Past and Present-2012-Conrad-181-214

from possible infringements by accompanying partners. They hired a ‘Japanese hostess to take care of wives’ and ordered the strict separation of couples during the day, at meals, and by accommodating them in different hotels. Even after ‘receiving considerable abuse from the wives of participants’ who found the arrangements ‘unduly harsh’, the organizers insisted on this policy by invoking the ‘line of duty to scholarly principles’.26

Participants included many of the most famous names in Japanese scholarship at North American universities, such as the historians John W. Hall and Marius Jansen, the sociologists Ronald Dore and Marion Levy, and the literary scholars Donald Shively and Donald Keene. The Japanese participants largely hailed from the two prestigious national universities in Tokyo and Kyoto. Retrospective accounts of the conference regularly emphasized the conflicts between US and Japanese scholars. But summarizing discussions along national lines was frequently itself a strategic move that should not lead us to gloss over the distinct differences within those groups. The Japanese participants included staunch Marxists such as historian Toˆyama

ˆ

Shigeki and the economist Ouchi Tsutomu, and to some extent also the sociologist Kawashima Takeyoshi, but also conservatives

ˆ

such as the historians Inoki Masamichi and Okubo Toshiaki, and even ultranationalists such as the philosopher Koˆsaka Masaaki, a member of the infamous wartime Kyoto School of philosophy. Between them were eminent social scientists, such as Maruyama Masao, who were frequently termed ‘modernists’ (kindai shugisha) in contemporary debate.

The discussions at Hakone followed a clear pattern. The first day was devoted to a ‘discussion of ‘‘modernization’’ in terms of general principles’, while the following days would focus more specifically on the case of Japan. This structure of debate, from the general to the specific, in important ways already prefigured some of the lines of conflict. Even though the initial position paper by John W. Hall made every effort to stress that modernization ‘is not to be confused with ‘‘westernization’’’, he linked the modernization process historically to Europe before its ‘adoption by non-European societies’.27 The universalizing ideal types were

26IHJ, Conference memo: ‘John W. Hall to Participants’.

27IHJ, Conference memo: John W. Hall, ‘Japan within the Concept of Modernization’, 11.

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thus tied to a specifically Western experience, as Japanese commentators also pointed out. The dichotomy of the West posing as the universal in opposition to Japanese particularity was further reinforced by the different assignments that US and Japanese scholars received. While the papers prepared by US participants were to focus on the ‘general principles’, the Japanese participants were asked to ‘direct their thought to the more specific problem of the modernization process in Japan proper’.28

The equation of the West with universality was supported by an epistemology that rendered the recent modernization experience of Japan — still being felt — an obstacle to theoretical knowledge. As Reischauer elaborated, ‘because people in the West have not had such an immediate experience of modernization, they see it objectively. They attempt merely to record and analyze events that happened a century ago and defer value judgments’.29 For the British sociologist Ronald Dore, also a conference participant, these different historical experiences produced ‘a world perspective and an ethnic perspective’. In this text, written for a Japanese audience, he defined access to the instruments of transnational capitalism as conditions of objectivity. While ‘American scholars can travel throughout the world with support of foundations, etc. and there are many who participate in the plans to support overseas economies’, he saw Japanese scholars as limited by ‘a major impediment, that is, language and lack of resources, and . . . the taint . . . of a provincialism (shimaguni )’.30 When the organizing committee of the conference decided to invite two Japanese to each of the follow-up meetings to be held in Bermuda and Puerto Rico, and to provide ‘these guests . . .

with sufficient funds for at least a full summer of travel and residence in the United States’, it may not be too far-fetched to surmise that here, too, transnational mobility — and a first-hand experience of the USA — was expected eventually to yield scholarly objectivism.31

The fetishization of objectivism was part of the strategy of most US scholars to depoliticize the discussion. They ‘hesitated’, as

28IHJ, Conference memo: ‘John W. Hall to Participants’.

29Edwin O. Reischauer, ‘Toˆzai ‘‘kangaekata’’ no koˆkan: Hakone kaigi ni sanka shite’ [The Exchange of ‘Modes of Thinking’ in East and West: Reflections on the Hakone Conference], Asahi shinbun, 11 Sept. 1960.

30Cited in Tanaka, ‘Objectivism and the Eradication of Critique’, 98.

31IHJ, Conference memo: Hall, ‘Japan within the Concept of Modernization’, 2.

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Maruyama Masao saw it, ‘to introduce any ideologically charged concepts into the definition of ‘‘modernization’’’.32 This indeed was to be the crucial bone of contention. While most US participants preferred bracketing the question of values, a strong group of Japanese participants — ‘unfortunately’, as John W. Hall would later lament in his summary of the conference — insisted on putting the issue of democracy squarely on the table.33 Was democracy to be understood as an essential element of modernization? This fundamental question, highly charged in the heated atmosphere of the Anpo summer, essentially split the conference group along national lines, even though, as we shall see, other lines of confrontation persisted as well. While many US scholars preferred to keep the concept as broad as possible and found it difficult ‘to maintain in the twentieth century that ‘‘authoritarianism’’ and ‘‘modernization’’ are antithetical terms’,34 most of their Japanese counterparts, in the light of blatant suppression of democratic participation in the wartime period, viewed this political reserve with suspicion.

The elision of democracy produced an interpretation of Japanese history that, in many ways, was an inversion of the metanarrative prevalent in post-war Japan. Unlike the Marxist Sonderweg historiography of deviance and lack, modernization scholars depicted Japanese history as a success story and as a model for other non-Western societies to follow. This implied a quasi-Nietzschean transvaluation of all the values of post-war scholarship: what had been labelled as feudal remnants, traditional structures and incomplete transformations were now rendered as cultural traditions conducive to modernization and as rapid and unprecedented industrial growth. The ‘gloomy view of Japan’s last century can be quite misleading’, Marius B. Jansen instructed his Japanese audience in a lecture in the spring of 1961.35 In a historiographical ‘reverse course’, obstacles were turned into catalysts, deviance became the norm: ‘Japan was the only non-Western nation’, as Robert Bellah saw it

32Maruyama Masao, ‘Patterns of Individuation and the Case of Japan: A Conceptual Scheme’, in Jansen (ed.), Changing Japanese Attitudes, 489.

33John W. Hall, ‘Changing Conceptions of the Modernization of Japan’, in Jansen (ed.), Changing Japanese Attitudes, 27.

34IHJ, Conference memo: Benjamin Schwartz, ‘Modernization and its Ambiguities’, 9.

35Marius B. Jansen, ‘On Studying the Modernization of Japan’, Asian Cultural Studies, iii (1962).

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retrospectively, ‘to have transformed itself into a ‘‘modern industrial nation’’, thus joining that small handful of exemplars of the course all would take’.36

Particularly pronounced was the re-evaluation of feudal Japan. While ‘feudal’, within the teleology of Marxist thought, had essentially equalled ‘pathological’ and served as a stigma mercilessly relegating any phenomenon to the dustbin of history, scholars now cautiously began to inquire whether ‘feudalism may have been more help than hindrance’.37 Before long, traditional values such as an ethics of goal attainment and a sense of duty, loyalty, filial piety and responsibility were ennobled as preconditions of change and progress, and as resources for the emergence of entrepreneurial spirits. As early as 1957, in one of the quintessential works forming the new paradigm, sociologist Robert Bellah had turned to Tokugawa Japan in his quest for the pre-modern origins of the modern industrial state. He was convinced that already in the eighteenth century, the ‘dominant political values in Japan were distinctly favorable to the rise of industrial society’. Bellah identified certain strands of Confucian thinking — for Marxist scholars the very hallmark of cultural stagnation — as veritable equivalents to Weber’s Protestant Ethic, and therefore concluded that ‘religion played an important role in the process of political and economic rationalization in Japan’.38

IV

MODERNIZATION MADE IN JAPAN

This large-scale and politically driven project of rewriting the Japanese past was seen by many Japanese commentators as a scarcely masked form of cultural imperialism under the geopolitical conditions of the Cold War.39 Indeed, when the first volume

36Bellah, ‘Introduction’, in his Tokugawa Religion, p. xii.

37IHJ, Conference memo: Marius Jansen, ‘Modernization in Japan: Some Problems’, 5.

38Bellah, Tokugawa Religion, 192, 194; in Japanese, Nihon kindaika to shuˆkyoˆ rinri

(Tokyo, 1962).

39See, for example, Wada Haruki, ‘Gendaiteki ‘‘Kindaika’’ron no shisoˆ to ronri’ [Idea and Logic of Current ‘Modernization’ Theory], Rekishigaku kenkyuˆ, cccxviii (1966); Wada Haruki, ‘Kindaikaron’ [Modernization Theory], in Rekishigaku kenkyuˆkai [Historical Science Society of Japan] and Nihonshi kenkyuˆkai [ Japanese

Society of Historical Studies] (eds.), Koˆza Nihonshi, ix, Nihon shigaku ronsoˆ

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of the Modernization of Japan series appeared as Changing Japanese Attitudes towards Modernization, the ambivalent syntax of the title allowed it to be read as a US policy goal, with Japanese intellectuals as its object.40 The people of Asia ‘are asking for an ideology’, Edwin Reischauer had proclaimed as early as 1949. ‘We have in many ways failed to give it to them. There is a crying need for people to have our ideology. We aren’t in the habit of giving it. We have the ideology but we aren’t presenting it to other people’.41 In 1960 this worry was no longer a concern, as Hakone clearly showed. In the following decades, modernization theory supplied what Dipesh Chakrabarty has described as a ‘transition narrative’.42 This helped mould the unmediated facts of the Japanese past into ‘history’ by furnishing plot structures that ‘can be viewed historically’, as John W. Hall admitted in Hakone, ‘as part of a process having its origins in the societies of western Europe’.43

Intellectual imperialism this no doubt was, but the diffusionist logic of the term veils the complex processes of knowledge production and of transnational exchange by which the notion of modernization took hold in post-war Japan. The concept of modernity/modernization, of course, was not the sole possession of post-war social scientists in the United States, but was a broad idea associated with enlightenment thought and evolving through a long history of discussions and conflicts on a global scale. Japan itself witnessed highly contested debates about the notion of modernity, including the famous 1942 conference on ‘Overcoming Modernity’.44 Koˆsaka Masaaki, a participant at

(n. 39 cont.)

[Handbook of Japanese History, ix, Controversies in Japanese Historiography] (Tokyo, 1971).

40Andrew E. Barshay, ‘What is Japan to Us?’, in David A. Hollinger (ed.), The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II (Baltimore, 2006).

41Cited in John W. Dower, ‘E. H. Norman, Japan and the Uses of History’, in

Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E. H. Norman, ed. John W. Dower (New York, 1975), 44.

42Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000), 30–4.

43IHJ, Conference memo: Hall, ‘Japan within the Concept of Modernization’, 5.

44On debates about the modern in Japan, see Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, 1985); Sharon A. Minichiello (ed.), Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900–1930 (Honolulu, 1998); Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Armonk, 1998); Tetsuo Najita and H. D. Harootunian, ‘Japanese Revolt against the West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century’, in Peter Duus (ed.), The Cambridge

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Hakone, was a member of the Kyoto School and one of the protagonists of three wartime symposia on the World-Historical Standpoint and Japan that approvingly discussed the philosophical significance of the total war in Asia. At the other end of the political spectrum, Marxist historians, as the most vociferous critics of the post-war imports from the United States, drew on a philosophy of history that constituted its own kind of modernization theory.45 But, more specifically, from the mid 1950s we can observe the emergence of a Japanese version of the concept of modernization that was explicitly pitted, as was its US follow-up, against allegedly deprecating Marxist views of the past. In particular, revisionist historians took issue with the dominant interpretation of the Meiji Restoration as a failure, and as a deplorably incomplete transition into modern times.

These discussions were stimulated less by historians than by scholars in the humanities, where Marxism’s hegemony had eased sooner. On New Year’s Day, 1956, the renowned French literature specialist Kuwabara Takeo called for a ‘new evaluation of the Meiji period’ in the high-circulation daily paper Asahi shinbun. Here he stated for the first time principles which he would later repeat more emphatically. ‘I believe that we should recognize the fact that Japanese modernization in the Meiji Restoration was successful’.46 He particularly admired the speed of Japan’s development, even if velocity came with social side effects.

The degree of modernization can be assessed differently depending on which element is given greater weight, but here I want to focus on the speed of development of productivity. No other country before it had industrialized as quickly as Japan did . . . In considering the modernization process as a whole, speed is one of the most important factors.47

(n. 44 cont.)

History of Japan, vi, The Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1988); Harry Harootunian,

Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, 2001).

45Kan Takayuki, Sengo seishin: sono shinwa to jitsuzoˆ [Intellectual History of Post-War Japan: Myths and Realities] (Kyoto, 1981).

46Kuwabara Takeo, ‘Meiji no saihyoˆka’ [A Reappraisal of the Meiji Restoration], Asahi shinbun, 1 Jan. 1956. The quotation is from Kuwabara Takeo et al., ‘Zadankai: Meiji Ishin no imi’ [Round Table: The Significance of the Meiji Restoration], Chuˆoˆ koˆron (Feb. 1962), 176.

47Kuwabara Takeo, ‘Tradition versus Modernization’, in his Japan and Western Civilization: Essays on Comparative Culture, ed. Katoˆ Hidetoshi, trans. Kano Tsutomu and Patricia Murray (Tokyo, 1983), 39–40.

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In thus aiming to substitute for the rhetoric of backwardness, time lag and stagnation a vocabulary of high growth, acceleration and the apotheosis of speed, history was turned into chronometry. Japan’s extraordinary achievement was not to be credited to cultural borrowing and imitation, but rather to the particular qualities of Japanese culture. ‘Japan, too, was economically and in other ways very undeveloped at the beginning of the Meiji era, but it had a unique and relatively well-integrated, sophisticated culture’, as Kuwabara put it in a later essay, ‘Tradition and Modernity’, in 1957 — an essay whose title already recalled the soon-to-be-ubiquitous dichotomy of modernization theory.48

Kuwabara was not alone in his reassessment of the Japanese past. At the Institute for Human Sciences ( Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyuˆjo) of the University of Kyoto, he formed part of a revisionist group that was pleading for a positive evaluation of Japanese culture, tradition and history, in stark contrast to Marxism’s emphasis on contradictions, oppression and backwardness. Alluding to the nationalistic intellectual group of the war years, the revisionists from Kyoto were also called the ‘New Kyoto School’ (Shin Kyoˆto Gakuha). They included the philosopher Ueyama Shumpei, whose own rehabilitation of the Meiji Restoration — for him clearly ‘a form of bourgeois revolution’

— still bespoke the discursive hegemony of the paradigm he aimed to supersede.49

But the most influential thinker of the group, in some ways, was the cultural anthropologist Umesao Tadao. Umesao was deeply influenced by ecological theories on the one hand, and by civilizational thinking on the other. Arnold Toynbee’s visit to Japan in 1956 had left a deep impression on him and triggered, as a response, his essay ‘Introduction to an Ecological View of History’, published in the journal Chuˆoˆ koˆron in the following year. In it, Umesao arrives at broad comparisons between Japan and Western Europe, the two peripheral zones in what he called the ‘Old World’. In his search for Japan’s ‘exact co-ordinates’ in the world, Umesao detaches Japan from Asia on the grounds that social and material development were more important parameters

48Ibid., 39; Kuwabara, ‘Dentoˆ to kindaika’, Gendai shisoˆ (Nov. 1957).

49Ueyama Shumpei, ‘Meiji Ishinron no saikentoˆ: shisoˆshi kenkyuˆ no kenchi kara’ [A Reappraisal of Theories of the Meiji Restoration: From the Perspective of the History of Ideas], Shisoˆ, cccxc (1956), 91.

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than geographical location; thus, Japan was ‘highly civilized’, as was Western Europe, and therefore not part of Asia or of the ‘Orient’. There were only a few countries, Umesao held, which could claim that their social development was a success story — specifically, those nations that lay on the periphery of the Eurasian continent.

Some regions have reached this state to a certain measure, but on a national scale it is only Japan and, on the rim of the opposite side [of the continent], the Western European countries which have created highly civilized states. They still retain a vast difference from countries like China, south-east Asia, India, Russia, the Islamic countries and Eastern Europe.50

To be sure, Umesao’s master narrative of world-historical change was not identical with Weberian modernization theory. His ecological notion of evolution differed from later notions of ‘development’, and he relied on a civilizational paradigm that did not postulate a universal pattern of change. Therefore, he did not perceive Japan as a model for the rest of Asia and Africa; rather, in some ways, his position seemed to echo earlier attempts to distance Japan from Asia such as Fukuzawa Yukichi’s famous ‘leave Asia’ dictum of 1885. But in many ways, the argumentative logic was compatible with, and indeed prepared the ground for, the variant of modernization theory that took the stage in the 1960s. Already for Umesao, the crucial parameters of success were economic growth and national independence — while the impact of fascism, in comparison, retreated into the background. And he, too, saw striking parallels between Western Europe and Japan that led him to treat the peripheral regions of Eurasia almost as a coherent and integrated cultural sphere. Indeed, Japan was presented as ‘honorary European’, as Noam Chomsky would later phrase it,51 also because it was part of the centuries-long conflict between East and West, from the fight against Mongol invasions until the Cold War: ‘The borderline between ‘‘eastern’’ and ‘‘western’’ Europe had its equivalent in Asia in the Korean strait’.52

Two further commonalities with 1960s modernization theory deserve mention. First, methodologically, Umesao privileged

50Umesao Tadao, ‘Bunmei no seitaishikan josetsu’ [Preliminary Thoughts on an Ecological View of History], Chuˆoˆ koˆron (Feb. 1957), 34, 37.

51Noam Chomsky, ‘The New World Order’, Agenda, lxii (1991), 13.

52Umesao, ‘Bunmei no seitaishikan josetsu’, 46.

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internal transformation (his term was ‘autogenic succession’) over influence and external pressures, and thus anticipated the internalist paradigm which was to become the hallmark of modernization theory. As the ‘driving force of historical development came from within the community’, Japan’s success was due to parallel paths and not, as might be expected, to extensive imports from Europe beginning in 1868.53 Instead, Umesao attributed the similar development to universal historical laws. ‘The development of Japanese civilization since the Meiji Era was a necessary process guided by the laws of world history and had . . .

nothing to do with a cultural conversion or Europeanization’.54 And second, when trying to explain these commonalities, Umesao in particular referred to the feudal experience that both Western Europe and Japan had shared. As Edwin O. Reischauer, John W. Hall and Robert Bellah would argue later, feudal Japan was not the dark period that Marxist historiography had made it out to be, but rather the springboard of Japan’s modernization. Only the social formation of feudalism, according to Umesao, made a bourgeois revolution possible. This revolution, in turn, had been the precondition for the emergence of capitalist society. Thus the ‘highly civilized’ countries of the periphery owed their success to feudalism, and Umesao went as far as to assume fundamental differences ‘between the consciousness and behaviour of people in societies which have passed through a feudal system and those which have not’.55

V

THE JAPANESE MODERNISTS

Since the mid 1950s, then, intellectual circles in Japan were engaged in vibrant debates about the character of modernization that drew on a variety of sources for inspiration. They challenged the dominant Marxist approach, and they supplied a set of categories to measure, and to explain, what increasingly came to be seen as the success — and for some authors even triumph — of Japan’s modern history. These approaches were thus conducive

53Ibid., 46.

54Ibid., 41.

55Ibid., 48. See also Suzuki Shigetaka et al., ‘Zadankai: rekishi ni okeru Nihon no senshinsei’ [Round Table: Japan as a Historically Highly Developed Country], Chuˆoˆ koˆron (Nov. 1957).

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to a favourable reception of US-style modernization theory, even if they did not lead directly to the Hakone formula of rationalization and structural differentiation. Indeed, the impact of the ‘Conference on Modern Japan’ depended to a considerable extent on its emphasis on novelty. In particular, the introduction of Max Weber was seen by the ‘founding fathers’ such as Hall and Reischauer as the crucial and innovative advance on a methodological level. Weber was to serve as the theoretical foundation for modernization theory and function as a counterfoil to Marx. ‘The effort to reduce the process of modernization to its simplest terms which proved most congenial to us at Hakone’, John W. Hall was later to reminisce, ‘was . . . Max Weber’s familiar concept of rationality’.56

Interestingly, care was taken not to let the alleged newness of the approach make it appear as something foreign and alien to the Japanese context to which it was now applied. Benjamin Schwartz, the historian of China at Harvard University whose definition of ‘modernization’ swayed many of the participants at the Hakone meeting, was at pains to stress that the ‘conception of modernization here proposed is perhaps not too different from that of many of the Meiji leaders’. In this reading, pre-Weberian Weberians such as the ‘members of the Iwakura mission . . .

showed a profound interest in all . . . areas of rationalization’.57 Irrespective of this genealogical construct, however, we need to realize that the Weberian approach was familiar to most Japanese participants in Hakone, not because it was implicit in the actions of the country’s historical leaders, but because it had exerted such an overwhelming influence on post-war debate.

Indeed, alongside and in many ways opposed to Marxism, in post-war Japan there had emerged a school of thought that was referred to as the ‘modernists’ (kindai shugisha) by contemporaries. The two figureheads of this intellectual strand were the political scientist Maruyama Masao (1914–96) and the historian

ˆ

Otsuka Hisao (1907–96). Their analyses of Japanese history were formulated against the dominant Marxist narratives without, however, completely breaking with historical materialism. Instead, they introduced the methodology of Max Weber to compensate for what they perceived as the shortcomings of Marxist

56Hall, ‘Changing Conceptions of the Modernization of Japan’, 21.

57IHJ, Conference memo: Schwartz, ‘Modernization and its Ambiguities’, 4.

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