Past and Present-2012-Conrad-181-214

‘THE COLONIAL TIES ARE

LIQUIDATED’: MODERNIZATION THEORY, POST-WAR JAPAN AND THE GLOBAL COLD WAR*

From 29 August to 2 September 1960, thirty-one eminent scholars congregated for the ‘Conference on Modern Japan’ in Hakone, a small hot-springs resort town just outside Tokyo, in the vicinity of Mount Fuji. The event was organized by the University of Michigan historian John W. Hall and others, and it included many prominent names in the contemporary Japanese humanities and social sciences, and their counterparts from other countries, mainly the United States. On the agenda were three days of intensive discussion on the issue of ‘modernization’ in general and, more specifically, in the Japanese context. The conference was to be, in hindsight and owing to the major and influential publications issuing from five following meetings, a foundational moment for the introduction of modernization theory to Japan.

Moreover, the conference was staged as a political project, as part of the active promotion and dissemination of a new developmental ideology. The conference coincided with the arrival of the new American ambassador to Japan, Edwin O. Reischauer. Reischauer was a noted scholar of Japanese studies at Harvard University, and he took part in the conference, using the communications machine provided by his position to popularize and spread the new ideas. The export of modernization theory was part of a larger US strategy in the global Cold War. Both the Hakone meeting and the subsequent summer seminars were funded by the Ford Foundation, whose area-studies programme

* I am grateful to the audience of the conference on ‘Transnational History in a Globalized World’, Oxford University, 9–10 September 2010, and in particular to the conveners Rana Mitter and Matthew Hilton; I also thank Nadin He´e for help in procuring primary materials. This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MEST) (AKS-2012-DZZ-3103).

Past and Present, no. 216 (Aug. 2012) The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2012

doi:10.1093/pastj/gts007

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was designed only after intense negotiations with various government bodies, among them the Central Intelligence Agency.1

Within a few years, modernization theory emerged as one of the most influential paradigms in the historiography of Japan — not only in the United States, but also in Japan itself. Against the background of an economic upturn and entry into a phase of rapid growth (koˆdo seichoˆ), a growing number of historians, not only those of conservative and pro-US bent, came to view modernization theory as a fully adequate approach to their interpretations of the Japanese past. Marxist historians in Japan, however, were highly critical of the new paradigm and denounced it as a form of cultural imperialism.2

Harry Harootunian has likewise described this collusion of geopolitics and scholarly influence as ‘a new stage of imperialism and colonialism without territorialization’. Modernization theory ‘prompted Japanese to incorporate American expectations to fulfil a narrative about themselves, produced by others, elsewhere’. From this perspective, the Hakone conference was just a symbol of intellectual dependence and of the asymmetries of knowledge production under US hegemony. As Japanese historians adopted modernization theory, they essentially incorporated a US image of Japan and formulated it as a self-realization: ‘What I would like to suggest’, Harootunian concludes, ‘is that America’s Japan became Japan’s Japan’.3

What I would like to suggest here, however, is that things were more complicated. In understanding intellectual exchange under conditions of globality, we need to go beyond a quest for its origins. The appeal of the modernization paradigm in Japan cannot be reduced to conspiracy, funding strategies and American supremacy in East Asia, important though these were. In line with recent attempts to read post-war history within a global historical framework, we need to place the reconfiguration of Japanese

1See Bruce Cumings, ‘Boundary Displacement: The State, the Foundations, and Area Studies during and after the Cold War’, in Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (eds.), Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies (Durham, NC, 2002), esp. 272.

2The critical perspectives on modernization theory in Japan are well summarized in Kinbara Samon, ‘Nihon kindaika’ ron no rekishizoˆ: sono hihanteki kentoˆ e no shiten [The View of History of the Theory of ‘Japanese Modernization’: Elements of a Critical Appraisal] (Tokyo, 1968).

3H. D. Harootunian, ‘America’s Japan/Japan’s Japan’, in Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (eds.), Japan in the World (Durham, NC, 1993), 200, 215.

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‘modernization’ within larger, transnational settings.4 I argue that the specific moment in which the Hakone conference was held, and indeed the longer history of debates about modernity in Japan since the inter-war period, were deeply shaped by transnational entanglements. And, crucially, the introduction of modernization theory in the 1960s was part of the global Cold War situation — a situation that in Japan was defined, apart from the presence of the United States, by the recent loss (and subsequent disregard) of empire.

I

MODERNIZATION, US HEGEMONY AND THE GLOBAL COLD WAR

In the 1960s, modernization theory emerged as a purportedly universal discourse on the trajectories of social transformation. The rhetoric of modernization — and, almost interchangeably, of development — became virtually ubiquitous, and social actors across the globe were able to adapt it to their own claims and agenda. The idea of modernization was heir to Enlightenment notions of social improvement and betterment, and to the nineteenth-century ideology of progress. As an ideology of practice, it had precursors in projects of social engineering since the 1920s, and also in parts of the American New Deal programme. But only in the post-war period were the different strands of developmental thinking transformed into a coherent framework that had both analytical purchase in the social sciences and a palpable impact on projects of political intervention.5 The fusion of theoretical approach and political agenda was epitomized by Walt Whitman Rostow’s seminal publication The Stages of Economic Growth, which presented modernization as

4For example Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, 2005); David Reynolds, One World Divisible: A Global History since 1945 (London, 2000); Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, Mass., 2008).

5On the origins of modernization theory in the United States, see Nils Gilman,

Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, 2003). On the notion of modernization in the Cold War world, see Michael H. Hunt, The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance

(Chapel Hill, 2007); Westad, Global Cold War; David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, 2010).

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a universal project of social transformation: ‘We are’, believed Rostow, ‘in the midst of a great world revolution’.6

The conditions of emergence of modernization theory were as global as its reach. On the one hand, the theory helped carve out a US position in relation to the global divide of the Cold War. Tellingly, Rostow’s book bore the subtitle A Non-Communist Manifesto. Modernization theory was built on the belief that liberal, democratic capitalism constituted the telos of history, and was thus framed explicitly against the ideological claims of the Soviet Union — even if it was, in many ways, premised on identical notions of development, making modernization ‘a kind of capitalist mirror image’ of Leninism.7 On the other hand, and this is less acknowledged, modernization theory was also an immediate response to the decolonization process. Politically it was designed to persuade newly independent countries ‘that it is better to be in our economic orbit than in the Soviet orbit — to put it brutally’, as CIA chief Allen Dulles stated at a conference in 1954.8 Modernization, recalled Robert Bellah, ‘was a process that produces all the good things: democracy, abundance — in short, a good society. Like ours’.9 Ideologically, modernization served as substitute for the civilizing mission now obsolete in the era of Bandung. Its proponents represented it as an anti-imperialist and non-racist alternative to the older ideologies of empire. Henceforth, the ‘white man’s burden’ had to be shouldered by the post-colonial nations themselves — if with a little help from their friends in Harvard and the State Department.10

While it thus bore the imprint of global entanglements, the notion of modernization, as it was presented at Hakone, was

6Max F. Millikan and W. W. Rostow, A Proposal: Key to an Effective Foreign Policy

(New York, 1957), 2. See also W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (New York, 1960).

7Nils Gilman, ‘Modernization Theory, the Highest Stage of American Intellectual History’, in David C. Engerman et al. (eds.), Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst, 2003), 50.

8Cited in Mark H. Haefele, ‘Walt Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth: Ideas and Action’, in Engerman et al. (eds.), Staging Growth, 84.

9Robert Bellah, ‘Introduction to the Paperback Edition’, in his Tokugawa Religion: The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan (New York, 1985), p. xii.

10On continuities of imperialist discourse in modernization theory, see Dean C. Tipps, ‘Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, xv (1973); Michael Adas, ‘Modernization Theory and the American Revival of the Scientific and Technological Standards of Social Achievement and Human Worth’, in Engerman et al. (eds.),

Staging Growth.

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also a particularly US concern. It was deeply embedded in the domestic politics of the United States, and could be seen as a larger national project by which the country defined its post-war role, and itself. Indeed, modernization theory can be interpreted as the global projection of a sense of mission that harked back to Manifest Destiny, and also to the New Deal — which, in the post-war period, lost its isolationist overtones. Not surprisingly, therefore, the models for development abroad were frequently derived from much closer to home, as Lyndon Johnson dreamed of building a Tennessee Valley Authority on the Mekong, and the Peace Corps trained volunteers for assignments in the Third World on Native American reservations and in New York slums.11 In the 1960s, US foreign policy became tightly connected to the agenda of modernization to legitimize development schemes, economic investment and political interventions.12

In this web of global ambitions, modernization theory entered into Latin America and many parts of Africa and Asia. In some cases, as in Taiwan, South Korea and Vietnam, it was introduced strategically with the intention of countering the appeal of communism. In others it was seized upon by local elites who felt compelled by the ‘possibility that modern life and improved living standards could be open to all, regardless of race or history of colonial subjugation’.13 In this context, what was the place of Japan? On the one hand, Japan was one of the United States’ closest Cold War allies. Politically, militarily and ideologically, Japan was the base from which US policy makers hoped to

11Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation Building’ in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, 2000), 147, 214. See also Fritz Fischer, Making Them like Us: Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s (Washington, DC, 1998); Robert Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World (Princeton, 1973); Kimber Charles Pearce, Rostow, Kennedy, and the Rhetoric of Foreign Aid (East Lansing, 2001); Ekbladh, Great American Mission, ch. 6.

12Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War

(Philadelphia, 2008); Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, 1987).

13Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (eds.), International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley, 1997), 9 (editors’ intro.). See also Mark Philip Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill, 2000); Gregg Andrew Brazinsky, ‘Koreanizing Modernization: Modernization Theory and South Korean Intellectuals’, in Engerman et al. (eds.), Staging Growth.

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carve out a position vis-a`-vis the communist countries in East Asia. On the other hand, in Japan the threat of ideological subversion was never entirely absent, in particular among a left-leaning intelligentsia. The importation of modernization theory to the country was thus infused with hopes for its stabilizing functions.14 More important, however, was the role of Japan as a test case, and indeed a showcase, for the theory more generally. Having barely escaped the fate of being colonized a mere century ago, and having just emerged from defeat and wartime destruction, post-war and high-growth Japan was formed into a model of development for others to follow. What was specific to the Japanese case was not only the speed of post-war growth, but also the fact that the transition from a feudal order to democracy and capitalism had taken place — at least that was the dominant reading — without major disruptions and, most importantly, without a social revolution. Within the tripartite order of the Cold War, Japan became a beacon which was supposed to light the way for the countries of the Third World in their quest to arrive in the First without recourse to the revolutionary strategies of the Second.

This peculiar role ascribed to Japan was one of the reasons for the lavish funding that US universities received for their East Asia programmes. The newly established area studies were designed to train academic and political experts, and to furnish the empirical evidence for the sweeping claims of the modernization paradigm. Between 1953 and 1966, the Ford Foundation alone poured the astonishing sum of $270 million into thirty-four US universities in order to build up their areaand language-study programmes. The Hakone conference was a crucial part of this large-scale endeavour.15

14For post-war Japanese–US relations, see John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York, 1999); Richard B. Finn, Winners in Peace: MacArthur, Yoshida, and Postwar Japan (Berkeley, 1992); Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York, 1985).

15Cumings, ‘Boundary Displacement’, 272.

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II

JAPAN IN 1960 AND MARXISM AS ‘OUR TRUE FOE’

The Hakone conference was held at a very specific moment in Japan’s post-war history.16 Both politically and academically, the US modernizers encountered a society deeply riven with conflicts. Indeed the year 1960 saw violent clashes over the future direction of the country when thousands of Japanese took to the streets in protest against the renewal of the revised US–Japan Security Treaty. The so-called Anpo protests marked a political watershed in post-war Japan, prefiguring many of the later demonstrations by the student movement and against the Vietnam War, and initiating a paradigm shift in social movements away from class struggle and towards decentralized forms of popular grass-roots activism. The multifaceted opposition directed its criticism at the close alliance with the United States in the bipolar world of the Cold War, symbolized by the US military bases established on the Japanese archipelago during the occupation years. But more fundamentally, the protests were also an expression of popular fears about the return of undemocratic rule, personified in the then prime minister, Kishi Nobusuke, a former wartime cabinet member and convicted Class-A war criminal. The violent clashes in the streets in the summer of 1960 not only brought down the Kishi cabinet and led to the cancellation of the planned visit of US president Eisenhower, but also established the issue of democracy as the primary concern of public debate.17

The Anpo conflicts shook Japan, and they were contemporaneous with major controversies in the academy. More specifically, the social upheaval came at a time when the post-war hegemony of Marxism in history and the social sciences was seriously challenged for the first time. Historical materialism had emerged as the dominant influence on the interpretation of Japanese history in the wake of military surrender. During the war, Marxist

16The best accounts of the Hakone conference are Victor Koschmann, ‘Modernization and Democratic Values: The ‘‘Japanese Model’’ in the 1960s’, in Engerman et al. (eds.), Staging Growth; Stefan Tanaka, ‘Objectivism and the Eradication of Critique in Japanese History’, in Miyoshi and Harootunian (eds.),

Learning Places.

17George R. Packard III, Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960

(Princeton, 1966); Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar Japan (Honolulu, 2001).

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thought had been suppressed and most of its representatives banned from the academy. After 1945, the tide turned and Marxism now appeared as the only intellectual current that was not implicated in the nationalist propaganda of the war years. For this reason, the US occupying army co-operated readily with Marxist intellectuals. Its officers treated the Marxist opposition as welcome allies against what they saw as fascist elements in Japanese society. The Japanese Communist Party, in turn, greeted the US forces as liberators from wartime oppression. The social reforms initiated by the occupation were hailed by some Japanese Marxist historians as the moment of a bourgeois revolution in Japan.

In these first years after the war, then, Japanese politics witnessed an unlikely coalition of US occupation politics and Marxist intellectual discourse. At the universities this resulted in the displacement of the most ardent representatives of a nationalist historiography. In their stead, Marxist economists and historians were soon called back to the institutions that had displaced them a decade before; within a few years, their interpretation of modern Japanese history was well established as the leading paradigm in Japanese historiography.18

The mutual understanding between occupation forces and Marxist intellectuals vanished after 1948 when the so-called ‘reverse course’ shifted the focus of occupation politics from social reform and establishing democracy to economic recovery and the incorporation of Japan into an anti-communist front in East Asia.19 But within the academy, Marxist approaches remained hegemonic and virtually unchallenged for another decade. Left-wing historians, and in particular Marxists, set the agenda of the main debates about the nation’s past: the Meiji Restoration as an incomplete bourgeois revolution; feudal remnants in Japanese society and the long-term origins of fascism; Japanese modernity and the fundamental laws of world history. Essentially, Japanese history was depicted as a deviant path, drawing on a vocabulary of incomplete transitions, time lags, deficiencies, pathology and lack. Many Marxist historians main-

18For the development of post-war Japanese historiography, see Sebastian Conrad,

The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century (Berkeley, 2010).

19See Howard B. Schonberger, Aftermath of War: Americans and the Remaking of Japan, 1945–1952 (Kent, Ohio, 1989).

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tained close relations with Japan’s Communist Party and viewed their scholarship as integrally related to issues of social reform.20 Only in the late 1950s did the situation begin to change, and the dominance of Marxist interpretations came gradually under attack. This had to do with trends inside the academy, as younger scholars began to criticize the established macro-historical paradigm of class conflict and stages of development, and began to make a case for a history ‘from below’.21 But the challenge to Marxist hegemony was also conditioned by larger transformations: the critique of Stalin and the insurrection in Hungary in 1956 compelled both the Communist Party and Marxist historians to engage in re-evaluations of the political situation and of historical interpretation. At the same time, the Japanese economy had embarked on a course of staggering growth. In 1956 the government declared the post-war period at an end (mohaya sengo dewa nai ), as economic success once again reached pre-war levels. The major cultural journals devoted special issues to the end of the post-war period. These developments made the Marxists’ claim that a proper bourgeois revolution, and indeed modernity,

were yet to appear in Japan seem increasingly implausible.22 But even if Marxist historians were thus on the defensive, in

1960 their positions were still well entrenched. In the course of the Anpo protests, numerous intellectuals had joined with the Communist Party in resisting a policy they viewed as an expression of renewed US imperialism. Also, increasingly, Japanese intellectuals on the left looked to the example of Communist China as an inspiration. No wonder, then, that the newly appointed Edwin O. Reischauer regarded modernization theory as directed against the Marxist conception of history underlying the Anpo protests and the political milieu of the Japanese left. Just as Reischauer’s father had participated in the State Department planning for the occupation of Japan, he was now plotting a second occupation — not physical, but of the minds of the Japanese

20Toˆyama Shigeki, Sengo no rekishigaku to rekishi ishiki [Historical Studies and Historical Consciousness in Post-War Japan] (Tokyo, 1968); Nagahara Keiji, Rekishigaku josetsu [An Introduction to Japanese Historiography] (Tokyo, 1978).

21Carol Gluck, ‘The People in History: Recent Trends in Japanese Historiography’, Jl Asian Studies, xxxviii (1978); Haga Noboru, Minshuˆshi no soˆzoˆ [The Birth of Minshuˆshi — History from Below] (Tokyo, 1974).

22J. Victor Koschmann, ‘Intellectuals and Politics’, in Andrew Gordon (ed.),

Postwar Japan as History (Berkeley, 1993).

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elites. The conference in Hakone, for him, was an academic instrument in the service of an anti-communist East Asia policy. And even if discussions in Hakone did not address the alleged communist threat explicitly, for Reischauer, at least, it was always present. His interpretations of history were part of an intellectual containment strategy in East Asia. ‘This classical Marxism is our true foe in Japan’, he wrote. ‘I have never shirked from an opportunity to inflict a blow against it. Of course, one does not use such words. The words I do use are: ‘‘Taking on a new view of history’’’. Arguing publicly for this revisionist view of history continued to be one of Ambassador Reischauer’s most important activities in Tokyo in the following years.23

III

HAKONE

Events at Hakone were thus in many ways overdetermined and highly contentious. The organizers therefore took particular care to convey the impression that the conference was strictly and exclusively scholarly. They resisted the ‘considerable interest in the Conference’ that had been ‘expressed by various news agencies, government offices, and individuals’ and limited participation to the invited academics.24 Moreover, in order to avoid any signs of intellectual imperialism, the conference was to be ‘the first truly international gathering in which Japanese served as the official language’ — a decision that was perceived, on the part of the Japanese scholars, as ‘epoch-making (kakkiteki )’.25 But undue political pressures were not the only concern. The organizing committee was also at pains to delimit the intellectual and social spheres, and to protect the all-male scholarly community

23Cited in Harootunian, ‘America’s Japan/Japan’s Japan’, 207. On Reischauer, see George R. Packard, Edwin O. Reischauer and the American Discovery of Japan (New York, 2010).

24International House of Japan, Tokyo, material-ID 10311495 (hereafter IHJ), Conference memo: ‘John W. Hall to Participants in the Hakone Conference on Modernization’.

25Marius B. Jansen (ed.), Changing Japanese Attitudes toward Modernization

(Princeton, 1965), 4 (editor’s intro.); Kawashima Takeyoshi, ‘Kindai Nihonshi no shakai kagakuteki kenkyuˆ: 1960nen Hakone kaigi no kansoˆ’ [Social Science Research on Modern Japanese History: Impressions from the Hakone Conference in 1960], Shisoˆ, cdxlii (1961), 483. In the end, however, language differences turned out to be a larger issue than anticipated.

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