Past and Present-2012-Conrad-181-214

orthodoxy. Soon the fusion of Marx and Weber championed in

ˆ

particular by Otsuka and his followers (‘Marx Weber’, as some scholars called it) established itself as one of the leading paradigms not only in historical studies but also in other social sciences.58

The so-called ‘modernists’ shared many assumptions and concerns with their Marxist colleagues, even if the two groups were perceived as competitors in the academic marketplace, and even if ‘modernists’ were treated as principal opponents by many Marxist historians. Their meta-narratives of the Japanese past were in many ways similar, as they portrayed an incomplete, skewed and belated transformation into a fully modern society. But while Marxist analyses focused on social and economic structures and the extra-economic constraints such as absolutist rule that had hindered the full blossoming of modernity in Japan,

ˆ

Otsuka’s Weberian approach led him to identify the causes for what he considered Japan’s deviant path elsewhere: in the remnants of ‘patriarchal dominance’ which had prevented the development of the kind of entrepreneurial spirit to which Weber had attributed the emergence of capitalism in Europe. The focus was thus very much on the cultural, and even psychological, preconditions for the development of a modern mentality, and on what

ˆ

Otsuka called the ‘modernization of the modern type of human being’ (ningen ruikei no kindaika).59

August 1960, then, was by no means the founding moment for a Weberian Japan, pace the triumphalist tones of the protagonists in Hakone. A Weberian paradigm was already well established before it reappeared via its Parsonian (and US) detour. In fact, the Japanese reception of Max Weber dates back to the early 1920s, when scholars in the fields of economic history and sociology cultivated a broad interest in Weber’s work. The Japanese reading of Weber was structured, to some extent, by the earlier impact of Karl Marx, and by the extended ‘controversy on Japanese capitalism’ (Nihon shihonshugi ronsoˆ) that erupted

ˆ

in the Historiography of the Otsuka School], Shisoˆ, dxlvii (1970) and dxlviii (1970). 59 For the post-war intellectual debates, see Andrew E. Barshay, The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions (Berkeley, 2004). For an intro-

ˆ

duction to the work of Otsuka, see Horst Arnold-Kanamori, Der Menschentyp als Produktivkraft: zu einem Aspekt der Max-Weber-Interpretation des japanischen

ˆ

Wirtschaftshistorikers Otsuka Hisao (Tokyo, 1992).

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among economists and social scientists in the 1920s and 1930s. The discussion among Japanese scholars, many of them educated at German universities, was conducted against a background not only of domestic political considerations, but also of Comintern strategies for global revolution, intra-Soviet conflicts that pitted Stalin and Bukharin against Trotsky, and the traumatic split between Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Communists in 1927. It is no exaggeration to say that for quite some time, Weberian scholarship was a handmaiden of essentially Marxist debates. Scholars employed Weberian categories in order to come to terms with the peculiarities of Japanese capitalism that the Marxist narrative axiomatically presupposed.60

The second major context of the early engagement with Max Weber in Japan was the wartime mobilization in the early 1940s.

ˆ

In these years, scholars such as Otsuka and Maruyama incorporated Weberian categories into their analyses of Japanese society. Again, the modes of appropriation were informed by the larger political and intellectual conditions of the time. As banal and selfevident as such a historicization may seem, this is hardly a trivial

ˆ

observation, given the iconic status of both Otsuka and Maruyama as founding figures of the post-war democratic departure. But recent studies have brought to the fore the extent to which their work — the symbol of the clean break with a contaminated past — had genealogies in the debates about mobilization during

ˆ

wartime. Otsuka’s search for a modern self, for example, while driven by his Weberian quest for entrepreneurial ethos, was also framed by the general mobilization of the Japanese people by the

ˆ

state. ‘We need to know’, Otsuka proclaimed in 1944, ‘that the emerging new economic ethics [ethos] is . . . based on individual responsibility for responding to the expansion of productivity

60 Uchida Yoshiaki, Weˆbaˆ to Marukusu: Nihon shakai kagaku no shisoˆ koˆzoˆ [Weber and Marx: Structures of Thinking in the Japanese Social Sciences] (Tokyo, 1976); Wolfgang Schwentker, Max Weber in Japan: eine Untersuchung zur Wirkungsgeschichte, 1905–1995 (Tu¨bingen, 1998); Wolfgang Schwentker, ‘The Spirit of Modernity: Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and Japanese Social Sciences’, Jl Classical Sociology, v (2005); Germaine A. Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan

(Princeton, 1986); Kojima Hinehisa, Nihon shihon shugi ronsoˆ shi [History of the Debate on Japanese Capitalism] (Tokyo, 1976). See also Gu¨nther Distelrath, Die japanische Produktionsweise: zur wissenschaftlichen Genese einer stereotypen Sicht der japanischen Wirtschaft (Munich, 1996).

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demanded by the ‘‘totality’’ [the state]’.61 In his post-war texts, he replaced reference to the state with the incorporation of individual subjectivity into structures of national economy. But it

ˆ

is hard to deny that Otsuka’s post-war project of mobilizing the people with a call for enlightenment rationality, internalized selfdiscipline and modern subjectivity was in some ways building upon, and even continuous with, his earlier notion of modernity as the product of economic subjects supporting total war.62

ˆ

Whether Otsuka’s trajectory proves the ‘complicity between totalitarianism and liberalism’, as has been claimed, need not be our primary concern.63 It is sufficient to record here that notions of modernization inspired by Max Weber’s categories had a long pre-Hakone history, each intimately tied up with changing transnational configurations. This history continued to shape, and overdetermine, the intellectual constellation in which Weber was introduced again, this time from the United States. Indeed, in some ways, the Hakone version of modernization theory essentially translated many of the earlier concerns of Weber-influenced scholarship into the context of the 1960s, and thus into high-growth Japan. As a result, the general narrative of peculiarity was left intact, but the ‘lack’ and the ‘distortions’ were now read as ‘fullness’. What Hakone did achieve, then, was to give this master narrative the imprint of an internationally

Mobilization, Subjectivity and Post-War Responsibility] (Tokyo, 2001), for example

nendai kara no kiseki’ [Wartime Mobilization and Post-War Enlightenment: Situating

ˆ

Otsuka and Weber since the 1930s], Shisoˆ, dccclxxxii (1997).

63 J. Victor Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (Chicago, 1996), 169. For a similar debate in the case of German social history, see Winfried Schulze and Otto Gerhard Oexle (eds.), Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus

(Frankfurt am Main, 1999). For the larger debate on intellectual continuities between wartime and post-war Japan, see Yamanouchi Yasushi, J. Victor Koschmann and Ryuˆichi Narita (eds.), Total War and ‘Modernization’ (Ithaca, 1998), and discussion of the ‘transwar’ concept by Andrew Gordon, ‘Conclusion’, in Gordon (ed.), Postwar Japan as History, 451–3; Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, 1997). A brief overview can be found in Takaoka Hiroyuki, ‘‘‘Juˆgonen sensoˆ’’, ‘‘soˆryokusen’’, ‘‘teikoku’’ Nihon’ [‘Fifteen-Years War’, ‘Total Mobilization’, ‘Imperial’ Japan], in Rekishigaku kenkyuˆkai (ed.), Rekishigaku ni okeru hoˆhoˆteki tenkai: gendai rekishigaku no seika to kadai [Methodological Turning Points in Historiography: Achievement and Future Prospects], i (Tokyo, 2002).

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accepted doctrine that enabled not only conservative political historians such as Sakata Yoshio, but also a young generation of former Marxists who had left — or were excluded from — the Communist Party after 1956, to subscribe to the new paradigm.

VI

ROBINSON CRUSOE AND THE ISLAND VISION OF DEVELOPMENT

More important than these genealogies in our context is an epistemological concern. As we have seen, the impact of modernization theory in the 1960s was the accumulated result of several layers of transnational exchange and appropriation. But the Weberian approach at its core was premised, seemingly paradoxically, on the effacement of all aspects of transnationality: instead it constructed history firmly within the borders of the nation state. It is worth dwelling on this point for a moment, as it leads us to the core of the issue of knowledge production under conditions of global entanglement.

The fundamental commonality that runs through the various forms of theories of modernization premised on Weberian categories consisted in their internalist approach. This paradigm was hardly concerned with foreign influences, contacts or transfers from abroad, exchange or migration; instead, the focus was entirely on internality, internal dispositions and mechanisms of internalization. In particular, in his influential book on the ‘Protestant Ethic’, Weber was less interested in external forces than in the ‘subjective appropriation of ascetic religiosity on the part of the individual’. External structures could force ‘external behaviour’ but they also paralysed the individual’s own driving forces, his or her inner motivation.64 This idea of autopoietic motivation, of development that comes from within rather than being the result of larger systemic contexts, has proved to be one of the most enduring elements of Weber’s work.

This focus on interiority can also be found in the Japanese vari-

ˆ

ants of theories of modernization. For example, Otsuka Hisao, in good Weberian style, highlighted the examples of Benjamin Franklin and Robinson Crusoe as the quintessential modern individuals whose paths post-war Japan should follow. In his essay

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‘Freedom and Autonomy’ in August 1946 he contrasted the modern ethic of Benjamin Franklin with Japanese paternalism (oyagokoro) to conclude ‘that the people in our country possess no inner originality ( jihatsusei )’.65 Hierarchical structures of mentality, combined with the absence of rational forms of social solidarity, were among the cultural roots that he blamed for the distorted development of modern Japanese history. The survival of despotic, pre-modern forms of dominance was the reason why Japan could not develop an independent entrepreneurial ethic. The path out of this blind alley appeared to lie only in the adoption of the ‘modern type of human being’, according to Franklin, that is ‘inner autonomy, rationality, a consciousness of social solidarity as well as . . . a realistic emphasis on economic life . . . When a decisive portion of the people transforms itself into this ‘‘modern type of human being’’, then modern productivity . . .

will be the result, and also the endogenous development of democratic rule’.66

This celebration of ‘inner originality’ and endogenous development culminated in the apotheosis of Robinson Crusoe, ‘the isolated economic man’, as Max Weber had called him.67 Robinson represented ‘the English early industrial bourgeoisie’, the social stratum that had emerged ‘at the forefront of world history. . . and would drive as a subject the construction of the massive, modern

68 ˆ

productive forces . . . in the industrial revolution’. Otsuka built on a longer history of Japanese fascination with Defoe’s castaway. Robinson Crusoe had been translated several times already by the late Edo period, and members of Japan’s modernizing elites in the nineteenth century, such as Niijima Joˆ, founder of Doˆshisha University in Kyoto, fashioned themselves as Robinsons when they set out for the West and for modernity.69 ‘What impressed

Otsuka Hisao, ‘Jiyuˆ to dokuritsu’ [Freedom and Autonomy], in Otsuka Hisao chosakushuˆ, viii, 177.

66Ibid., 184.

67Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (Munich,

2004), 197.

68 ˆ ˆ

Otsuka Hisao, ‘Robinson Kuruˆso no ningen ruikei’ [Robinson Crusoe as a

ˆ

Human Type], in Otsuka Hisao chosakushuˆ, viii, 219.

69 Hirakawa Sukehiro, ‘Japan’s Turn to the West’, in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (ed.), Modern Japanese Thought (Cambridge, 1998), 76–9.

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206 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 216

reality he was facing by creating a rational system of production

. . . on such an isolated island (zekkai kotoˆ)’.70

This was nothing but an island paradigm of historical development. It was formulated at a historical moment when, even in Japan — often seen, figuratively as well as literally, as an island country (shimaguni) in world history — a Robinsonian solitude and isolation was difficult to fathom — after a drawn-out war in Asia and in the Pacific, after the atomic bombs, under the impact of unconditional surrender and US occupation. However, all this

ˆ

did not prevent Otsuka from linking Crusoe — the quintessential modernizer sui generis, autonomous and relying on his own capacities — to the situation of post-war Japan. In this reading, Japan likewise was expected to develop from within, to rise like a phoenix from the ashes, and to modernize entirely on its own.

Weberian modernization theory thus allowed what was part of larger, global structures to be read as self-generated. Nowhere was this more striking, and indeed blatant, than in the case of the post-war reforms which, in fact, had been largely engineered by the occupying forces. In a text in the academic journal of the

ˆ

University of Tokyo in 1946, Otsuka Hisao expressed his enthusiasm over the ‘reforms which . . . we did not think possible in our wildest dreams during the ancien re´gime . . . reforms, which have been carried out by the [US] army of occupation’. But, signifi-

ˆ

cantly, Otsuka was not insinuating that the Japanese had to ape the European or US model. The example of Western history did not ‘force our country . . . onto a Procrustean bed’ of historical development: ‘Japan is neither England nor the United States, nor is it France or Russia’. That said, he insisted on the significance of agrarian reform as a world-historical turning point. Japan embarked on a programme of social change, not because this was American or European, but because it was simple historical necessity: a ‘necessary transition phase’, a ‘general fact’ according to the laws of world history, ‘and in this respect there is

colleague Takahashi Koˆhachiroˆ. ‘There is no question’, he proclaimed, ‘that this agrarian reform represents a necessary result of the structural historical contradictions which were an integral

ˆ

Problems during the Phase of Economic Reconstruction], in Otsuka Hisao choˆsakushuˆ, iv, 326.

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component of the specific land ownership system of Japanese capitalism. Thus they cannot be explained by referring to outside pressure’.72

Under the narrative spell of modernization teleology, external forces — such as the seven years of occupation, backed by more than 350,000 US personnel — thus almost entirely disappeared from the historical record. The myth of a clean break between wartime and post-war, and the urge to explain everything from within: these were the ideological pillars of early post-war Japan. This island view of history tied modernization to culture and relied on internalist trajectories that wrote Japan out of the world. Not only were the effects of the US presence obfuscated, but also the longer continuities that tied the new Japan of democratic rule and the economic miracle years firmly to the pre-war and wartime periods.73

VII

EMPIRE ERASED

But the most marked of these ideological effects was the erasure of empire. This statement may come as a surprise. After all, as we have seen, in the debates about modernization theory in the 1960s, imperialism was a constant concern. Critical Japanese voices repeatedly warned that to adopt the new paradigm was complicit with US hegemony in East Asia. This is also what Reischauer, on the other side of the fence, had in mind when, in his 1955 book Wanted: An Asian Policy, he advised US politicians consciously to downplay the role of US models in advancing the country’s cause in the Far East. In order not to arouse suspicion of indoctrination, he saw good reasons ‘for consciously underplaying America in our intellectual dealings with Asia’.74 The appropriate strategy for this was to stress the universal concept of modernization that would replace colonialism. It would foster ‘a new post-colonial relationship between the northern and southern halves of the Free World’, as Walt Rostow expressed it in

72Takahashi Koˆhachiroˆ, ‘La Place de la Re´volution de Meiji dans l’histoire agraire du Japon’, Revue historique, ccx (1953), 270.

73See Yamanouchi, Koschmann and Narita (eds.), Total War and ‘Modernization’. See also the debate about the so-called ‘1940 system’; a first synthesis can be found in Bai Gao, Economic Ideology and Japanese Industrial Policy (Cambridge, 1997).

74Edwin O. Reischauer, Wanted: An Asian Policy (New York, 1955), 196.

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a memorandum: ‘As the colonial ties are liquidated, new and most constructive relationships can be built’.75

These precautions notwithstanding, the threat of US imperialism remained a constant, if veiled, presence in the debates over modernization theory. What was ‘liquidated’ instead, and largely fell into silence, was Japan’s own former empire, which was almost entirely wiped off the historical map within the framework of the new paradigm. Between 1895 and 1945 Japan had assembled one of the largest empires in modern history. This huge empire came undone almost instantaneously with the end of the Second World War in August 1945. It was an empire that had encompassed spheres of military influence only recently acquired; colonies such as Taiwan and Korea that had been annexed half a century before; and places of massive Japanese settlement like Manchuria, where more than 320,000 Japanese, mainly peasant families, had migrated. This empire vanished in the summer of 1945 and it seemed to leave hardly a trace. In post-war Japan, and well into the 1980s, the memory of empire was virtually erased. The philosopher and cultural critic Karatani Koˆjin has therefore spoken of the ‘de-Asianization’ of Japanese post-war discourse as a general characteristic of the political and intellectual landscape in the years of the economic miracle.76

In a way, this had to do with the general renunciation of empire that accompanied defeat in 1945. In the 1930s, the colonial empire had been a central ingredient in Japan’s strategies to secure itself a place in a changing world order. Its particular version of imperial rule, as epitomized by the so-called puppet state of Manchukuo — with an emphasis on anti-colonial ideology, economic investments, legal sovereignty and cultural similarities

— was aimed at forming a regional bloc and needs to be seen as a departure from the nineteenth-century tradition of imperialism.77 The credo of Japan’s imperial destiny was diffused not only by the propagandists of state ideology, but also by intellectuals who interpreted the ‘East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ as

75Rostow, memorandum to Theodore Sorensen, 16 Mar. 1961, cited in Latham,

Modernization as Ideology, 16.

76Karatani Koˆjin, ‘The Discursive Space of Modern Japan’, in Miyoshi and Harootunian (eds.), Japan in the World. The philosopher Takeuchi Yoshimi, in his Kindai no choˆkoku [Overcoming Modernity] (Tokyo, 1983), has made a similar point.

77See Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, 2003).

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part of an attempt to arrive at an alternative form of modernity in East Asia.78 In the wake of military defeat, these visions lost all plausibility. ‘Our nation, pressed back to the small Japan at the time of the Meiji Restoration, should draw lessons for the future from past mistakes, turn over a new page and immediately start to build a new Japan’, declared Prince Higashikuni, the transitional prime minister in the couple of months after surrender in 1945.79 Under the conditions of US occupation, a new constitution and economic recovery, post-war Japan firmly pursued a policy of alignment with the West.

The absence of empire can be observed on different levels. One of the most striking cases was the interpretation of the Second World War. Under the banner of modernization theory, imperialist aggression was turned into economic success. This shift has often been noted. The hegemonic view in early post-war Japanese historiography had held that the period of fascism and war was merely the culmination of a long history of antagonisms and distortions that marred Japan’s modern past. ‘Japan was pulled into one war after another by the Tennoˆ system, the semi-feudal land ownership system as well as the inextricably linked monopoly capital . . . and to their advantage’, as the authoritative Marxist five-volume textbook of the war had it.80 Against the backdrop of rapid economic upswing — ‘unprecedented growth as almost never seen by any other country’81 — this bleak reading was now effaced and replaced with the ‘stumble theory’ of the war as exception, a deplorable detour on which Japan had stumbled in her modernizing efforts. Reischauer was representative in his assessment that ‘overall [Japan’s modernization] was a great success’ and would emerge as a ‘model (tehon) for Asia’, even if conceding, in telling phraseology, that the country had ‘experienced a number of difficult problems like militarism’.82 It was one

78See Najita and Harootunian, ‘Japanese Revolt against the West’; Harootunian,

Overcome by Modernity; Richard F. Calichman (ed.), Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan (New York, 2008).

79Cited in Asano Toyomi, Teikoku Nihon no shokuminchi hoˆsei [The Colonial Legal System of the Japanese Empire] (Nagoya, 2008), 571.

80Rekishigaku kenkyuˆkai (ed.), Taiheiyoˆ sensoˆ shi [History of the Pacific War], 5 vols. (Tokyo, 1953–4), i, 2.

81IHJ, Conference memo: Tsutomu Ouchi, ‘On the Problem of Growth in Japanese Agriculture’, 4.

82Edwin O. Reischauer and Nakayama Ichiroˆ, ‘Nihon kindaika no rekishiteki hyoˆka’ [Historical Appraisal of Japan’s Modernization], Chuˆoˆ koˆron (Sept. 1961), 97.

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of the standard criticisms put forward by leftist scholars in Japan that modernization theory amounted to a whitewashing of Japan’s belligerent and expansionist history between the Meiji Restoration and the war in the Pacific.83

Less noted is the fact that this revisionist reading went hand in hand with the disappearance of Japanese imperialism. The textbooks in the early 1950s had put the main emphasis on the war in China, which was interpreted as a conflict between the Chinese people and Japanese imperialists. The war against the USA, as a result, faded into the background — from the Marxist perspective it was not much more than a typical conflict between two imperialistic states which illustrated the internal contradictions within the capitalist system.84 From the mid 1950s, this changed markedly. The war in Asia — officially renamed as the ‘Pacific War’ (taiheiyoˆ sensoˆ) by the US occupiers and thus symbolically ‘deAsianized’ — was increasingly relegated to the background. The shift was complete with the publication of the vast sourcebook on the ‘Path into the Pacific War’ in 1962–3. This seven-volume compilation, published by Tsunoda Jun, meticulously avoided the term ‘imperialism’ and focused instead on a reconstruction of Japan’s path into the war with the United States.85

To be sure, the lack of critical engagement with Japan’s wartime empire was never absolute.86 Individuals such as the journalist Honda Katsuichi, and pressure groups such as the Teachers’ Union and the Japan–China Friendship Association, occasionally did campaign for a critical perspective on the colonial past. Interpretations of the past were always a contested field. But, on the whole, given the power relationships that existed in Japan, these critical voices hardly made it into official, statecentred memory and remained rather marginal.87 And strikingly,

83Inoue Kiyoshi, ‘‘‘Kindaika’’ e no hitotsu no apuroˆchi’ [One Approach to ‘Modernization’], Shisoˆ, cdlxxiii (1963), 1455–63.

84See Rekishigaku kenkyuˆkai (ed.), Taiheiyoˆ sensoˆ shi.

85Nihon kokusai seiji gakkai, taiheiyoˆ sensoˆ gen’in kenkyuˆbu [ Japanese Association for the Study of International Politics, Research Group on the Origins of the Pacific War] (ed.), Taiheiyoˆ sensoˆ e no michi: kaisen gaikoˆshi [The Road to the Pacific War: A Foreign Policy History of the Origins of the War], 7 vols. (Tokyo, 1962–3).

86For an early example, see Ubukata Naokichi, Toˆyama Shigeki and Tanaka Masatoshi (eds.), Rekishizoˆ saikoˆsei no kadai: rekishigaku no hoˆhoˆ to Ajia [Themes for a Re-Evaluation of the View of History: Historical Method and its Relationship to Asia] (Tokyo, 1966).

87See Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005

(Cambridge, Mass., 2006).

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