Conclusion:
Notes on the "Public" in Postwar Japan
Sketch of Hasegawa Nyozekan by Yanase Masamu, 1935.
Courtesy of Chuo[*] University.
What, in sum, are we to say of these two political thinkers? Nanbara Shigeru combined a philosopher's concept of state with an administrator's view of society. Hasegawa Nyozekan had empiricist concepts of both society and the state, but the two were never integrated. Nanbara's idealist philosophy of political value was a constant shield against cooptation at a time of awful pressure to conform. For this one may, as I do, admire him deeply. The significance of his thought, however, is specific and contingent; first in that Nanbara worked in an anomalous institutional setting, second in that its neo-Kantian philosophical underpinnings ceased, except in the indirect ways already noted, to be salient in political discourse after 1945. It was above all a successful intermediate strategy. With Hasegawa Nyozekan matters are less clear. His communitas did not produce a theory of resistance to state authority, or even an escape from it. Nyozekan recreated a good world. But in the existential moment of its creation, it was stripped by its author of any explicit political purpose. Nyozekan was a tragic optimist. Both men shared the inability to withdraw from the "national life" concomitant with publicness in imperial Japan. Publicness, therefore, was their crucible. But that world is gone.
Does this mean that no contemporary significance is to be attached to Nanbara or Nyozekan? Certainly their postwar careers have their interest. Nanbara served in a number of characteristically elite positions: for example, in the House of Peers, where he participated in deliberations on constitutional revision; twice as president of Tokyo University; and as head of the first Japanese educational mission to the United States in 1949. Let us glance at one representative instance: Nanbara was named to the House of Peers in March 1946. This was a position he shared with a number of "organ theory" adherents, notably Miyazawa Toshiyoshi, who were appointed to fill vacancies occasioned by the purge. Nanbara was among those who argued that the new Imperial House Law, which was presented to the Ninety-first Diet at the end of 1946, should provide for the possibility of abdication. While the emperor, Nanbara said, bore no legal or political responsibility, he did bear "moral responsibility" to the people (kokumin ) and to the imperial ancestors for "plunging the people into such misery with this first total defeat since the founding of the empire." Abdication, it seemed to Nanbara, was the appropriate expression of such responsibility. Owing to the combined opposition of Allied GHQ and Prime Minister Shidehara Kijuro[*] , however, the law was written without this explicit provision. The immediate issue, of course, was the constitutional fate of the koku -
tai : How had it been affected by the surrender (specifically by the acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration)? Miyazawa and Nanbara argued that in fact, after 15 August, the kokutai as defined by the Peace Preservation Law was dead. Imperial sovereignty, after all, had been denied in the acceptance of the declaration. A "new kokutai " had been born, in which the emperor (in the words of the new constitution) was a "symbol of the unity of the people." As Nezu Masashi has remarked, it was in part because of rigorous interpellations, by Nanbara among others, in the House of Peers that the government was forced to yield in its determination to make "retention [goji ] of the emperor system" the purpose of the new constitution.[1]
Hasegawa Nyozekan, who was seventy in 1945, took his place with Yanagida Kuino, TsudaSokichi[*] , and Watsuji Tetsuro[*] as grey eminences in the "reconstruction" of Japanese culture after the defeat. But it cannot be said that his contributions brought out any new themes. With a combination, one imagines, of urgency and a sense of déjà vu, he restated the positions he had taken on rationality and restraint in Nihonteki seikaku and other contemporaneous works. As was noted earlier, Nyozekan never took a radical stance after his repudiation of illegality in 1933. He "returned" to what he claimed he had always been. So much is this the case that Maruyama even speaks of Nyozekan's radicalism as "unnatural"! A final anecdote will underscore the point: In 1961 Nyozekan (at eighty-six) was nominated by the Liberal Democratic Party head, Ikeda Hayato, for the chairmanship of the Kokumin Kyokai[*] , a party fund-raising organ then in the planning stages. Nyozekan declined.[2]
As noted at the outset, this study has aimed primarily to describe and explain the dilemmas of public life in imperial Japan, and not to write complete intellectual biographies of its two main subjects. As such, its contribution must be judged independently of its secondary purpose, which is to sketch out, in part, the "prehistory" of certain postwar trends and figures. In fact, the two come together. For in trying to describe the long-term significance of Nanbara and Nyozekan, it becomes apparent that it is less their personal achievement after 1945 than the patterns of thinking and certain key ideas, as taken up by others, that matter. The best example, as I suggested in the Preface and elsewhere, may be found in Maruyama Masao himself. I leave for a later work the full exposition in its own context of Maruyama's thinking as it has developed since the late 1930s. Yet here, too, my interest is not—and will not be—in Maruyama alone. He is representative of the generation educated at the apex
of the academic hierarchy while the imperial system faced its deepest crisis, which took it upon itself to "decode" the imperial system and to define the meaning of postwar for a defeated and occupied country. This decoding and definition was not to be the work of Nanbara or Nyozekan—or indeed of any public man of their vintage. It would fall instead to those nourished on crisis, and, more important, on systems of thought explicitly proscribed until 1945. For this reason, rather than simply continuing the story with a focus, perhaps misplaced, on Nanbara and Nyozekan, I have thought that a slightly detached conclusion that attempts a preliminary setting out of "postwar" themes would be truer to my present and future intentions.
"It is my view," the novelist Oe Kenzaburo[*] has written, "that the concept 'postwar' struck the mind and imagination of the Japanese people with utter clarity the moment the war ended."[3] This "utter clarity" was a matter of both light and space. It was linked, literally and metaphorically, not only to the "blinding flash" that laid waste Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but to the steadily widening circle of urban desolation caused by many months of Allied bombings. This spawned one of the great migrations of history—from Japan's cities to the countryside—and left the nation's population stunned and prostrate in anticipation of an occupation as brutal as that carried out by their own forces on the Asian continent. The fact that the American occupation was not as violent and vengeful as expected needs to be understood in the context of the long period of physical and psychological violence—capped by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—let loose upon the Japanese people beginning in the last year of the war. The population had been beaten into passivity, and the economy of violence dictated that further bloodshed was unnecessary. In this context the virtual absence of post-surrender resistance by Japanese, and of wholesale violence by Occupation forces is perhaps less difficult to explain.
Abject defeat, in any case, threw into glaring relief the hollow fantasy both of the New Order at home and of the "extension of the imperial virtue" to the peoples of Asia. The former was a "mangled caricature"[4] of state and national community that exhausted the energies and loyalty of its people. The latter was a misbegotten, unwelcome, and tragic campaign for the "liberation" of Asian peoples who (with a few exceptions) found unbelievable Japan's claims to have undertaken such a mission.
It has been argued that Japanese occupation ended Western colonialism in Asia and was therefore a progressive force. So said Ba Maw of Burma, whose country, under British control was (as J. S. Furnivall put it) "not a human society but a business concern." But even Ba Maw was forced to admit that Japan had betrayed "her Asian instincts."[5] So be it, then: history is cunning. Japan cannot be called a conscious (or even knowledgeable) liberator. Its concerns were military and geopolitical, and it exploited nationalist sentiment where local hostility to prior Western colonial authority, and its own strategic aims, made such a policy advantageous. In most other cases—formal colonies such as Korea and Taiwan, objects of attempted and actual control such as China, and later Indochina, the Philippines, and Indonesia—nationalism was as dangerous to Japan as it had been to the Western powers it displaced. It was for this reason that Japan—here, too, offering a lesson still unlearned by later arrivals—claimed to Western audiences to be fighting against communism in Asia. No colonial power was credulous enough to believe that Japan sought anything better for the subject peoples of Asia than they had already endured. Here Japan and the West stood on, and fought over, common ground. Liberation by Japan brought bitterness to Asian peoples, many of whom also sought liberation from Japan.
This point—Japan's appeal to the threat of hostile ideologies as justification for its imperialist campaigns—brings us back to the collapse of the imperial system at home. Within Japan the ideological threat was taken seriously and used effectively against critics of the regime. The "national community" (kokumin kyodotai[*] ) in the name of which Japan's population was mobilized for and participated in total war was an ideological construct with an emotional appeal and intellectual legitimacy incomprehensible to those who were not members of that "community." The "magnetic" power of the emperor at the zenith of the imperial system, with his ministers and officials and soldiers arrayed beneath, along with the masses of imperial subjects all giving "assistance" (yokusan ) to his rule, drew upon long-inculcated sentiments of political, ethnic/national, and moral identity of the utmost validity. Only objective physical defeat, accompanied by the self-denial of its own enabling ideology of kokutai , could bring the system down. And down it came, leaving the nation in a moral as well as ideological vacuum. But a nation—even Japan with its dominance of political values—is more than its political system, and the Japanese people survived and struggled to make sense of the new, postimperial world.
In the political realm especially, the postwar "moment" opened up vast, uncharted possibilities. The destruction of the empire and negation of its premises meant that ideologies and worldviews formerly held to be inimical to the kokutai were no longer so; socialism, liberalism, and democracy (as models for a political system and for society as a whole) were permitted to reenter the public discourse from which the imperial state had long sought to excise them as unhealthy and dangerous to the spiritual constitution of the nation.
The alacrity with which Japanese intellectuals took up this new (or renewed) discourse has been amply documented and in any case is beyond the scope of this discussion to recapitulate.[6] Here I wish only to ask the questions, to help set the agenda. What has this renewed public discourse meant, and how has it functioned in postwar Japan? What role have public men played in shaping the political and social consciousness of the country? More specifically, how has participation in the public changed since 1945?
The ideological transformation to postwar has been described by Maruyama Masao as a third "opening of the country" (kaikoku ) to the world—and to "universal" ideas, philosophies, and worldviews. This was a process accompanied by cultural experiment and uncertainty, sexual and moral license, economic chaos and physical deprivation. The productive capacity of the country was virtually wiped out, hunger rampant, the people massively displaced and thrown back upon their own resources and imaginations. This negation, this new horizon brought by desolation, also pointed the way toward reconstruction. Defeat for the Japanese brought a bitter trial, recrimination, and (some) well-deserved guilt. But it also created a still unknown future and a mandate to transform self and nation along humane and democratic, perhaps revolutionary, lines. For participants in public discourse, this meant a chance to explore freely and with undisguised passion ideas whose expression (since it was hard to distinguish it from advocacy) had been obstructed or closed off entirely.
Freedom could not mean historical amnesia, however.[7] For as we have seen, the sense among public men of identification with the nation—and therefore with the state—was not entirely the result of coercion. It was not to be uprooted through "liberation" from without in an institutional, let alone military, sense; this to be followed by a return to
some imagined "liberal" status quo ante 1931. For Japan as a state, society, and culture, the war and all it represented was not simply an aberration that could be repudiated and wiped from memory. This would seem to be true especially for those who lived through the communication of ideas and experience to others—here their credibility and intellectual legitimacy would stand or fall. However, some public men fell strangely silent after 1945 about their experience of war and national emergency. I shall try to explain why this happened.
An entire generation of public men had come to maturity during the years of the national emergency that was proclaimed in 1933, and it was precisely from among them that the intellectual leaders of the early postwar years would emerge. They had lived through the greatest crisis ever faced by Japan, knowing that in large part Japan itself had brought that crisis to birth. Thus their identity and intellectual formation, their sense of personal role, their values and morality, reflected a basic existential engagement (acknowledged or not) with the imperial system; that is, with the modes and structures of thought that had developed within, both in support of and in opposition to, that system.
The generation with which I am here concerned never knew "traditional" Japan. They could not claim, as Hasegawa Nyozekan did, to have known a world unaffected by the Meiji Restoration. And the imperial Japan that formed them had undergone a cataclysmic defeat. (Indeed, for true believers like Minoda Muneki, a defeat of cosmic proportions, to which the only possible response was suicide.) Until August 1945, no one of them, nor any public man, could claim membership in the political or national community except by rejecting, or integrating into the framework of the "national community," universalistic beliefs that officially defined public discourse would otherwise deem unacceptable. After the decimation of the organized left began in 1928, the sphere of orthodoxy had expanded but flattened; modes of participation in the "national life" had become more explicit, the costs of inclusion more prohibitive. Paying one's dues—remaining within the pale—could be deeply demoralizing. We have seen how profoundly this was so for Miki Kiyoshi and for Tanabe Hajime. The intellectual illegitimacy of the national cause had become a source of anguish for them. Others with similar sentiments had responded with debilitating or defiant silence, public but coded criticism, private anger, and despair. There was no neutral ground.
Nor was there any transcendent space or universal sphere of values
unmediated by the "nation" (mizoku ) or the "national community." Indeed, as Hashimoto Mitsuru has noted, for Japanese intellectuals minzoku was a category that "overcame universality" and itself became "absolute." In Ishida Takeshi's words, "community [kyodotai[*] ] was the Achilles' heel of Japanese social science."[8] Not every public man was willing to perform this exaltation unconditionally, of course. Thus the struggle and challenge of publicness lay in the definition of minzoku . To what extent could it include "universal" characteristics? Was it entirely particularistic? Needless to say, the state's fissured hegemony over the discourse meant that dissent was muted and seldom directly ideological; the self-acknowledged audience for dissent was small, the intellectual surface suffocatingly uniform. And though there was much movement beneath that surface, the ideological hegemony of the "national community" was maintained.
With the collapse of the old order, however, this hegemony disintegrated. Within the limits set by Occupation censors—which, pace Eto Jun[*] , allowed a quality, and not only a quantity of freedom—the key assumption of orthodoxy was overthrown. This had held that "universal" equaled Western equaled alien and dangerous. The vaunted claim of the "overcoming the modern" theorists, that rationalism, liberalism, and materialism (whether individualist or collectivist) had been sublated (aufgehoben ) into a higher communal and spiritual unity was exposed as a sham. This is not to deny (as Maruyama Masao, for example, does not) the cogency of certain aspects of the "overcomers"' critique. But whether that critique can be detached from its historical context of outand-out cooptation and manipulation, and thus contribute to the current debate about the "postmodern," is another matter. It is clearly related, in ways that need careful elucidation, to the critique of Enlightenment thought, to postsubjectivist theories of politics, and to the posthumanist discourse that continental thinkers have done so much to make salient in contemporary intellectual life. But all this, save for a few comments at the end of the present work, must await later treatment.[9]
How, then, did a wartime generation conceptualize the postwar "moment"? And with what consequences for those who knew nothing of war and little (and frequently nothing) of postwar privation and uncertainty? Here I wish only to suggest the main lines along which this conceptualization took shape—the Marxist and the "modernist"; or, in Shoji Kokichi's[*] terms, "socialist" and "humanist." Focusing particularly on the latter, I shall try to indicate how these lines are interwoven, and make a number of observations about the fate of what Victor
Koschmann calls the "modernist" project as it concerns the general problem of the "public" in contemporary Japan.[10]
At the core of the postwar emancipation of public discourse lay a twofold mandate: reconnection with "universality" and with "subjectivity." Social theory and practice would henceforth have to embrace these categories. Obviously, neither the meaning nor the consequences of this avid embrace were clear in 1945. Like everything else in the years immediately after the defeat, concepts and positions were fluid, owing to the uncertain ideological orientation and policies of the Occupation authorities, associated developments within Japanese politics and society, and changes in the international situation. In particular, the legal reemergence not only of hitherto "dangerous thought" (kiken shiso[*] ) but of proscribed organizations meant that intellectual and political life would be related with a sensitivity and dynamism never before experienced in modern Japan.
Thus the universal concepts to which virtually all public men swore allegiance—"universality" itself, "reason," "science," "progress," "democracy," "modernity," "subjectivity," and so on—became potent signs and symbols in a public discourse undergoing rapid and concentrated development after 1945. The key here is the great impact, for good or ill, of "external" social and political forces upon that discourse. This is another way, perhaps, of saying that it was "public" rather than the preserve of an out-of-touch academy or other elite. At least this was the case for the years up to 1960: As is well known, fragmentation, disillusionment, and violence plagued the Japanese left as the succeeding decade neared an end. The established (or establishment) opposition was only one of a number of canalized or segmented institutions (universities were obviously another) by then inadequately equipped to deal with public questions. Over this same period—one of "miraculous" economic growth at home and vast expansion of Japanese economic interests overseas—the "public" in Japan came to represent an object to be administered rather than a self-conscious social entity. Ideologically, this administration is often clothed in an essentialism of national character (symbolized by the so-called Nihonjin ron ), and complemented by an "internationalist" projection.
This is all very different from the ardent embrace of universal ideas and ideals by public men of the early postwar years. That embrace was not without its own pitfalls and serious fallacies, as we shall see. And
the reasons for the shift to essentialism can only be suggested here. High economic growth, a political system dominated by a bureaucratic/single party complex, rapid specialization, and concentration of commercial communications media all seem to have worked to bring this about. Underlying the process, I think, was the historical power of the cult of public authority over association for open public discussion , which simultaneously dampens the popular desire for participation in politics, and perpetuates the condition of tutelage. This hobbles attempts to transform popular discontent and aspirations into a continuing, affirmative public movement.
While not denying the importance of these recent developments in any way, however, I believe that in fact, the Occupation itself, especially the years from 1945 to 1950, was decisive for the subsequent shape of public discourse in Japan.
I suggested above that Marxism and "modernism" formed the two main lines of development in public discourse after 1945, one proceeding along "socialist" lines and concerned with establishing the conditions for an assertion of class subjectivity by the proletariat; the other along "humanist" lines and striving for the "establishment of the modern self" (kindaiteki jiga no kakuritsu ) in Japan.
The impression is sometimes given in schematic accounts that Marxism simply "took over" among Japanese intellectuals after the war. No doubt this must have seemed the case to American scholars; whose military language training and growing diet of Cold War rhetoric did little to prepare them for well-informed involvement in Japanese intellectual life, at least in its immediate postwar incarnation. It is also true that the legalization of the long-suppressed Communist Party under the orders of occupation authorities came as a shock—and not only to those hostile to the left—and that Marxism as a Weltanschauung had posed the most comprehensive and compelling intellectual challenge to the prewar system. But we simply cannot understand postwar Japanese public discourse by calling it "Marxist-dominated." Let me try then to indicate something of the significance of prewar Marxism to the postwar situation.
In the exhaustive analysis by participants in the "debate on Japanese capitalism" of the transition from feudal to absolutist (or bourgeois) society, the position of the Koza[*] (or Lectures) faction of the Party, which tended to follow closely the theses worked out within the Comintern, was dominant. This held that Japan remained "feudal" in certain crucial respects, such as social relations of production in agriculture and
the makeup of the ruling alliance. The position is significant for two reasons. First, it determined revolutionary strategy (after the promulgation of the 1932 theses) in treating a bourgeois revolution as still necessary before any transition to socialism could be possible. Second, and more important in terms of postwar public discourse, it drew attention to the continued power of "feudal" forces in the as yet unreformed system of land tenure. This basic position was easily transposed into non-Marxist terms to read that Japan was not yet fully modern . Leaving aside the question of means and priorities in the desired transformation, this was in substance the position taken by "modernists" such as Maruyama Masao, Otsuka Hisao[*] , and Fukutake Tadashi.
It cannot be said, however, that prewar Marxists (or anyone else) had been able to give sufficient attention to the particular problems of ideology and consciousness under the imperial system—to the whole problem of the mobilization of an "irrational" tradition in support of absolutism. In this respect, as Shoji[*] argues, the economistic approach of the dissident Rono[*] (or Labor-Farmer) faction was probably more deficient than the politicist Koza[*] argument in "grasping the totality" of Japanese society under the imperial system.[11] In any case, the way was open for (relatively) untrammeled analysis of that totality only after 1945. But the practice of "social science" must be recognized to rest on a Marxist foundation.
In the political arena, the Party claimed a history of "resistance" as an organized body to the imperial system and won a legitimate place in the ideological spectrum. Its star rose quickly in the newly legalized and officially sanctioned movement to organize Japanese workers, for example. And it shone just as brightly over the scarred intellectual landscape as well. The internationalist faithful remnant that remained after the leadership had recanted and gone over to a chauvinistic Japanism in 1933 had been released from a decade and more of imprisonment, or had returned from exile. Their impact was immediate; they appeared now as "mirrors which in their brilliance shed glaring light on the weakness that haunted the innermost hearts" of intellectuals who had sung hosannas to the New Order.[12]
Thus Marxism rightfully played a powerful role in public discourse, and its definitions of key words such as democracy, people, science , and subjectivity received wide and respectful attention. However, the transformation of that discourse after 1945 is by no means reducible to an exchange of hegemonies; kokutai did not simply yield to Capital or to the Party's theoreticians. Indeed, the philosopher Nakamura Yujiro[*]
goes so far as to argue that Marxism did not even constitute the "mainstream" in postwar thought.[13] Rather, we need to consider Marxism as one fertile source of theory and critique, which had to compete and engage in debate with other emancipated, but less systematic, approaches to public questions.
Among the latter, one is of particular interest to us here: the group of academics (many from imperial universities), critics, and writers known collectively as the "modernists" (kindaishugisha ). Most prominent among them were Maruyama Masao (b. 1914), a specialist in political thought; the economic historian Otsuka Hisao[*] (b. 1907); Kawashima Takeyoshi (b. 1909), a legal scholar; the literary critic Kuwabara Takeo (b. 1904); and the sociologists Fukutake Tadashi (b. 1914) and Shimizu Ikutaro[*] (b. 1907).
As is frequently noted, this loose association of public men did not take the name "modernist" for themselves. It was attached to them by their Marxist counterparts in cultural and ideological debate, who pointed to their more or less uniform insistence that Japan had yet to achieve "true" modernity. This was a "not yet" to be struggled for , and hardly something that Japan had "overcome". The attainment of this true modernity was to entail a transformation not only of the structure of society (though Maruyama and Fukutake lay considerable stress here) but of the spirit or mentality of the people. The modernists broke with the historical materialists in rejecting any one-way causality from being to consciousness, arguing that these constituted a totality of semiautonomous elements rather than phenomenon and epiphenomenon. The exact formulation varied, of course. But all were self-conscious heirs of the Enlightenment. Maruyama, whose brilliance was said (somewhat formulaically) to have illuminated the darkened skies of the defeated nation "like a comet," sought to overcome the "irrational" and feudalistic spiritual subservience of the people under the former regime and to foster among the Japanese a modern ethos of politically engaged subjectivity. He sought, in short, to create citizens. Maruyama was skeptical of the transformative potential of sensually based subjectivity ("only the flesh is true"), insisting that ultimately a leap from "carnal literature" to "carnal politics" would have to be made if modernity were to be achieved.
In focusing upon the modern ethos, Maruyama followed Otsuka[*] , with whom he shared the decisive influence of Max Weber. Maruyama's commitment to modernity, as is well known, dates from the interwar years and found its first and perhaps most powerful expression in his essays on Tokugawa Confucianism. Written in the midst of war (the
later ones under the Damocles' sword of the military draft), the essays uncovered a "modern" political rationality—specifically, a Hobbesian theory of social contract—in the "logic of invention" that drove the philosophy of Ogyu Sorai[*] (1666–1728). Here it must be understood, however, that a historical paradox lies at the core of this logic. Sorai's "modern" logic of invention had been exercised in an attempt to restore the Tokugawa system to a pristine feudalism. His articulation of what was a "modern" concept of politics was an unintended consequence of this attempt. Deeply influenced as he was by Hegel and Marx, Maruyama could not be satisfied with the exposition of the thought of a single thinker, except insofar as the mode of thought it revealed could be linked to shifts in the political and economic base of society. While he came to modify his base/superstructure approach, the commitment to subjectivity remained to animate his later work. In context, the wartime essays represent a powerful insider protest of an unfree present and defense of rationality already present within Japanese political thought. Having shown that the "demon" of modernity was deeply insinuated within the native tradition, Maruyama set out after 1945 to reconstitute Japanese politics by tapping that latent rationality, making it explicit and empowering it to transform contemporary consciousness. Indeed, that transformation was the key; the target was the "tenacious familial social structure—the hothouse of traditional Japanese nationalism— and of the ideology that perpetuated this structure.[14]
Maruyama's modernism clearly flowed from deep and long-standing conviction rather than an unreflective acceptance of a new hegemony. At the same time, the fact that Maruyama absorbed the national perspective of his mentors (both Nanbara the insider and outsiders such as Hasegawa Nyozekan and his own journalist father), and that he made it the critical concern of his entire intellectual life illuminates the difficulty of distancing oneself even from a political ideology and culture perceived as pathological. Maruyama remained critical of unreflective claims for or against "universality." Subjectivity—the exercise of transcendent critical faculty in a particular social and cultural nexus—was (and is) for Maruyama nothing if not a struggle to be both/and rather than either/or. It is a critical standpoint, not a national perspective, which Maruyama has privileged and sought to make a "mobile constant."
Another unfolding of modernism may be noted briefly here. This we encounter in the work of Shimizu Ikutaro[*] . A pioneer of social psychology in the early 1940s (his chief work being Shakaiteki ningenron —On social man), and an adept in pragmatic philosophy, Shimizu called after
the war for the subjugation of "irrational" blind desires through rational instrumentalities to create a constructive new social type. Unlike Maruyama, who had discerned the development of modern political rationality within the feudal womb; and unlike Otsuka[*] , for whom (as for Nanbara) the transcendent—but still nonrational—realm of faith could vivify a modern rationality, Shimizu conceived of nothing beyond in strumental rationality itself. And that rationality had as yet no part in Japanese society, but had to be mediated to it by a community of enlightened democratizers. Rationality, introduced from without, would have to wage a constant battle with "explosions" of blind, and presumably reactionary, impulses. After the anti—Security Treaty demonstrations in 1960, however, Shimizu's basic position changed. He denied the need to subdue the blind impulses of the mass, instead insisting that the desires and mentality of "everyday" people, in the context of the existing social structure, "already revealed the values necessary to democracy.[15] Shimizu's shift in perspective may have prefigured the critique by younger thinkers, such as Yoshimoto Takaaki and Irokawa Daikichi, of modernist "elitism," and as such had some merit. (One might even call attention to the echoes in Shimizu's position of a work like Nyozekan's Nihonteki seikaku .) On the other hand, it seems to me that Shimizu's post-1960 approach fits more easily than Maruyama's into the ideology of an "administered" society that emerged in the 1960s. This is because it basically considers popular consciousness unchangeable; once a lamentable failing, it is inverted to become a strength. It also leaves in place structures of power and communication to perform the procedures of administration. Maruyama's position, with its negative valuation of Japanese social structure and call to complete the bourgeois revolution, may seem discordant amidst Japan's economic dynamism and political stability. Shimizu's social psychologism, on the other hand, while perhaps better in touch with "reality," bears the taint of thorough cooptation. This suggests, among other things, that the problem lay not so much with the masses as with the intellectual elite. Shimizu particularly wants to affirm the basic congruence of his thought with the "democratic" status quo and remain an opinion leader; to have his cake and eat it too. But might it not be the case that without some degree of tension with, and separation from, the "audience" and the status quo, really creative thinking and the intellectual power necessary for leadership simply run dry?
"Modernism" clearly contained seeds of internal division. But let us remind ourselves of the basic situation of public discourse in the years
following Japan's defeat: the old "paradigm" of kokutai and "national community" suddenly and violently collapsed, to be replaced through intellectual contestation—carried out on a far broader scale than hitherto, involving multiple social strata—by a series of overlapping, sometimes conflicting, versions of a new publicness.
As Hashimoto Mitsuru noted, public discourse during the "national emergency" was virtually hegemonized by an exalted, even "absolutized," concept of minzoku intended to "overcome" a hostile "universality." With the new dispensation and the renewed embrace of universality, are we not simply talking about a recolonization of public discourse by Western categories congruent with Japan's subservience to U.S. interests and the reintegration of Japan into a U.S.-dominated "Free World"—or, in the case of leftists, by a mere self-referential utopianism? Alternatively, was it not simply a rewriting of the equation "universal equals Western equals alien and dangerous" to read "universal equals Western equals liberating and politically correct"?
Clearly there were ambiguities in the situation. Perhaps the best way to answer the question is first to glance at the political history of the early Occupation as it concerned intellectuals. In its initial objectives, as is well known, occupation policy was viewed as a liberating force by many who had chafed or been persecuted under the old regime. The new Constitution, legalization of the Communist and other opposition parties, encouragement of labor organization, enfranchisement of women, and reform of family law and land tenure were hailed as measures symbolic of a democratic and peaceful Japan. Postfeudal, postimperial Japan was to be open to the world, capitalist and socialist. It was a roseate vision. But the conditions that made it credible—foreign military occupation and loss of sovereignty—also ensured that nationalism, the appeal to kyodotai[*] , would remain a powerful political weapon. This, indeed, was a point lost on neither the left nor the right. Nor has it been lost today, as the presumptive harmony of the people is used as a rationale for legislative retrenchment and ideological regimentation in education.
A number of public men became uncomfortable in this world of "rationed freedom" (which was nevertheless real, just as rationed food was still real food). Partly this had to do with the issues of nationalism and sovereignty just alluded to. But it had equally to do with the inevitable debate on the question of war responsibility. This was not, as many realized, an issue that could be settled by a purge of "ultranationalists." For,
leaving aside legal questions of the "right to judge" and the validity of "victor's justice," the execution of the purge, when not halfhearted and inept, was hasty and allowed numerous loopholes. We cannot deal with particular cases; it is a matter of record that for political and practical reasons the official bureaucracy emerged largely untouched below the very highest levels. As far as academics, journalists, and writers—public men—were concerned, the abstraction and allusiveness common to much of their wartime production saved many a career. (There were also cases of voluntary withdrawal from public work—Yabe Teiji being but one example.) The issue of how public men treated their own immediate past was, therefore, one that had to be addressed not officially but publicly ; that is, in open, transparent discussion.
It is Maruyama Masao's claim that something like this happened; that the majority of Japanese intellectuals formed what he calls a "community of contrition" (kaikonkyodotai[*] ).[16] He sees this community as functioning through 1960—breaking up after the anti—Security Treaty demonstrations that brought down Kishi Nobusuke but failed to prevent the treaty from taking effect. This, Maruyama seems to feel, was the last act of engaged and organized political subjectivity, and the (premature?) end, of the "community of contrition."
In another sense, the community of contrition came to an end sooner, perhaps by 1952. To put it another way, its internal contradictions combined with the rightward shift in Occupation policy to prevent its full potential from being realized. How was this so? We have already seen that the "community"—what we have termed postwar public discourse—was composed of two separable groups. On the one hand were Marxists, some of them Party members, many sympathizers; and on the other "modernists," who, while they incorporated and built upon Marxist categories and insights, were not historical materialists and felt no political bond to the Party or to the USSR. (This is not to deny the sense of moral identification many modernists felt with the cause of the left to combat counterrevolution, as witness the extensive discussion of contemporary fascism in journals such as Shiso[*] and Sekai .)
These constituencies, indeed Japan as a whole, were immediately and profoundly affected by the great political movements of the second half of the 1940s: the coming to power of Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and, under vastly different circumstances, of Mao Zedong in mainland China, along with the reintegration of the "Free" or capitalist world order under the domination of the United States. First of all, occupation authorities had begun to issue warning signs even in 1946 that
they would not tolerate what they regarded as a communist-controlled labor movement. Indeed, the banning of the general strike in early 1947, amidst a still desperate economic situation, was a body blow to the entire left.[17] Continuing with its "lovable Party" line (first enunciated by Nozaka Sanzo[*] ), the Party struggled to remain at the head of the democratic labor movement. But with mounting repression after 1948, culminating in the "Red Purge" of 1950, this became problematic in the extreme. (Indeed, MacArthur sought to make the Party once more illegal.) More telling, however, was the fragmentation of the leadership and the Party generally brought about when in 1950 the Cominform condemned Nozaka's "lovable Party" deviationism and demanded a more militant confrontation with the occupying powers and the Japanese state. The Party officially accepted the criticism, and followed it up with a period of attempted terrorism. This cost it much mass support, and the end of the Occupation found the Party in tatters, its leadership underground and its policies discredited. The Party had moreover presented to the public a most unedifying example of Stalinism in action by truckling to every instruction emanating from Moscow.
This harsh judgment is mitigated somewhat when we consider just how dramatically the political climate changed after 1947. The entire period from 1947 to 1952 was stamped by SCAP's definitive renunciation of some of its earliest, and in context most radical, reforms. This was particularly the case with labor organization. Communists, as we have noted, were expelled from public and private sector unions, and the Party as a whole was driven from public life by 1950. But much more was at stake: experiments in production control and with worker councils were halted as capital regained the initiative. Zaibatsu dissolution was, of course, abandoned as harmful to capitalist reconstruction. Conservatives in Japan were no doubt relieved to be able to identify themselves as "liberals" and observe that radical policies that had "gone too far" were now being reversed. Indeed, the "logic of capital" had by the early 1950s fully displaced the "logic of labor." Especially symbolic in this regard was the vastly expanded influence of two organizations: Keidanren—the Federation of Economic Organizations, and Nikkeiren—the Federation of Japanese Employers' Associations. The former was founded in 1946, but its functions were restricted to liaisons between individual economic organizations. In time, and particularly after 1952, it became the chief means by which industry and business articulated with the Diet and official bureaucracy. In this role it far over-shadowed the labor organizations that had once found favor with Mac-
Arthur. The story of Nikkeiren is similar. American authorities would not at first permit even the formation of such a body. By 1947 it had reversed this policy, and Nikkeiren soon came to represent "virtually all major Japanese enterprises." Under its leadership, and with the full cooperation of the government, Nikkeiren in 1948 spearheaded a drive to "Secure Management Authority," and in 1949 followed with a call to "Establish New Labor Relations." Union authority within the workplace was severely compromised in the name of worker "independence" from "outside" control, and at the national level, a revision of the 1945 Labor Union Law ratified the inversion of power relations between labor and capital.[18]
Just as the "reverse course" was not as sudden as it is sometimes described, so, too, its meaning is not clear-cut. We have already seen that the left was divided between Marxists (Communists, left-wing Socialists) and "modernists," and that each constituency was itself composed of overlapping groups representing different perspectives. Its unity was tenuous enough to begin with. We may say that the "reverse course" that unfolded after 1947 and reached its peak in 1950 meant not so much (or not only) that socialist revolution was made impossible, but that in general a strong, politically conscious, labor-based democratic opposition was blunted and canalized along enterprise lines. This was not inevitable. It was the result of conscious policy decisions within Allied GHQ, the Japanese government, and business circles. In industry, capitalism was to take precedence over democracy.
The unquestioned success of the land reform, meanwhile, created for the post-Occupation government a strong rural base, maintained without great difficulty in political tutelage once economic growth allowed some rechanneling of largesse to rural districts. This payoff constitutes one of the great successes of the postwar reforms, in terms both of social and economic equity and long-term political benefit.
The significance of the "reverse course" is greater still, for it is by no means certain that the basic task of "democratization" was complete by 1950. Contemporary accounts—not always sympathetic—suggest that after 1945, as at no other time, there was among the Japanese people a pervasive concern, almost a hunger, to explore questions of ideology and to participate in politics. Images of "students with empty bellies lined up in bookstores to buy works of philosophy and social science"[19] come to mind here, along with the names of a myriad of groups seeking
to try out their vocal chords in public: one thinks of the Seinen Bunka Kaigi (Youth Culture Conference), the Jiyu Konwa Kai[*] (Society for Free Discussion), smaller groups such as the Jinmin Bunka Domei[*] (People's Culture League) and the Nihon Bunkajin Renmei (League of Japanese Men of Culture). Particularly emblematic are the Minshushugi Kaga-kusha Kyokai[*] , or Minka (Association of Democratic Scientists), which drew members from prewar Marxist intellectual groups and metamorphosed into a Party front organization; the 20-seiki Kenkyujo[*] (20th Century Research Institute) and Shiso[*] no Kagaku Kenkyukai[*] (Association for Research into the Science of Thought), which (via certain segments of their membership) helped to introduce postwar American social science, especially social psychology and its underlying pragmatic philosophy, to a receptive Japanese audience.[20] We have already seen that intellectual lines and positions tended to overlap rather regularly at this point. It ought not to cause great surprise, then, to find on the roster of the Minka the name of Hayashi Kentaro[*] , later to become one of the staunchest of Japan's intellectual cold warriors. But we should not miss the larger point here, which is not the sometimes short life or confused political orientation of such organizations, but the impulse that gave them birth: "contrition" and the democratization of knowledge. These were the intertwined sentiments that gave public discourse its vitality. The real damage that may have been done by the hard rightward swing of the Occupation, and by the left to itself through its Staliinst tendencies, was to prevent the full realization of a profound popular desire to join the public world—even if, as for many, it meant missing a meal.
Yet neither GHQ, the subsequent Japanese governments, nor the Party—none of these organizations, however powerful—can alone be held responsible for this unrealized potential. In saying this I do not mean to imply that the armed force of an occupying power was something that could have been overcome, for example, in a "February Revolution" in 1947. (Indeed, it could legally have been mobilized to crush any popular insurrection until 1960.) But there are areas, less tangible to be sure, for which public men and the "community of contrition" were responsible, and that bear some consideration here.
I have in mind two problems: the extent and quality of "contrition," and a broader claim, differently expressed and with differing political implications, that Japanese intellectuals are somehow unable or unwilling to put their theory into "practice"; that they live vicariously in a
world of imported concepts that bear little relation to the social reality around them and are therefore easily replaceable when their dissonance with reality becomes (politically) inconvenient, suspect, or otherwise unacceptable.
Clearly the two problems are bound up with each other. As we have seen, postwar public discourse began with "contrition" for the excesses of an absolutized ideology of national community, and with a corresponding embrace of universal values. The forms of contrition and embrace were, of course, not uniform. "Contrition" and the embrace of "universal" values seemed frequently to involve discrete gestures and organizations. Partly this had to do with the "Red Purge" and the assault on labor unions thought to be controlled by the Party. But there were also internal dynamics—ideological and political conflict—that acted as a brake on long-term unity. Thus the opposition parties came to sponsor their own forces in the labor and peace movements separately; within these movements, too, forces seeking independence of the parties also emerged. The idea of forming loose, self-sustaining networks for social and political action was not powerful—at least until the advent of Beheiren in the late 1960s. Thereafter, too, the citizens' and antipollution movements have had to contend with the problem of fragmentation and narrowness of perspective.
But let us return to the expression of "contrition" in the early postwar years. More characteristic of early "contrition" was the exaltation by fallen leftists of the Communist Party to the exclusion of any criticism. They would not fall again! Alternatively there was the call for so-zange[*] , a collective/summary metanoia or confession in which the entire nation would unite as one in repentance of its sins and dedicate itself to the promotion of peace.
We must be careful here, however. On religious and philosophical grounds, there were serious attempts to confront the implications many intellectuals drew from Japan's brutal aggression and defeat, and from their own self-acknowledged involvement in, or impotence to prevent, what had happened. One such is Tanabe Hajime's Zangedo[*] toshite no tetsugaku (Philosophy as metanoetics), a work published in 1946 but completed in 1944, "as the nation [sank] deeper and deeper into hell." Certainly the issue of a philosopher's responsibility for the implications, not to mention the distortion and misappropriation, of his thought is extremely contentious. In this case the difficulty lies in Tanabe's concept of the "logic of species" (shu no ronri ), which Nanbara Shigeru—in Kokka to shukyo[*] —and a number of postwar critics charged was an
elaborate rationalization for Japanese statolatry. Beginning in 1935, Tanabe wrote of "species"—as opposed to genus or individual—as "the most immediate ground of being . . . a concrete substrate in terms of which the individual formally actualizes its genus in history." As such, "species" represented the "radical irrationality of pure desire for life at the core of human consciousness, a desire defined by social conditions, . . . a social archetype." Here, it should be emphasized, social meant national; and as with Nishida Kitaro[*] , Tanabe came to see "a positive significance in acknowledging the emperor of Japan as a symbol of the sacredness of the nation." On the basis of this "logic of species," Tanabe went on to discuss, in terms of Henri Bergson's Two Sources of Morality and Religion , "how only an 'opening of species' to genus through the dialectical mediation of rationality has any hope of promoting freedom in history." In Zangedo[*] toshitenotetsugaku , Tanabe attempted to provide an existential ground for the confrontation by the individuals making up the species (i.e., himself and his fellow Japanese) of its collective sin, and in so doing, simultaneously to use philosophy to get "beyond philosophy." This, Tanabe was convinced, was his duty, as a philosopher, to the nation. Despite the inference—drawn by ultranationalists and their critics alike—that such notions as the logic of species reflected his espousal of aggressive, imperialist war, Tanabe's intent was quite otherwise. He had in fact sought to articulate a critique of "blind nationalism." Thus Tanabe did not regard his entire philosophical project as tainted, but believed it to contain the potential for its own transfiguration in confrontation with history. And he was willing, where Heidegger never was, to face the issue of the moral, social, and political meaning of his own act of philosophizing in the context of a malevolent particularism. Tanabe never intended the logic of species to mean the yielding of the individual moral sense or subjectivity to the state-as-nation, but seems to have realized that, in minds other than his own, it did foster precisely such abdication.[21]
So, too, ironically, for the so-zange[*] Tanabe enjoined on the Japanese people in his first postwar work. We have already seen that the need to face the reality of moral failure was apparent to him by 1944, and that any confrontation with it would be undertaken by individuals on the basis of the logic of species. But in its officially sponsored form, the call to repentance seems to have assumed the character of unconditional collective absolution. As Maruyama Masao noted in 1956, "There can be no doubt whatsoever that the 'collective repentance of 100,000,000' [i.e., national repentance] was in reality no more than a squid's jet of
black ink released by a ruling group facing a desperate situation."[22]So-zange[*] became a "blackwash" to evade the issue Tanabe sought to face. It dissolved all individual responsibility in a collective gesture meant more to foster domestic tranquility than to face the painful question of why the war was begun and how human beings act in wartime.
Softening American attitudes toward the whole question of war responsibility also had a role to play. The "reverse course" brought back into public life many who had been purged for their wartime activities. It became possible for certain intellectuals, uncomfortable with their past actions, to retreat into a practical collectivism in the interest of national reconstruction, to talk grandly about problems of "peace" and "democracy" without ever considering how their past and present were related. As I have said, neither official acts by the U.S. authorities nor any institutional approach would have been sufficient to sustain an inner compulsion among Japanese public men to face the past. Not sufficient—but they were necessary. It is my feeling that public forgetfulness, sometimes masked in confessional, sometimes practical, "get-on-with-life" terms, was countenanced for political reasons before the full dimensions of the issue were revealed. The atmosphere of "contrition" could not survive cooptation and repudiation by the highest authorities of state. In this respect the interests of conservative Japanese officials and those of the United States were identical.
This brings us finally to the connection between "contrition" and the dual problems of intellectual vicariousness and the failure of praxis on the part of public men. Unquestionably, certain long-term factors are at work here: these are the external origins of the infrastructure of the modern state in Japan and its political and intellectual "technology," and the position of public men as nationalizers of foreign models. One result of this nexus, as we have seen, is a vulnerability to appeals made by the state in the name of the national community, and a general tendency to reject positions of organized and confrontational "outsideness." This is not to deny that public outsiders have spoken passionately and persuasively on behalf of the good and decent life—one threatened by state incursions—of "everyday" people. In this sense, the "Nyozekan model" (if I may be forgiven the phrase) is very much alive. But whatever its virtues, this is a now nonconfrontational strategy that frequently, and explicitly, abjures any political intent. More specifically, publicness has tended to ramify with a bias toward the state. Liberalism, in the sense
of a "doubt that seeks to build fences around those in power, rather than bridges for them,"[23] has historically been weak in Japan. And it has not been easy for public men to maintain the independence of perspective that is vital to their work. My suspicion is that this difficulty has a great deal to do with the conditions under which Japan entered the modern world—rapidly, under external pressure, and driven by the state. I also suspect that Japan is not alone in this, and that something like the experience of its public men has been shared by others in similar societies. The weakness of the public sphere can be dangerous to any nation.
But will it always be such a struggle to support an independent public sphere? Will Japanese public men always shrink from confrontation with the state and "unauthorized" social practice, and therefore condemn themselves to intellectual vicariousness? Skepticism in this regard is not hard to understand. Consider the tempting symmetry of Takeuchi Yoshimi's sardonic observation, made in 1948:
In Japan, when ideas are out of line with reality we start afresh by abandoning our former principles and searching for others. Concepts are left high and dry, principles abandoned. . . . With increasing speed and intensity we junk what is old and adopt what is new. If liberalism doesn't work we try totalism [zentaishugi ]; if that doesn't work we turn to communism, and so on. We are bound to fail, but failure itself never fails. It is the mother of success. . . . Japanese ideology, in this sense, never fails. It is eternally successful by eternally failing. This is repeated ad infinitum. And that we call progress.[24]
I confess that I am not prepared here to defend or reject Takeuchi's sweeping claim as a whole. Maruyama Masao and Fujita Shozo[*] , among others, have in their own way voiced similar ideas: that the essence of the "Japanese spirit" is its emptiness; that it is the contentless "something that remains" when external, universal elements are (analytically) removed; a "logic" of eternal renewability, and so on.[25]
However, I am not persuaded that such a phenomenological observation captures the specificity of intellectual experience. It does not explain the "failure." I have tried to capture some of the specificity and explain some of the "failure" here, using the example of the modernists to suggest the sense of vacuousness of past values, the hope of future empowerment, and how that hope was defeated. I do not think that the fragmentation and subversion of the postwar public discourse represents simply a resurgent particularism. It was encouraged for political and other reasons by those who controlled Japan, was consonant with conservative sentiment outside the ruling circles, and afforded an easy way out of a still unresolved moral dilemma.
Who then stands as the "representative" public man? It seems that in terms of content, publicness in Japan continues to entail some attempt to mediate "universality" to the particular political and social nexus of Japan, but that the public sense has been weakened by its burden of bureaucratism and statism. I believe, following Ishida Takeshi, that the links of private individuals and groups to each other have grown tighter, but that this remains a "corporate privatism," exclusive rather than inclusive. The links of society to the public remain tenuous.[26] I would argue that this is true to a surprising degree even among the academic (and literary) "counterestablishment." Here, too, one must recognize important exceptions such as Oe Kenzaburo[*] , Oda Makoto, Takeuchi Yoshimi, and Takahashi Kazumi. The latter two, interestingly enough, were specialists in Chinese literature and admirers of Lu Xun.
The overall situation, however, fits well with the "administered society" (kanri shakai ) Japan has become. It is no accident that sophisticated administration, under the now four-decade long dominance of the bureaucratic/single-party complex, and stunning corporate prosperity since the late 1950s have brought Japan remarkable political stability. There is even a democratic glitter and playfulness in the accessibility in "hyper-urban" places like Tokyo, of safe, short-term escape from company, school, and family. There is "information" and all manner of intellectual and physical stimulation available everywhere. The Japanese are thoroughly "informed" about the world through highly centralized sources. The countryside, except for truly remote areas and others dependent on declining industries like coal mining (Yubari[*] in Hokkaido[*] , for example) is scarcely less wired. Perhaps, as Ishida notes, the democratic system, with its "peace constitution" and guaranteed rights, no longer appears as a "gift of the Occupation."[27] Indeed, the administrative (or in Robert Bellah's terms) "schoolmaster" state[28] is thoroughly atarimae . It is "deserved"; it is "obvious," as are the prosperity and stability it has brought. This is no mean achievement.
But in trying to answer our question, "Who is the representative public man?" we are faced with the fact that, in terms of what Ralf Dahrendorf calls "representative" (read "public," as opposed to "legitimative" activities), there is a singular sterility about the contemporary situation. One may cite the work of the antipollution activist Ui Jun as an example of genuine representative action: performed on behalf of others and contributing to the "reservoir of possible futures."[29] There must be local examples many times over of such individuals—indeed, real public vitality may depend on movement below the national level. But this in a
way proves the larger point: Ui must confront the system as a representative of its victims . He cannot claim to be part of a transparent public discourse. Yet this, if nothing else, was the promise of the "community of contrition."
Not so long ago the phrase datsu seiji —"connoting a trend toward 'depolitical' apathy"—came to the fore. It has remained apt.[30] Politically the country seems to be spinning its wheels, waiting on the one hand for the final triumph of the right, in the form of constitutional revision to renounce the renunciation of war, and on the other for the fragmented opposition to find some way out of its semiexile within the system. (I am not overlooking the important role played by opposition parties in keeping the LDP "in line," and preventing egregious abuses of its—as of 1986—commanding majority in the Diet.) The claim has been made that the Socialists are at work formulating a correct practical response, in the light of stepped-up and assiduous theoretical work, to the long series of electoral defeats that has marked the party's recent history.[31] Perhaps this may lead to something. For the moment, I cannot say from what quarter a renewal of the public sense in Japan will come. Perhaps it is always destined to be ephemeral, some kind of Durkheimian "collective effervescence." Perhaps we ought not to wish for the conditions that initially brought forth the "community of contrition" to emerge again. On reflection, however, it is precisely such thinking—and the inclination to "leave things to the august authorities" (okami makase )—that led to disaster in the first place.
In the light of these observations, I would propose that we may view two public men as representative of the postwar period. I begin with the majority report. This would be the ex-Marxist, long-time pragmatist Shimizu Ikutaro[*] , who as an insider at Tokyo Imperial tapped the mobilized intellectual energies of the "national emergency" to pioneer social psychology; as an opinion-leading journalist was heavily influential in discussions of the problems of "peace" and "democracy" in the immediate postwar years; ushered in the theory of mass society in the 1950s, and Daniel Bell's "end of ideology" somewhat later; finally turning after the mass demonstrations against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty of 1960 to the explicit defense of the democratic system that was and is the status quo. At first glance, Shimizu seems to embody the eternally renewable "Japanese ideology" criticized by Takeuchi Yoshimi. But where is the failure? Shimizu has been a trendsetter. One would have little difficulty in showing, furthermore, that Shimizu's intellectual peripeties are not fundamentally different from those, say, of Sidney Hook, Norman
Podhoretz, Michael Novak, or any of a number of neoconservative thinkers in the United States. Perhaps "Japanese ideology" here means a capacity to see the virtues of corporate and multinational capitalism and consumerism without (as yet) any overt official militarism—although Shimizu has leanings in this direction as well.[32] In any case, in his moves back and forth between representative and legitimative activities, and his apparent settlement on the latter, Shimizu seems one effective symbol of public discourse in Japan as it has developed over the past four decades.
I close with a somewhat longer minority report. This comes best, I believe, from Maruyama Masao. We have already glimpsed something of his chief problematic, which differed from Shimizu's in a number of respects even as they cooperated in such groups as the 20th Century Research Institute. Let me say something about what makes Maruyama a "minority," though certainly not a "minor," thinker.[33]
Maruyama owed his once commanding position in the social science firmament to his consistent, intellectually informed commitment to the inculcation of political subjectivity in Japan, and to the explosive creativity of his conceptual formulations. His 1946 essay on the "theory and psychology of ultranationalism" was virtually physical in its impact on readers as it overturned everyday reality by breaking the code in which all discourse on the emperor system had been conducted for so long. In seeking to expose the "pathology" of Japan's ideological "slavery" under that system, Maruyama's text employed (as Victor Koschmann notes)[34] an almost coercive irony. In a sense, this irony, and an insistence on the ubiquity of spiritual subservience among the Japanese people, placed an unbridgeable gulf between Maruyama and his audience. This was a source of great strength. He was ever the magister . He exploited (and I mean no cheap criticism here) his insideness to the hilt. Maruyama the enlightener met the hunger for empowering knowledge—not just for "information" as in later decades—in a way few others in the early postwar years could emulate.
A good deal of Maruyama's credibility, I think, stemmed from the fact that he was not a "pure" insider à la Nanbara. His father, Maruyama Kanji, was a prominent liberal journalist and close associate of Hasegawa Nyozekan. Along with the influence of his father, Hasegawa Nyozekan's attitude toward the state, his ability to draw out the significance of a detail or episode, and, concretely, his analysis of "Japanese fascism"—all these informed Maruyama's outlook. It is not an indifferent piece of petite histoire , then, that Maruyama, at a crucial mo-
ment, combined in his own work the two streams of "insider" and "outsider" publicness represented by Nanbara and Hasegawa Nyozekan respectively. This is what gave his texts their appeal, and explains why the gulf that he (like Nanbara and unlike Hasegawa) created, worked in his favor. Maruyama portrayed himself as an intellectual, a public man, who was in the system but not of it.
And here precisely was the problem. Could that really be true? Could he really be so involved and so distant at the same time? (No wonder he was dubbed "Maruyama Tenno[*] ".) It seems that he could not. Maruyama reacted defensively and only piecemeal to the criticism that he was slow to acknowledge the deep implication of public men in Japan's mobilization for, and execution of, total war. There seemed to be a blind spot in his analyses of "Japanese fascism." He alluded only briefly and obliquely, for example, to the roles of his senior colleagues Royama Masamichi[*] and Yabe Teiji as "theorists" of the New Order. He scarcely acknowledged the existence of the Showa Kenkyukai[*] . One reason may be that attacks on intellectuals were motivated by a desire, or at least served, to deflect attention away from others who were more "responsible"—members of the ruling elite on the one hand, prewar Communists on the other. Although "responsibility" did not mean the same thing in these cases—one involving execution, the other failure to foresee and prevent—Maruyama claimed that there was more to be said on this score before the war responsibility of intellectuals became a central issue. The evasive tone (at least for this reader) is inescapable.[35]
Over the years, Maruyama has made an effort to address this question. But it has come in the context of a broader discussion of the intellectual as "organization man" (as Koschmann puts it), and much reading between the lines must be done. I would not expect anything on the order of his early postwar analyses to emerge. The larger point seems to be that in modern, technologically capable societies, public men will in one way or another be involved professionally in any undertaking that requires a massive mobilization of a nation's resources. In future total wars, victory and defeat may become indistinguishable. But until now, defeat in such conflicts has for the vanquished meant the repudiation and transformation (sometimes through domestic revolution) of entire political, social, and cultural systems. Certainly this was the case for Japan in 1945. Defeat and occupation became the occasion for a radical self-questioning that took on a significance of its own, raising historical and moral questions of unparalleled urgency.
It is for this reason that one looks at the blank spot in Maruyama's
work with regret. "Who, in later times, will be able to understand that we had to fall again into the darkness after we had once known the light?"[36]
Some brief reflection, in the light of Maruyama's work, on the question of whether public man is synonymous with organization man seems fitting here. Maruyama has restricted much of his analysis to Japan, insisting that there remains unsolved for Japan a special problem of detaching from universal its persistent identification with what is foreign to Japan. I do not wish to refute this point, which seems quite valid. But one may still ask whether Maruyama is not to be numbered among those who would subscribe to Peter Nettl's dictum: "As modernity advances, the intellectual retreats."[37] This is not, I think, a moral judgment so much as a lament and call to arms. Maruyama seems to me to have responded to that call at a time when many others in Japan, knowingly or not, were retreating. Valid criticisms can and should be made of Maruyama, as of all public men. But they should be made in recognition of his special "minority" status as a defender of what was most valuable in postwar public discourse: the commitment to open political process, to clarity in public matters, to freedom of thought and action.
Modern societies have been marked by the great, if contested, incorporation of public men into highly sophisticated structures of power, administration, and communication. This has not meant subservience only. Vast potential for the sharing and actualization of knowledge awaits participants in public discourse. But this will demand an independence of perspective and a commitment to free activity. It is not clear that we understand how this independence is to be preserved.