Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan
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Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan
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| ISBN-13: | 9780520947672 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/08/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 376 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Making Japanese Citizens
Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan
By Simon Andrew Avenell
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2010 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-94767-2
CHAPTER 1
Before the Shimin
The Dark Energy of the People
THE PEOPLE, DAILY LIFE, AND THE ETHNIC NATION
Conventional treatments of the shimin idea and civic activism—especially in Japanese-language scholarship—usually begin with the anti-security-treaty protests of 1960 or just before. This starting point is quite understandable: before this event the term shimin was hardly used in political discourse, and when it was the connotation was most often negative or, at best, qualified. For most Marxists, shimin and shimin shakai (civil society) amounted to no more than the bourgeoisie and bourgeois society and, as such, could—at best—be a step on the pathway to somewhere better. The fact that many of Japan's major cities lay in ruins after the war also made it difficult for people to imagine themselves as part of an urban political citizenry—as "citoyen"—when the pressing question for many was how to avoid starvation. Moreover, legally speaking, the Japanese people were not sovereign citizens until the promulgation of the new constitution in 1946, and until 1952 their sovereignty was overseen by the Allied Occupation of the country. The American crackdown on militant labor activism in the late 1940s and state moves against other forms of leftist activity in the 1950s also did nothing to promote a popular sense of the people being in control. In short, the shimin idea remained in the shadows until the late 1950s for a whole range of reasons.
But simply because activists and intellectuals were not using or deploying the shimin does not mean that ideas and practices that would later become central in shimin thought and activism were also absent. On the contrary, the period from the end of the war until the mid-1950s was crucial in laying the intellectual foundations for later civic thought associated with the shimin idea, especially its connection to the nation and notions of daily life. For intellectuals, of course, one of the primary projects in the early postwar years was a search for the holy grail of subjectivity (shutaisei), which many felt was sorely absent in the psyche of modern Japan. Marxists, modernization advocates, literary specialists, and others tried their best to forge such subjectivity within the bounds of their own ideologies and disciplinary fields. The civil society theorist Uchida Yoshihiko even identified a group of civil society youth (shimin shakai seinen), populated by a who's who of the postwar intellectual community: Okochi Kazuo, Otsuka Hisao, Takashima Zenya, Noma Hiroshi, and Maruyama Masao, for example. Such intellectuals—especially in their commitment to notions of individual autonomy and "ethos"—laid important ideational foundations for later civic thought. Their public activism through essays in widely read progressive journals also contributed to an emergent public sphere in which issues of national import could be debated (if not decided) beyond formal political channels. Indeed, we could begin a study of the shimin idea and citizen activism by tracing a line from the ideas of intellectuals such as Maruyama and Otsuka to the concrete civic activism of 1960, showing how the people took hold of such ideas and became shimin.
In this chapter, however, I approach the prehistory of the shimin idea from a slightly different perspective: in the space where intellectuals and ordinary people interacted. This space is important for two reasons. First, progressives who would later mature into influential movement intellectuals cut their teeth in this space. Second, the ideas produced there influenced later shimin thought and activism in direct and palpable ways. Specifically, progressives' remorse about the war prompted a self-critique of their status as intellectuals and a search for a new democratic subjectivity within ordinary Japanese people and their daily lives. Intellectuals imagined the Japanese people not only in contradistinction to a delegitimized state and a class of professional thinkers but also as a social formation tightly coupled with the nation and daily life—both of which they felt had been violated by the wartime regime. The people became cathartic vehicles for intellectuals simultaneously to deal with their own remorse and to construct a new form of progressive leftist nationalism. To be sure, intellectuals recognized the need to nurture a renewed democratic consciousness in the country, but they believed this would take root only if ordinary people made this consciousness their own. Universalistic ideas such as democracy had to be connected to aspirations and identities that made sense for ordinary people; otherwise these ideas risked abstraction and ideological manipulation. Hence, such intellectuals not only looked outward for a solution to the recent past; they also saw value in a conceptual and ethical rehabilitation of the Japanese people and their quotidian lifeways. It is in these early imaginations and articulations of the ethnic nation (minzoku) and daily life (seikatsu) that we discover the intellectual seedbed for later shimin discourse and civic activism.
In the first part of the chapter I look closely at the interventions of the philosopher Tsurumi Shunsuke and his intellectual club, the Institute for the Science of Thought (Shiso no Kagaku Kenkyukai), formed in 1946 by Tsurumi, his sister Kazuko, and a group of like-minded academics. Among the various intellectual groups of the early postwar period, the institute became a key theoretical and organizational hub for the shimin idea and citizens' movements. Many institute members were actively involved in postwar civic activism, becoming movement intellectuals in their own right. The institute also became a kind of nursery for citizens' groups: members of the Voices of the Voiceless Association—the quintessential citizens' movement of the Anpo struggle—actually belonged to a group affiliated with the institute and its various cultural circle activities. All the more significant, then, that Tsurumi and institute members spent the years before the Anpo struggle conceptualizing the people (hitobito) not as the bearers of a deracinated and universalized democracy but in terms of a progressive ethnic nationalism and an authentic sensibility of the inhabitants of daily life (seikatsusha). Contrary to accusations that the institute's members were American ideologues or "ninja" of the communist left, we discover a remarkably rooted—culturally rooted—set of aspirations in their search for a people's philosophy (hitobito no tetsugaku).
The institute's early postwar ruminations bequeathed a number of intellectual legacies for later shimin thought. First was the idea that the people—as a synthesis of the nation and daily life—were the most qualified to resist the state. Institute members hardly idealized the people and often lamented their limitations, but for Tsurumi Shunsuke, at least, the "mild cunning" of the people born from the yoke of daily life seemed far more legitimate and trustworthy than intellectuals and their sullied Westernized rationality. This belief in the durability and genuineness of daily life is a central thread connecting civic thought and activism throughout the postwar period. Second, despite this belief and even though the institute authenticated a cultural identity and space, members stopped short of providing any concrete definition or conceptualization of what the people should be or how they should act. Replicating the more general disorder of the early postwar moment, the early imaginations of the people contained a degree of interpretive and descriptive plasticity—a core of certainty surrounded by a pliant exterior. The plethora of appellations for the people is instructive: the masses (taishu), the common folk (shomin), the populace (minshu), the civic nation (kokumin), the ethnic nation (minzoku), the ordinary people (futsu no hitobito), the people (hitobito), the inhabitants of daily life (seikatsusha), the eternal folk (jomin), the Japanese (Nihonjin), and, more rarely, citizens (shimin) or the people of Marxist discourse (jinmin). This plasticity also carried over into the shimin idea, affording it a modularity, inclusivity, and receptivity remarkably at odds with the Marxist proletariat, which "belonged" to the established left and its predetermined historical project.
In the second part of the chapter I turn to the independent cultural circle (sakuru) activism of the 1950s—the training ground for later citizens' movements. As it developed throughout this period, circle activism challenged leftist initiatives to direct and shape social energies into essentialized class categories. Circles brought into question the idea that people should be organized hierarchically and led from above by farsighted elites. Intellectually, circle activism challenged the privileged position of a vanguard—intellectuals, politicians, bureaucrats—as the only source of socially useful meaning. Organizationally, circle activism presented an alternative to the hierarchical, centrally directed model of the established left, forging instead a more egalitarian form of human organization and interaction—what literary critic Ara Masato referred to as "horizontal connections" (yoko no tsunagari). Such intellectual and organizational innovations made the circle movement an ideal model for later, more overtly political civic groups.
But the circle movement passed on ambiguous legacies too. As observers discovered, circles were not always forward or outward looking. They were not always openly progressive and could be remarkably narrow and exclusivist. Although an enthusiastic advocate of the circle movement, Tsurumi Kazuko lamented how participants in cultural groups often failed to connect their individual predicaments to broader social inequities, while her brother Shunsuke had to admit that circles often displayed a passive acceptance of the status quo, and their members a primitive materialism of daily life. Circles' commitment to individual autonomy and self-help also ran the risk of replicating conservative attempts to fashion a self-reliant and self-responsible citizenry imbued with the ethos of "spontaneous service." In short, for all its promise, circle activism also foreshadowed the vulnerabilities of nonaligned civic activism from the earliest years of the postwar era onward.
TSURUMI SHUNSUKE, WAR REMORSE, AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE PEOPLE
Actually, the discovery of the people did not begin as a discussion. It began in the experience of war and defeat by a group of intellectuals who would soon find solace and hope in the Institute for the Science of Thought. Although early postwar discussions about the people certainly provided the intellectual backdrop for the shimin idea, we need to step back and consider the impact of the war on institute members if we want to discover the idea's emotional and psychological locus. Among these members none is more important than the institute's founder, Tsurumi Shunsuke, because his war experience was both emblematic and central in shaping the ethos of the institute and its approach to the people.
When hostilities broke out between Japan and the United States, Tsurumi was an undergraduate student at Harvard University. He later recalled how the outbreak of war was one of the rare moments in his life when he felt a real sense of ethnic consciousness and a desire to be in Japan. After being arrested on somewhat dubious charges of anarchism, Tsurumi found himself in an internment camp for Japanese Americans in Maryland. Here he was given the choice of staying on in the United States or returning home. Wanting to be in Japan at the moment of defeat and expecting exemption from active military duty (he had tuberculosis), Tsurumi—together with his sister Kazuko and others—decided to return. After arriving in Japan, Tsurumi received orders to undertake the military physical exam and, to his great surprise, was found fit for military service. His physical condition ruled out active combat duty, so instead he was assigned to the navy as a civilian employee and dispatched to the island of Java in February 1943. He was twenty years old.
It was on Java that Tsurumi faced the realities of war head on, specifically the issue of how he was personally going to deal with his role in a war that he purportedly opposed. Indeed, Tsurumi's failure to oppose the war actively while on Java (or anywhere else) deeply shaped his postwar sense of remorse, his attitude toward the state, his attack on the intellectual, and his ultimate turn to the people. This was an experience Tsurumi shared with many other intellectuals of his generation, and it would bring him to the center of postwar discussions about wartime responsibility. How Tsurumi differed from other intellectuals was that he opened up his wartime activities to public scrutiny in the postwar period. From the very outset his project was as much about personal vilification as it was about detached scientific scrutiny.
Tsurumi's recounting of his interactions with local women on the Indonesian island of Java are among the most revealing and troubling. On his arrival in 1943, the civilian official Tsurumi was charged with monitoring enemy broadcasts, disposing of official documents, and taking care of high-ranking officials. Among other things, this caretaking included the procurement and provision of "comfort women" for officers. At the ring of a bell it was Tsurumi's duty to provide a woman and, if necessary, a condom. From the outset Tsurumi concluded that such tasks were a "far better path than killing others." He decided that if at any time during the war he was put in the position to kill another, he would commit suicide first. Arranging comfort women, then, represented the lesser of two evils—what Tsurumi called a passive ethic (shokyokuteki rinri) of resistance—and it was a task he admitted doing in a "businesslike" and "thorough" way. In between his duties Tsurumi spent time reading religious books and praying to God for his own moral improvement.
Tsurumi vehemently refused sexual relations with comfort women or any other local women while on Java—much to the amusement of his peers, who labeled him Yokozuna, or grand champion on their virgin ranking (dotei banzuke). Tsurumi explained his abstinence quite differently, however. "I clearly felt that my attraction to women was in conflict with the state," he later explained. "Sex vs. State: this was the basic equation for me. I did not want to liberate my [sexual] attraction to women in a medium certified by the state." So nonparticipation in the institutionalized sex of the comfort stations became for Tsurumi a concrete manifestation of his passive ethic of resistance to total control by the state. Similarly, Tsurumi kept his attraction to a "bright-eyed" seventeen-year-old housemaid at the level of desire—unconsummated. In the midst of his daily wrongdoings (yugai naru doryoku) he quietly harbored the fantasy of a liberated relationship (kaihotekina kosho) with this "girl." According to Tsurumi, confining his sexual desire to the realm of fantasy partly separated him from the system of domination the Japanese exerted over local people. Again, this became a kind of resistance for him—albeit a passive one.
Of course, other questions remained and rightly troubled him: passively resisting by not doing was one thing, but why had he worked so conscientiously in this wartime system? As his intellectual peer Maruyama Masao later pointed out, not doing constituted one form of wartime responsibility. One reason, Tsurumi explained, was simple cowardice; another was a habit of formalistic effort he had learned from around the age of fifteen or sixteen. But, in the end, he had not been able truly to resist; he had not produced any kind of decisive springboard by which to cut himself off from the state. Here lay the roots of his postwar remorse and his reconceptualization of philosophy.
Too ill to continue his duty, Tsurumi was eventually repatriated to Japan in late 1944, and after a brief stint at the Naval General Staff Division, he spent the remainder of the war recuperating in the resort town of Atami. It was here that he heard the emperor's broadcast of defeat and surrender on August 15, 1945. His reaction, of course, was totally negative, particularly because the emperor focused on Japan's losses, bypassing the pain inflicted by Japan on others—a pain that Tsurumi knew he had not lifted one finger to oppose. "It made me feel absolutely terrible," he recalled. "I thought the emperor was a rogue (iya na yatsu)." Unlike other intellectuals such as Shimizu Ikutaro, who supposedly broke down and wept, Tsurumi found in the moment nothing more than indifference (mukando) and self-hatred (jiko ken'o).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Making Japanese Citizens by Simon Andrew Avenell. Copyright © 2010 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1. Before the Shimin: The Dark Energy of the People
Chapter 2. Mass Society, Anpo, and the Birth of the Shimin
Chapter 3. Beheiren and the Asian Shimin: The Fate of Conscientious Civic Activism
Chapter 4. Residents into Citizens: The Fate of Pragmatic Civic Activism
Chapter 5. Shimin, New Civic Movements, and the Politics of Proposal
Conclusion: The Shimin Idea and Civil Society
Notes
Bibliography
Index