The study of the interwar period of modern Japanese history has long been marked by the shadow of the subsequent rise of militarism and war mobilization. As a result, the phenomenon of “Taishō democracy” that arose in this period to promote liberal values and democratic enfranchisement in the form of party government and extension of suffrage had also been mostly, if not totally, devalued as a failed experiment.Footnote 6 However, since the 1980s, interwar liberalism and its intellectual champions have come to receive a steady stream of scholarly attention in the English language, by Hirai Atsuko, Sheldon Garon, Sharon Nolte, Andrew Barshay, Miriam Silverberg, among others.Footnote 7 While most of these works are critical of the limitations of interwar Japanese liberalism, they still continue to expand the scope of investigation beyond the narrative of “a Japanese failure.” By 1991, Andrew Gordon was able to present a synthesis in which both limitations and signal achievements of what he characterized as “imperial democracy” were fully acknowledged, and not merely as a prefatory stage for the wartime “imperial fascism” that plunged Japan into a spiral of devastation.Footnote 8
It is therefore not surprising that we see in more recent studies of intellectual and political history of twentieth-century Japan the attempts to rethink the meaning and significance of interwar liberalism and the major intellectuals associated with it. The books presently under review approach just such intellectuals, Yoshino Sakuzō (1878–1933) and Yanaihara Tadao (1893–1963), respectively, from fresh perspectives. Neither is an intellectual biography in the usual sense, even though both are firmly grounded in a thorough and careful reading of the primary sources. Even though their disciplinary approaches are very different from one another, both works are conscious of the problematic relationships among democracy, liberalism, and imperialism, and not merely in the context of modern Japanese history. The authors, historian Jung-Sun Han and political scientist Ryoko Nakano, respectively, share the orientation of “doing justice” to Yoshino and Yanaihara, genuinely committed to liberalism yet squarely operating within the normative and institutional framework of colonialism and imperialism of the early twentieth-century variety. They address, with varying degrees of persuasiveness and satisfaction, but always with conviction and seriousness, the tough question of whether these thinkers could truly be called “liberals” if they still remained believers in colonial expansion.
Han persuasively argues for the significance of the colonial territories to the totality of Yoshino Sakuzō's intellectual enterprise, and by extension to the Japanese perception of their sociopolitical identity in the age of the empire. Despite clear indications of the sympathy Yoshino extended to the colonized Koreans and Taiwanese, as manifested in his scathing criticisms of the ideology of assimilation, Han ultimately sees him as an imperialist who sought to preserve the moral integrity of the imperial Lebensraum. She begins her analysis with an in-depth discussion of how Meiji-period Christian liberals such as Tokutomi Sohō, Nitobe Inazō, and Ebina Danjō ended up supporting Japanese imperialism, even while challenging the nationalism, chauvinism, and particularism of the kokutai thought (pp. 40–55). Their sympathies for the colonized Koreans, for instance, were based on an arbitrary decoupling of the Korean state and its “people,” based on the assumption that the Japanese empire was able to better “serve” the interests of the latter. Yoshino inherited many of the orientations and assumptions of these Meiji Christian liberals. Han observes that the strong piestic-ascetic dimension of Yoshino's Christian beliefs complemented his Right Hegelian critique of the laissez-faire liberalism in which “the ‘organic state’ was expected to protect society from the ruthless expansion of the market system, while at the same time sustaining national progress and development” (p. 56).
To her credit, Han does not simply dismiss Yoshino's liberalism as an ideological justification for the Japanese imperialist project. She shows that Yoshino was, for instance, intensely aware of the integrity and authenticity of Chinese and Korean nationalisms, categorically rejecting the notion that such nationalisms were politically malleable by the imperialistic rivals of Japan (namely the United States and England). He urged Japanese colonizers to “reflect on their own action (jiko hansei)” in administering Koreans, Taiwanese, and Chinese (pp. 112–19). Indeed, Han demonstrates that Yoshino was admirably capable of a form of dialogic imagination that put the Japanese in the shoes of Koreans and Taiwanese. Nonetheless, she criticizes him for confusing the conceptualization of “social” and “ethnic” communities and thus ultimately rendering his brand of social criticism vulnerable to the “encroachment of ethnocentric tendencies” (pp. 125–26).
Furthermore, Han, in agreement with Japanese historians such as Furukawa Eriko,Footnote 9 but not Matsuo Takayoshi,Footnote 10 characterizes Yoshino's famed theory of minponshugi as a “technology of discipline” rather than a system of thought that could guarantee individual and human rights against the state. In other words, despite Yoshino's unusual sensitivity to the plight of the colonized and other disenfranchised members of the Japanese empire, he was still very much a statist thinker. Han interprets Yoshino's social activism as well as his support of the working class and the Social Masses Party (Shakai Taishūtō) as originating from his belief that such actions could provide for a greater level of national integration. She likewise argues that Yoshino's criticism of the military's invocation of the emperor's supreme command authority (tōsuiken) was based on a statist logic, holding up the Meiji Constitution's proviso that the emperor rely on the advice of his “ministers” in mobilizing domestic resources, and thus criticizing the military's behavior as an attempt to create a “double layer of government” in the Japanese state.
While Han's criticism of the statist or anti-market-oriented features of Yoshino's liberalism is convincing, I am somewhat dissatisfied that she seems to replicate a typical left-wing critique of “bourgeois liberals” in that she ultimately blames Yoshino for not sufficiently reaching out to the working classes and thereby “disarming” their “passionate” critique of the state. Is this a fair criticism of interwar liberals? It is true that Marxists such as Yamakawa Hitoshi (1880–1958) hurled sharp criticism of such “moderate” and “politically compromising” behavior by Yoshino and other “establishment” liberal figures. Yet, are the records of Marxists and socialists truly superior to those of Yoshino and the like-minded liberals in terms of promoting, supporting, and expanding democracy and citizens' rights in interwar Japan, or in advancing the autonomy and welfare of the colonized peoples? The level of Yoshino's awareness of racism suffered by the Korean students studying in Japan should not be underestimated. Han herself points out that Yoshino was not afraid to criticize strongly the proletarian parties for their pro-imperialist stance, calling this convergence between the military and the proletariat exactly what it is: fascism (pp. 142–49). It seems that Yoshino believed that individual self-improvement was the primary means of achieving democracy and that the state should intervene to augment whatever individual efforts lacked: in many ways this view is reminiscent of the contemporary American criticism of the unfettered, market-oriented neoliberalism.Footnote 11
Moreover, Han acknowledges that Yoshino's writings were context-sensitive and continued to evolve. Her perceptive comparison between Yoshino Sakuzō and Rōyama Masamichi (1895–1980), an influential political theorist of democratic socialism, illuminates this point. Rōyama, despite his eventual slide into support for a war mobilization regime, recognized the “bankruptcy of parliamentarian politics,” or the limitations of the bourgeois democratic parties to fully integrate all social classes into a national polity, earlier than Yoshino, who, in Han's estimation, was unable to factor in the “economic causes” of the rise of fascism or militarism into his analysis. Thus Yoshino supported “bourgeois” party politics to the bitter end (pp. 142–49). Yet, Rōyama's solution to the “China Problem” was to emphasize that China was not yet a nation-state and to argue that Japan's primary objective was a “civilizing mission” to build a modern China, attempting to portray the main Japanese impact in Manchuria as that of long-term economic development and social welfare for the local residents. This view was decisively rejected by Yoshino, who discounted the international legitimacy of Manchukuo, the puppet state established by the Kwantung Army. As Han concludes, “Rōyama grossly misjudged the intensity of the Chinese commitment to national independence and self-respect” (p. 185); would Yoshino, who died in 1933 and was not active during the escalation of the Sino-Japanese Conflict and the Pacific War, have made the same misjudgment had he lived on? From Han's own analysis, I find the possibility rather unlikely.
One of the great strengths of Han's study is the rigorous attention she pays to how shifting international relations, especially among European nations and the United States, affected the domestic political theories of Yoshino and other Japanese thinkers. The same strength is apparent in Ryoko Nakano's challenging exploration of Yanaihara Tadao. Yanaihara's intellectual accomplishments as a liberal thinker have already been examined by Susan Townsend,Footnote 12 but Nakano relentlessly focuses on the question of how a sophisticated, “non-Western” theorist of imperialism like Yanaihara can provide for us the means to critique the U.S. hegemony in the post-1945 “liberal world order.”
She argues that Yanaihara, while accepting basic tenets of imperialism, was strongly critical of the poverty and inequality created by colonial enterprises. Yanaihara, according to Nakano, conceived of a “colony” that could maintain the principle of equality of citizenship (something very different from the top-down, artificial policy of “racial harmony” promoted in Manchukuo) and yet be firmly committed to the modernization and improvement of the lives of the colonized. Concretely, Yanaihara believed that colonial Taiwan could be his own “utopia,” wherein there would be “a peaceful, cooperative life in a society of mixed races without struggling for the prosperity of capitalist companies,” and a place “more practical and more respectable” than a “Japanese national asset in terms of assimilation and national defense” (Yanaihara Tadao, Teikoku shugi ka no Taiwan [Taiwan under Japanese imperialism], 1929, p. 331, quoted in Nakano, p. 78). This did not mean, of course, that Yanaihara was not a proponent of Japanese imperialism: he was clearly against the immediate decolonization of either Taiwan or Korea. On the other hand, very much like Yoshino Sakuzō, he consistently rejected assimilation policies in favor of “the creation of an ideal multiethnic society” within the Japanese empire (p. 89). Nakano further shows that Yanaihara's writings gave a positive assessment to the British Dominion in this context, while acutely aware of how racism and ethnic nationalism could put such a multiethnic arrangement in jeopardy. His sensitivity toward the problems of racism and ethnic nationalism, Nakano claims, made Yanaihara critical of the notion of the “East Asian economic bloc” as well as the pan-Asianist discourse justifying the foundation and management of Manchukuo. His solution to the practical dilemmas faced by the Japanese colonial empire was to support a trusteeship or mandate system (iin tōchi), such as the one Japan adopted over the Nan'yō Islands in 1922. In Yanaihara's thinking, such a mandate would be firmly supervised by an international body such as the League of Nations.
These interpretations of Yanaihara's ideas are provocative yet firmly grounded in the judicious and careful reading of his writings. However, I am not entirely convinced of some of Nakano's claims. For instance, she insists that Yanaihara's usage of the term shokumin be translated into English not as “colony/colonize” but as “migration/migrate” (pp. 41–46). She argues that this usage more accurately captures the emphasis given in his theory on the socioeconomic dimensions of colonization rather than political-administrative ones, but this does not make him, as she seems to argue, a more prescient critic of colonialism than his contemporaries, although it is fascinating to learn that Yanaihara considered the Zionist movement a “practical form of colonialism” (pp. 52–56). Still, the point here is not that Yanaihara understood the nature of Western colonialism better than most, but that he fully accepted the “progressiveness” of Zionism, with little thought given to the fate of the Palestinians.
Likewise, Nakano's own agenda of critiquing the U.S.-led liberal world order sometimes overwhelms her otherwise stimulating and enlightening analyses of Yanaihara's ideas, ending the book on a note that left this reviewer scratching his head. She states that “Yanaihara's work challenges the conventional assumption that empire is a historical construct” (p. 144), which is particularly befuddling to a professional historian like myself. I think she means to argue here that the structure of imperialism is embedded even in such “benign” international systems as the current U.S.-led “liberal world order,” but that is only a conjecture on my part. I am nonplussed as to how to interpret her statement. Moreover, Nakano seems unable to appreciate how Yanaihara mapped out an ideal form of international relations without introducing through the back door a form of Japanese particularism. She writes, “Yanaihara's sensitivity to ethnic and cultural diversity can provide a powerful critique of universalism” (p. 148). However, from this reader's point of view, the strengths of Yanaihara's theories appear to reside in his unwavering commitment to the universal values of freedom and social justice that must, according to him, be applied on an equal basis to all races and ethnic groups “settling down” in a particular territory. Finally, her study, while freely extending and applying Yanaihara's ideas to post-1945 global situations—some of her extended analyses are persuasive, others not so persuasive, such as applying his ideas of colonization to China's treatment of the Tibetan independence movement—unfolds in a total absence of any engagement with the postwar Japanese state as a “player” in the global stage, much less its sometimes nakedly neocolonialist relationships with Korea, Taiwan, China, and Southeast Asia during the Cold War and beyond. As in certain forms of right-wing historiography of modern Japan, one receives the impression from her account that postwar Japan simply melts into the shadow of the mighty United States.
Despite my caveats regarding Nakano's arguments, there is no denying that both authors bring into discussions of interwar Japanese history a heightened awareness of colonial and postcolonial realities, including the issues of racism, ethnic nationalism, identity formation, and the complex relationship between domestic politics and international systems. From different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, they show us that the Japanese turn to Asianism and the notion of an “East Asian bloc” in the late 1930s has negated the possibility of Japan's own project to create a viable “liberal international order” as envisioned by men like Yoshino and Yanaihara: it was supposed to culminate in a Japanese empire surrounded by still-friendly, decolonized former territories, or at the very least autonomous, self-governing territories administratively independent but socioeconomically bound to the empire. (Today's Wales and Scotland in the United Kingdom come to mind.) This alternative vision of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was not merely a pipe dream. Han, for one, demonstrates that the Lytton Report of 1931, while rejecting the notion that Manchukuo was a “spontaneous” creation of the Manchurian peoples, was prepared to concede Japan's “special relationship” with China, as long as the former was willing to avoid unilateral aggressive domination of the region (pp. 175–78).
Most importantly, despite Nakano's only partially persuasive claims about the uniquely non-Western character of Yanaihara's theories, both studies illuminate how the liberal qualities of Yoshino and Yanaihara's thought as well as their ability to criticize Japanese territorial expansions and to sympathize with the colonizers appear to have stemmed from what I would identify as strains of Kantian international liberalism. Richard Wolin points out that from the perspective of Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace (1795), “colonialism's main sin was that it inadmissibly reduced indigenous peoples to a means to an end: that is, fodder for the enrichment of the metropole and its inhabitants.”Footnote 13 In the same vein, Yoshino's Right Hegelian “statism” might have distanced him from more radical ideas involving overcoming class differences, but it also allowed him to hold on to a staunch defense of the “moral integrity” of public policies and enterprises. Merely “economically benefiting” the minority, the disenfranchised and the colonized, without endowing them with autonomy, that is, the right to self-determination, was ultimately morally unacceptable to him. For Yanaihara, too, the multiethnic, multicultural, and yet equitable relationships of the residents of an imperial territory—his ostensible ideal “vision” of a colony—could only be maintained under the supervision, or at the very least approval, of an international body operating under the “higher principles” of cooperation and peace.
It would be easy to dismiss these interwar liberals as “children of their times.” But, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, are we really doing so much better in promoting equity among national, ethnic, and cultural communities? Jung-sun Han and Ryoko Nakano in their respective works admirably show that the introduction of the heuristic category “empire” into the assessment of interwar Japanese liberalism does not result in a mere reconfirmation of the latter's allegedly outdated qualities. Such examinations instead reconfirm the continued relevance of the aspirations, endeavors, and frustrations of the prewar liberal thinkers such as Yoshino Sakuzō and Yanaihara Tadao to understanding and improving our own world today.
