New Classics in Modern Japanese History
By DICK STEGEWERNS
Louise Young's Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism will be a landmark in the scholarship on the Japanese creation and management of the short-lived puppet state of Manchukuo (1932-45). This is not to say that her theoretical framework of imperialism as a modern phenomenon consisting of political, economic, and cultural elements and implemented by both state and society is new or that her conclusions are shocking. But then, nowadays, who is able to come up with something entirely original in the field of Japanese history where all major ground has been covered by the immense output of the Japanese themselves and where it seems very difficult to introduce a new interpretation of the facts? What Young does so well in this book, is to furnish some existing interpretations with extensive proof.Japan's Total Empire is an ambitious work. In her attempt to deal with all major groups who acted as agents in the making of Manchukuo into the jewel in the crown of the Japanese empire, Young discusses the role of the army establishment, the mass-media, the various government bureaucracies, the business elite, the intelligentsia, and the rural population. After a concise but excellent overview of the previous history of Japanese imperialism, she discusses in rich detail the three nation-wide 'imperial projects' of the 1930s which involved all groups in Japanese society with the new state: the media campaign in support of its creation, the economic campaign to develop its industrialization, and the migration campaign to solve Japan's 'overpopulation problem' in the countryside. Introducing and structuring a great bulk of primary and secondary Japanese sources, she succeeds in conveying the message that Manchukuo was an inherently modern phenomenon. This was no instance of 'traditional imperialism' from above, it was the product of a reciprocal relation between a modern state and a modern mass society. Moreover, Young rightly emphasizes that Japan's choice for an 'autonomous diplomacy' of expansionism in the 1930s was not propelled by feudal remnants but derived from the maturation of modern institutions.
However, there are a few key points in this book with which I tend to disagree. One is Young's projection of the Manchurian Incident as a 'sudden' phenomenon and of the subsequent 'process of incremental imperialism' not as 'a chain of inevitability', but as a 'chain of contingent decisions' which nevertheless led to 'total empire'. It is true that it was not the single decision of Kwantung Army officers which brought about what is often called the 'fifteen-year war'. There had been earlier instances of local insubordination which failed exactly because the army was very much aware that the timing was premature. But in 1931 when it gave the go-sign, the army knew it could make it in terms of support on the home front and in this conviction it was not alone. During the 1920s many 'liberal' intellectuals were also painfully aware that they had lost out in the competition for the favour of the increasingly influential masses. The army-inspired voluntary organizations with their wide ramification in the countryside had succeeded in swaying the debate on foreign policy. Since Japan's formal colony Korea was safe in the post-WWI new world order, this debate was overwhelmingly about Japan's informal sphere of influence in China. The stronger the Kuomintang became in the 1920s, the more the debate centred on Japan's key position in Manchuria and whether to 'intervene' or not. In this sense the idiom and rhetoric in the three campaigns Young describes was definitely not new. Moreover, 'the incident' surely did not come as a surprise. It was a long-contemplated option which, after considerable calculation, became reality in 1931.
This does not imply that the Manchurian Incident was inevitable. After all, it was the continuation of a trend which had been temporarily halted, even slightly reversed by both internal and external pressures after WWI. In contrast, the consequences of Japan's choice for a total war in East Asia in defiance of both China and the Western powers were inevitable. Quite a few people during the 1920s, both Japanese and non-Japanese, both inside and outside the armed forces, correctly predicted the stages subsequent to 'a Manchurian incident': an all-out but inconclusive Sino-Japanese war, Pearl Harbour, Midway, and devastating air raids on Tokyo. The only thing nobody could have imagined were Nagasaki and Hiroshima. From this point of view, the Manchurian Incident was at the same time the beginning of a new phase of total-war imperialism and the point of no- return on the road to self-destruction.
Another issue is whether Young's framework of 'total empire' is helpful in the end. Stressing pluralism, reciprocity, interrelatedness, and compromise, she points us once again to the complexity of human life and history, and thus also to the complexity of phenomena such as modernity and the Japanese creation of Manchukuo. However, this does not absolve the historian from the task of trying to 'force' all the different factors into some sort of hierarchical order. When looking at the creation and management of Manchukuo and the effects these had on Japan itself, I think one can hardly overemphasize the strategic element.
The lure of ruling the whole of Manchuria, located between the colony Korea, the enemy Russia, and the huge potential of 'China proper', was an irresistible temptation in army circles. Its strategic natural resources put it in a class entirely different from Korea, Taiwan, or Micronesia. The popular image of Manchuria as the land of inexhaustible resources was linked to the utopian aim of self-sufficiency, which was directly related to the post-WWI idea of total war. The choice of taking Manchuria was a choice in favour of preparing for total war, instead of enduring an inferior position in the so-called Washington System any longer.
The management of Manchukuo was also undertaken with the priority of military preparedness in mind: the army had the final say in which industries would be promoted, which tariffs would be decreased, and whether and where Japanese farmers were to be settled, and in its decisions it was to a large extent blind to the civilian interests of the capitalists and settlers.
Japan's choice of preparing for total war had the simultaneous effect of bringing the possibility of total war even closer to its own doorstep. This increasingly demanded more preparation in the sense of the reorganization of domestic society. Young discusses these transformations within Japanese society, referring to the growth of the mass media, the emergence of imperial interest groups, the expansion of state-intervention in economy and society, and the growth of new state apparatuses, yet she characterizes these as 'imprints of Manchukuo on the metropolitan society'. I do not object to this as long as Manchukuo is defined as the first stage in the thorough and irreversible implementation of total war planning, an equally modern but more universal phenomenon which also requires the 'complicity' of all groups in society.
This rather lengthy critique may give the impression that I am completely at odds with Young's conclusions, which is definitely not the case. These are merely a few differences of interpretation and do not in any way question the high quality of her book. The amount of information this book uncovers is dazzling, her observations are sharp, and her analysis is solid. Both in terms of the period she discusses and of the attention she gives to society and culture, Louise Young has written the perfect sequel to Duus, Myers, and Peattie's The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895-1937.
In the same splendid series Twentieth Century Japan: The emergence of a world power, published by the University of California Press over the last few years, we have seen a fair number of works which have taken up the issue of the creation of a Japanese 'imagined community' at the point where Carol Gluck's Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the late Meiji Period left off. After Leslie Pincus' book on Kuki Sh¨zö (Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan) and Takashi Fujitani's book on the creation of the modern institution of the emperor (Splendid Monarchy: Power and pageantry in modern Japan), we are now treated to Mirror of Modernity: Invented traditions of modern Japan, an edited volume by Stephen Vlastos which brings together many of the American authorities in 'cultural studies' on pre-war modern Japan. There is a strong thematic unity to the contributions, something which is often lacking in edited volumes. The only problem is that since the book has taken some five years in the making, quite a few contributions have long since been superseded by full-volume publications by the same (and sometimes other) authors. Nevertheless, the book makes for a very interesting read and may well function as an eye-opener for the 'Orientalist' general reader to the fact that such 'uniquely Japanese' phenomena as harmony, weak legal consciousness, agrarianism, labour management, and in their present form even such vestiges of tradition as the martial arts (including sumo) are nothing but modern inventions.
Another edited volume which shares the above-mentioned trend in focusing on the issues of the imagined community, the social or geographical periphery, civil society, and culture is Japan's Competing Modernities: Issues in culture and democracy, 1900-1930 by Sharon A. Minichiello. It has the typical shortcomings of an edited volume; the book is divided into the compartments 'Geographical and Cultural Space', 'Cosmopolitanism and National Identity' and 'Diversity, Autonomy, and Integration', which are as vague and all-encompassing as one can get, and accordingly most contributors tend to do their own thing without giving much consideration to the heralded theoretical superstructure of 'competing modernities'. Nevertheless, many of the case studies give interesting insights into fairly untrodden territory (in the English language) such as the Koreans in Manchuria, the Ömoto-kyö spiritualist Asano Wasaburö, modernist architecture, popular songs, media culture in Osaka, broadcasting in Korea, etc. Moreover, there are ambitious attempts by Julia Thomas and Kevin Doak to tackle the voluminous issues of respectively 'naturalizing nationhood' and 'culture, ethnicity, and the state' within the scope of twenty-five pages.
This is a far cry from the only other edited volume available in English on the Taishö period (1912-1926), namely Silberman and Harootunian's Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taisho- Democracy dating from exactly 25 years ago. By adding a large quantity of the elements culture, society, periphery, ethnicity, and identity, the new volume presents us a picture of 'the Taishö experience' which is much more complex than its mere political characterization as a 'Taishö democracy' can ever encompass. Both the content and the beautiful cover make this book very difficult to resist for those who have an interest in pre-war modern Japan. Luckily the publishers have made it immediately available in a paperback edition, so it is one tenth of the price of the intolerably expensive New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan to which it is a sequel. *
References
Minichiello, Sharon A. (ed.)
Japan's Competing Modernities
issues In Culture And Democracy, 1900-1930
University of Hawai'i Press, 1998
Vlastos, Stephen (ed.)
Mirror of Modernity
Invented Traditions of Modern Japan
University of California Press, 1998
Young, Louise
Japan's Total Empire
Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism
University of California Press, 1998
Drs Dick Stegewerns, teaches Modern Japanese History at Leiden University, e-mail: stegewerns@let.leidenuniv.nl