Abstract
This chapter examines the transformation of the Japanese national public sphere (kokumin kōkyōken) during the decade and a half between 1931 and 1945 in relation to the rise of mass dictatorship in the specifically Japanese context. What I attempt to do here is make a small contribution not only to the much larger debates on the elusive and complicated nature of the state-society relationship in 1930s and early 1940s Japan but also to developing the conception of mass dictatorship as a theoretical framework through which to assess the often seemingly self-contradictory character of state mobilisation and its effect on social life in Japan during this period, especially on the public-private demarcation and the distinction between mobilisation and consent, or voluntary activism. The present essay will attempt to suggest directions for examining (1) the growth and transmutation of the state organs and apparatuses that sought to dismantle the critical function of the public sphere and ‘engulf’ civil society; (2) the accompanying ideological articulations of the ‘totalistic’ state-society relationship (whether ‘fascist’ or not) expected to suppress or eradicate critical functions of the public sphere and monopolise the discourse on nationhood; and (3) the critical counterdiscourse that nonetheless continued to emerge in the shifting national public sphere and challenge the totalising claims of the Japanese state.
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Notes
Kyu Hyun Kim, The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Asia Center, 2007).
Mitani Hiroshi, Yamaguchi Teruomi, 19-seiki Nihon no rekishi: Meiji ishin wo kangaeru (Tokyo: Hōsō Daigaku Kyōiku Shinkōkai, 2000).
Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger, with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 136–37.
Consult the following works regarding these issues: Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
Kenneth Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969).
Richard M. Reitan, Making a Moral Society: Ethics and the State in Meiji Japan (Honululu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009).
Mitani Hiroshi, ‘Joron-kōron keisei: hi-seiyō shakai ni okeru minshuka no keiken to kanōsei’, in Mitani Hiroshi, ed., Higashi ajia no kōron keisei (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 2004), pp. 16–24.
For similar views in English, see Merry Elizabeth Berry, ‘Public Life in Authoritarian Japan’, Daedalus 127/3, (Summer 1998), 133–65.
There are still few definitive English-language book-length studies of the major ‘Taishō democrats’, such as Yoshino and Ōyama Ikuo. For a recently published book-length study of Yoshino Sakuzō, see Jung Sun N. Han, An Imperial Path to Modernity: Yoshino Sakuzō and the New Imperial Order in East Asia, 1905–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Asia Center, 2013). Also consult Brett McCormick, ‘When the Medium Is the Message: The Ideological Role of Yoshino Sakuzō’s Minponshugi in Mobilising the Japanese Public’, European Journal of East Asian Studies 2/6 (2007), 185–215.
Dick Stegewerns, ‘Yoshino Sakuzō: The Isolated Figurehead of the Taishō Generation’, in Dick Stegewerns, ed., Nationalism and Internationalism in Imperial Japan (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003), pp. 113–31.
For a critique of this view of the Japanese Emperor as a quasi-religious figure automatically inspiring fanatical devotion, see Kyu Hyun Kim, ‘The Mikado’s August Body: “Divinity” and “Corporeality” of the Meiji Emperor and the Ideological Construction of Imperial Rule’, in Roy Starrs ed., Politics and Religion in Modern Japan: Red Sun, White Lotus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Cf. Jie-Hyun Lim and Kim Young Woo eds, Taejung tokjae: kangje wa tongüi saiesŏ (Seoul: Ch’aeksesang, 2004).
Jie-Hyun Lim, Kim Young Woo, ‘Taejung tokjaeran muŏssinga?’Yoksa wapip’yŏng 9 (2004), 245–58.
Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Of course, we can debate whether a modern state can truly achieve its objectives without co-optation of, collaboration with, and capitulation to the bourgeoisie or, in any case, the dominant socio-economic stratum. My own views hue closely to the notion of the state as both a ‘field’ of social activity and an ‘independent’ agent, developed by Michael Mann. See States, War and Capitalism: Studies in Political Sociology (London: Blackwell, 1992).
Warren Montag, ‘The Pressure of the Street: Habermas’s Fear of the Masses’, in Mike Hill and Warren Montag eds, Masses, Classes and the Public Sphere (London: Verso, 2000), p. 139.
See discussion of Adolfo Scotto di Luzio, L’appropriazione imperfetta: Editori, biblioteche e libri per ragazzi durante il fascism (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996)
Sergio Luzzatto, ‘The Political Culture of Fascist Italy’, Contemporary European History 8/2 (1999), 320–22.
Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 259.
Cf. Arima Takeo, Failure of Freedom: A Portrait of Prewar Japanese Intellectuals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).
Harry D. Harootunian, Bernard Silberman, and Gail Lee Bernstein, eds, Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taishō Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974).
Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 317.
Quoted in Michael A. Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security, 1919–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 31.
Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 55–95, 106–14.
Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 189.
For a discussion of Minobe’s constitutional ideas and the contents of ‘emperor organ theory’, consult Frank O. Miller, Minobe Tatsukichi: Interpreter of Constitutionalism in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965).
Also see Richard H. Minear, Japanese Tradition and the Western Law: Emperor, State and Law in the Thought of Hozumi Yatsuka (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
Koyama Tsunemi, Tennō kikansetsu to kokumin kyōiku (Kyoto: Akademia Shuppankai, 1989).
Minobe Tatsukichi, ‘Hijōji nihon no seiji kikō’, Chūō kōron, January 1933.
Arima Manabu, Nihon no rekishi, vol. 23, Teikoku no shōwa (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2002), p. 135.
See Sheldon Garon, State and Labor in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
Furukawa Takahisa, Shōwa senchūki no sōgō kokusaku kikan (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1992).
Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy, pp. 253–61. See also the ‘conversion’ of Akamatsu Katsumaro, one of the leaders of the proletarian parties, into a national socialist following his tour of Manchuria, discussed in Gordon, ibid., pp. 284–87. Also consult Eguchi Keiichi, Toshi shō-burujoaji undōshi no kenkyū (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1976).
For the view that the IRAA represents an important phase toward the consolidation of the ‘Japanese system of fascism’, see Kosaka Jun’ichirō, ‘Taisei yokusankai no seiritsu’, Iwanami kōza Nihon rekishi, vol. 20 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1976).
For criticisms of this view, see Itō Takashi, Konoe shin-taisei: Taisei yokusan e no michi (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1983).
Akaki Suruki, Konoe shin-taisei to taisei yokusankai (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1984).
For an analysis of the IRAA using the corporatist model, consult Amemiya Shōichi, Kindai Nihon no seiji shidō (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1997).
Kokusaku kenkyūshūhō 3/3 (10 January 1941), in Kokusaku Kenkyūjo, ed., Senji seiji keizai shiryō, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Hara Shobō, 1982), pp. 22–3.
For Itabashi’s interpretation of the Meiji Constitution, see Itabashi Kikumaru, Waga kokutai to kenpō ronsō (Tokyo: Kenpō Gakusetsu Saikentō no Kai, 1936).
See Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, orig. pub. 1908).
Cf. Uchikawa Yoshimi, Masu media hōseisaku-shi kenkyū (Tokyo: Yūhikaku, 1989).
Yamanouchi Yasushi, J. Victor Koschmann, and Narita Ryūichi, eds, Total War and Modernization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
Satō Katsumi, Genron tōsei (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 2004).
Yoshida Noriaki, Senji tōsei to jānarizumu (Kyoto: Shōwadō, 2010).
Kuno Osamu, 1930 nendai no shisōka tachi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1975).
Kitagawa Senzō, Sensō to chishikijin (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2003), pp. 7–15.
Kunugi Toshihiro, ‘Nihon fuashizumu taisei seiritsu-ki no gunbu no kokumin dōin seisaku’, in Nihon Gendaishi Kenkyūkai, ed., Nihon fuashizumu, vol. 2, Kokumin tōgō to taishū dōin (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 1982), pp. 44–50.
Toyosawa Hajime, ‘Nitchū sensō-ka no shuppan-genron tōseiron wo megutte’, in Akazawa Shirō and Kitagawa Kenzō, eds, Bunka to fashizumu (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyōronsha, 1993).
Gregory J. Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 175–80.
Akazawa Shirō et al., eds, Shiryō Nihon gendaishi, vol. 13, Taiheiyō sensō-ka no kokumin seikatsu (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 1985), pp. 184–85.
Kitagawa Kenzō, ed., Shiryōshū: sōryokusen to bunka, vol. 1, Taisei yokusankai bunka-bu to yokusan bunka undo (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 2000), pp. 67–72.
See, e.g., Nagai Yoshikazu, ‘Taishū bunka no naka no Manshū’, in Tsuganesawa Toshihiro and Ariyama Teruo, eds, Senjiki Nihon no media ibento (Tokyo: Sekai shisōsha, 1998), pp. 37–51.
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Kim, K.H. (2013). Total War Mobilisation and the Transformation of the National Public Sphere in Japan, 1931–45. In: Mass Dictatorship and Modernity. Mass Dictatorship in the Twentieth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304339_7
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