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State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis

University of California Press

Text in Nanbara Shigeru's hand
of "Waga nozomi" (My desire, ca.
1898; for a translation, see p. 52).
Courtesy of Education
Centre, Kagawa Prefecture.

Both Nanbara Shigeru and Hasegawa Nyozekan regarded the emergence of the modern state as a universal, defining condition of national historical development. And both recognized it to be a process specific to each national society: every history is unique. Hasegawa Nyozekan at moments embraced an explanation of Japan's history based on a conjuncture determined ultimately by the dominant mode of production in society as it articulated with external economic forces; at other times he relied for explanation on cultural formations handed down from the past. Nanbara Shigeru was more consistent. For him history was an unfolding of worldviews whose logical contradictions compelled further development via dialectical breaks with the past. Both were keenly aware of the "unique" aspects of their nation's history, especially its political development. But that very awareness of difference was born of a deeper belief in Japan's irrevocable and complete entry into the stream of world history, and bespoke, further, the conviction that all particular histories would ultimately converge.

In this basic outlook, the two men were very much products of the Japan that had been opened to the world in the mid-nineteenth century. For with the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and Japan's subsequent exposure to a bewildering variety of Western modes of thought, Japan's history and future development appeared in an arresting, even thrilling, new perspective. This was the viewone with indigenous roots to be surethat all history, Japan's included, was inherently relative and manipulable; and that what Japan needed was to review its past and determine its future course in the light of the advanced state already reached by the powers that had made their appearance on the horizon at that crucial moment. This view, challenged though it has been by a powerful quasi-nativist reaction, has never been superseded.1

At the same time, Japan's spectacularly successful entry into the stream of universal development also produced recurring fears that someday the bubble would burst, that the nation would forever be forced to play catch-up with the West. This complex has given Japan's modern history an urgent, and sometimes violent and frenetic, quality. And it has, in most periods, fostered a preoccupation with national identity, with being "understood" by the outside world. In its efforts to "stand shoulder to shoulder with the West," Japan met great success at the turn of the twentieth century, only to find its "special relationship" to East Asia a source of friction, hostility and frustration vis--vis its fellow colonial powers (not to mention those actually subject to Japanese rule). Such experiences have in their turn produced spates of compensatory

truculence and encouraged explanations for the actions of the state that look directly to cultural predisposition and the national character.

Whatever may become of this mind-set in the future, there can be no doubt that its proximate origins are to be found in the late Tokugawa and early Meiji periods, when the consensus was formed among the nation's leadership to make a forced march to national strength, lest Japan suffer the fate of China. In its urgency, this consensus on the need for a "rich country and a strong army" ( fukoku kyohei*

) also presupposed that the state itself would direct the nation's development toward its utilitarian end. But who made up the state? Who was to supply the resources and shape priorities and strategies? What was fukoku kyohei to mean for the people?

In the years roughly between 1868 and 1898, an answer emerged from among the myriad factional conflicts, clashes of economic interest, and confrontations over matters of principle among the social forces struggling for a voice in the polity. This answer can, I think, be encapsulated in three contemporary formulas.

First, kanson minpi : "Exalt officialdom, slight the people/officialdom is exalted, and the people base." This is perhaps the key to the process by which the Meiji leadership sought to create a modern state. Influenced both by Tokugawa traditions of bureaucratism long divorced from actual feudal landholding and, after the 1880s, by imported Prussian models for administration, the "founders" built a state in which preponderant power lay with official bureaucracy and a transcendent cabinet rather than with an elected representative body. A description of this process is far beyond the scope of this introduction, of course. Here, let it suffice to say that the state, itself composed of power blocs frequently at odds with one another, managed to take effective, though not undisputed, charge of laying the infrastructure of national strength and identity: a conscript army, a new land tax system, standardized and compulsory education, a constitution, local and national assemblies, railroads, telegraph, post, and so forth. Stupendous popular energies were released, particularly among the upper segments of the peasantry, with the disestablishment of traditional statuses. But all at a price: vast numbers of legally equal imperial subjects were excluded from any political representation. The land tax did not ease the burden of the peasantry, but attempted to rationalize collection and concentrate revenues in the hands of the central authority. Warrior discontent over disestablishment split the leadership and had finally to be put down by force. Industrial development, spurred by military expenditure and transfer of

ownership and management of plant to select private hands, took off in the mid to late 1880s, but did not proceed on a scale sufficient to absorb an increasing rural population. Instead, writes the economist Makoto Itoh, it created a "huge impoverished reserve army in the rural villages," which "served to hold back the improvement of industrial workers' wages." "In stark contrast to the rapid growth of capitalist production, peasants and wage earners continued to suffer poverty and insecurity. Labor unrest in the cities developed parallel with [indeed, independently of] socialist ideologies, including antiwar campaigns, and at the turn of the century began to attract the attention of a wider public."2

The second formula is kazoku kokka , "family state": it describes how the kokutai articulated with the nation as a whole. Thus "family state" will represent the complex legitimating ideology that took shape by the 1890s as the leadership rejected (and partly coopted) proposals, made from within the ruling group and by publicists close to the sovereignty question, for a "mixed" English-style constitutional monarchy and a more radical democratic system derived from natural-rights theory. The "family state" postulated a semidivine monarch whose family was the "great house" for all those of his subjects, at once chief priest of the Sun line and a modern ruler with...