor of the meat nor the fragrance of the wine. For as they silently set their forks to the meal, down upon their heads, as lightning, flashed an inauspicious portent: as the ancients had it, "The white rainbow pierced the sun" [hakko hi o tsuranuku ] the burden of which was that our peerless empire would soon face a fearful day of final judgment.

Normally hakko hi o tsuranuku —"certainly no slight to the imperial house," according to Sugimura Takeshi, then of the Asahi —was understood to refer to a celestial portent of military disorder. A "common sense" association of the time, however, linked the "sun" with the Son of Heaven—that is, with the emperor. Being pierced clearly signified a threat of assassination.^[64]

Evidently Onishi's use of this phrase gave the signal to the right wing, which seized the opportunity the trial afforded to vent a good deal of spleen over the Asahi 's long-standing attacks on Terauchi. It is true that

the paper had been hostile to Terauchi ever since he had served—the first military man to do so—as governor-general of Korea, in which capacity he had presided over its annexation to Japan. The hostility was particularly marked in Editor-in-chief Torii Sosen's writing, which tended (as Nyozekan remarked) "to blame the Terauchi cabinet for everything."^[65] Torii's special animus was directed at Terauchi's China policy—his support, presumably, for Duan Qirui (Yuan Shikai's successor as president of the Chinese Republic) as against followers of Sun Yat-sen, for whom there was much sympathy among Japanese intellectuals. In any case, a number of journals and organizations joined in the campaign against the Asahi , which continued for a month after the "White Rainbow" case went to court. One publication, Suginaka Shukichi's Shinjidai , had the backing of Terauchi's home minister, Goto Shinpei^[*] .^[66]

For the trial, the government had prepared (but did not use) a list of articles that had appeared between February 1917 and September 1918, some of which Nyozekan had written. In the event, the prosecutor focused on the "White Rainbow" story, and in due course, Tai Shin'ichi, as Asahi editor, and Onishi Toshio^[*] were indicted on a charge of subverting public order.^[67] The "incident" continued, however.

At the time, Nyozekan was the Asahi 's city editor and ultimately responsible for the affair. Tai, "who actually handled the story" was deputy editor and had put Onishi on the story. It soon became apparent that with the anti-Asahi campaign continuing, a number of government figures, along with a pro-Seiyukai^[*] faction at the paper, had more in mind than putting away these two small fry. At one point Murayama Ryohei^[*] , founder and president of the Asahi was seized, in Sugimura Takeshi's words, by "right-wing punks [uyoku no gorotsukidomo ] from the Kokoku Seinenkai^[*] at Nankanoshima in Osaka." They tied him to a stone lantern with a leaflet pinned to his kimono that said, "On Heaven's Behalf We [Will] Execute This Traitor to Our Country" (Ten ni kawarite kokuzoku o chusu^[*] ).^[68] Whether because of this incident, or owing to the cumulative effect of the campaign, Murayama felt compelled to resign as president of the Asahi . In their turn, Torii Sosen and Nyozekan also resigned, thus assuming responsibility for the entire affair. This was not the end of the resignations, however. The pressure from outside—including the government, where some wished to see the Asahi shut down completely—had brought to the surface a long-standing split on the editorial board between Torii Sosen's anti-Seiyukai^[*] faction and another headed by the noted stylist Nishimura Tenshu^[*] . Among the domi-

nant figures in the latter was Honda Sei'ichi (Setsudo^[*] ), an "absolute backer" of the Seiyukai^[*] . Murayama Ryohei^[*] attempted to appoint Torii managing editor as a way of denying Nishimura's faction control of editorial policy. The attempt failed when Murayama was presented with the government's "deal": if Torii and Hasegawa Nyozekan would leave, "things would go lightly" for the Asahi . They agreed. But Maruyama Kanji, the news editor, knowing that his own anti-Seiyukai stance was sure to cause more trouble, urged the two men to stay. (So that they could hang together?) Torii and Hasegawa demurred. Maruyama himself was given little choice. An executive of the paper visited him shortly, and after some discussion proceeded to take from his pocket a letter of resignation for Maruyama to sign. Realistically, he could not expect to get much done at the Asahi , and so acquiesced. Leaving along with him were the Investigation Bureau chief, Hanada Daigoro^[*] , and Oyama Ikuo^[*] , who had been active as an editorial writer. Eventually Inahara Katsuji, who headed the Overseas News Bureau, and Kushida Tamizo^[*] , a guest editorialist, followed suit.

Nishimura's faction, represented by Nishimura himself as a consulting editor, along with Honda Sei'ichi, was now in charge. With some bitterness, Maruyama Kanji remarks that the change in editorial staff "brought the tinge of the Seiyukai, of political parties, into the Asahi ." Deep down, he did not hope for great things from Japan's old-line party men and looked to the intelligentsia (interi ) for a "rational" parliamentary politics, "a politics that does not push" (isoganu seiji ). Like Yoshino and Minobe, Maruyama assumed a fundamental congruence between the Japanese and English, French, and American constitutional systems. That is, politics in these systems was a matter of "compromise." In the 1930s Maruyama asked publicly, "to whom should the system entrust the responsibility of 'dialogue' with the military?" His answer: again the interi , and he challenged the army in print to explain itself and to compromise. As Kobayashi Hajime remarks, the "logic" of this compromise, once overturned, "proceeded to wring Maruyama Kanji's neck."^[69] Nyozekan, too, regarded Nishimura's dispensation—in the event an interregnum, with Murayama back a year later—as a blot on the Asahi 's history. Murayama's quick return seemed to restore the paper to its "traditional" status as a critical force, attracting such minponshugi luminaries as Yoshino Sakuzo^[*] (who was also badly in need of money) as editorial consultants. But as Sugimura Takeshi observes, beginning with the "White Rainbow" incident, "the relative importance of the critical function in organs of opinion gradually diminished." The vast expan-

sion of readership in the years after 1918 brought about the rapid commercialization of all communications media. With it, the price of "failure"—being shut down, pressured, or otherwise threatened by the government—grew that much higher. A newspaper had to publish, period.^[70] And although Nyozekan himself retained close personal ties with his Asahi colleagues, he never returned to the paper in any official capacity. On 4 December, the Osaka District Court found Onishi^[*] and Tai [Yamaguchi] guilty, and they were sentenced to a month's imprisonment.^[71] The following day, Nyozekan moved to Tokyo, renting a house on the outskirts of the city. That night, his mother, Yamamoto Take, died of a brain hemorrhage.

The Founding of Warera :
"We Ourselves"

The account, just completed, of the breakup of what has been called the "Nihon -style left" at the Osaka Asahi , was based on nearly forty years of hindsight. But at the time, Nyozekan wrote early in 1919, "we were all in the dark," not only about what was afoot in the Asahi boardroom, but about the ultimate outcome of (what seemed) a permanent and depressing compromise of the paper's "strict neutrality." But this was to prove a fertile darkness. Not knowing when or if the Asahi would return to itself, Nyozekan opted to reconstitute the Asahi "tradition" in a new, smaller-scale, and more personal mode. None of those who left the Asahi , in fact, had expected their "base" at the paper to be permanent. A crack, as it were, had opened in time and space, and it was imperative to leap into it. Difficult as it was to cut loose, this was the only condition for advance. Only struggle could bring strength. The "base" or surroundings did not matter at that point. "Otherwise we would have held on . . . but it was we ourselves who had to grow strong."^[72] This was the name of the journal Nyozekan established to carry on the direction of the Osaka Asahi . Warera was published monthly in Tokyo between 1919 and 1930. In setting up this new journal of opinion, Nyozekan gathered around him not only colleagues from the Asahi but also friends like Furusho Tsuyoshi^[*] (Ki?) from Katsunan's Nihon . In addition, and appropriately, for Warera was anything but an exercise in nostalgia, Nyozekan's venture also attracted two new groups. First, there were young, mostly Marxist social scientists from Tokyo and Kyoto Imperial, as well as other universities, disciples of Takano Iwasaburo^[*] who had gotten together in 1920 to defend Morito

Tatsuo. Morito, it will be recalled, had along with the budding economist Ouchi Hyoe^[*] published a study in Todai's^[*]Keizaigaku kenkyu^[*] (which Ouchi^[*] edited) on Kropotkin's social thought. In an "unprecedented use of the press laws against a scholarly publication,"^[73] censors in the Home Ministry hit upon the article (which did not advocate Kropotkin's anarchism) and ordered distribution of the journal halted. Morito and Ouchi were suspended and eventually convicted on criminal charges. Morito resigned, while Ouchi, after a year's probation, returned to teaching. Takano meanwhile had left Todai for other reasons and assumed directorship of the Ohara^[*] Institute, which became a magnet for Marxists, socialists, and "left-wing" social policy thinkers. (Nyozekan joined Ohara as a consultant in 1922, and in the following year became one of its directors.) Warera 's connection with the Takano group was owing not only to intellectual affinity: the journal was one of Morito's most vigorous defenders. The significance of this "incident" for all who wrote from a dissident position was largely overlooked at the time—except by Warera , which made a habit of defending those who ran afoul of the government's machinery for rooting out "dangerous thought."^[74]

A second new group active at Warera were students, again largely of Todai and Waseda provenance, who had in 1918 formed an equally famous organization, the Shinjinkai. Both of these new groups shared a kind of radicalism, more or less informed by a working knowledge of Marxism and social science. The emphasis in both cases was on society and away from state and nation, indicating the direction in which all, including Nyozekan himself, considered that "real life"—the only source of meaningful thought—was to be found. But there were definite gradations in this attitude among the members of the Warera circle. There was no "line," no consensus on the implications for social practice springing from their "discovery of society." Warera reflected this gradation, with Nyozekan and Maruyama Kanji ranged alongside writers, both young and established, who were more explicitly socialist, such as Oyama Ikuo^[*] , Kawakami Hajime, and his student (and critic) Kushida Tamizo^[*] . Nyozekan's ideas, too, were changing. But this was not, he would have insisted, the result of exposure to a "new wave" at Warera that was somehow destined to reach the "shore"—society itself—ahead of those who had preceded them. Such a view would bespeak only intellectual arrogance. For no notion in the world of thought was valid if not responding to, or generated by, the slower and more powerful undulation that was social change itself. Indeed, Nyozekan saw in Warera a record of that undulation. The journal was to be both product and cre-

ator of social consciousness. It could only hope to capture the dynamism of the reality that moved all around it.

In more traditional political terms, Warera projected both the older nationalism of the old Nihon left and the new ideal of "social reconstruction" that had also inspired the journal Kaizo^[*] . It would be misleading to consider this nationalism a narrow party or factional orientation. It embodied an entire outlook on public life. As with "social reconstruction," it was an ideal as much as a position taken on concrete issues.

Nyozekan captured this Warera "moment" in an eloquent maiden essay, "Osaka Asahi kara Warera e," published in February 1919. Much of the essay is concerned with the atmosphere at the Asahi and relates some of the details of the breakup of its editorial staff. We have already covered much of this ground. As a statement of Warera 's program and ideals, and as a suggestion of the ideas then gestating in Nyozekan's mind, the essay could hardly be more lucid. It is a declaration of "publicness."

All life is struggle, Nyozekan avers—to be born, to eat, to stand and walk, to run, to express oneself and "be" in the world. The characteristic of human life is consciousness. It is the awareness of what one is about , and what is about one. Life is inevitably a painful awaking, "from happy unconsciousness to unhappy consciousness."^[75]

An individual? From a biological point of view, close to nonentity. The "volume" of a single human being is microscopic in terms of the universe as a whole. Nothing could have less significance. But its essence is another matter. The fact that it is aware constitutes its "substantiality" and significance. And in asserting this, no human being must yield.^[76] From this statement of premises, Nyozekan draws parallels between the life of individuals and that of organizations—that is, of individuals functioning in an "organic" collectivity. The discussion of consciousness shifts to one of freedom. Indeed, the exercise of the latter is inconceivable without the former, and if not taken together, neither term has any meaning.

The assumptions underlying Nyozekan's disquisition bear some attention here. They belong, clearly, to the "humanist psychology" of the bourgeois nineteenth century. It is the way of thinking associated with the great European theorists of progress, evolutionary and revolutionary: Comte, Marx, and above all Spencer. Animating this humanism was the belief that "progress" or evolution, both individual and social, is inevitable (though not unilinear), and also that evolution must and can be made to entail an ethical or moral advance through the applica-

tion of reason.^[77] In some of his later writing on the "Japanese character," the seimeitai , and Laozi, and in scattered remarks, Nyozekan seems to embrace a kind of Tolstoyan intuitionism—á la Platon Karatayev in War and Peace —and to disparage the "Greek" tendency toward abstraction. But this never displaces, and in fact is meant to "complete," his firm belief in a process of world evolution susceptible of discernment and analysis by rational individuals.^[78]

The moral and material advance with which Nyozekan is concerned is preeminently social. He was not an "individualist," if the term is understood to take the development, happiness, or liberation of an abstract individual as a paramount concern. Rather, individuals are real and important because society is, and vice versa. They are "dual aspects of the same life."^[79] The view is integrative in the sense of William James's remark that "the community stagnates without the impulse of the individual; the impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community." Thus freedom is a matter not so much of inherent individual capacities as of individual and social need. Consciousness demands it, as it were, instinctually. No society will survive without the evolution of organs to allow freedom to express itself. This is as true in politics as in society. In politics, possession of power sometimes creates the illusion among rulers that power alone suffices and is self-justifying. In society, law, tradition, and convention as embodied in institutions tend to fossilize. In both cases the freedom of human beings (which, because individual capacities and goals vary, often appears as conflict) breaks through entrenched "system" and leads to advance.

In the progress of society in general, and now in particular when "society" has become the active concern of politics, the realm of freedom of debate and of association becomes vitally important. Apart from the development in economic organization that ultimately mandates change in social institutions and ways of thought, the free "competition" of ideas in society spells the difference between revolution and "rational" advance. Nyozekan, we must remember, was writing in the aftermath of the Russian revolution and the Rice Riots. Neither then nor at any later time did he advocate the violent overthrow of the state.

Nyozekan's strictures concerning freedom in Japanese society are double-edged. On the one hand, he was optimistic about the "discovery of society" that had taken place among the Japanese masses and intelligentsia (and to a lesser degree among bureaucrats and "scholar functionaries"). It seemed to promise genuine reconstruction. The combination of actual social development with the recognition of such development

would dictate action that was both realistic and progressive. On the other hand, a politically retrograde ruling class, even a well-meaning "enlightened" bureaucracy, could easily frustrate this development, with catastrophic consequences. The Rice Riots were but a foretaste of what could be expected when a politically undereducated people is forced to give vent to an irrepressible demand for social equity: "People who cannot use their mouths will use their fists."^[80]

The "political impoverishment" of the Japanese people was in part a historical product of Japan's forced march from a feudal to a bourgeois state. The weakness of the "bourgeoisie" compelled the state, in its place, to oversee (to its own benefit) what should have been a social transformation fueled by popular energy and intelligence. But with the hardwon self-discovery of Japanese society, "elite charity" would no longer suffice.^[81] A politically impoverished people is impoverished in all areas of life. Aware of this condition, it will seize control of processes of wealthcreation dependent on its own labor. It will take back what is its own.

The only rational policy under the circumstances was the intense political education for which the people were fully ready. But this was not something the "shepherds of the people" could provide. Even with the best of intentions, bureaucracy would only retard social progress. By its nature, it tried to force the members of society into the same mold. The point was to "let go," to allow each Japanese to develop the political sense by doing politics.^[82] This meant, of course, the minponshugi program discussed earlier. The whole point of the program was that the social and political worlds now impinged on each other as never before. In fact, each political demand had a social concomitant and vice versa. To claim to have achieved freedom and equality in politics without freedom and equality in society was to ratify inequality and unfreedom in both spheres. (Concretely, for example, this would mean the passage of universal suffrage without any legislation guaranteeing the right of labor to organize.) Thus the opening up of the political process to society was the only way, short of revolution, for the state to resolve a contradiction that was dangerous to itself.^[83]

The present age of social reconstruction had afforded the state a great opportunity to tune in to the popular will (min'i ). This had been the secret of success of the advanced nations of Europe. By listening (at least just enough) to the voice of the people, states such as Britain, France, and the United States had retained their social orders, and proved that "the greater the volume of freedom granted to a people, the more natural it is that they secure for themselves positions of excellence in the

world. It is not the act of one solicitous for the progress of the state [kokka ] to accommodate a single group of individuals by suppressing that freedom when society does not in the least demand it ."^[84]

Nyozekan's gesture to the nation here is not purely formal. It is the essence of what he called the "safe nationalism" of the Osaka Asahi . This was the "tradition" it had "to its shame" repudiated in 1918 and that he intended Warera to continue. It was the democratic and liberal nationalism, he claimed, of the Charter Oath itself. And not only the Asahi , but all independent newspapers and media of opinion, because of the moral sanction only they could apply, had a unique role to fulfill in the "national progress." This fusion of moral sanction, democratic impulse, and national outlook amounted for Nyozekan to the "publicness" (koteki seishitsu^[*] ) of journalism. In this sense, the period of transition from Osaka Asahi to Warera may have represented the deepest flush of the Taisho^[*] redefinition. This was all the more so when a further principle—probably the first victim of reaction—was added: national morality was to be matched by international morality. What a nation professed at home had to characterize its relations with other nations; there could be no democracy at home that fed itself on the fruit of colonial exploitation.^[85] In this Nyozekan shared with Nanbara Shigeru an idealist tenet applied most often to the "real world" in the process of displacing an old colonialism with a new one. This, at least, was the lesson Japan learned at Versailles. The insistence on this continuity of moralities soon disappeared from Nyozekan's writings as he came to see a world united by its common implication in a process of production rather than by shared values.

Domestic threats to this optimism, and to "publicness," were also close to hand. The danger posed to the Osaka Asahi by bureaucratic, party, and business interests was to Nyozekan's mind all too obvious. But in society itself lay another danger, a by-product of the long-standing exclusion of the people from political life:

Many young businessmen, since coming into contact with advanced economic conditions, have grown dissatisfied with the status quo. But in many cases, owing to the meagerness of their moral, especially intellectual, life, that dissatisfaction expresses itself in a superficial hankering after formal "culture," a deliberate unconcern for the life of our people; in following the trend to live as an individual wholly cut off from society; in claiming to need [things] of generally scant value.^[86]

In sum, Nyozekan was demonstrating the dual nature of "publicness" by pointing out the dual nature of what threatened it. On the one hand

lay self-justifying institutions and programs, with the state as primus inter pares : let us call this the danger of the organizational imperative. On the other, there was an exclusivist privatism and self-centeredness. If publicness is created through the openness of both state (official) and individual (private), so too its negation came through this closure. That was the danger Nyozekan seemed to see. And it was up to the media to "work out" the public sense. If Nanbara attempted this from within the official world, from "inside," Nyozekan's place was "outside." As we have seen, he did not put great hope in "shepherds of the people." He doubted whether they could let go enough, and trust the people to act for themselves. But that was the very direction in which the real world was tending. The time had come for its submerged voice to be heard.^[87]

Warera , Nyozekan proclaimed, was an organ of "safe nationalism" that represented the socialized public of late Taisho^[*] . But within months, the journal and Nyozekan himself began to show signs of a deepening radicalism—an awareness of the essentially conflictual nature of class relations in a capitalist society, and a concomitant belief that a harmonious, state-maintained consensus for stability and social peace was at best a bureaucratic illusion, and at worst a prettified form of militaristic coercion.^[88]

Intellectually, the concern of Nyozekan, Oyama Ikuo^[*] , and others was to uncover the root causes of what appeared to be an increasingly reactionary political situation. The signs were all around, in the reaction of the powers to the Russian revolution, in the events in Germany; in the entrenchment of capital for a long struggle with an awakened working class at home. Nor were occasional shudders of fear of the populace entirely absent from the pages of Warera . But the logic of the situation was too compelling, and politically Nyozekan came to associate with people and causes that led to suspicions in some circles that he was a "dangerous" individual.

Even those sympathetic to what Nyozekan and Warera stood for grew overly cautious. Yoshino Sakuzo^[*] and his associates in the Reimeikai—an organization that formed around Yoshino, Fukuda Tokuzo^[*] , and the jurist and universal suffragist Imai Yoshiyuki in 1919—provide a suggestive example. The occasion of its founding was Yoshino's famous public debate with the nationalist Uchida Ryohei^[*] and members of his Roninkai^[*] , whose stalwarts had been responsible for the long campaign against the Osaka Asahi and for the violent attacks on its publisher. The Reimeikai, buoyed by the dramatic show of support given to Yoshino, defined its chief purpose as the "stamping out of bigoted

thinking" (ganmei shiso^[*] no bokumetsu ); its political platform was minponshugi par excellence. But here experience had shown caution to be necessary. The membership, particularly Yoshino, was extremely anxious to avoid suppression by the authorities. Thus although he was interested in forming a united front on the suffrage issue within academic and critical circles (rondan ), Yoshino explicitly refused membership to Marxists and socialists such as Sakai Toshihiko. The latter, to be sure, had their own strategic interest in making common cause: to overcome the police repression that had already rocked them. They wanted back in. Yoshino was convinced that any link to Sakai and the others would imperil his own wing of the movement.

It was amidst this atmosphere that Hasegawa Nyozekan was also denied membership. The official reason given—plausible in a formal sense—was that Nyozekan was not an academic, as were the other members, including Oyama Ikuo^[*] . But behind this decision, Matsuo Takayoshi argues, was the fear not only of divisiveness within the group over its uncertain political complexion, but of the threat to its survival if it took in figures perceived as dangerously radical. (From this point on, Nyozekan sarcastically referred to the "professors' democracy" of the Reimeikai. But it is to be noted that it was Yoshino himself who apprised Nyozekan of the internal dissension that had led to his exclusion from the organization.)^[89]

Matsuo goes on to upbraid Yoshino—though mildly and with respect. He accuses Yoshino of timidity for failing to take a chance on a united front, not only with people like Nyozekan, but with committed socialists like Sakai. More fundamentally, he faults Yoshino's condescension in not recognizing that a worker-led movement was quite capable of enunciating its own goals and ideology. This, of course, brings the discussion into the realm of "if only." My suspicion, however, is that a united front would have required more than personal courage and conviction on Yoshino's part; the entire intellectual and political culture was in question. However these matters may be, it remains true that by the early 1920s, Nyozekan had come to embody a radical, suspect outsideness that would remain with him into the 1930s.

A final vignette will bring the narrative here to a close. Following Warera 's vigorous defense of Morito Tatsuo, Nyozekan joined with the novelist Arishima Takeo and the dramatist Akita Ujaku to plead the cause of Vassili Yeroshenko, a Russian associated with the younger Warera crowd. A blind poet and revolutionary, Yeroshenko had come to

Japan for training at the Tokyo Blind School, and for a time he was associated with Osugi Sakae^[*] . Home Ministry documents from 1919 include warnings from the British Embassy in Tokyo that while in India Yeroshenko had made contact with known revolutionaries and had to be watched. He had attended a series of lectures given in the spring of 1920 by Nyozekan and others at the YMCA in Shiba, and later accompanied Nyozekan on speech-making tours to the poverty-stricken northeast of Japan.

On 28 May 1923, the Home Ministry ordered Yeroshenko's deportation. He went into hiding, but was finally seized and taken to the Yodobashi Police Station. The following day, Nyozekan went with Arishima and Akita to Yodobashi, but they were refused permission to see Yeroshenko. They decided to take the issue to the Home Ministry, where they demanded, in a meeting with officials, to be allowed to see the prisoner. They were refused.^[90]

The Two Critiques

It was just at this point that Nyozekan published two major works, to which we now turn our attention. These were the Gendai kokka hihan (Critique of the modern state) and Gendai shakai hihan (Critique of modern society), both published by the Kyoto firm Kobundo^[*] , the former in June 1921, and the latter the following January. Taken together, these books run to over a thousand pages and are as ambitious as their titles imply. They represent Nyozekan in his "critical" period—universalist in his approach, Spencerian in method, yet never losing sight of Japan as the object of ultimate concern. The Critiques are not academic treatises but a knotted string of hundreds of mini-essays given unity through a shared method and the clearly interrelated problems of state and society they address. Most of the essays appeared first in Warera , but other and larger-scale publications such as Kaizo^[*] and Chuo koron^[*] are well represented.

In writing his Critiques Nyozekan synthesized a huge amount of reading in British and continental sociology, political thought, and pragmatic philosophy.^[91] And while it might be possible to trace the influence of individual authors (besides Spencer and Hobhouse, whose impact Nyozekan recognizes explicitly), it seems to me that the more relevant question to ask is twofold. What, first, is Nyozekan's general orientation, the critical base from which he judges both the social forms

he observes and the content of the ideas that purport to represent and analyze those forms? A second question also arises: What did Nyozekan not see? What remains ambiguous or puzzling in the Critiques?

We noted earlier that Nyozekan had absorbed the "humanist psychology" and evolutionary viewpoint of the nineteenth century. In the Critiques this remains evident. But here, the focus is more specifically placed on the nature of institutions themselves, how they arise, function, and decline. One helpful formulation of the evolutionary view of institutions that Nyozekan absorbed (and modified) may be found in a recent work, Gianfranco Poggi's The Development of the Modern State . In one passage Poggi describes what he terms the "theory of institutional differentiation" as the signal contribution made by the classical sociology of Spencer and Durkheim to the modern understanding of the state/society relation:

Since it is in the very nature of the modern state that there should be many states, and since modern states have historically exhibited an enormous variety of institutional arrangements, clearly one speaks of the modern state as one system of rule only at a high level of abstraction. At such a level it seems appropriate to some sociologists to regard the formation of the modern state as an instance of "institutional differentiation," the process whereby the major functional problems of a society give rise in the course of time to various increasingly elaborated and distinctive sets of structural arrangements. In this view, the formation of the modern state parallels and complements various similar processes of institutional differentiation affecting, say, the economy, the family, and religion.

This approach has illustrious proponents both among the great sociologists of the past, who used it to get a conceptual hold on the nature of modern society, and among their contemporary epigones. It has attractive links to other disciplines dealing with evolutionary change. And it can be applied at various levels. Thus one might say that the key phenomenon in the development of the modern state was the institutionalization, within "modernizing" Western societies, of the distinction between the private/social realm and the public political realm, and that the same process was later carried further within each realm. In the public realm, for instance, the "division of powers" assigned different functions of rule to different constitutional organs; in the private realm, the occupational system became further differentiated from, say, the sphere of the family. And so on.

Thus a proponent of this approach has the considerable advantage of applying a single more or less elaborate model of the differentiation process, with appropriate specifications and adjustments, to a great range of events, showing how in each case the same "logic" applies.^[92]

One could hardly ask for a better outline of Nyozekan's general approach. His Critiques rest on deeply held Spencerian convictions. In

fact he states that his purpose in the Critique of the Modern State is to write a "natural history of the state."^[93] The phrase is a transfer from Spencer's critique of the narrow politicism of contemporary historians. Spencer wrote:

That which constitutes History, properly so called, is in great part omitted from works on the subject. Only of late years have historians commenced giving us, in any considerable quantity, the truly valuable information. As in past ages the king was everything and the people nothing; so, in past histories the doings of the king fill the entire picture, to which the national life forms but an obscure background. . . . That which it really concerns us to know, is the natural history of society.^[94]

For Nyozekan, the state is part of society. It is a partial society (bubun shakai ), one of a number of institutions (seido ) into which modern society has become differentiated. For this reason, although his critique of the state was published first, it should be considered together with the Critique of Modern Society and viewed much as a blowup of a crucial piece of some larger canvas: only through this enlargement can the peculiar aspects of the state's evolution be grasped as they should. It would be wrong to assign to the state any logical or philosophical priority in Nyozekan's thinking. That goes to society as the vessel of human lives (seikatsu ). It is undeniable, however, that his development as a thinker came by way of Katsunan's liberal nationalism —after an early youth spent in a realm where political events "were as a sheet of oil" that covered the seimeitai . In this tension we can see a kind of experiential dialectic, of which the Critiques form a momentary resolution.

But there is more to these works than a personal dialectic. They are a critical exercise prompted by an external problem. Indeed, just as Spencer took as his target the scribes of "great men" and their minions, so Nyozekan wrote (especially in part 1 of Critique of the Modern State ) with the conscious purpose of laying bare the premises of the "metaphysical" state theory produced by the functionaries of Tokyo Imperial University. These scholars, wholly indebted to German state science and jurisprudence, had in Nyozekan's view served only to modernize the mythology of the state. Regardless of intent, they mystified what they ought to have clarified, idealized what they ought to have criticized. In dealing with the problem of ideology as "cover," Nyozekan revealed a partial debt to Marxism as true "science," although his conclusions regarding social practice did not point to revolution. More directly, Nyozekan followed the example of the British social theorist and political activist L. T. Hobhouse, whose Metaphysical Theory of the State

(1918) had subjected to critique the work of the British neo-Hegelian Bernard Bosanquet.^[95]

In outlining the main themes of the Critiques , we may most usefully begin literally at the beginning. We need to understand Nyozekan's point of departure. Gendai —"modern times" or "the present"—is above all a problem, personally identified and experienced. It arises from a contradiction between social reality as perceived and an imposed normative and conceptual model. That model is ideological, the expression of power. It distorts and hides reality, and retards evolution, with which Nyozekan identifies himself. This situation that demands critique is gendai , itself a normative position. The "present" from which Nyozekan works is that of a Japanese state compelling society, despite its continuing poverty, to support an imperialism it is unable, materially, to sustain. The price is exploitation of the producing classes, human suffering, and thus ideological crisis. The latter is important because it is the occasion both of repression by the state and of hope for social reconstruction.

It is important to remember that despite the titles of their respective works, neither Hobhouse nor Nyozekan take an antistate position. Both concede the need for the state (bureaucracy plus political parties in a representative body) to assume a positive role in the realization of liberty and equality. In Liberalism (1911) Hobhouse emphatically denied—pace Spencer—the Old Liberal thesis that the pursuit of equality, a "positive" goal, entailed the curtailment by state power of individual liberty, and hence that liberty and equality were contradictory as ends. Hobhouse rejected the argument on two counts. First, "liberty" did not equal unrestricted indulgence, but included as a corollary self -restraint by the individual in the common good. That the restraining force had of necessity to originate in the state was a false assumption. Second, Hobhouse considered that industrial capitalism (as least in Britain) had developed to the point where equality of opportunity could be attained. The economic and political system could support an effort by the state to remedy the appalling inequalities that had resulted from the perpetuation of Old Liberal economic and social policies in a world of unionized labor and concentrated capital. The state, though it could not legislate "morality," had the duty to create the conditions for it, which meant structural changes in the system by which public resources were distributed.^[96] The state was to be an instrument for the achievement of social ends, rather than the guardian of an anachronistic and unjust social arrangement.

Nyozekan, it is true, regarded the Japanese political system, espe-

cially the parties, as suffering the consequences of decades of bureaucratic tutelage. They seemed interested only in carving out spheres of power for themselves, and unable to take the initiative in promoting the social good. Organized around personalities and regional factions, they were given to the adoption of reformist positions simply as a wedge against a current power holder. And whatever criticisms could be made of parties on this score, the same was true for their elders, officialdom itself. All in all, the state ruled in its own interest, and to a great extent remained a "feudal"—private—institution.

Still, Nyozekan felt that in the long run the future belonged to the parties as at least potentially representative of society. Thus he calls for the parties, rather than the bureaucracy, to take the initiative in encouraging the growth of labor unions. The ultimate goal, he states explicitly, is the emergence of a British-style Labour Party. Nyozekan was not sanguine about any rapid achievement of this goal. But one can see his reasoning. By allying themselves with the working masses, the parties could "surround" the state with society and considerably strengthen their hand against bureaucracy by turning the Diet into a truly representative institution with broad popular support.^[97]

The particular political actors notwithstanding, Nyozekan, like Hobhouse, considered that the state as a whole was moving away from minimal and "negative" control over society to its "positive" administration or management (kanri ). But this did not have to mean simply the greater intrusion of the state into society, so long as "society" (which Nyozekan identified with the producing classes) possessed institutions strong and independent enough to compel bureaucracy to share the duties of kanri . To ensure that kanri indeed meant a scaling-down of state power, a representative political body elected by a universally enfranchised populace was obviously of great importance. Why, then, do the Critiques seem at times to waffle on the suffrage issue? In fact, they do not. But one has to take into account Nyozekan's perspective and priorities. First, he was alarmed at the tendency among minponshugi publicists to treat suffrage as a cure-all for Japan's political ills. Nyozekan believed that an unorganized society would too quickly be coopted and split by preexisting forces. Second, Nyozekan considered that the regional and bureaucratic factionalism that bedeviled Japanese politics was far stronger than that found in the social and economic spheres. Thus to expect the political system to take the lead in "socializing" itself was simply myopic. The most that could be expected at present was that the state would do its best not to obstruct movements for reconstruction already at work in

society.^[98] At some future date, its role might be different. And the key to the reconstructive process was, of course, the legal growth of unions among the working class. Without this basic guarantee (an assumption Nyozekan never examined) of quality and equality in social life, no political reform could have genuinely progressive consequences. But that society was headed toward an age of kanri and away from Japan's version of the antisocial selfishness of laissez-faire (in the sense that bureaucracy did nothing to protect workers—the true producers—against the built-in abuses and dangers of capitalist economy) Nyozekan did not doubt.

What we have above is no more than a sketch of Nyozekan's position on the immediate question of what ought to be done to make minponshugi viable. The position amounts, indeed, to the institutionalization of the will of the people, both socially and politically. It is a position quite specific to Japan as a late-developing industrial capitalist state, but one having much in common with other such states: a constitutional political form that needed socializing; a working class emerging into self-consciousness; a petty bourgeoisie frightened of the working class, yet itself excluded from political power; a bourgeoisie itself newly hatched from a feudal shell.

The fact that the Critiques were concerned with the present, then, does not imply that the past has ceased to matter. Indeed not. For in adopting a Spencerian view Nyozekan accepted the idea of an unbroken chain of social cause and effect, and that social forms arise from functions determined, not by conscious intervention at any given "present," but by conditions inherited all along the line. For Nyozekan, as for Spencer, "society is a growth and not a manufacture."^[99] The present does not exist versus the past, but because of it. The conservative implications of Nyozekan's assertion that we live "from" the past emerge more fully in his postcritical period after 1933. But as we have already seen, Nyozekan's inaugural essay in Warera warned of the need to foster evolution, lest revolution become inevitable. Let us only remind ourselves here that even this position, in the context of Nyozekan's political associations, must already have seemed dangerous enough.

Two corollaries of this past-consciousness soon become clear: impulses to fix origins and to identify universal principles of development. Nyozekan does not, however, succumb to any genetic fallacy. By asking the question of origins, he did not seek to mark out ineluctable fate, but rather to identify mechanisms and functions that could "explain" the subject. His real interest was in the evolutionary process itself.^[100] Still,

Nyozekan does rely on a single universal and cyclical principle to explain the organization, development, and destruction of all institutions. Institution (seido ) may here be defined as an action system (kodo taikei^[*] ) for the realization of the collective ends of the individuals who compose it. For Nyozekan, individuals are bound to institutions from birth, so that it is a delusion to posit a "total" individual freedom, or to lament its undue usurpation. Human beings cannot but act socially. Similarly, the only freedom that means anything is the "socialized freedom" that issues in action. Freedom is something one does (as is speech ). This is not to deny that as institutions fossilize, they encroach on the "socialized freedom" of their members, hence wounding the entire social body. In this sense, "every institution . . . is a tyrant."^[101]

Every institution—state, economy, family, church—may be said to participate in the struggle for existence. Each seeks to continue in existence and maintain its power structure in the face of changes of modes of production (Nyozekan used the Marxist formulation), and the social relations determined by them. In this competition, institutions are forced to evolve. It is precisely the force of consciousness expressed in action that powers this challenge to institutional hardening.

With particular regard to the state, Nyozekan subscribes to a developmental scheme according to which the state has a dual functional origin. On the one hand, he posits an "instinct to subjugate" (seifuku honno^[*] ) that arose from the need of tribal groups to eliminate threats from without. Such threats felt among ancient civilizations (synonymous with the state) led to the evolution of means of organized self-defense; the alternative was to perish. But what was there to be defended? A way of life, a "society" following its own instinct toward "mutual aid." It is this instinct that Nyozekan, following Kropotkin, identifies as the primary feature of human society. (Spencer, indeed, had made the same argument: the chances of species survival were, and remain, better through interaction and cooperation.) "Society," however, needs the state, and the state is social to the degree that it "looks after" society's growth. Accompanying decisive shifts in (not elimination of) dominant modes of economic life and the increasing complexity of processes of production, distribution, and consumption came the "institutional differentiation" necessary to sustain social life. Not least among these institutions was the state, increasing in power as the life over which it watched grew in prosperity and complexity. Depending on geography, environment, and culture, furthermore, the state developed in multiform and competing modes. Nyozekan is not interested in describ-

ing these except in large abstractions generally associated with a dominant productive mode: feudal/military, absolutist/early capitalist, bourgeois/liberal, and so on. The key point he wishes to make is that the state, in the course of its evolution, cannot cease to express the two instincts from which its function derives. And when, as in the present, a shift in the social relations of production becomes imminent, the state like any other institution seeks to preserve itself and its power. It does so through resort, on the one hand, to its ostensibly legitimate monopoly on the use of force. But when it turns the instinct to subjugate inward on its own social body, with naked force, the benefit to itself is only temporary. The state must rely in this sphere on the social "consciousness" its presence has inculcated. It is, however, precisely this consciousness that has come into question. What happens when the state's (or any other institution's) ideology fails? Nyozekan seeks to answer historically, sociologically, scientifically. That is, the failure of ideology is not attributed to any teleology, to the unfolding of spirit in history in a dialectic. Instead, Nyozekan treats the production (and overcoming) of ideology as an institutional dynamic. Hardly unique to the state, it is a feature of all institutions, since, as "the basic form of organized human activity" all involve relations of power that are mutable. There is no question, in this connection, that for Nyozekan the growth of state power and of its intolerance of social "deviance" is the mark of the modern world. For this reason, his attention is given to state ideology in particular.^[102]

Ideology then is no mere imposition, analogous to physical force. It is not a restraining ("negative") but a propelling ("positive") element in the state's institutional makeup. It is reproduced not only by the state itself but within other organs of the social body. Hence the "consciousness" of the state inculcated by its particular pattern of domination in a given historical place and time may actually induce the ruled to cling, despite themselves, to social and political forms already facing destruction in a long developmental cycle. Yet this objectified, "known past," the national identity to which men cling, which has now lost its congruence with social life, meant in its ascendancy a new and exhilarating sense of belonging; it was a great leap forward. "The evils of state" and "the evils of industry" (kokka aku, sangyo aku^[*] ) that now torment the producing classes were at one time the implacable fist that over a century shattered the chains of feudal subjection in all areas of life and liberated the bourgeoisie. The English and French revolutions are eternal monuments to this smashing of fetters, no more, no less. Yesterday's

progress, however, is today's misery; today's misery, tomorrow's progress. So it has gone and will go.^[103]

But what is special about the state? It is the extraordinary degree to which it forces those whom it rules to live with this paradox:

The present state of the state [kokka genjo^[*] ] is such that without some sacrifice of humanity one cannot remain a member of the nation [kokumin ]. It is a condition much lamented—so we are told—by representatives of the state who possess some modicum of conscience. And it is a condition that places the state in fundamental conflict with the natural and moral condition of humanity.^[104]

The function of modern state ideology, therefore, is to make this situation palatable. It does this by denying the negative aspects of the reality of the state—its arbitrary use of force in the interest of the ruling class—and fostering the belief that the state is the proper arbiter, if not the very font, of all values, cultural, political, and social. Ideology, then, to substantiate its claim, must rely on what Nyozekan calls "metaphysics." For him this was a pejorative term. It connoted a manufactured "ideal" that served to hide what was real. This was, no doubt, a somewhat "outmoded" notion of ideology, just as his concept of "consciousness" is basically undialectical. But it is extremely powerful when used, as Nyozekan uses it, not to vindicate the ideological system of another state than his own, but to reflect, and prod, the consciousness of his own neighbors.

Ideology as an intellectual and emotional appeal seeks to reproduce the state's will in its subjects. Another name for this is patriotism, officially defined. This brand of patriotism, Nyozekan points out, is a modern phenomenon. It is not the same as rootedness, the profound feeling of attachment to a native land and its way of life. Granted that xenophobia has always been with us, modern state patriotism is new in that it turns the xenophobic impulse within, seeking to excise whatever deviant thought contradicts officially prescribed sentiments and the political position defined as consonant with those sentiments. The state is "like a jealous mother-in-law lording it over her son's bride" (society). It will tolerate no higher loyalties, and is thus in conflict with "scientific truth,"^[105] as well as with the moil that is social life. But it is ultimately in conflict with itself. The harder ideology is pushed, the stronger will be the reaction in the consciousness of the individuals who make up national society: Discontent can produce utopias. Combined with class hatred, it will lead to revolution.

Even if it is not employed in constant repression, a "metaphysical concept of state" stands always in the wings. It is no accident, Nyozekan argues, that Hobhouse wrote on this theme in reference to Great Britain: given the right conditions, even Britain, whose system Nyozekan deeply admired, would not hesitate to adopt an ideology conducive to political repression; that is, an ideology vaunting a supposed ideal ("loyalty," "unity," etc.) embodied by the state. In the absence of such conditions—or at least of propaganda efforts to persuade the public that such crisis conditions existed—"metaphysical" state ideologies lose much of their force. Under "normal" conditions, after all, the state is, or should be, irrelevant. No modern state is immune from the "metaphysical" tendency; that is the point.^[106]

The Critique of the Modern State , then, is an exposition of the paradox of modern political allegiance. It is not a negation of national or cultural identification. More important, it is an attempt to examine the social reality of the state. This brings us back to the "modern" of Nyozekan's title. We have seen a little of his specific analysis of then contemporary Japan. Let us now examine his views on what shape the state of the future may take, in Japan, and in the wider modern world.

We should regard it as truly extraordinary if among the administrators of the state [kokka ] today . . . someone could claim to possess a fair understanding of even one issue affecting it. The fact is that with the chaotic entanglements and vast size of the state, no one understands it correctly, administers it properly, or deals with it fairly. The state, to put it simply, is a bloody mess [tada zawazawa gayagaya to sonzai shite iru ].^[107]

As a life-form (seikatsu yoshiki^[*] ) the state is subject to limitations that reflect the conditions of its emergence and growth, and to decline. The struggle against these limitations produces chaos, and it is out of this chaos that besets the state that those over whom it rules will wrest a new consciousness and find the power to transform the institution. This transformation, however, should not be seen as a single act of creation but as the result of irresistible and cumulative changes in society as a whole. In this process—especially in attempts at reform—limited meliorative measures are enacted as preservatives. At their worst, such measures only "cover up the bad breath" of a declining institution working at cross-purposes to society, and may even encourage reaction. At the same time, a needed reform may be the key to dramatic surges forward. Thus in evaluating a reform program, Nyozekan urges, the main thing is to intuit the potential for transformation that it contains. He took it

as axiomatic, as we have seen, that the state cannot run ahead of society. His firm insistence on this point leads him to take some paradoxical stances. While identifying "interventionism" as the universal successor to laissez-faire among capitalist systems, Nyozekan asserts that new mechanisms such as the Kyochokai^[*] and "social policy" can be little more than "bribes thrown to the people" in the interest of preserving the intervening institution. This regardless of the "good intentions" underlying them. The same goes for the parties opening up to labor—a position, it will be recalled, that Nyozekan strongly supported.^[108] How is one to sort this out?

Regardless of subjective intent, Nyozekan argues, institutions in fact cooperate in their own demise—or condemn themselves to violent overthrow. Thus passage of universal suffrage (still four years off when the Critique was published) would, along with the hoped-for liberal-labor alliance, lead to the "collapse of party government" as it had taken shape under Hara Kei. When and how, Nyozekan could not say. But he was confident for a number of reasons that the political future lay in this direction. Not, indeed, because the parties had evolved into institutions truly representative of society, but because their constituencies were still limited to the nonproducing classes. That is, their evolution had barely begun; they were still "under construction." When the parties began of their own accord to widen their constituencies, as had happened in Britain with the rise of Labour, the Japanese bourgeois parties could be said to have completed their evolution and to have entered the "self-destruction" cycle that was the prelude to further socialization.^[109]

(In fact, the collapse did follow a decade later. But the "socialization" then barely under way was quickly coopted by elements within the parties themselves, the state and military, and transformed with mixed success into "nationalization" and preparation for war. The point that needs to be made, of course, is that as with individuals, institutions do not exist or act alone, but always in competition with others. The ends involved are seldom compatible. To predict the consequences of one development in a single institution—or a discrete group of them—is always risky because it invites so many imponderables from without and may end in demonstrating something quite other than what was intended.)

But what of the future? If the age of the ego—of Old Liberalism and laissez-faire, the nation and capital as little gods—was coming to an end, what form would a "socialized" political system take? Clearly, Nyozekan asserts, bureaucratic meliorism, parliamentarism, and "political" reform all represent transitional stages in a longer wave of evolu-

tion. "Utopia" would bring something different. Thus far (in 1921) the world had seen only one clear indication of what it might be—the Soviet Union. Nyozekan was not sanguine about the potential achievements of the Bolshevik regime. He had his doubts, first of all, about social planning in general: "The more practical the state's policies [i.e., the more they contrive to refashion society in accordance with an "ideal"], the greater the danger involved. Recall that after the French revolution destroyed the ancien régime, there followed the despotism of capital; and after the tsarist despotism in Russia, that of Lenin."^[110]

Nyozekan's characterization of the Soviet regime is best understood in the context of his general typology of utopias. It is based on two intersecting analyses of the "new political movement," one based on the form of the state/society relation, the other on the mode (or "mood") of the regime. Thus there were, according to the formal analysis, four potential directions in which any state emerging from laissez-faire could go, depending on its history and current circumstances:

1. anarchism [museifushugi ], which asserts the possibility of realizing genuine life-goals through the abolition of traditional state authority as we have known it;

2. national socialism, which acknowledges traditional state authority and would further endow it with total power in the administration of society;

3. syndicalism, which plans for the realization of new (social) organization based on producer control; and

4. guild socialism, which calls for the autonomy of industry through control by producers alone, in confrontation with the consumer state.^[111]

Now, no one is in any position to predict which of these forms (ideal types?) will be adopted in Japan or in any other country. They represent in any case the necessary and possible ramifications of "socialization." Notice that Nyozekan uses neither "socialism" alone nor "communism" to describe these new political arrangements (a bow to the censor?); most likely he would place communism under "national socialism" as the category that most closely approximated, not the professed ideal of a given system, but its actual operation. Note also that "society" is synonymous with the producing classes. Nyozekan does not employ the concept of a "civil society" itself composed of a plurality of relations to the dominant mode of production. There is but one key relation, which is that of the social group actually performing the act of production. For Nyozekan, labor, as we shall see, meant life itself, and the condition of

labor was the single most important problem in the social organization of the future.

The ideal political form assumed by the "new movement" in society does not of itself determine its relation to society. Of equal importance is the mode, or "mood" (kokoromochi ), of rule. Nyozekan, rather than employing a right-left gradient, asserts that in day-to-day life, all the new regimes will manifest more or less anarchic or more or less dictatorial tendencies. These in turn represent "political thought—concepts of humanity expressed in political life"—characteristic of society at a given stage of culture/civilization (bunmei ). Thus anarchism stands for social catabolism (bunkai sayo^[*] ): the breakup of sociopolitical forms. It rests on an ultimately individualistic view of "natural" man. To the degree that he is left alone, he enjoys freedom in accordance with a natural propensity for self-restraint in the interest of the social good. An "anarchic" system lets (human) nature have its way, nature as expressed in the actual life (jisseikatsu ) of work. Hence Nyozekan's sympathy for syndicalism to the extent that it sought to replace "antisocial" state power with that of producers' organizations. But in its insistence on the need for a strong "vanguard" authority—an elite party purporting to guide the process of socialization—syndicalism also exhibited dictatorial features that made it a threat to personal freedom.

"Dictatorship" seeks actively to sweep away all fetters of the old forms that hinder it. Since it regards the persistence of such vestiges as expressions of the "evil" in human nature, it tends inevitably toward despotism. Dictatorship, however, is "anabolic" in that its aim is to bind society to itself; it performs a "constructive" or "synthetic" function (goka sayo^[*] ). As with syndicalism, "national socialism" tends to dictatorship, but in the latter case, the existing state seeks to arrogate to itself all authority in the administration of society. The emergence of anarchic or dictatorial tendencies can hardly be fortuitous: again Nyozekan instances the Bolshevik regime. Despite the latter's plea that temporary necessity required dictatorial forms, Nyozekan remarks, "it is doubtful that these will be of short duration. No regime that has used dictatorship to establish itself will move away from it of its own accord; it has to be forced."^[112]

The revolution, then, must be understood to have embodied the entire cycle. The actual destruction of the tsarist regime was its own work. Nyozekan viewed the predominantly "anarchist" intelligentsia—products of the nobility such as Tolstoy, Bakunin, and Kropotkin—as the

articulation of a social consciousness in extremis. It reflected the separation of the cultural elite, not to mention state authority, from the masses whose sacrifice ensured their status. And it reflected the gulf between the few "advanced" cities and the trackless countryside. The empire was, culturally speaking, hopelessly overextended. Its autocracy was being eaten away from within by its "darling babes"—anarchist aristocrats who had recognized that the high culture of the elite had grown incomprehensible even to itself, quite apart from the unconscionable burden its maintenance placed on the lower orders. The power of "anarchist thinking," Nyozekan sums up, "is proportionate to the degree to which the anabolic function operates in civilization."^[113] In this case, of course, autocracy (dictatorship) was the ideology—or mythology—of a ruling class in fast decline; anarchism as social consciousness reflected the actual condition of that civilization.

Nyozekan did not consider Japan to be facing the same situation. It was only in his cultural studies of Japan, written in the second half of the 1930s, that Nyozekan filled in the suggestion made in the Critique that the "high" and "mass" culture of Japan were to all intents and purposes mutually compatible and comprehensible. This was owing to the presence of integrating forces that served to maintain order in society, in the absence of which, Russia had broken apart. In the Critique Nyozekan limits himself to the observation that there had been no Japanese revolution at the end of the feudal period because the sovereign—the imperial institution —presented no actual obstacle to the "natural" process of transition from one social form to the other. For this reason, as we have seen, Nyozekan feared that efforts to foment revolution in Japan were fated to fail. The state could not, and need not, be destroyed so that the reconstruction he envisioned could take place. Of course Nyozekan never promoted a single program, much less enlisted in any effort to gain power. But in the Critique of the Modern State , he speaks hopefully of the potential of the last of the four modes of socialization mentioned earlier. Guild socialism recognized both the need for producer control and autonomy and the fact that industrial capitalism had created a national market—a "consumer state"—in Japan, with which the producing class could form a modus vivendi . Like all "socialisms" it was a mixture of anarchic and dictatorial elements, but it was the least lethal of all conceivable forms of the "new movement" in politics.^[114]

We have seen on a number of occasions that Nyozekan's Critique calls for a scaling-down, shrinking—in evolutionary terms, further dif-

ferentiation—in the role of the state vis-à-vis society. One must concur with the judgment of Royama Masamichi^[*] , an early Warera associate and later a New Order theorist, that the state/society relation in the Critiques remains hazy, and that Nyozekan's deepest inclination was to a "romanticism of daily life" (seikatsuteki romanshugi ). Nyozekan, Royama^[*] argues, felt that the goodness and beauty of "daily life"—local, popular, and unpolitical—were of a greater value than national, collective, political life. It is true, as Royama claims, that Nyozekan is loath to recognize the state's function as the "regulator of collective life."^[115] (But perhaps this says more about Royama than about Nyozekan!) The state does seem destined, in Nyozekan's eyes, to remain "an alienated presence" (sogaitai ) in society.^[116] Still, Nyozekan's anarchism was not antistate. He recognized the necessary presence of the state. Recall that as against Felix Oppenheimer, who saw in the state only the abnormal expression of the "exploitative instinct" in human societies, Nyozekan identified two conflicting "instincts." An instinct to subjugate was, to be sure, always prominent in the state's behavior. And with the emergence of capitalism, the state had also come to represent the "possessive instinct" of the "haves" over the "have-nots." At the same time, Nyozekan had argued that the state was also "social" insofar as it protected society from external threat.^[117] The danger, of course, came when these warlike instincts were turned (in the form of a "semifeudal" bureaucratic and military establishment) inward on society itself. The state, therefore, could not be dispensed with; it had to be "surrounded," used, controlled by society.

Nyozekan's critique of the state is a blowup of a crucial detail, but still a detail, of a greater whole. That whole is society: "the stage on which the struggle for existence among a myriad life-courses is played out."^[118] The second of the Critiques , the Gendai shakai hihan of 1922, seeks to demonstrate the degree to which extra-state (kokkagai ) institutions, whether cultural, economic, or sexual, were following their own evolutionary paths. Some of the major themes this Critique shares with its counterpart have been outlined above. The evolutionary nature of institutions, the repeated cycle of creation/destruction/creation by which evolution proceeds, have been made clear. Similarly, we saw that in the growth of industrial capitalism, Nyozekan identified a phenomenon of importance equal to the rise of the absolutist state. As the state developed a metaphysical raison d'être according to which it occupied the summit of human life, so the capitalist enterprise (kigyo^[*] ) set itself up as

a kind of mediator between society and a new divinity: wealth.^[119] In the Gendai shakai hihan , Nyozekan follows the impact on social life of the incarnation of this new organizer of human energy.

With unbounded faith in the creative power of wealth (money and property), the enterprise, now a distinct social institution, assumed control over the processes of wealth-creation. Hitherto, in what is admittedly a drastic schematization, work, life, and thought had been organically related, as for example in the medieval guild. Here Nyozekan indulges in a little of the "romantic medievalism" of William Morris, but only a little.^[120] The enterprise had destroyed that relation, substituting for it a nonproducing organ whose function was the exchange of externally created values. The capitalist enterprise, in short, robbed the worker of the vital sense of autonomy. Forced to "live his life within the thought categories of another," the worker became "a malleable apparatus attached to a machine."^[121] The reward for service to the enterprise, Nyozekan writes, was "wretchedness, hunger, ignorance, and degradation."^[122] And in the end, the humanity of both worker and capitalist—"the former through hunger and want, the latter through their satisfaction"—was spoiled.^[123]

Nyozekan's Critiques treat ideology—the process of idealization—as inherent in institutional development. Thus we find an interesting parallel between the two works in the examination of state "science" and the so-called rodo no geijutsuka^[*] : the transformation of labor into art. Under this heading Nyozekan attacks the work of early non-Marxist socialists, such as Edward Carpenter and William Morris in Britain, and the associated thesis of the "joy of labor"—labor as pleasure and as play—articulated in Japan by Morimoto Kokichi^[*] and the philosopher Kuwaki Gen'yoku.^[124] The pages Nyozekan devotes to this critique are among the most moving in his work. Not only does he make a fervent call for labor to be understood in its reality, and not as it ought to be; he uses the discussion as a point of departure to suggest a "labor theory of art." This in itself is only a partial articulation of Nyozekan's view of "humanity" as the impulse to create, born of the pain that is life.

What is labor? Labor is pain, the physical and psychic pain of yielding to material necessity. Labor is at once an individual and social act, the "interaction [kogo sayo^[*] ] of social necessity and individual impulse."^[125] Labor is the basic condition of life; it is life itself. From this transhistorical set of definitions, Nyozekan examines the implications for the labor movement of the currents in it that spring from con-

ceptions of labor as joy, play, or pleasure. Considering that Nyozekan pinned his hopes for social reconstruction in Japan on the labor movement, it is not difficult to understand the vehemence with which he rejected these views. His primary objection lay in the fact that any organized attempt to improve the condition of labor based on such premises amounted to a contradiction in terms. How could any good come of action based on a misreading of the reality of work? Though he did not question their sincerity, he could not help but find something dangerous, or at best obstructive, in these attempts to deny, to escape, what work was. Neither could work be made into something not of its own nature. It was axiomatic that misconception of reality played into the hands of those forces—capitalist enterprise—that sought to perpetuate it. Advocates of the labor as art/labor as pleasure thesis were of course no more satisfied with the status quo than Nyozekan. So the mystification in which they indulged was hardly intentional. It simply bore out a conviction that Nyozekan held apropos of politics: "Given the need to compel a majority, it becomes necessary, not to force its will mechanically, but instead to cause it to will what the despot itself wills."^[126] So, too, in the realm of working-class consciousness. If the producing class can be convinced that it must escape from, rather than recognize, the force that dominates its life, the chance for advance now at hand will be lost. Thus "paternalistic" proposals "from above" for a shorter working day and improved conditions and treatment, though valid in themselves, can actually impede worker consciousness if they are thought to assist in the transformation of work back into what it was at some romantic time past, without any change in the relations of production.^[127] This does not mean that Nyozekan, or Warera , denied their support to meliorative proposals or to one or another draft of a labor union bill. In fact, Warera editorialized in favor of the Home Ministry bill of 1920 (written by Nanbara Shigeru), rather than the version prepared by the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce.^[128] Work under capitalism, Nyozekan insists, can never be joy, never pleasure, never play. The acceptance of the contrary view amounts to an admission that the goal of life is to imitate Veblen's leisure class, to perpetuate the invidious division under capitalism of labor from life, thought, and pleasure—and from positions of power in society.^[129] It takes little thought to see that "a society in which those who have the easiest life hold the most power is an absurdity. What we ought to have is a society in which those who bear the most suffering have the most power."^[130]

Here, precisely, was the sickness of Japanese society, reflected, however innocently, in the slogan "transformation of work into art." Such an art would, of course, be a sham. The real imperative was the reverse, the "transformation of art into work." This does not mean simply the "proletarianization" of art in the sense of idealizing a proletarian subject, or setting up a false antinomy between "good" socialist and "evil" capitalist. Nyozekan meant rather that art, if it is to be real, cannot ignore the great cultural shift under way, from the age of the ego to that of society. And since for Nyozekan society was the world of work, art would perforce have to "reproduce" human toil and suffering. To the extent that it did so, it was genuinely creative.^[131] The creative act and the act of work therefore shared this common spring—they were both, in a sense, sacrificial.

Could work itself then be creative? Was there no way in which it could be transformed? There was—given worker control over production. If the process of production were restored as far as possible to the control of those actually involved in it, the creative, spontaneous element in individual work could emerge. (It is an open question whether it was workers themselves, or the intellectuals attempting to organize them, who regarded producer control as the main issue. If, as has been suggested, recognition of their "right to benevolence" was the key worker demand in the early labor movement, where did Nyozekan get his ideas? He does not say.) But even with this element restored to certain kinds of labor, "no one can tell me that we ought to hope for the day when the coal diggers of the world will do their work with 'artistic feeling' or with the mechanical indifference of an ant."^[132] In other words, certain kinds of work will remain, under any system, physically and psychologically painful. But the more work can be made to balance the primary social need for regularity and the individual (and still semiconscious) need to create, the more meaning the sacrifice that is daily toil will have.

Were there grounds for hoping that organized workers in Japan could bring about a "socialized," "humanized" world for themselves? Not in the short run. Thus Nyozekan counseled workers not to condemn the system in toto, but to win for themselves what legal gains they could, believing that "as sure as the hands of a clock turn," "socialization" was an eventual certainty.^[133] But the steps were imperceptible. Frustrated hope could lead to thirst for revolution. This would fail. Perhaps, Nyozekan ventures, "by some miracle" the right laws could be passed and legal worker-based parties established.

But as long as the producing class must work through institutions controlled by the middle class, they will meet the same frustrating difficulty as if they were trying to grab hold of a snowball with red-hot tongs. A system in which such a reasonable goal can be achieved only through a miracle is not a good system. What of those unlucky souls who, no matter what they do, are unable to work their way free, and so search for the miracle? We dare not condemn them. Nor dare we laugh.^[134]

Nyozekan viewed "present-day" society as being in transition. Modern times everywhere had in a sense "created" the individual as the core unit of all life—of all knowledge and action. Now, however, with the long-term development of institutions—political, economic, and social—the universal exaltation of the individual was giving way to a "social" perspective. This was not a regression to a closed or feudalistic pattern, but a new "sociality" of free (or "complete") individuals conscious of their interdependence and of the need for self-restraint in the interest of the whole. The individualist wave was now cresting on the undulating sea of the social.

It seems fitting, in this connection, to close this review of the Critiques with a look at Nyozekan's analysis of the evolution of sexuality. This is an area of special interest, also, because Nyozekan's critique itself provoked a counter-critique from feminist circles.

Nyozekan approaches the problem of sexuality along lines now probably familiar: as with the state vis-à-vis the seimeitai and the enterprise vis-à-vis the producing classes, this is an evolution of institutionalized power relations confronting the most basic and creative human impulses. Ever the functionalist, Nyozekan asserts that all culture is essentially a "refinement and sublimation" (eibinka, junka ) of "unconscious" sexual feeling, whose purpose has, of course, been the reproduction of the species. This in no way diminishes the importance of conscious cultural transmission and creation; in fact, one characteristic of the age is the increasing "impingement of consciousness on the sphere of the unconscious." But there is no denying that real life will remain a sometimes volatile mixture, not wholly susceptible to manipulation, of both.^[135]

Even in their current ego-oriented state, love and sex remain eminently social as well as individual. This accords, of course, with Nyozekan's thesis that "individual and social represent dual aspects of the same life." Now the "individualization" of sexuality, and the "divorce of sex from reproduction" are part of a larger socioeconomic phenomenon brought about by the Industrial Revolution, which has in turn had repercussions in many spheres. The institution of marriage, conceptions

of pleasure and desire, and how these are to be pursued and satisfied, have all been affected. Prefiguring Ivan Illich by many decades, Nyozekan argues that with the development of industry over the course of the nineteenth century, gender roles—those sanctioned in the West by the church and in the East by "Confucian morality"—broke down in the face of the imperatives of the production process. Women could no longer expect to spend their lives as "reproductive specialists." Apart from the actual bearing of children, there was no qualitative difference in women's relation to a society dominated and defined by industrial production. That is, just as the male proletarian did not work for or with his family, but sold his labor as an "individual" on the "market," so too did women—with the burden of childbearing as an added, rather than definitive, role. The preindustrial (precapitalist) world—whose disappearance from Japan Nyozekan places in the first Meiji decades—had been one of "gender"; reproduction of the family the paradigm. In this world, Nyozekan argues, women can be said to have been far stronger than at present, even to have "dominated" existence. In common, conscious discourse, "sex" as an act has now been divorced from reproduction. In Illich's sense, "gender" has been overwhelmed by the atomizing abstraction of industrial work.^[136] (One wonders what existential sources in Japan Nyozekan turned to in support of this assertion—literature? statistics?)

What effect has this combination of the "degendering of society" and the "refinement of love" had on the institution of marriage? Here (we may extrapolate) is where the potentially liberating contradiction arises. Marriage as seido has not kept up with the transformation of society into a market. It is dominated by feudal patterns that in some ways (for women) make life that much worse. Not only have they and the family been displaced in the market as the object of labor; the negative aspects of their former institutional position—absence of choice, legal subordination to the husband, practical serfdom—have been preserved. The social contract had yet to find its way into marriage. But "everything that lives, evolves." And the transitional phase of late-capitalist society, from the age of the ego to that of society, has prompted the development of "feminism" (Nyozekan uses this term). This is an attempt to overturn the persistent logic of subjection on two fronts. On the one hand, if there is no biological basis for women's social role, then there ought to be no legal-institutional barriers to its full exercise. There can be no scientific basis for the restriction, apart from biological necessity in childbearing, on what women do. In evolutionary terms, therefore, feminism

is a necessary development. Nyozekan in fact makes the (at first sight reactionary) argument that just as the present system constitutes a male dictatorship, so might the future produce a female dictatorship. "Women just as men push their lives forward toward the infinite. They will not be confined by the stereotypes that take shape in the minds of our contemporaries."^[137] However, Nyozekan makes this caution: for the feminist movement to seek liberation via the male rhetoric of "rights"—male because in actual fact males have set up the production process responsible for social contract theory—is to play with illusion.^[138] Laws relating to sex, as with all other laws, will change only when it no longer serves the interest of dominant strata that they be preserved. Just as he had argued with respect to universal suffrage, Nyozekan supports the securing of women's rights as an admirable goal, but insists that without a transformation in the mode (and social relations) of production, the effort could easily end more in frustration than in creative change. And as with that earlier argument, Nyozekan seems to waver. He implies, despite his strictures against it, that only revolution will bring about the needed transformation, while yet arguing for "extremely gradual" development through piecemeal measures. These, backed by education in consciousness of the long-term end, will amount to qualitative change at some point.

The logic of subjection was open to challenge on another front. This involved the "sublimation [?] of romantic love" (koi no Junka ), as an expression of resistance to fossilization in the institution of marriage. Change in this sphere would decisively affect the lives of both men and women. It was no less important, and probably a better indication of the long wave of development, than reform of law:

As love in its increasing refinement and sublimation yields its dignity to individual sexuality, so too we see a similar tendency for political evolution to be grounded in the development of the individual. Modern man cannot endure a politics that does not take a strong individual as its key component. This arises from the fact that the end of society is seen to reside in the perfection [kansei ] of the individual. We aspire to the refinement of love because it represents the perfection of our individuality. Modern society is bound to take as its purpose this perfection of individuality.

Herein lies the freedom of refined love. It is not limited by the institution of marriage. All institutions are subject to criticism. In some cases, they are trampled underfoot. This, however, is but the powerful expression of human emotion, before which all things lie subject. Yet if this human emotion were not itself grounded in humankind's social consciousness, it would never enjoy the victories in our lives that it does .

To attempt by main force to link such a basic emotion to a transient institution is a futile and impossible enterprise. Herein lies the failure of those who preach the conformity of love with the institution of marriage.

This is not to say that marriage as an institution does not stand in need of affirmation at present. But as with every other static institution, it is also bound to suffer the criticism of dynamic human emotion. Through the ceaseless stimulus of this criticism, the institution is spared sclerotic degeneration and is forced to follow a graduated and fluid evolution. Refined sexuality resists not only the particular institution of marriage per se, but all things that try to repress it. The public in applauding it is resisting the absurdity of man's present physical and mental life. From this resistance is born our continuing evolution.^[139]

Nyozekan's conclusions about the social consequences of this "degendering" and "institutionalization" did not go uncontested. The feminist activist and historian Takamure Itsue (1894–1964), for example, took direct issue with Nyozekan on a number of basic points. Her critique, which appeared in the anarchist women's journal Fujin sensen , came in response to a lengthy article by Nyozekan serialized in the Tokyo Asahi early in 1929.^[140]

In "Shakai mondai toshite no sei no goraku" (Sexual amusement as a social problem), Nyozekan had examined what he called the "hedonist culture" of the modern city; a culture in which sex had been divorced from reproduction and was pursued for its own sake in "institutions" (kikan ) established for that purpose. One aspect of this culture was economic, as he sought to demonstrate in a discussion of legalized prostitution. Nyozekan regarded this as a kind of safety valve for the satisfaction of sexual desire by those incapable—primarily for financial reasons—of marriage in a bourgeois society. That is, prostitution was a social necessity in working-class life, with its many unattached men. It was—or, in modern, hedonist culture, had become—an index of poverty and the inability to form families.

Takamure refuted this argument. The truth, she asserted, was rather that, as had historically been the case, licensed prostitution was supported by men who had money, time, and desire. It was part of affluent life under a patriarchal system. Citing a survey of the clientele of a licensed quarter in Wakayama taken between 1915 and 1918, Takamure noted that "of the 166,000 and more customers, a mere 20.3 percent of the total number were thought to be between twenty-one and twenty-five years of age and unmarried; customers between the ages of twenty-six and forty-five were most numerous, and those above forty-six also appeared in no mean numbers." The licensed quarters, in short, catered

to the married trade, to those able to pay. On the whole Takamure found that time—or boredom—and money among the propertied had led to hedonism. More fundamentally, Takamure questioned Nyozekan's deeply held (or at least frequently voiced) conviction that sexual desire, as an individual instinct, ought "naturally" to be subject to social constraint. In the most primitive societies, those who violated the boundary of institutionally licit sex were killed, Nyozekan had claimed, and "society" still establishes extreme sanctions against violations of sexual status norms. On the contrary, Takamure asserted, it is not "society" that abhors sexual license and disorder, but the privileged classes, fearful for the political and economic bases of their status:

A society whose political and economic foundations are firmly set not for the ruling strata but for the good of all, will never find that freedom—of whatever kind—disturbs its good order. To the contrary, by allowing reproduction to take its natural course [seishoku no shizen ]—and reproduction has an inherently proper direction and order—we promote the welfare of all humanity.^[141]

Sexual taboos are therefore not natural or fated, but historical constructions aimed at guarding the interests of dominant strata. "Society" in the true sense, far from placing restraints on sex as natural (sei no shizen ), understands, encourages, and provides for its development.

Takamure, then, was naturally bound to question Nyozekan's understanding of the aspirations of modern women. For her, sexual taboo and repression were a feature, not of the most primitive society, but of society after its division into ruling and ruled; after the emergence of social and economic exploitation. Far from being natural, they were historical and could be changed. To put it another way, Takamure was perhaps suspicious of the high valuation Nyozekan attached, on functional grounds, to "social" restraint. She seems to have found that here, concealed behind his otherwise radically critical language, lay a deep incomprehension of women's experience.

A final observation will bring this review to a close and open the way to what follows. This, too, has to do with Nyozekan's apparent radicalism. In her critique, Takamure identifies Nyozekan with Marxism. As we shall see, he in fact had a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward Marxism, while seeming to maintain close ties with its main Japanese theorists. Perhaps more interesting is the skepticism—if not contempt—Takamure reveals for Japanese Marxists and the Communist Party membership. The contradiction between their intellectual commitment

to liberating revolution and their own day-to-day behavior and attitudes toward women was apparently quite flagrant. (And she adds, "Those who would excuse the sexual games of the Party membership should be aware just how reactionary they are.") It is to be noted, however, that she does not accuse Nyozekan in this regard; nor does she suggest any willing misogyny on his part.

Takamure closes her critique with a sharp parting shot, which reveals her skepticism of the liberating potential of the intellectualism of contemporary Marxists: "Hasegawa has of late become something of a Marxist. This is only right. Marxism is the sophism of our day; with its materialism and dialectics it is truly the heir of its distant Greek ancestor. And Hasegawa has shown his true colors as an unapologetic sophist."^[142]

Of Showa^[*] Politics but Not in It

In an account of limited scope such as this one, some injustice to the subject and his concerns is unavoidable. Nuances are missed, insights overlooked. I have not, unfortunately, been able to capture the rich variety of voices with which Warera articulated its criticisms and program for social reconstruction. True, Nyozekan was Warera : but both were more than synonyms for each other, and both changed. At the risk of schematizing too much, I must now try to put Nyozekan in some kind of perspective by considering his work in the light of the diverging paths taken by three major contributors to the journal, Nyozekan himself, Oyama Ikuo^[*] , and Kawakami Hajime. The latter two had been associated with Nyozekan at the Osaka Asahi . Kawakami's reports of prewar London, and his enormously famous Binbo monogatari^[*] (Tales of poverty) had appeared on its pages. Oyama^[*] , whose career up to 1932 in many ways parallels that of Hobhouse, had despite student protests been forced to resign his post at Waseda University in the wake of the violent "Waseda Incident" of 1917, and joined the Asahi 's editorial staff.^[143] Along with Nyozekan, he had left the paper at the time of the "White Rainbow" trial and was prominent among the founders of Warera . Each of the three men used the journal as a home base from which to pursue their linked, but increasingly divergent, destinies. In the decade between 1922 and 1932, each of the three made a choice of weapons in the social struggle that drove them apart, never, to be sure, into mutual hostility, but nonetheless apart.

This was the period punctuated, in 1925, by the enactment of universal male suffrage and the Peace Preservation Law. While the former vir-

tually guaranteed the mushroomlike growth of legal "proletarian" parties, the latter sought to ensure that none of their programs could ever become reality. In this sense, we may say that the left hand knew what the right hand was doing, and vice versa. By 1925 Oyama^[*] , having been reinstated at Waseda, was regarded as the opinion leader among progressives. He was as ever idolized by his students. He and Kawakami, professor of economics at Kyoto University, reigned as the "Twin Bulwarks of the East and West" (Tozai no soheki^[*] ) among publicists of the left social movement. Between 1921 and 1925 Kawakami had "drawn close" to Marxism. Along with his monthly, Shakai mondai kenkyu^[*] (Studies in social problems), Kawakami published a translation of Marx's Wage Labor and Capital and authored Yuibutsu shikan ryakkai (An outline of the materialist view of history) and Shihonshugi keizaigaku no shiteki hatten (The historical development of capitalist economics). The latter work was criticized by Kushida Tamizo^[*] , Kawakami's student and a Warera contributor, for its moral idealization of the proletariat. This and other criticism—notably that of Fukumoto Kazuo that Kawakami's work had an inconsistent and deficient theoretical foundation—prompted Kawakami to embark on an intensive and selfcritical examination of his Marxism.

The enactment, meanwhile, of universal male suffrage and the political organization of the proletariat was in the eyes of both Oyama^[*] and Kawakami a signal opportunity. Oyama, with Nyozekan's support, was the first to take the plunge, when in 1926 he accepted the chairmanship of the newly formed Worker-Farmer Party (Rodo Nomin To^[*] , or Ronoto^[*] ). Compelled on this account to resign once again from Waseda, Oyama stood for election to the Diet from Kagawa. True, the Ronoto was regarded as the legal arm of the Communist Party. On the other hand, Oyama had the support of the local peasant movement. Admittedly, the association with Bolshevism was dangerous, but Oyama was probably not prepared for the viciousness of the Tanaka government's repression of the party. He was, needless to say, defeated. Nyozekan commented mordantly that "If Oyama could have gotten elected, so could have one of the stone lanterns at the [nearby] Kotohira Shrine."^[144] (Oyama's dramatic campaign slogan turned out to be prophetic. "In this election," he proclaimed, "we are headed to a battleground—and to our graves." Two years later, Yamamoto Senji, a Kyoto University biologist elected on the Ronoto ticket, was stabbed to death by a right-wing terrorist.) Oyama was soon pushed to the forefront of the legal left. He weathered the dissolution of the Ronoto by official order following the mass arrest

of Communists and their sympathizers in March 1928. And despite "blistering" criticism by the Communist Party (which followed the lead of the Comintern), Oyama^[*] was among the founders of the Shin Ronoto^[*] in 1929, and finally elected to the Diet in 1930 as a representative from Tokyo's fifth electoral district. After the Manchurian Incident, however, Oyama felt that the tide of reaction had made his political activity both futile and dangerous. On the advice of Nyozekan, Maruyama Kanji, and others, Oyama and his wife left Japan for the United States in February 1932. They returned sixteen years later.

The formation of the Shin Ronoto proved to be the parting of the ways for Kawakami and Oyama. The former, along with Hososako Kanemitsu, had been intimately involved in founding the party as a transitional organ in anticipation of a resurrected JCP. But the Party, now underground, regarded the new organization as a rightist-deviant betrayal, and vilified it from the first. Before long Kawakami and Hososako adopted this line. From this point onward Oyama, already considered a Communist and sellout to Russia by the bourgeois parties, was enrolled among the "betrayers" of the left. As for Kawakami, he had already been expelled from the university following the March 1928 arrests. Returning to journalism and translation, he wrote a "Leninist" Tales of Poverty : II, began translating Capital in 1931, translated the Comintern's 1932 Theses for Akahata , and finally joined the Party later that year. After this "supreme moment" in his life, Kawakami went underground, but he was arrested in January 1933. Although he foreswore any further active involvement in the movement, Kawakami never repudiated the ends or means adopted by the Party: he remained a "theoretical" non-apostate. Kawakami's subsequent career need not detain us here. Let us merely take stock of what became of Nyozekan's Warera colleagues. Oyama went into politics, though to Nyozekan's mind he did not possess the necessary ambition, guile, or sangfroid, eventually finding exile the only logical step to take. Kawakami moved from legal to illegal political activity, was arrested, and spent five long years in prison. The point is that both men did what Nyozekan would not and could not: joined the organized struggle for political power. Nyozekan's personal motto, it will be recalled, was danjite okonawazu : "[Be] resolute in not taking action." With the passage of suffrage in 1925, this position obviously took on new meaning. Not that Nyozekan's contribution would have been greater had he chosen to okonau , to act. The point is that the political fates of Oyama and Kawakami clearly suggest what might have happened if he had.

Nyozekan, Oyama^[*] , and Kawakami were all three of them consistent. But we come now to a point in the story where drastic shifts in direction became the order of the day as the left responded to the reactionary political situation. Aside from complete submersion in unpolitical life (the "cocoon" option), one choice open to public outsiders was repudiation of the left and some degree of active involvement in rightist politics. This was tenko^[*] in the "classic" sense of Sano Manabu, Nabeyama Sadachika, Hayashi Fusao, and Akamatsu Katsumaro. But this is to view the matter too narrowly. The broader question, beyond the organizational impact of mass defection from the JCP, concerns the generalized "return to Japan" (Nihon e no kaiki ) by leftist intellectuals after 1933. Here, unlike Oyama and Kawakami, Nyozekan was involved. However, we can treat his "return"—the issue of tenko broadly conceived—only after considering the crisis that engendered it. We must, in short, place Nyozekan and ourselves amidst the cross-currents of Japanese fascism.

By the last years of the 1920s Warera was on its way to becoming a financial basket case. Loss of revenue through periodic run-ins with the censors and postal authorities, fires, and the death of a long-time patron in 1929 all took their toll. The whole tenor of the times seemed to militate against Warera 's survival. The "rise of the military" and right-wing terror against the backdrop of depression needs no rehearsal here.

Overall, Warera in its last years continued along the lines suggested in the two Critiques . But now certain problems only adumbrated there—because as social developments they were present then only in germ—came to the fore. A good deal of attention is given to the Japanese role in Manchuria, especially that played by the army and the South Manchurian Railroad (Mantetsu). Nyozekan's concern was not the autonomous function of these organizations. He asked, rather, how they fit into the larger dynamic of the expansion of Japanese capitalism, and how this dynamic in turn was tied into the mutual relations of the Japanese bourgeoisie in the state and political parties. That is, Nyozekan, though he would not have used the term, was moving toward an analysis of "superstructural" problems as such in Japanese capitalism. It is intriguing to note in this connection that in 1926 and 1928 Nyozekan made month-long speaking tours of Manchuria and North China, both at the invitation of Mantetsu itself.

At the same time, Nyozekan continued to write on the related problems of ideology and consciousness. In 1932 Iwanami published a long article by Nyozekan on the production of ideology, which dealt with art

in its relation to the "reality" of social movement, a theme he had treated a decade earlier. By this time, however, Nyozekan found himself sharing the current with such Marxist literary critics as Kobori Jinji and Kurahara Korehito.^[145] But it is well to remember that inevitable and "conscious" evolution, not a vanguard-directed social revolution, remained Nyozekan's chief value position, despite their shared categories of analysis.

As the earlier sketches of the careers of Oyama^[*] and Kawakami show, the late 1920s and early 1930s marked a final act in the "late Taisho^[*] " discovery of society. The logic of radicalization was playing itself out: Warera published its final issue, the 128th since 1919, in March 1930. Included in its pages was a short announcement of a change in title, to Hihan —Criticism. For twelve years, Warera had "put the whip" to society and history; the contrivances of the mind, conscious and unconscious, had about run their course, while "like a mule that has overeaten," society would seem to have stood stock still. That is, the problem remained a problem, and now "new energy, new weapons, new methods" were needed to "kick" society in the mind and force it to move.^[146]Hihan made its first appearance in May 1930. With the Esperanto subtitle La Kritiko Socialista (later just La Kritiko ) the journal ran for four years, publishing forty-two issues, of which two were banned, others censored so severely as to be illegible.^[147]

Oyama Ikuo had been insisting since 1925 that the proper role for Warera was as the "theoretical organ" of the working class, an explicit link between the proletariat's theory and practice.^[148] Nyozekan had demurred, first because he did not want to set the journal up as an arm of the "vanguard" within the organized revolutionary struggle. As Royama Masamichi^[*] points out, Nyozekan regarded the Bolshevik idea of a vanguard party as an anachronism and a weapon specific to the far more backward conditions Lenin had faced in Russia.^[149] We saw earlier that Nyozekan regarded revolution as historically and socially unnecessary for Japan. Yet he speaks of the need for "new energy, new weapons, new methods" to "kick" society and "make it move." All very vague and allusive language, to be sure. Clearly Nyozekan is signaling a break from the counsels of patience in the earlier Critiques . As Tanaka Hiroshi remarks, Nyozekan had replaced Warera 's essentially moral critique of the state as an abuser of power with analysis and critique of the state as the instrument of a late-capitalist ruling class. In this respect, the earlier Critiques are transitional, since the link between change in the social relations of production and in social consciousness is clearly made. Ta-

naka is careful to point out that if anything, the change from Warera to Hihan represents an intensification of critical focus rather than an embrace of "the unity of theory and practice."^[150] Nevertheless, one senses a drop of despair in Hihan . The confidence that had animated Warera , that change would come "as surely as the hands of a clock turn" is missing. Had Nyozekan misjudged the volume and force of the reactionary tide he had identified a decade before? Hihan vibrates with the perception that "something" had happened, a qualitative change in world (and hence Japanese) politics and society, ominous in nature and not soon to disappear. Japan, in short, was turning fascist.

Hihan , with some hints in the last issues of Warera , can be read as an attempt to analyze and counter the threat of fascism theoretically. Nyozekan's articles on the subject were in short order prepared for publication as a book. Appearing on 20 November 1932, Nihon fuashizumu hihan (Critique of Japanese fascism) was banned the same day, and reissued in heavily censored form on 12 December.^[151]

How and when did Nyozekan come to view Japanese fascism as a possibility? At what point did the development of Japanese politics and society seem to him congruent with what contemporary European and Soviet analysts described as fascism? To what degree, and with what differences? For a public outsider with Nyozekan's background to broach this issue in print was clearly a risk. Vis-à-vis not only the state, but also the Japanese left, he was walking a tightrope. Hence the second strand of our discussion: Where did Nyozekan's critique situate him? To what consequences did the Critique and his other activities during these years lead? What, in other words, were the personal consequences of his public stance? Finally, what legacy did Nyozekan's experience leave for other, later public outsiders?

Limitations of space permit only a rough outline of how these two strands are woven together in the Critique . The "imported" theories of fascism that inform Nyozekan's analysis all shared the perception that fascism was a form of counterrevolution. Thus its definition and analysis were of greatest concern to the revolutionary forces, for whom the fight against it was an urgent theoretical and practical necessity. It was not until 1933 (with some exceptions) that non-Marxists began to direct their critical attention to fascism. Nyozekan's work, since it dates from 1928–31, naturally reflects the viewpoints and concerns of revolutionary Marxist writers, both those working within Comintern orthodoxy and others who formed the various "side currents" of the debate.

The identification of a tide of reaction after the events of 1917–18

was, of course, common to all parties. The first wave had come with the attempt by the West (and Japan) to encircle and destroy the Soviet Union; next, there was the role of social democracy in the collapse of socialist revolutions in Germany, Hungary, and Austria; and, third, the assumption by Mussolini of power in Italy. This wave of counterrevolution appeared to most analysts in the revolutionary camp as an attempt by parliamentary regimes in late-developing capitalist states to shore up a declining finance capital by means of petty bourgeois (in some cases social democratic) shock troops. Thus between 1922 and 1931 the Comintern was led to define fascism as (in 1924) "one of the classic forms of counterrevolution in the epoch when capitalist society is decaying." As Stalin put it, fascism was "the bourgeoisie's fighting organization" and relied "on the active support of Social Democracy."^[152] It is beyond my purpose to examine the consequences for the left—widely acknowledged to have been catastrophic—of the Comintern's identification of "social fascism" as the greatest enemy of the proletariat. In any case, when after 1928 Stalinism "fell like a hood" over Soviet culture,^[153] potentially fruitful and liberating debate on fascism was an early victim, bringing with it "a widening divorce between the Comintern's policy and the actual situation, internationally and within each country."^[154]

Now although the concept of fascism rested on the "economic" assumption that capitalism had entered its final crisis, it is important to keep in mind that the crisis itself, while springing from wartime destruction and economic dislocation throughout the 1920s, was also social and political in expression. Indeed one of the egregious failures of the Comintern theses on fascism was the neglect both of the interclass (social) and cultural (ideological) aspects of counterrevolution. Although the 1929 crash and Hitler's rise to power in 1933 did force a tactical shift—the call for communist parties to join with social democracy in an antifascist "Popular Front"—this "did not reflect," one critic notes, "any significant advance in comprehension."^[155]

These developments, of course, came after Nyozekan had published his analyses. For him, late 1931—the aftermath of the Manchurian Incident—represented the climax of the process up to that point. Thus it is all the more interesting to note the similarities between Nyozekan's ideas and those generated from among the "side currents" of the contemporary European debate on fascism. Indeed, it was only here that attempts were made to flesh out the phenomenon's social and cultural dimensions. None denied what Gavan McCormack calls the "capitalist essence" of fascism. But its contradictory ideological tendencies, strength

among the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and the mechanisms by which the fascist movement articulated with capitalist states would have lain virtually unexamined were it not for such unorthodox commentators as Karl Radek, Clara Zetkin, and August Thalheimer. One can see in their insights strands of thought shared with Nyozekan. How this is so will become clear in due course. The question of influence is impossible to resolve and may be irrelevant. But the congruence in certain areas is not.

Nyozekan did not consider his Critique a work of "abstract theory." Rather it aimed at understanding "concrete political phenomena" in Japan. And although not meant as prophecy, Nyozekan felt that the course taken by Japanese politics—the end of party cabinets and the final turn toward open military aggression—had borne out his analyses.^[156] They are a blend of close reading of political developments in Japan from 1929 to 1932, and comparative "social science"; that is, a class analysis of "Japanese" fascism that, while it employs Marxist formulations, comes to conclusions quite different from the Comintern and contemporary Koza-ha^[*] positions. In fact the term "emperor-system absolutism" (tennosei zettaishugi^[*] ), the linchpin of the prewar Koza-ha characterization of the modern Japanese state, is conspicuous in Nyozekan's Critique by its absence, even in disguised form.

The Critique embraces two theses. First, fascism as a potentially dominant political form emerges preeminently in "late-developing" capitalist states such as Italy and Japan, where bourgeois social power has historically been weak, and where the postwar economic crisis has shaken an already exclusivist, "oligarchic" parliamentary system. (The case of Germany, with its powerful Social Democratic Party, comes immediately to mind as a counterexample to the type of parliamentary system dominant in a potentially fascist regime. At the time Nyozekan wrote, of course, the Nazi takeover was only a speculative possibility.) Ultimately, fascism serves to reinforce capitalism and its "bourgeois dictatorship" by the elimination of all organized legal opposition, especially that of the working class. Thus fascism need not mean the dismantling of parliamentary institutions per se, only the removal from them of working-class representation.^[157]

Here we come to the second and larger thesis, which revolves around the role of social classes and groups in the achievement of fascist ends. We must understand that no concept of an all-pervasive rationality is at work in the idea that one class can achieve its ends through the manipulation of another. The sense is closer to the "playing out" or expression

of a "nature" determined by the total social being of a given class—its relation to other classes and to the national past.^[158] Members of a class cannot but be what they are, and in doing so can serve two masters without being conscious of the fact. Thus, in explaining fascism, Nyozekan joins with Radek and Zetkin, who "recognized as early as 1923" its petty bourgeois roots and appeal, and admitted that the appeal "extended through broad social groups, large masses which reach far into the proletariat." Zetkin, addressing the executive committee of the Comintern in the same year, reminded her audience that fascism was a "movement of the hungry, the suffering, the poverty-stricken, the frustrated."^[159] That is, fascism as a movement depended on the mobilization of petty bourgeois fears of displacement, especially by the working class from below. It was a mistake, therefore, to make an enemy of social democracy at a time when, on the contrary, an alliance against capitalism and (though Nyozekan could not have said so) for the overthrow of the capitalist state was necessary.^[160] This was not to deny petty bourgeois hostility to the working class; and that the petty bourgeoisie was (in theory) susceptible to mobilization/manipulation from either side. It played, as Nyozekan put it, a "pendulum" role. Lacking a clear "class attitude" of their own, the groups that make up the "middle stratum" ("small landowners and shopkeepers," etc.) are driven back into reactionary chauvinistic nationalism—the defensiveness of the tribe under attack.^[161] This chauvinism took as its prime target the parliamentary status quo, its attack taking shape as a call for order and justice for the little man, and for an end to the anarchic internationalism and "liberalism" of big capital. It is similarly opposed to the true internationalist socialism of the working class—the internationalism so decisively rejected by the majority of social democratic parties in 1914, which is the only possible defense against fascism.^[162]

Nyozekan's point, however, is not to idealize an existing hero-class but to expose the political tendencies of the middle stratum under certain conditions: the greater the development of bourgeois democracy in a society, and the greater the representation enjoyed by the working class, the smaller the chances of fascism developing when capitalism experiences a serious crisis. However, the obverse is also true; even a democratic society long accustomed to political stability will face, as Britain did after 1929, the internal threat of fascistization in the name of order. This was the lesson Nyozekan drew from Oswald Moseley's breakaway from the Labour Party and his creation of the British Union of Fas-

cists.^[163] Nyozekan does not deal in absolutes, but rather in terms of degree and extent. Fascism was not a ready-made article that could be imposed on a social and political system by a determined enemy, whether internal or external. It was to some degree an "organic" development. Though vitally affected by and transforming that system's relations with the outside, fascism was essentially domestic in its genesis. Its growth (from movement to state?) could be gradual and legal, or violent and illegal. The removal of a fascist regime was of course another matter. Writing in the aftermath of the Manchurian Incident, Nyozekan contemplated the prospect of a second "World War" between fascist and bourgeois democratic (and socialist) regimes. The cure for fascism was sure to be violent.^[164]

Let us consider how Nyozekan applies his argument to Japan. His first thesis, as we saw, concerned the general function of fascism. The second outlined the petty bourgeois roots of the phenomenon but stressed, on the basis of the Italian example, the cooptation of "primitive" fascism as the regime made its peace with capitalism. In discussing Japan, Nyozekan arrived at a formula that was to see lasting service. This was "cool fascism" (sometimes "cold" or "legal" fascism): the idea that, in Japan at least, with the petty bourgeois "movement" too fragmented to coalesce into a single political force, but too strong to ignore, fascism would come about not only without the destruction of, but indeed through, the existing institutions of government. That is, elements within the state and political parties would gradually make it their purpose to destroy independent working-class organizations and blunt, in the name of national unity and harmony, all opposition from within the bourgeois camp.^[165] Thus: "I believe that in Japan, too, it is not violent, but legal, cool fascism now preeminently taking shape. Before long middleclass fascism will be absorbed [goryu seshimerareru^[*] ] into cool fascism. If we consider Japan an advanced capitalist nation, that, in formal terms, is the course fascism will take."^[166]

In the realization of cool fascism, it is the petty bourgeois movement that provides the necessary destabilization as it seeks by its own violence to counteract the threat to the system from the radicalized working class. That is, it creates the desire for order, and having done so, it is to be "melted into the furnace" of the "cool fascist" dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (an odd mixture of metaphors).^[167] In the economic realm, fascism serves capitalism in analogous fashion: "it erects a bulwark against collapse using the [ideology] of small and middling industry and

commerce."^[168] After 1929, of course, this bulwark, far from having been strengthened, was all the more easily absorbed through the process of the concentration of capital.

Nyozekan does not seem to have regarded Japanese "cool fascism" as a kind of Bonapartism. That is, he did not accept the idea of "class equilibrium" maintained, or a power vacuum filled, by an autonomous fascist state.^[169] Rather, he took the opposite, eclectic tack of trying to subsume the increasingly powerful influence of segments of the military within the category of the middle stratum. Assuming a correspondence between the upper stratum of the bourgeoisie and that of the military, and between the middle stratum (petty bourgeoisie) and middle echelons of the military, Nyozekan argues that in fact the conflict emerging between the "Young Officers" (he does not use this term) and their civilian allies on the one hand and the entrenched bureaucrats of the upper echelon of the army on the other was one of class.^[170] And just as the ideology of the middle differs from that of the upper stratum in society as a whole, so, too, within the military. Just as the petty bourgeoisie's construction of social reality, when threatened, resorted to irrationalist chauvinism—as was proven, to the profound shock and disgust of many progressives at the time of the Great Kanto Earthquake—so, too, the middle ranks of the military were the most determined to impel Japan toward aggressive territorial expansion as a solution to overpopulation and rural poverty. Both, finally, were the first to resort to violent methods in domestic politics.^[171] The question becomes, how is this petty bourgeois front to be absorbed into the ranks of cool fascism? Is this a conditio sine qua non for any development of fascism in Japan? It is difficult, in Nyozekan's Critique , to see what the mechanism of absorption (or de-fanging) is to be. And it is not surprising to find that contemporary Marxist commentators, like Shinomura Satoshi, found the assumption that fascism in Japan would ultimately triumph through existing institutions to reflect an "undialectical grasp" of the problem: "So long as the soil for the cultivation of fascism exists, we must account it a crucial error to recognize in it only the growth of 'cool' or 'legal' fascism while denying that of fascism proper (honrai no )." There is a "practical [jissenteki ] danger" that "by confining the emergence of fascism to one or the other type, our [the party's] praxis will fall completely into the clutches of the bourgeoisie's maneuvers."^[172]

However, Nyozekan does at least try to outline the process of absorption. He hints, first, that in the case of the military (in regard to which censorship must have been extraordinarily rigorous) it will be

violent. Here, of course, Nyozekan was right. He also shows, through an examination of contemporary Japanist groups and their platforms, that "fascist" organizations in Japan's rural districts and towns, while avowedly anticapitalist, were frequently under the control of local bigwigs with connections to the major parties. These organizations in fact gloried in their service to counterrevolution. Anticommunism, rather than anticapitalism, was their great point of pride.^[173] (Thus Nyozekan was probably not surprised that such groups went over to the cause of capital [ = the state] once the final attempt by officers of the Imperial Way faction at a coup d'état failed. They had lost their only focus of activity outside the state itself.) But what of the relation between zaibatsu capital, state bureaucracy, and the parties as a whole? How did Nyozekan envision their eventual role in the development of a fascist regime in Japan?

As of mid 1932, portents of the development of cool fascism were coming, in Nyozekan's view, from the parties. These signs, of course, came after the government's apparent acquiescence in the army's moves in Manchuria, after the March coup d'état attempt, and after the open repression of the left, beginning in 1928. Nyozekan had in mind particularly the activities of Home Minister Adachi Kenzo^[*] (1864–1948), whose "boycott" of cabinet business and call for a government of "national unity" had brought down the Minseito^[*] cabinet of Wakatsuki Reijiro^[*] at the end of 1931. Having caused the collapse of the government (and of a cabinet led by his own party), Adachi bolted from the Minseito and, with the famous "Showa^[*] Restorationist" Nakano Seigo^[*] , formed the Kokumin Domei^[*] . How did Nyozekan interpret these moves? To better understand his position, we must take a small detour and fill in the background, with which Nyozekan must have felt his readers already quite familiar.

It is interesting to note that Adachi had long been known as a maker and breaker of party fortunes. From his beginnings as an organizer of right-wing terror gangs under the direction of Toyama Mitsuru^[*] and Uchida Ryohei^[*] (leaders of the "classic" radical-right Genyosha^[*] ), Adachi had gone on to become the "giant killer" in the smashing election victories of the Rikken Doshikai^[*] in 1915. (Formed in 1913, the Doshikai combined with two other groups in 1916 to form the Kenseikai, and then in 1927 with the Seiyu Honto^[*] to create the Minseito.) A consistent advocate of a "hard"—pro-military—line in China, Adachi was joined in his efforts to forge a "national unity" coalition by other friends of the army, notably the "new zaibatsu " magnate and Seiyukai^[*] chairman

Kuhara Fusanosuke. Indeed, elements of the Seiyukai^[*] had on their own sought "army cooperation to bring down the Wakatsuki cabinet."^[174] To be sure, the ultimate aim of all these efforts, a one-party government that enjoyed the blessing of the military, was not shared by all the elders of the Seiyukai or the Minseito^[*] . This much is clear from the defense of the principle of parliamentary government mounted by Inukai Tsuyoshi and Wakatsuki Reijiro^[*] in the wake of the assassination in February 1932 of Inoue Junnosuke, the Minseito leader and a former finance minister. Inukai had reaffirmed his belief in the "beneficial effects" of parliamentary government, while Wakatsuki denounced the trend toward fascism in Japanese politics and the rule of terror certain to result if Japan were to follow the lead of "Russia, China, and Italy" in establishing a one-party state. With Inukai's own assassination in May, however, "the era of party cabinets came to an end."^[175]

There is little question, then, as to Adachi's antipluralist proclivities. At the same time, it would be wrong, as we have seen, to imagine that he or Kuhara desired the establishment of an outright military dictatorship; certainly they did not relish the prospect of rule by those who had assassinated Inukai. Nevertheless, it is equally obvious that Adachi—and not only for Nyozekan—was a symbol of the powerful trend toward accommodation with the military that was permeating the parties. But what sort of accommodation was this to be? What could a man such as Adachi have hoped to achieve through a "national unity" cabinet—the type of cabinet that did, of course, predominate in the years after 1932, and under whose aegis actual party influence within the cabinet drained steadily away?

In Nyozekan's view—to return now to the Critique —Adachi was concerned to guarantee that the interests of industrial and finance capital represented by the parties would still be served despite the "new situation" in Manchuria. This meant winning control for big capital over the South Manchurian Railroad and its allied enterprises. These had become a zone of special privilege for bureaucrats and military figures, and as such were insufficiently flexible as tools in the expansion of private Japanese capital.^[176] Although the two-party system had seemed to promise a stable domestic political arrangement for this expansion, too many destabilizing elements were surfacing: abroad, the Western and Soviet threats, intensified now since the overrunning of Manchuria, and Chinese nationalism and capital in North China; at home military insubordination and working class and peasant agitation, not to mention (for Adachi) the immediate problems of strategy vis-à-vis the Seiyu^[*]

kai.^[177] Adachi thus felt it expedient to "unify" the parties under retired military figures beyond accusation of partisanship, and to accommodate rather than antagonize the military. (Inukai Tsuyoshi had of course taken the opposite tack.) In short, cabinet power had to be single, not in order to prevent further military outrages in Manchuria or North China, but so that the parties' constituencies could begin to reap the benefits of "acquiescence."

The real issue, as Nyozekan saw it, was not civilians versus the military, but upper versus middle/petty bourgeoisie. (The fact that in their efforts to secure military favor for coalition, Seiyukai^[*] officials had approached the army general staff and ministry officials, would seem to bear this out.) Adachi was this upper stratum personified, looking ahead to the time when it would be necessary to bring its minions—the line officers of the Kwantung Army and their domestic allies—to heel. Whether this would be possible was, as Nyozekan points out, quite another question. There was always the danger that the petty bourgeois "horse," while still "bridled" by the institutions of the bourgeois state, would grow too strong and throw its rider.^[178] Thus Adachi's moves, as Wakatsuki himself had hinted, could be seen as the "fascistization" of the parties themselves, through fear not so much of direct revolution as of loss of their dominant position in the state as then constituted.

Nyozekan thus locates the engine of cool fascism, as of 1932, in the parties, and ties it directly to the interests of Japanese capitalism in Manchuria. At this point, bureaucracy in Nyozekan's view remained, like the military, divided in itself, at "heart" a semifeudal and guildlike province, and allied in its rank and file with the petty bourgeoisie. (This is not to imply that there was any sort of "Luddite" mentality involved. Bureaucracy was never antimodern in the sense that it resisted technological innovation. Quite the contrary. The question was rather one of control.) The parties had clearly established their dominance over the political system, but only on the condition that bureaucratic influence remain as a structural and ideological brake on big capital. Abroad, the anti-zaibatsu policy of the government in Manchukuo seemed to bear this out; similarly bureaucratic sponsorship of "social policy" as a means of class conciliation was evidence of this same influence. For while it might seem to reflect the rising influence of the proletariat, it sprang in fact from the "petty bourgeois" origins and consciousness of bureaucracy itself. Nyozekan traces this lineage back to the "middle stratum force of the feudal warrior class," which was itself responsible for the Meiji Restoration. Bureaucracy had served as the technician of the hur-

ried transition from feudal to (industrial) capitalist production and still harbored the territorializing impulse characteristic of the former condition of society. This was evident in the frequent attacks on giant industrialists and financial combines as "antinational." The parties in turn were compelled to go after petty bourgeois support and to acquiesce in continuing bureaucratic influence. In this sense—in its partial orientation to petty bourgeois interests and consciousness as Nyozekan very broadly construes them—Japan was ab origine "fascist."^[179] Within five years, of course, the center of gravity was to shift, as Nyozekan had predicted, from this "aboriginal" to a "legal" fascism. One may perhaps infer that the technical side of bureaucratic personality, following the collapse of the radical petty bourgeois front in 1936, finally came into its own, overcoming its "guild" consciousness sufficiently to supplant the parties as the dominant institution, along with the army, in political society.

Nyozekan's account of Japanese fascism is necessarily truncated. Its categories seem eclectic and arbitrary at times. The membership of the middle stratum is only vaguely indicated; there is not a single economic statistic in the entire work. Nyozekan obviously had heavy censorship to contend with. And while he did believe that fascism could be understood through class analysis, one could not pin down the author of the Critique as an adherent of any organized ideological movement or party. These factors may account for some of the vagueness and imprecision. Despite these limitations, Nihon fuashizumu hihan can claim to be the first attempt to clarify the interclass dynamics of fascism in Japan. It has the immediacy of a work wrestling with an immense and present danger.

One point of particular interest in the Critique is its powerful treatment of fascist ideology and art. For Nyozekan art becomes fascist when its producers make use of obscurantist traditionalism not out of principle, but for purely commercial motives. Such, Nyozekan contends, is the nature of much of the contemporary "mass art." Fascist because it plays on the emotions of the masses while mobilizing them against (unexamined) "forces" that threaten the national essence, such work is also pure nihilism. Its producers are, of course, pawns in the bourgeoisie's campaign of cultural imperialism. What is important is that "art" hide reality from its consumers. To the extent that the producers of such work are unaware of their political role, they are to be pitied and awakened. To the extent that they are aware, they are vultures to be unmasked. Yet this is in fact the dilemma of the whole petty

bourgeoisie. Inescapably bound to a capitalist system of production (including artistic production), its particularism cannot but be compromised by the "universal" quest for profit. Unable to see its own liberation in the struggle of the proletariat, the middle stratum turns against it. But in whose cause? The petty bourgeoisie have none of their own. They condemn the corruption of bourgeois politics not (despite the rhetoric) because it is corrupt, but because it is not theirs . The middle stratum is the big loser.^[180]

The Critique , finally, seems to have been the first work to expose the "timelessness," social ubiquity, conceptual emptiness—and supreme usefulness—of contemporary Japanism.^[181] It was this ideological feature of Japanese society that implicitly linked mass and elite: though the elite version of Japanism was more refined, it helped in its own way to integrate the intelligentsia into the ideological superstructure of the state. Indeed, it was debate over how to counteract this kind of integrating force that divided the Japanese left. And for the JCP in particular, it was a major stumbling block, not least because the Comintern could not grasp such a situation.

However, between the intelligentsia and mass there was, according to Nyozekan, a major difference in degree of consciousness. Like big capital, Nyozekan argues, the interi knew what they were about. They were conscious of their social role,^[182] whether in support of or opposition to the system. Scholar-functionaries (who, according to Maruyama, must be considered members par excellence of the interi )^[183] had explicit knowledge of their purpose: to legitimate capitalism under the Meiji constitutional system. One dimension of this task was the attempt to link the "timeless" idea of the kokutai with the current system that professed to protect it. This was the purpose, for example, of works such as the Kokutai ron shi (History of theories of the national polity), compiled by the Shrine Bureau of the Home Ministry in 1919. The volume contained articles by such established academics as Kakehi Katsuhiko, a constitutional law scholar, and the historian of religions Anesaki Masaharu—both of Tokyo Imperial. (Admittedly, Nyozekan remarks, Kakehi is a "crank [kijin ] who claps his hands in supplication when he mounts the rostrum and dances strange dances." But Anesaki is a "sound scholar.")^[184] Whatever the differences in tone, they are in agreement on the unchanging nature of the kokutai .

In this respect, the work of figures such as Yoshino and Minobe can be understood as attempts from within to reformulate the argument for the system's legitimacy under changing conditions. But what happens

when the impingement of society on politics forces the interi to seek not a new formula but a new system? Here Nyozekan's argument on the dynamics of seido comes to mind: the existing institution reacts to protect itself; the means it chose in the early 1930s were fascist. For the interi as for the mass, the line between tolerable dissent and heresy had been drawn in 1925. Now, in the early 1930s, the space given over to legitimate dissent was narrowing drastically. Nyozekan, it will be recalled, regarded a self-conscious proletariat as the only real answer to fascism. It did not materialize, and we may assume that he took for granted the absorption of the masses into a "fascist" system. But what of the interi themselves? Until the advent of the "national emergency" (hijoji^[*] ) around 1933, there had been no obvious connection between the interi and fascism. Indeed, their sentiments, if Nyozekan is any indication, seemed genuinely hostile to it. But by the last years of the decade, after the mass tenko^[*] of the JCP leadership and rank and file, the campaign against Minobe Tatsukichi and the university purge of 1938–39, the hostility seems to have softened considerably. With the triumph of "cool fascism," many among the interi were hewing to the state. Some, like Royama Masamichi^[*] , Kaji Ryuichi^[*] , and the journalist Matsumoto Shigeharu, were followers of Nyozekan who had come to see such service as the cutting edge of social renovation. Royama^[*] , indeed, spoke the language of a refined fascism. Nyozekan could not have forecast this development, and both he and others were hesitant (after 1945) to examine it. Nonetheless, the involvement of Japanese intellectuals in the country's mobilization for struggle against the West can be seen as the extension of a problem implicit in Nyozekan's Critique . More to the point, it is implicit in his life . To this problem, that of tenko broadly conceived, we now turn our attention.

Return to the Womb

Beginning in the year 1933 the reel of Nyozekan's life seems to turn back on itself and begin to unwind. After this point, Nyozekan repudiated any associations that could possibly link him, in official minds, with the illegal Communist Party. The rhetoric of class struggle drops away from his texts, to be replaced, within two years at most, by that of national integration and communitarian harmony. Themes of remembered childhood and youth reemerge in his writing (he had in fact begun to publish a serial autobiography as early as 1921).^[185] The seimeitai re-

asserted itself. Nyozekan, in short, "returned to Japan." But this time the cause of the state was the cause of the life-world. The two, once separate, were now bound together in Nyozekan's thinking as Japan moved closer and closer to war.

This thumbnail sketch, though it captures the salient features of Nyozekan's reorientation after 1933, still does not explain very much. We may not accept the judgment of Yamaryo^[*] Kenji, the senior scholar of Nyozekan's work, that Hasegawa Nyozekan "committed" tenko^[*] after 1933. But it is impossible to dispute the reorientation, or its comprehensibility in the context of Nyozekan's own experience. In "returning to Japan," he at least was returning to a world he professed to have known in reality. Yamaryo^[*] was not perverse in describing Nyozekan's tenko as a nashikuzushi no tenko^[*] : tenko on the installment plan; deliberated tenko ; tenko sans crisis. One problem comes immediately to mind, however. Yamaryo seems to begin with a postwar concept of tenko that has two implications: betrayal of the left (in practical terms, the Communist Party) sometime before 1945, and (what is crucial but left unstated) a second "reorientation" to the left, at least in the sense of a selfcritical examination of the first tenko , after 1945. Room for argument about Nyozekan's change of position after 1933 does exist. On the second point, not so much. Nyozekan made no return to the left that even approximated his position up to 1933. These questions aside, it seems to me that Yamaryo so tailors the category to fit his client that his argument is reduced to a tautology. Nyozekan's tenko equals Nyozekan's experience defined as tenko . I feel it is better to examine Nyozekan's thinking after 1933 without recourse to the postwar use of the term. Instead, let us for now take as a point of departure an observation made by the Polish historian Andrzej Walicki apropos of Tolstoy's spiritual crisis and "sudden change" in the late 1870s: "In sum, we may say that whereas [this crisis] was only a stage in the evolution of Tolstoy's ideas , it did mark a real turning point in his life ."^[186]

At what point did the pressure of his situation on his ideas and vice versa compel a conscious change in Nyozekan's life? What ideas? What sort of change? And how did this change react in turn on his ideas?

Hihan , the successor to Warera , was short-lived. Its last issue appeared on 1 February 1934. At that point, Nyozekan's reorientation was still in its initial stage—that of cutting old ties. With Hihan no longer being published, Nyozekan gave up the means he had employed since 1919 of making his criticisms heard on as close to his own terms

as possible. Thenceforth he would publish frequently (until late in the war), but now mainly in the mass circulation dailies, especially the Yomiuri , and in books. Still, demand for his essays and Zeitkritik remained, and Nyozekan published in such "highbrow" monthlies as Bungei shunju^[*] and Shiso^[*] , as before in high-powered opinion journals like Chuo koron^[*] and Kaizo^[*] , and later in Nihon hyoron^[*] .^[187] Unlike a number of well-known liberals of the 1930s and early 1940s, Nyozekan never chose to publish a purely personal "mini-journal."^[188] He continued to speak in public on panels, gave lectures, made addresses, and so forth. In point of fact, 1934 as compared to the previous year was spent in relative silence and privacy, with the exception of a short daily column in the Yomiuri . When Nyozekan began to resume a more typical public life, it was clear that the "critical period" was over.

Its last years had been marked by impeccable progressive politics. In September 1931 Nyozekan had been named chairman of the Sovieto Tomo no Kai (Friends of the Soviet Union) at the time of its reorganization into the Nisso Bunka Kyokai^[*] (Japan-Soviet Cultural Society).^[189] His article in the December Hihan on the Manchurian Incident prompted the authorities to ban the issue on the grounds that it subverted public order. The May 1932 issue of Hihan was banned for "suggestions of antimilitary and antiwar sentiment." In September and October of that year, Nyozekan presided over the founding and organizational meetings of the Yuibutsuron Kenkyukai^[*] (Society for the Study of Materialism), or Yuiken, and he continued as chairman—some say as a figurehead—for a brief period.

Early 1933 brought the deaths of Sakai Toshihiko and Yoshino Sakuzo^[*] , and the murder by police of the proletarian writer Kobayashi Takiji. In May Nyozekan, at the urging of the critic Nii Itaru, joined the philosophers Miki Kiyoshi and Tanabe Koichi^[*] in founding a group to protest the burning of books throughout Germany under the aegis of the newly installed Nazi government. The next month Nyozekan joined some three hundred artists and literary figures at an anti-Nazi protest meeting. He was among the organizers, also, of the antifascist Gakugei Jiyu Domei^[*] (Arts and Sciences Freedom League). And so on: in short, Nyozekan at fifty-eight was one of the grand old men of the interi who lent their names, energy, and sympathy to the antifascist movement on the Japanese left.

But it was Nyozekan's association with Yuiken and the remaining micro-organizations associated with the JCP that figure more closely in

his ostensible tenko^[*] . We have already mentioned his chairmanship of Yuiken. In the eyes of the Home Ministry the organization (which had an initial membership of about forty) was designed to "contribute to the expansion and strengthening of the Japanese Communist Party and the Comintern." Thus the claim of its chairman that it was "purely scholarly" in its concern for materialism was "deeply suspect" and the organization's movements were needful of the authorities' "closest attention." This Yuiken received. It is worth noting that the Marxist philosopher Kozai Yoshishige, a Yuiken and Party member, considers that by the time of Yuiken's founding, the Party had been so decimated that it had neither the personnel nor the organization to support the luxury of a "cultural policy." "The Party did agree," however, "that such an organization was necessary," and Communists such as Tosaka Jun and Hattori Shiso^[*] were indeed among Yuiken's founders and driving figures. Still, Nyozekan was undoubtedly sincere in his statement that the society's study of materialism was meant to be purely scientific. But it was not long before ideological disputes arose, even among the Communists themselves. These were serious enough that non-Marxist members such as Nyozekan ("I don't really 'get' Marxism. Especially dialectical materialism: that I can't swallow whole."),^[190] and unorthodox Marxists like Miki soon felt alienated. Despite Tosaka Jun's "asceticism"—his efforts to preserve Yuiken's intellectual autonomy and hence ensure its survival—the organization was so split internally, and police harassment so severe, that it became insupportable. It is difficult to say what Nyozekan's contribution to Yuiken was exactly, apart from the figurehead value of his name, and possibly a role as gadfly; he was, after all, a materialist of a kind. The society's genuine advances in the dissection of Japanese ideology and in formulating a Marxist theory of technology cannot be denied. But since Nyozekan's direct involvement in the theoretical debates seems to have been slight, we shall, regretfully, pass over them here. Yuiken disbanded voluntarily in 1938, just as "academic Marxists" such as Ouchi Hyoe^[*] , Arisawa Hiromi, and Wakimura Yoshitaro^[*] found themselves arrested and headed for prison in the second "Popular Front" incident in February of that year. Nyozekan, of course, along with Miki and many others (whose names will soon reappear) had long since ceased to have any association with Yuiken.^[191]

One indication of the atmosphere in which Yuiken operated from the beginning ought to suffice. In March 1933 Nyozekan spoke at a public lecture meeting called to commemorate Yuiken's founding six months

earlier. Held at the Bukkyo Seinenkan^[*] (Buddhist Youth Hall) in Hongo^[*] , the meeting was attended by a number of university and higher school students. One of these was Maruyama Masao:

I was just finishing my sophomore year at Ichiko^[*] , and went to the meeting from my dormitory. Hasegawa Nyozekan, who was chairman of the society, addressed the gathering. He began with a statement of Yuiken's purpose as an organization. "[The members of Yuiken] strive constantly to undertake the scholarly study of materialism, and as such neither take any political action nor hold to any fixed political purpose." What he said—or more accurately tried to say—next is interesting. "Rather it seems these days that it is those who speak from 'idealist' or 'spiritual' standpoints that have taken on a distinct political coloring—." The instant Mr. Hasegawa delivered himself of this statement, the commander of the Motofuji Police Station, who had been seated, in uniform, to the left of the rostrum, picked up the sword he had propped between his legs, and pounding it on the floor, shouted that the meeting was over. At the same moment a contingent of chin-strapped police—there were so many of them you had to wonder where they had all come from—rose abruptly from their seats scattered throughout the hall, and glowered at the audience. The commander strode up to the rostrum, moved Mr. Hasegawa aside, and in severe tones declared, "I hereby order this assembly to disperse." People were stunned; the meeting had barely gotten under way! Still they had little choice but to make their way to the exit. As they streamed out, plainclothes officers of the Special Higher Police [Tokko^[*] ] who had been waiting there for them began to direct the police in making arrests. "Take this man. That one." I had the honor at this time of being pointed out for arrest.^[192]

The second half of 1933 brought the tenko^[*] declarations of Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika. The Party, already laboring under the direction of a Comintern that "understood nothing of conditions in Japan,"^[193] now lost its domestic leadership. The "moderate" 1927 theses of Bukharin had been superseded in 1932 by new theses that, while reaffirming the need for a bourgeois democratic revolution first (the tennosei^[*] , in other words, was acknowledged to be "absolutist"), also prescribed illegal methods as the key to shaking the imperialist regime. Remember that the USSR's heightened fears of a Japanese threat in the wake of the occupation of Manchuria were being translated into the Comintern's instructions to its client Party. And, as E. H. Carr points out, while direct communication between the Comintern and the "struggling rump" of the JCP was virtually nil after 1933, the 1932 theses had been widely disseminated. The stand members of the left took on the issue of legality versus illegality of Party methods was thus a key indication of allegiance in the eyes of both the Party and the police. The

issue had come to a head in the Omori^[*] Bank Robbery Incident of 6 October 1932. Three khaki-clad Party members—initially thought to be army officers—stole 32,000 yen from the Kawasaki Daiichi Bank in a desperate attempt to obtain funds for Party operations. (The plan was unknown to all but one member of the Central Committee.) The robbery "badly discredited the . . . Party in the eyes of the public and seriously damaged its prestige among its own members," notably Sano Manabu. The government took full advantage of the incident and subsequent trial to portray the Party as a nest of gangsters. Beginning that same October, and continuing throughout 1933, police arrested the leadership, displaying stunning brutality in the treatment of its prisoners. By fall 1934 the authorities had demolished the Party's professional revolutionary core^[194] and were free to concentrate on theoreticians, and, increasingly, on non-Marxist sympathizers. Noro Eitaro^[*] (an example of the former) was a leading Kozaha^[*] theorist and historian who had been the guiding figure in the debates on Japanese capitalism during these years. He was arrested at the end of November 1933, and died in custody the following February. He was thirty-four.

This was the situation when Nyozekan's number came up. One morning during the same week in November, Nyozekan was taken in custody to the Nakano Police Station (he had moved to Nakano from Yotsuya in 1926). There he was interrogated by a detective dispatched by the Tokko^[*] for that purpose. Nyozekan was suspected of having paid, through Hososaro Kanemitsu (former chairman of the Ronoto^[*] ) some hundred yen to MOPR (Mezhdunarodnaya Organizatsiya Pomoshchi Revolutsioneram)—International Red Aid.^[195] Blankets and personal belongings were brought. Nyozekan was released sometime after midnight. The major papers carried the story of the arrest, since Nyozekan (according to the Tokyo Nichinchi ) was a "central figure" in Yuiken. Other arrests of Yuiken associates followed: Funaki Shigenobu, Oya Soichi^[*] , Tosaka Jun, Kaji Ryuichi^[*] , Oka Kunio. Thus it was not Nyozekan the individual, not the liberal, but the Yuiken associate and "communist sympathizer" whose activities the authorities sought to interdict.^[196]

The details of the Tokko's investigation, which concluded some three weeks later, are unavailable. But the result was public. On 15 December the Tokyo Nichinichi announced: "All Suspicions Cleared Up: Nyozekan Quietly Tells His Story."

I have always respected the law. In the past I have acted, and [I] expect to continue to act in the future, in accordance with my motto: Never break the law. If you break it, pay the penalty. Of course, being human I cannot guar-

antee that I will never break the law, but if I did I would never ask the authorities to look the other way. I would be prepared to accept a fair judgment. As a social critic I could not preserve my critical conscience without an attitude toward daily life of an almost too rigorous self-regulation. These days society has grown altogether too lax. People seem to make no effort to apply discipline in their actions. So it happens that even opponents of the Communist Party tend to find themselves playing the role of sympathizer. For the sake of ideology [shugi ], friend leads friend into error; the young deceive those who came before them. Outrageous behavior of this sort has grown all too common. What will become of our society if friends can no longer trust each other and neighbors come to suspect one another? We Japanese still enjoy cohesion as a people, but will we be able to [continue to do so] the way things are going? This is a fundamental problem, greater than that of the Party or any other issue! Where does responsibility lie for this state of affairs? It lies in particular with the flaws in our moral education up to the present. This is what thinking people [shikisha ] ought to pay heed to.^[197]

It is hard not to smile at this statement. Here is Nyozekan the "elder" blaming the system for his being trapped into "playing the role" of communist sympathizer—not that this was the real issue, of course. One wonders who is accusing whom. The statement is characteristic in its indirection, its deflection of responsibility. Nyozekan was anxious to portray his action as that of a generalized subject (I the people?), responding to institutional ills: the state pounding its mailed fist, the Party forcing its adherents to degrade human ties in the name of ideology. Nevertheless, the statement does mark a turning point in Nyozekan's life. Despite its artfulness, the statement contains a clear repudiation of the illegal JCP and its methods and purpose. Nyozekan's declaration of fidelity to the law was, I believe, sincere. He was not bending over backward completely, though he did wish to mollify the police. He owed nothing to the Party—quite the contrary. And his long-standing doubts about vanguard activity were a matter of record. In any case, Nyozekan's memberships in leftist organizations lapsed. A planned contribution to the Nihon shihonshugi hattatsushi koza^[*] (Lectures on the history of the development of Japanese capitalism, 1932)—on the influence of the Restoration on later social thought—was left unrealized.^[198] At the same time, Nyozekan did not embrace the official Japanism. He wrote no selfcriticism beyond the statement quoted above. Most important, he never denounced his associates. All in all, one may say that Nyozekan, at the moment of his arrest, faced an unappetizing choice: cut loose from any association with illegality, make a feint to the right, or not play the public game at all. But was it possible to make a mere "feint" to the right?

Is Yamaryo^[*] correct in saying that public repudiation of the JCP was, psychologically and symbolically, a permanently debilitating blow to Nyozekan's critical capacity? As of late 1933—early 1934, it was still impossible to say. But one can agree with Yamaryo that Nyozekan did make a "proto"-tenko^[*] , in the sense that his renunciation of the left was permanent. The ties were cut.

But as Yamaryo himself points out, Nyozekan's reorientation was a drawn-out process. And obviously no single text can stand as "proof" of tenko (assuming that one accepts the implied problematic). It is rather a question of a total life-text. Let us approach the matter from a different angle. How did Nyozekan understand the concept of tenko at the time? What sort of process did he think it was? Now admittedly, with his tendency to generalize the subject, it is sometimes difficult to tell where "Nyozekan" begins and ends. When is it legitimate to infer that he is referring (obliquely) to himself and his convictions? Always? Never?

The July 1933 issue of Hihan contained a collection of short "selftributes" to the journal from its writer-readership. In large part they lionized Nyozekan himself. As one contributor put it, he was "an oasis in a time of emergency," a bastion of sanity, critical sense, and so on. In the same issue, Nyozekan published a mini-essay on the subject of tenko (this in the aftermath of the Sano-Nabeyama bombshell). Here Nyozekan argues that nations, not individuals, undergo tenko : the entire history of Japan is a series of tenko , necessary steps back prior to a vault forward. Note where Nyozekan lays the stress. While he sees clearly that tenko represents a drawing back (as of a bow string), his interest lies with the vault forward that ultimately results from tenko . Thus, the importation by the Soga of continental systems of thought and government for "Westernization" that later culminated in the Taika Reforms had been preceded by the Shintoist reaction of the Mononobe to the introduction of Buddhism. The efflorescence of the early Meiji period had been preceded and made possible by the sonno joi^[*] movement. Proposals for a modern constitutional system came only after the defeat of reaction in the 1873 debate over whether to "chastize" Korea—and from within the defeated party. These three movements, each of vital importance in the nation's history, represent three tenko . And now after the invasion of Manchuria, another was at hand:

The Japanese capitalist form of state, now approaching completion [kansei ] has in this worldwide final phase [of capitalism] arrived at the point where to

support itself it must make a further capitalist leap. This has, as was to be expected, required an "anticapitalist" reaction. The present-day Mononobe have not been content to insist that all images of Buddha be cast into the canals of Naniwa. They have taken up arms themselves [gunjiteki seiryoku o katsudo^[*] seshimeta ].

Will the history of Japanese capitalism, with this reaction, now shrink back into feudalism, or will it by a "turnabout" [tenko^[*] ] to imperialism make a great leap forward? The matter is now "under consideration."^[199]

Leaving aside the particular, and pressing, question Nyozekan is addressing here, let us note again the key point in his concept of tenko The main thing is not to look back at what has been renounced, but ac the—partly unintended—progressive consequences. "The significance of conservatism," Nyozekan had written many years earlier, "lies in the fact that it creates the primary condition for progress." His argument about tenko is a refinement of this position.

Let us now take a leaf from Nyozekan's book and "degeneralize" the subject from nation to individual: Nyozekan had, after all, argued that the interi were fully conscious of their social role. They must, then, be prepared to take a stand. If Nyozekan left the left behind, to what "reaction" did he ally himself? And if that alliance was to serve as pressure on the springboard to progress, what sort of progress did he envision?

The "reaction," it is fair to say, was the cause of the seimeitai , the unpolitical world of everyday life. Nyozekan for a time stepped back from the explicitly public world. He signaled this opting out with a translation, in the final issue of Hihan , of a telling passage from the Analects :

Tzu-lu, Tseng Hsi, Jan Yu, and Kung-hsi Hua were in attendance. Confucius said, "You think that I am a day or two older than you are. But do not think so. At present you are out of office and think that you are denied recognition. Suppose you were given recognition. What would you prefer?" Tzu-lu promptly replied, "Suppose there is a state of a thousand chariots, hemmed in by great powers, in addition invaded by armies, and as a result drought and famine prevail. Let me administer that state. In three years' time I can endow the people with courage and furthermore enable them to know the correct principles." Confucius smiled at him as if flattered.

"Ch'iu, how about you?" Jan Yu replied, "Suppose there is a state the sides of which are sixty or seventy li wide, or of fifty or sixty li . Let me administer that state. In three years' time I can enable the people to be sufficient in their livelihood. As to the promotion of ceremonies and music, however, I shall have to wait for the superior man."

"How about you, Ch'ih?" Kung-hsi Hua replied, "I do not say I can do it but I should like to learn to do so. At the services of the royal ancestral

temple, and at the conferences of the feudal lords, I should like to wear the dark robe and black cap [symbols of correctness] and be a junior assistant."

[Turning to Tseng Hsi,] Confucius said, "How about you, Tien?" Tseng Hsi was then softly playing the zither. With a bang he laid down the instrument, rose, and said, "My wishes are different from what the gentlemen want to do." Confucius said, "What harm is there? After all, we want each to tell his ambition." Tseng Hsi said, "In the late spring, when the spring dress is ready, I would like to go with five or six grownups and six or seven young boys to bathe in the I river, enjoy the breeze on the Rain Dance Altar, and then return home singing." Confucius heaved a sigh and said, "I agree with Tien."^[200]

This was not mere nostalgia. Nyozekan was tired. It must not be forgotten that he had spent the years since 1918 in a running battle with censors, police, and financial ruin. Despite all the efforts of Warera and Hihan , of the dissident interi , the forces of armed reaction at home and abroad seemed everywhere to have triumphed. The philosopher Miki Kiyoshi, with whom Nyozekan was soon to be associated in new circumstances, described the situation in contemporary terms: "Those who have been crushed by the political pressure of the fascism now current withdraw from reality and return to themselves. Just as a man, after enduring the struggle that is city life, returns beaten and wounded, fed up and weary, even disconsolate, to his home village."^[201] But "home" for Nyozekan no longer meant Fukagawa or Tokyo. He had so thoroughly generalized himself that "home" meant Japan itself. Nyozekan the public man returned to a public womb: he immersed himself in cultural studies. The shift from "criticism"—read dissent—was decisive. It was also latent. Nyozekan was, of course, conscious of the change, remarking that he felt as if a "great rock" long hidden from view had been uncovered.^[202] Indeed, no one so long under the influence of Seikyosha^[*] thinking could have failed to form an intense concern for an integrated national character and identity. Nyozekan's earliest sensibilities (as he later portrayed them) were colored by chronological and geographical out-of-jointedness; and nothing makes for an acute sense of identity like standing "alone together." In short, Nyozekan's "return to Japan" was personally authentic. Recall his huffy defense against accusations of arrivisme : "My preference for things Japanese is not new."

Its personal genuineness does not mean that Nyozekan's embrace of "home" was unproblematic. He could hardly accept the monopoly on national identity claimed by "idealists" and "spiritualists." His contempt for those who capitalized on Japaneseness for purposes of political reaction never abated. This much is implicit in the major expression

of Nyozekan's reflections on the national character, Nihonteki seikaku , a collection of essays written between 1935 and 1938 and published in that year by Iwanami. The work was clearly meant to be controversial, and, coincidentally or not, sold 112,000 copies by 1941. (To this we might contrast the 5,000 copies sold of the first [1942] printing of Nanbara's Kokka to shukyo^[*] . The latter figure, however, represents the total available at a time when paper was in exceedingly short supply, especially for academic books. Nanbara's work, in any event, was a sellout, and it appeared in at least three postwar editions.)

The Japanese national character depicted in Nihonteki seikaku , while dynamic and evolving, still manifested certain traits conspicuous for their "modernity": realism, pragmatism, restraint, rationalism (not abstractionism), and tolerance. Futhermore, Nyozekan argues, in each period of Japanese history, constructive popular energy has been the dynamic force in the growth of culture. For this popular life, the imperial institution has been, until modern times, virtually irrelevant.^[203] In 1938 Nyozekan chooses to imply this irrelevance through omission rather than declare it openly. But it is not hard to find more explicit hints at the point in his earlier writings: his debunking, for example, of patriotism in the Critique of Modern Society , or the treatment of kokutai in the Critique of Japanese Fascism . It is this aspect of Nyozekan's exploration of the national character that has led some critics to reject Yamaryo^[*] Kenji's thesis that Nyozekan "committed" tenko^[*] . Iida Taizo^[*] , for example, finds in Nyozekan's public valorization of a "stateless" Japanese society a valid expression of "resistance" to the overweening presence of bureaucracy and military power. He suggests further that this tendency in Nyozekan's thought can be traced back to the period immediately following the Kanto earthquake. The mob violence and massacre of Koreans in Tokyo and Yokohama came as a deep shock and disillusionment to Nyozekan. The disillusionment and shock were double: the violence was the work of everyday people, and the government did nothing to prevent it, in fact took advantage of it in order to murder a number of socialists and anarchists. But, rather than convincing Nyozekan of the need for a genuine social revolution, the terror drove him to idealization of a free and natural communitas uncorrupted by tribalism and the will to power. However, as Iida stresses, the change was gradual and revealed itself only in subtle ways. And it certainly did not lead Nyozekan into apoliticism.^[204]

So far, so good. But how long could this "passive" resistance last? Had not Nyozekan, through his audacious choice of problem, made

himself vulnerable to those forces he sought to counteract? Nyozekan's choice of problem, as Yamaryo^[*] says, is a problem in itself. Yamaryo cannot have meant that the choice of "Japan" was ipso facto a problem: The work of Tosaka Jun (Nihon ideorogii ron , 1937); Nagata Hiroshi, ( Nihon hokensei^[*] ideorogii and Nihon tetsugaku shisoshi^[*] , both published in 1938); Hani Goro's^[*] studies of the Restoration; and of course Maruyama Masao's essays, written between 1940 and 1944, in Nihon seiji shisoshi kenkyu^[*] (1952) all come to mind as evidence to the contrary. Perhaps it was Nyozekan's conceptualization that caused the difficulty. Why Japanese "character"? Did not this approach reflect some deep conservatism? Still, if we isolate Nihonteki seikaku , we can agree with Iida that Nyozekan remained the cagey urbanite, mocking the exceptionalist orthodoxy in its own language. But Nyozekan does not equal this single text: if we consider also his organizational affiliations of the same period, we can clearly see that Nyozekan's "urbanity" and critical detachment were themselves mobilized as Japanese society was prepared for an East Asian war after the China Incident. So the real question becomes: given mobilization, how much or how little?

In Nihonteki seikaku , Nyozekan embraced a "modern"—rational, tolerant, realistic—Japan, one very much of a piece with his longstanding position on the basically more humane tenor of life in a society free of ideology. At the same time, however, Nyozekan had put on the "flip side" of the Nihon fuashizumu hihan . For in his writing after 1938, Japan has (or is ) a cause. It is one needful of rational criticism to be sure, but primary; needful of tolerance and realism, yes, but primary. He had taken a crucial step. "Japan" had been a nation woven into an international society whose members were all subject in one way or another to capitalist production. Each nation had taken its own path, but in a broad sense all faced the same task: to restructure the production and distribution of wealth so as to place control in the hands of those who actually produced, who sacrificed themselves. But now the international task had become the national cause. It began as an effort to make Japan "understood." But Nyozekan went further, seeking to be among those who actually defined the cultural dimension of the cause. Japan was to be the subject of action. The question was no longer "What should be done about Japan?" Now it was, "What should Japan do—in China, in East Asia, in the world?"

Ironically, Nyozekan's very openness must have led him into mobilization. He came to emphasize the virtually innate harmony of the Japanese, the absence of cultural divisions and class conflict—indeed

even of class itself. Five years earlier he might have attempted to expose the ideological genesis of such an assumption. But no longer. One corollary of the emphasis on the realism and rationalism of Japanese culture, found also in Nihonteki seikaku , is identification of the two. Because the Japanese are a realistic and rational people, things are the way they should be and vice versa. Hitherto, such a claim might have reflected Nyozekan's clear sympathy for a "humane anarchy"^[205] in society. The seimeitai was best left to itself. The state in particular had no business fooling with the "real" world. But in what is perhaps the key shift, or deemphasis, in Nyozekan's writing after 1938, this perception of the state as extrinsic, even dangerous, begins to waver. This is not a matter of the printed word alone. In this respect, the record up to 1945 is equivocal. Less so was Nyozekan's association with the Showa Kenkyukai^[*] (Showa^[*] Research Association).^[206]

The Showa Kenkyukai was nothing if not an attempt to wed the social consciousness of the interi with a concomitant desire to exercise actual authority in the state. Konoe Fumimaro's brain trust, founded in 1936, sought to provide the prince and the reformist technocrats and military figures associated with him with a workable plan for a way out of the China quagmire, for the "reintegration" of the Japanese economy and broader economic development in East Asia, and for the mobilization of the Japanese people in the service of these ends. In part this was a last-ditch attempt to channel state authority into a new center, one that could prevent the fruitless dispersion and contention for power among upper- and lower-echelon civil and military officials, party men, and extraconstitutional figures. Some way of "rationalizing" Japan's widening aggression abroad, in the context of attempts to resolve the entrenched problems (especially in agriculture) of the nation's dual-structured economy, was obviously necessary. At the same time, involvement in the association did not preclude a desire among some members to work for "creditable . . . and humane" ends through a revitalized state.^[207] As organizations , after all, the parties were no longer a factor.

The failure of the association in all these aspects has been analyzed by Japanese and foreign experts and need not detain us here. But it is important for our purposes to note that the association was widely suspect from the start owing to the leftist background of its most brilliant members. Miki Kiyoshi, whose attempts to place Japan's aggression in China in a legitimate philosophical and world-historical framework formed the nucleus of the New Order's cultural policy, is only one prominent example. And it is significant, though not surprising, to find

that with Konoe in eclipse after 1941, Miki soon fell out of favor. He resumed contact with the left. Arrested for harboring a suspected communist, Miki died in prison shortly after the end of the war.^[208] His death, coming when it did, crystalizes the dilemma of public outsiders who were drawn into state service after the left had been decimated.

Nyozekan's case is similar to Miki's in that for the first time in his life, he found himself a servant of power—or would-be power. His activity in the association centered on cultural policy. As a member of the Bunka Mondai Kenkyukai^[*] (Research Committee on Cultural Problems), a suborganization of the association, Nyozekan seems to have served as a "generalist." And, since he was a close observer of Chinese politics, his opinions were particularly valued. Nothing published or circulated by the association bears Nyozekan's name as chief author, but it is a fact that he contributed to the synthesis of cultural principles designed to guide the New Order, Miki Kiyoshi's Shin Nihon no shiso^[*] genri (1939).^[209] Articles by Nyozekan published in Kaizo^[*] and elsewhere somewhat earlier are in any case congruent with the general thesis of the Principles . This held that Japan, as the only successful modern power in Asia, had ipso facto the opportunity, right, and duty to use its unique position to force subject peoples out of their Western captivity; to create a postcapitalist "cooperativist" order with Japan as the natural nucleus and source of industrial, political, and cultural expertise. To be sure, Nyozekan was aware of the issue of Chinese nationalism, but he seems to tie it in with the expansion of Chinese capitalism rather than to recognize in it a broader phenomenon. Indeed, for him, regionalism and geographically differential modernization ("China is a Commonwealth without an England"), rather than external interference, were the greatest problems facing China. Thus he discounts the possibility that Japan might be a factor in unifying China in a way permanently disadvantageous to itself.^[210] A modern aggressor must believe that if successful it will convince those it has conquered that it rules in obedience to some higher principle. Nyozekan had to have accepted this myopia, at least enough to have joined in synthesizing the association's cultural program. (He did not have the heart of a saboteur.) And that meant accepting the corollary, that an activist state was needed at home to mold the masses to the ends that inspired the association's formation. Nyozekan was also a member of the Showajuku^[*] (Showa^[*] Academy). Founded in 1938, the academy (according to its statutes) sought "to contribute to the formation of leading figures [shidoteki jinkaku^[*] ] equipped with [the] spirit, knowledge, and experience necessary for the total fulfillment of

the historical mission, now in process of realization, of the New Japan." At the same time, genuine chauvinists at the fringe of both organizations found Nyozekan—in fact all the "ex-leftists"—to be undesirable; this we know from the diary of that quintessential servant of power, Yabe Teiji.^[211] The point, however, is not the impact Nyozekan had or did not have, but that he, like Miki, Sassa Hiroo, and Saigusa Hiroto—all early departees from Yuiken and association members—was mobilized. If others found him questionable, so be it. Nyozekan was prepared to serve, and in a limited capacity, he did.

In addition to his involvement in the association, Nyozekan took part in two other organizations. Here he was more prominent, and his tenure of greater duration. To take the latter first: in June 1942 Nyozekan joined the Bungaku Hokokukai^[*] (Society for Patriotism through Literature), as honorary chairman of the Criticism and Essay section. He had been recommended for this position by Kuwaki Gen'yoku and the Min'yusha^[*] historian Takekoshi Yosaburo^[*] . In April 1944 Nyozekan was named chairman, in which capacity he remained, presumably until the organization's dissolution. It seems to me that Nyozekan's membership in the society means comparatively little: one must consider the date. It was probably incumbent on anyone without independent wealth or patronage to join in order to keep publishing. It may not be unfair to regard joining the society as akin, mutatis mutandis, to joining the Soviet Writers' Union. For some Japanese it may even have been a kind of professional lifesaver, not unlike the Federal Writers' Project during the New Deal, again mutatis mutandis.

The other affiliation is more revealing, since it was unofficial and wholly voluntary. In mid 1939 Nyozekan helped to found the Kokumin Gakujutsu Kyokai^[*] (League for the National Arts and Sciences).^[212] Conceived by Shimanaka Yusaku^[*] , president of the prestigious Chuo Koronsha^[*] , the league numbered among its charter members some twentysix luminaries of the Japanese intelligentsia. The group's intent was to promote "cultural science"—read internationalism, objectivity, and free inquiry—from a refined "national" (kokuminteki ) standpoint. With its appeal to the "masses" (via the state) on the one hand, and on the other to the interi as dispensers of Western (cosmopolitan) enlightenment, the organization managed to bring together under its aegis a varied cast. There were former members of Yuiken (just as in the Showa Kenkyukai^[*] ) such as Miki Kiyoshi and the mathematician Ogura Kinnosuke; journalists such as Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, Abe Ken'ichi, and Ryu Shintaro^[*] (Ryu^[*] , of course, had authored the association's economic "bible," Nihon Kei -

zai no saihensei , and was an admirer of the theory of Italian fascism); and eminent philosophers and scholars such as Watsuji Tetsuro^[*] , Nishida Kitaro^[*] , Kuwaki Gen'yoku, Tsuda Sokichi^[*] , Yanagida Kunio, and Koizumi Shinzo^[*] . Creative writers such as Shimazaki Toson^[*] and Masamune Hakucho^[*] were also enrolled. And so on. Clearly no such mélange of personalities and approaches could be brought together to serve a single, clearly articulated principle. The tension was implicit in the league's statement of purpose, and by and large the "internationalist" impulse suffered. But this was owing in no small measure to attacks from without, first from rightists led by Minoda Muneki, on Tsuda Sokichi; and later, in 1943, from the army, which was alarmed at the presence of Miki Kiyoshi on the membership rolls.

The league managed, nevertheless, to meet regularly until 1945, and to hold lectures and publish a series of monographs. Some of these works, like Ogura Kinnosuke's Senjika no sugaku^[*] (Mathematics in wartime), were repudiated by their authors after 1945: "It speaks all too clearly to my abject submission to the powers-that-be."^[213] Alone among its members, Nyozekan was (according to Yamaryo^[*] ) catholic enough in his background, interests, and talents to embody the group's purpose and enjoy the confidence of all involved. It is characteristic of him that he remained enthusiastic until the end, and certainly had no cause after 1945 to regret any of his public acts as a member.

There was, to be sure, a range of feeling among the members as to the eventual outcome of the war. The journalist Baba Tsunego was possibly the most pessimistic. Next came Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, forced to confine his forebodings to private conversations and to his now famous diary, Ankoku nikki . What Kiyosawa had to say about Koizumi Shinzo, whom he found hopelessly sanguine about Japan's prospect, probably would apply to many among his confreres. "I had thought him a harderheaded liberal. Instead," Kiyosawa wrote, "he seems to be afraid to think things through to the end."^[214]

As for Nyozekan, we might rather say, following Yamaryo, that living the situation, the here-and-now of war everywhere, was all. Though he was invariably acute in discerning the contradictions and stupidity of that situation—not, significantly, its tragedy—Nyozekan was not given to prediction or to dramatic shifts in temperament or opinion. This was characteristic, perhaps, of a man who viewed words and ideas as following after and looking at, rather than creating or changing, reality. This quality of hanging back is evident even in Nyozekan's most propagandistic and programmatic writing of the middle years of the Pacific

war. Even here, one finds the distinct and complex layering of voices that reflects his development; the inability to yield entirely to an irrational "ideal" or a conviction unsupported by the evidence of "life." I shall close my account with a brief consideration of two of these wartime texts.

"The Greater East Asia War," Nyozekan proclaimed in April 1942, "has as nothing else caused the whole world to recognize anew the national [minzokuteki ] superiority of the Japanese."^[215] The immediate cause of Japan's crusade lay not in any inherent aggressiveness on the nation's part. Far from it: after long efforts at what Nyozekan calls "Amaterasu diplomacy"—"to assuage with words"—the nation found to its dismay that its pacific character remained misunderstood and belittled by the Western powers. Japan had no choice now but "to pluck up [its enemies] like young reeds, crush them, and send them flying in the wind."^[216]

Nyozekan assumed the task, in this connection, of setting forth the true, and obviously unappreciated, source of the nation's superiority. This lay not in weaponry or machines but in its dynamic character—a theme common to, but hardly the exclusive domain of, Japan's war propaganda. Indeed, it seems very much a part of present-day Nihonjin ron . The main lines of argument have been introduced earlier, in the discussion of Nihonteki seikaku . We may note here one major, though unsurprising, difference in the argument. In the earlier work, Nyozekan had conspicuously avoided reference to the imperial house, or to politics in general, as a central concern of, and spur to development in, Japanese ethics and intellectual life. Now, with the entire nation (minzoku ) involved, and to all appearances headed for victory in, a world war, Nyozekan feels compelled to identify the continuity of the imperial presence as the dynamic core of the nation's political being. It is this presence that distinguishes the modern Japanese from all other constitutional systems. Characteristically, Nyozekan quotes Kuga Katsunan's Kinji kenpo ko^[*] (1888) to make the point. This saves him from having to rely on any of the current highly illiberal and antiparliamentary "theorists" of the kokutai in making his pledge of allegiance. Furthermore, Nyozekan's gesture to orthodoxy is deliberately kept within political bounds. The "imperial prerogative from which the constitutional system proceeds" (Katsunan) is used in a "liberal" manner. It is not the font of value or coeval with all that is Japanese. Rather, the imperial institution is used as an analogy for the constant self-renewal of Japanese culture. Japan has not discarded its past, political, social, or aes-

thetic. But "pastness" is not its own justification. Rather, it is their continuing and immediate contribution to the national life and character that has guaranteed the vigor of past cultural products. Japan is not an antiquarian nation. In fact (as Fukuzawa had first argued) Japan has always been modern in the sense that the products and spirit of the past have never been "idealized" or frozen, but have served—the past-aspresent—to make Japanese society a single evolving whole.^[217]

However, Nyozekan avers, the single evolution of Japan (mandated in large part by ethnic homogeneity and geography) has never meant the repression of natural human complexity. Here we see the Spencerian moment in his thought, healthy as ever. Nyozekan does not deny the presence in Japanese history of sometimes severe conflict. But this conflict—such as that which caused the fall of the Tokugawa—has taken place within the context of a long, upward evolutionary development toward harmony through complexity. No political or social strife in Japanese history has ever been severe enough to shatter the underlying unity of the people; this is a point of tremendous pride for Nyozekan. In fact, the national character may be said to be "nuclear," and hence extremely conservative. That is, each period of emerging differentiation resolves into integration through a renewal of the springs of identity. In what Yamaryo^[*] Kenji calls the "spatialization of history"—understandable in Japan's case, where the geographical determinant is so powerful—Nyozekan alludes constantly to a return to national self-as-place. To be Japanese means to live as Japanese. Nyozekan asserts that no abstract "human being" can exist in Japan: "For a Japanese, all [other] Japanese are part of the Japanese ethnos [minzoku ], that is, of the Japanese nation, the clan [shizoku ], the family; whether as sovereign or subject, parent or child. He cannot conceive of them otherwise than as actual human beings living their lives within the territory of Japan."^[218] Japanese mythology and philosophy support this sense of belonging. They are entirely specific. Indeed, Nyozekan adds, the great universal philosophizing nations—Greece and India—have "died out." Specificity is strength. Science (i.e, abstract thinking), too, is pursued in Japan not for its own sake but for practical purposes. For this reason it serves, as does the quotidian art of the shokunin , to integrate the people rather than to divide them. The summit of Japanese creativity is reached in the realm of the intuitive and practical.^[219] Art is life; life is to be "crafted." With this spirit (Nyozekan uses the word seishin ) Japan has embarked, unwillingly, but now with total dedication, on an effort to display its character.

The second and final text to be considered comes from late 1943. Nihon kyoiku no dento^[*] (The tradition of Japanese education)^[220] merits our attention for one chief reason, its equivocal attitude toward the state. In part the work was a contribution to the wartime effort to create a more efficient educational system. It was time, Nyozekan felt, to counteract the "Western" tendency toward "useless" abstraction and overspecialization, and, by implication, the invidious separation of mass from elite in society. Nyozekan proposed that Japanese society be "deschooled" (to use Ivan Illich's term). Education happens not only in school, but in life. And life meant work and home. All of life's "places" (ba ) should be transformed into sources of social education. This is not only a matter of changing perceptions, but of institutional mobilization and decentralization. Nyozekan never denies the need for a requisite degree of specialized training, or for the analytical frame of mind that supports it (true for any industrial society, whether at war or not). But, he suggests, the Education and Armed Service Ministries need not be the only dispensers of education. Indeed, he implies, such education as they do dispense may even obstruct genuine "social" learning. Every ministry—Agriculture, Commerce and Construction, Welfare—and organization, public and private, ought to involve itself. The responsibility should be shared, diffused.^[221]

What appears on the one hand a proposal to save the state's resources by redistributing the cost of cannon fodder, and to expand the role of the state to boot, can also be seen as a criticism of the institutions that have created the need for cannon fodder in the first place. "Social" education could not help but be more pacific; the more deeply rooted learning is in society, the less inclined young minds should be to an uncritical acceptance of official and military indoctrination.

Given the context, one must seem to bend over pretty far to make such a reading. Still, virtually all of Nyozekan's writing on state and society up to that point suggests that he took advantage of the forum offered to try and take back even a little of what the state had commandeered.

It is not my purpose at present to follow Nyozekan's public life into the postwar years. One comment here will have to suffice. Only remove references to the particular cause—or rather the means—chosen by Japan in 1941, and one finds that virtually nothing changes in Nyozekan's subsequent presentations of the national character. Indeed, Kuwabara Takeo regarded Nyozekan as basically conservative in his thinking for having clung to the concept itself. And so he was. After 1945 he remained what he had become after 1935, a conservative (but not even

remotely reactionary) "man of culture" (bunkajin ). Nyozekan never ceased to regard a deliberate caution, living from and with the past, as the trait most dominant in the Japanese national character. He continued to identify his own life with that of his fellow Japanese to an extraordinary degree. What he idealized in his own past-as-present, he idealized in that of the nation as a whole. Although we are assured by Ouchi Hyoe^[*] that Nyozekan was a "very private person," his projected personality assumed a direct continuity between self and the society he represented as a public man. Nyozekan's shift after 1938 from outsider to insider meant an ever stronger identification of society and nation. And though his period of state involvement was brief, the identification was permanent: there was no tenko^[*] , no return to dissent, after 1945.

Recall the embarrassment Nyozekan admitted when in 1937 he "discovered" in himself a visceral chauvinism. This aspect of "national" (indeed, not only Japanese) character—the explosive, state-sponsored xenophobia that has made of nationalism "the starkest political shame of the twentieth century"^[222] —seems to have merited but little of Nyozekan's attention after 1945. True, he threw himself into the "reconstruction" (saiken ) of the national psyche along peaceful lines after Japan's defeat. But it is a pity that Nyozekan forsook the darkness so soon. For only in its immediate aftermath, and then for the first time, could that darkness be spoken of openly. To do so, Nyozekan would have had to expose the unexcised, violent "petty bourgeois" element in his own and the "Japanese character." He would have had to "spit on himself," as (he said) any critic worthy of the name had to. But did he?

Perhaps this is unfair. Nyozekan did not, even in his propaganda, write words he did not believe. In the essay on national superiority written in 1942, and in other writings after 1945, Nyozekan recognized the absence from the "Japanese mentality" of a universalizing or transcendent impulse able to place the subject of thought outside its object.^[223] Where once he had gloried in the specificity of Japanese culture, he now lamented its tenacious grip. And he blamed the interi (himself included, says Yamaryo^[*] ) for never having developed "eyes for the universal." Thus, the Japanese reality persisted: life and place "produced" thought. Being—being Japanese?—produced consciousness. Neither before 1945 nor after did Nyozekan's worldview recognize an encompassing, immaterial "outside." He saw only coexisting material universes with distinct experiences.

Nyozekan came closest to identifying a "universal" in the Spencerian developmental premises of his early Critiques . His exposure to Marx's

analysis of nineteenth-century capitalist production allowed Nyozekan to distinguish the spurious cosmopolitanism of the bourgeoisie from the genuine international solidarity of the working class. The new capitalist powers of the twentieth century reacted to both of these phenomena with a massive display of armed nationalism. Nyozekan began a critique of this process—an effort recognized and praised by Marxists such as Sakai Toshihiko. But Nyozekan, rejecting the Soviet alternative both as a model and critical vantage point, was drawn into the reaction itself. Unable to yield to the violence it entailed, however, he sought to tease a stateless society out of Japanese history: remember that according to Iida Taizo^[*] , Nyozekan was propelled in this direction by the shocking aftermath of the Kanto earthquake. Nyozekan created a personal myth and shared it generously. As public man, it was the least he could do. As a critic, it was the most.