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.