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?