China and Japanese Modernization

Since the first pangs of modern consciousness in Japan, China has served as a prism through which various manifestations and permutations in its self-image have come to the surface. At times adulated, and at times admonished by various segments of Japanese society, China in the Japanese gaze has reflected ‘events’ taking place within Japan and in Japan's larger relationship to international society. In this important sense, China has functioned less as an element of similitude and far more as a perceived moment of historical and cultural difference to which some have aspired and others averred. Looking back at Japan's modern encounters with the West, it also seems that China has functioned as a kind of weathervane for the passions, fears and desires of intellectuals from a spectrum of different positions and ideologies. Just as modernization and globalization have necessitated the creation and popularization of national identity,Footnote ¹ so have they also required the creation of Others against which these vocabularies of cultural identity and history can be located. Neither this sense of the modern nation nor the concomitant sense of its Others have, however, been inevitable or transparent ‘things’ in themselves.Footnote ²

Japanese images and representations of China, whatever their flavour or function, have often been wrapped in layered tones of historical complexity. During much of the Edo period (1603–1868), the existence of imperial China affirmed the ontological integrity of a Sino-centric world order.Footnote ³ Like a huge sun that burns the eyes if looked at too closely, China was for many influential minds in Edo Japan a sprawling empire to be kept at a safe distance. Even before the arrival of Commodore Perry's Black Ships in 1853, from the early nineteenth-century the Mito School (or School of ‘National Learning’) had begun to assert the foreignness of Confucianism in order to make Japan the new centre of an early modern Asia. Thus, even though they did utilise Confucian themes of familial loyalty ensconced within nativised versions of cultural essence and spiritual authenticity,Footnote ⁴ Mito School scholars such as Sato Nobuhiro (1769–1850) sought to reverse the presumed cultural and historical supremacy of China so that Japan might gradually reconstruct its position in East Asia.Footnote ⁵ After the Opium War of 1842, and China's series of humiliating losses to England, previous Sino-centric worldviews in Japan became more subject to widespread intellectual and cultural controversy, ridicule and repudiation. From the early Meiji period (1868–1912) and the work of the ‘enlightenment thinker’, Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), to various strains of pan-Asianism after World War I, the imagined role of China by Japan was one that gradually helped to certify Japan's claim to political superiority in Asia and its growing cultural ambivalence towards Europe.Footnote ⁶

Some of this cultural ambivalence has also existed towards China in much of the twentieth-century. Even though Fukuzawa, and more contemporary thinkers from all walks of Japanese intellectual life, have claimed to understand the historical and cultural significance of China in the context of Japanese modernity, there has never been a consensus of any kind. Thus, while in the early stages of Japanese modernity the language of race, colonialism and survival of the fittest characterized modes of thinking about China, debates in contemporary Japan focus on whether it is important to align with the old empire (America), the emerging one (China), or whether a more inclusive regional Asian economic and political configuration would be advantageous. One common element of recent debates has been the belief that China has finally ‘awakened’ and that Japan must, in one way or another, come to terms with its past conquest and exploitation of China in order to complete the task of historical reconciliation.Footnote ⁷ It may thus come as a historical surprise to some that many Japanese historians, intellectuals, students, and cultural circles in early post-war Japan saw China at the apex of its prestige and political influence at the very moment Japan began to expand its industrial capital as an engine of post-war export-led growth. This early post-war view towards China can tell us about images of Japan's own past, present and future, as well as how some saw a potential renaissance in Asia that did not depend upon the West, nor upon a Hegelian view of world history with Europe, America, or even Japan, as its epicentre.Footnote ⁸ Just when national defeat in World War II was being transformed into a second chance at modernization and a place in the modern capitalist world, certain Japanese historians and intellectuals saw in China the possibility of a path that had consistently eluded Japanese modernity in the Meiji, Taisho and early Showa years. Immediately after the war, an influential group of Marxist historians and intellectuals began to hold up China as a kind of mirror from which to gaze upon Japan's historical scars and imperfections and, moreover, begin the process of [re]sculpting Japanese modernity and its place in Asian history in ways that diverged from more popular narratives of reintegration into an American-led world order.

This paper takes a critical look at how the radical Left in Japan viewed China in transition after the war examines the historical and political ironies associated with attempts to narrate modern Japanese history as a moment of post-colonial liberation. It does not, however, take on the much broader issue of differences between China and Japan in terms of the historical and social role of Marxism in the twentieth-century.Footnote ⁹ Although the radical historians discussed below did have an important voice in both the pre-war and early post-war eras, the social role and political influence of Marxism was quite different in China to that in Japan. The immediate years after World War II were, however, a time of survival and idealism rather than of reflection. In spite of the decline of Marxist approaches in Japan after the 1950s, the first ten years or so after the war were a time when anything seemed possible in an Asia that was beginning its own moment of decolonisation and finding its own voice.

This paper examines the ways in which a number of young Japanese historians and intellectuals saw China as the elixir to all that seemed to be ailing early post-war Japan. It argues that this phenomenon was far more than the mere Japanese idealization of Mao Zedong's charismatic powers of mass persuasion or mere rapture over the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Instead, their views towards China brought to the surface raw frustrations over what was taking place after the war in the name of Japanese democracy and modernity— both undeniably influenced by the United States. In contrast to others who saw it necessary to accept the logic of Asia as being on the ‘periphery’ of world history and modernity,Footnote ¹⁰ those looking to China saw the possibility of reconfiguring the cultural and historical topography of Asia. They envisioned a new relationship between Asia and modernity that could avoid the pitfalls of pre-war Japanese ultra-nationalism, Japan-centric pan-Asianism and imperialism. During an era in which Japan had just lost its own Asian empire and had been thrust into the project of refashioning modernity based upon America and Europe as models, certain historians (and the cultural movements they organized) began to challenge this vision of modernity with their own historical interpretations of where Japan stood on the world stage and within East Asia.

Colonizing Japanese history in a decolonizing Asia

Although Japan has showed a resistance to imperialism, many agree that China and Japan have shared an intertwined, if not similar, cultural heritage over the centuries which still overlaps in certain modern traditions. After World War II Marxist historians in Japan focussed on common cultural and historical traditions between Japan and China because they felt the modern struggle of Asian nations, including Japan, should be one of resisting the global integration of cultures, economies and political systems at the hands of larger forces such as empires. Although at first glance it might seem that early post-war Chinese and Japanese history was heading in two very different directions, it was equally true that Japanese Marxist historians—looking out into the world at the formative stages of the Cold War era—saw both nations as having common experiences in dealing with this uncomfortable phenomenon of forced integration and subjugation at the behest of more powerful historical forces.Footnote ¹¹

Before digging into the specifics of how and why certain Marxists saw such similarities and intertwined historical fates, it is first necessary to point out that Marxism in much of the twentieth-century represented an important set of principles that had much to say about the everyday conditions of ordinary people in seemingly disparate regions of the world. In a very crucial sense, Marxism has been infinitely more than a cold, materialist creed touting the primacy of economic conditions over culture, identity, or memory. In their attempts to interpret and appropriate cultural traditions for very modern causes and objectives, certain thinkers and movements in China and Japan realised the practical value of Marxism in working out issues related to the development of the ‘nation-state’. This began not after World War II, but in the early decades of the twentieth-century where, as Germaine Hoston shows, indigenous traditions of revolutionary activity and thought began to emerge in both China and in Japan.Footnote ¹² These trends paralleled, and were influenced by, larger movements in international Marxism such as The Third International (the international Marxist platform organized by Moscow in 1919) which declared the worldwide struggle against imperialism to be a central issue in the aftermath of World War I.Footnote ¹³ Marxist resistance to capitalism began more and more to associate itself with the formation of movements that declared the time ripe for national liberation and independence.

From the end of World War I and the beginning of the modern decolonisation movement on the global stage, Marxism sought to adapt itself to social and cultural forms of resistance whose objective was achieving the independence of peoples (or nations), from North Africa to the Middle East, Southeast Asia to East Asia, as well as Europe and the USA.Footnote ¹⁴ As Michael Denning demonstrates, from the early 1920s various kinds of ‘cultural fronts’ (taking the form of ‘proletarian literary clubs, workers theatres, camera clubs, dance troops, choruses, and composers’ collectives’) emerged, not only in East Asia but also in places like Eastern Europe and the United States of America.Footnote ¹⁵ Dennis Dworkin likewise points out that, in post World War II Britain, ‘cultural Marxism’ sought to develop the ‘autonomy of culture in social life’ through various ideas and cultural movements that departed from materialist readings of Marxist ideas.Footnote ¹⁶ These somewhat similar approaches were linked by their common resistance to fascism, imperialism and their desire for a kind of national autonomy (or ‘national-popular’Footnote ¹⁷) based on the primacy of the working-classes.Footnote ¹⁸ Similarly, in the early twentieth-century in China and Japan, Marxian-led cultural movements organised by workers, intellectuals, artists and historians began to take root.Footnote ¹⁹ Their common object of consternation was the Japanese economic, political and military elite, who were not only creating a fascist regime at home, but who were also colonising China, Korea and Southeast Asia. Not only were various kinds of cultural fronts/proletarian cultural movements beginning to take hold in both China and Japan, but their growth was in many ways also a mutually cooperative and trans-historical enterprise that sought out common themes, representations, and objectives.Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, the development of proletarian cultural ideas and movements, or ‘fronts’, was something that took place in a mutually interactive way in pre-war China, Japan and Korea.

How could this have had any bearing upon early post-war Japan, which had just been the largest coloniser of Asia, including China? Modern Japanese and Chinese history existed within the unequal terms of colonizer and colonized, rather than on an equal plane of shared cultural resistance to historical forces and powers that had overwhelmed them. How could themes of ‘national liberation’, common to cultural fronts in China and in pre-war Japan, have had any mutual relevance after 1945? From the summer of 1947, progressive Japanese voices of many persuasions began to see a ‘Reverse Course’ in the American Occupation policy as a harbinger of the return to fascism, rather than as the fulfilment of the original post-war promise of democracy.Footnote ²¹ There were a number of well-founded reasons to support such views, none more demonstrative than the rehabilitation of war criminals, including the architects of Japan's wartime industrial policy in Manchuria, Kishi Nobusuke (1896–1987), who served as Prime Minister of Japan during the late 1950s. Kishi and other wartime figures in the Japanese empire were basically relieved of any official responsibility for their past actions by the Occupation, in what was called the ‘Reverse Course’. From about 1947 the Occupation Authority, led by the United States of America, sought to enlist Japan in the larger regional and global effort to ‘contain’ Soviet communism, a policy first initiated by US President Truman in 1946.Footnote ²² The objective of this policy shift was to develop Japan as an economic showcase for the emerging American-led world order and, more finitely, to make Japan a lynchpin in the effort to stave off communism in East Asia. Although recent studies have argued persuasively that in some specific areas, like education,Footnote ²³ it was actually the Japanese leadership rather than the Occupation that pushed for more conservative policies. It is difficult to deny that the Occupation moved further away from social reform and more towards social control and repression by the summer of 1947, resulting in mass public demonstrations and strikes. Occupation crackdowns on a labourer's right to strike, on Left-leaning media, public employees, as well as on the Japan Socialist Party and Japan Communist Party, infuriated those who had just several years earlier heralded the Occupation as the ‘liberation of Japan’ from Japan's own feudal and violent past.Footnote ²⁴

Young, visionary Marxist historians, such as Ishimoda Shō (1912–86), Inoue Kiyoshi (1913–2001), Matsumoto Shinpachirō (b. 1913), and Uehara Senroku (1899–1975), believed by about 1950 that this state of affairs constituted the virtual ‘colonization’ of Japan to American imperialism.Footnote ²⁵ As a result, they began to organize what might be called a cultural front—whose centrepiece was history-writing by ordinary people—as a social and political means to ‘liberate’ the Japanese working-class from a position of historical and political subordination to the United States. If Marxist historians could present Japan as the subject of Western imperialism in the same way China had presented itself as the subject of Japanese wartime subjugation, they could begin to narrate and depict historical trajectories for Japan that merged with those of China, and Asia more generally. This meant Japan was to be historically placed and politically positioned as a victim of Asian colonization, rather than as a colonizer of an Asia which had, in reality, just been released from Japanese colonial rule. While Marxists were acutely aware of Japan's past and its imperialism, much Marxist history from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s centred on how the Japanese nation (minzoku) was the victim of American imperialism and how, consequently, it was necessary to begin a formal struggle for ‘national independence’ (minzoku kaihō).Footnote ²⁶ Japanese Marxists, viscerally aware of what Japan had done in times past to China and Asia, began writing histories that portrayed the Japanese working-class and other marginalized voices as a historical and political subaltern, co-axial to the larger stream of Asian peoples seeking to take charge of their own destinies.Footnote ²⁷

Behind the notion of national independence lay the deeper issue of American Occupation and the implied contrast between Mao's beneficial policies and the more baleful ones of Westerners. While it is difficult to deny that the USA was (and still is) in some important ways neo-imperial, the question of whether the Occupation was the moral equivalent of pre-war fascism is far more complex. Under the Occupation, economic, social and political reforms did have an affect in many areas, including the right of women to vote and the more general freeing up of labour unions and the Left to make their voices heard. This was perhaps why they saw interpreted crackdowns on unions and strikes as a virtual return to the days of tyranny and fascism. The early days of ‘liberation’ at the hands of the Americans were in some genuine ways undermined and betrayed by Cold War policies that affected the Left and did speak to the recognition that both America and the West could no longer hold on to their predominant stature in Asia.

In this regard, the timing of the Marxist turn in historical narrative was well-placed. It occurred within the larger context of the ‘tectonic’ move to find a new ‘current history’ of Asia that crystallized in the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia.Footnote ²⁸ In 1947, historians such as Ishimoda had taken a great interest in accounts of how India won independence, in particular, Jawaharlal Nehru's The Discovery of India (a historical account of India before British rule right through to independence). Inspired by Mao's China and Nehru's India, Japan realised that the huge political shifts in Asia heralded a new age of liberation and independence. Historically, European colonial powers had acceded to powerful, indigenous movements which made all but inevitable their ascendancy to independence. The fascination with China was far more than just admiration for its next door neighbour; it was a sign of much deeper interest in the transformation of East Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia, as the fortunes of Europe declined.

The boldness of this approach put forward by Ishimoda and his colleagues lay not only in the way it positioned Japanese history alongside Asian history, but also in how it viewed post-war Japanese democracy. For example, the liberal intellectual and political philosopher Maruyama Masao (1914–1996) supported the idea of parliamentary democracy and looked to Europe and the United States of America, believing that post-war modernity had to include a nation-state with a civil society and a strong middle-class that could stand independently of the state. Post-war Japanese capitalism was driven more by public expectation and public rationality than by the state, the military, or large industrial interests that had ‘shipwrecked’ Japan in times past. Modernity for Maruyama thus meant the West, democratic modernization, and a kind of bourgeois democratic revolution that did not necessarily entail a transition to socialism. Only these would insure that the residue of Japanese feudal customs and traditions could eventually be overcome and replaced by a more modern democracy.Footnote ²⁹ The worldview of Maruyama and other liberal intellectuals therefore was linked to their perceptions about what kind of social system was necessary in post-war Japan. Most of all, Maruyama saw Japan as socially and historically apart from Asia insomuch as Japan had historically already come full circle. Asian liberation nationalism of the early post-war era, in places like China, Indonesia and India, could build upon nascent revolutionary traditions because they were just beginning to enter a post-colonial phase and a new era of independence for the first time.Footnote ³⁰ For Maruyama, a radical past marked by mass resistance to Japanese colonialism had eliminated much of the old feudal society in places like China, Korea and Southeast Asia. Modern traditions of radical political activity in such places could be counted upon to provide the kind of radical change that Japanese society, still mired in feudal traditions, could not easily produce.Footnote ³¹ Like Marxist historians, therefore, Maruyama maintained that pre-war Japan had no meaningful tradition of anti-imperialist nationalism or radical cultural movements that could serve the present.

Although they shared many critiques with Maruyama regarding Japan's pre-war past, some Marxist historians saw a very different confluence of historical opportunities and avenues open to them. One of their goals during the early post-war period was to show why Japan was in fact potentially just like China, Indonesia, or India. Historians, such as Matsumoto Shinpachirō, on the one hand made persuasive cases for the awakening of ‘revolutionary cultural traditions’ (kakumeiteki dentō bunka) in post-war Japan that could lead to socialist revolution and ‘national independence’.Footnote ³² On the other hand, they depicted Japan as one link within the larger Asian drive toward liberation from colonial rule, global capitalism and the realist balance-of-power equation integral to American foreign policy.Footnote ³³ In fact, historians such as Eguchi Bokurō, Tōyama Shigeki and Uehara Senroku treated both the USA and the USSR as neo-imperialist leviathans. Yet, they based their claims not simply upon a preference for avoiding geo-political games or for achieving national independence alone, placing emphasis upon what they held to be shared Asian cultural attributes that could be brought out in place of the kind of realpolitik and fascination with military power which plagued both camps during the Cold War.Footnote ³⁴ As certain historians saw it, Asian civilization and a tradition of tolerance, rooted in principles of mutual respect rather than equations of fear and the threat of nuclear annihilation, offered the possibility for new forms of cooperation and harmonious relations.Footnote ³⁵ In place of instrumental reason and power politics, they offered a view of cooperation, laced with appeals to historical and cultural bonds, to bring Japan and East Asia together in ways that dodged issues of war-responsibility and why Japan was now suddenly on the same historical and political terrain as those whom it had dominated just several years earlier.

There are two important points that should be pointed out here. Firstly, the approach of historians was in some ways a form of cultural essentialism that presumed Asian values to have their own unique and contiguous magical powers. These values did not work in the pre-war era and the arguments of Marxists themselves suggested that rather than cultural necessity there was more of a historical and political moment at hand that had indeed come with Asian decolonisation. Secondly, the insertion of Japan's past into the trajectory of post-war decolonisation glossed over the question of its own past in Asia. This is even more ironic because many Marxist historians, in particular Uehara and Munakata, were concerned with history education and with making history-writing itself a radical praxis of action that could be taken up on the popular level in, for instance, the Movement for a People's history of the early 1950s.Footnote ³⁶ This movement, led by Marxists such as Ishimoda, sought to bring history-writing into the domain of everyday life among housewives, factory-workers, mothers and students as part of a sweeping drive towards greater working-class consciousness in all geographical areas of Japan. At the same time, however, as Tomiyama Ichirō points out, in the immediate aftermath of empire and Japan's reorientation to a minimalist sense of nationhood, many Japanese intellectuals exhibited a kind of amnesia over the past and substituted direct debate over Japan's past with a more comfortable debate over the lack of Japanese individual subjectivity (shutaisei) in the wartime past.Footnote ³⁷ From a very different viewpoint, this perspective is also supported by Oguma Eiji, who has recently argued that the early 1950s ‘re-evaluation of Asia’ by Japanese intellectuals on various sides of the political spectrum was a way to intentionally cast aside the past and make it easier to bring Japan ‘back into Asia’.Footnote ³⁸

It is hard to claim that Marxists were not consciously aware of what had been done in the name of Japan during the pre-war and wartime years, especially because many Marxists also felt the heavy hand of the Japanese state during this period.Footnote ³⁹ Marxists like Ishimoda were unequivocal in the view that they had failed the pre-war masses in mobilizing and awakening them to blunt fascism. On a more subtle level, however, they at times tried to assuage and come to terms with what Japan had done in Asia by steering a new narrative and political course for the Japanese working-class in the aftermath of empire. By rearticulating a kind of pan-Asianist or ‘Third Way’ as something completely different from pre-war versions of pan-Asianism they claimed that, in contrast with the past, Japan could no longer be above Asia but had instead to locate its political destiny within an Asia that looked very different from that of only a decade before. Ishimoda, Inoue, Matsumoto among others looked to China for a conceptual framework that would support their claims for reinventing Japan's historical relationship with Asia. This was, in essence, a kind of strategic decision: the problem of Japan's past in Asia could be vicariously resolved, they hoped, through a new framework of post-war Asia with China now at the historical and political helm.

Behind this decision lay a clear, though unmentioned, self-differentiation between post-war Marxist interpretations and pre-war versions of pan-Asianism. Historians and thinkers belonging to the pre-war Kyoto School sought to make Japan the epistemological and geo-centric nexus of a new ‘world history’ during an age in which Japan's prevalence in Asia was both a historical and a political fact.Footnote ⁴⁰ The significance of attempts to ‘overcome the modern’ was, therefore, laden with political baggage equal to or even surpassing the disturbing historical positions of the Kyoto School. This is precisely why, as shown below in more detail, Marxists went to great pains to re-historicise their positions through historical (rather than ontological or racial) discourses of the ethnic nation.Footnote ⁴¹ Although they did this by distancing themselves from the Kyoto School and pre-war versions of pan-Asianism (which they saw as irreversibly discredited), they did utilize elements of pre-war historical traditions (even though they narrated these as being completely ‘new’) within the attempt to re-insert Japan into Asia.

By about 1950, Japanese Marxists were able to draw upon an important modern Japanese tradition of Marxist cultural practice.Footnote ⁴² The centre of this cultural Marxism, for those with the most respected voices on the radical Left (Marxist historians), lay in the practice of history-writing as a means to organise a cultural front against American imperialism. The reasons for the primacy of history and history-writing in this objective were not hard to understand: historians (particularly Marxist historians) put forward the idea that history could now serve as an easily-accessible instrument for both personal growth and national salvation. History-writing, and the discipline of history as a whole, were now seen as being the antithesis of pre-war forms of history-writing (koku-shi) that had legitimized the imperial state and Japanese militarism.Footnote ⁴³ As Carol Gluck notes, during the first decade after World War II Marxist historians like Ishimoda Shō sought to diagnose the mistakes of the past in order to make a better present.Footnote ⁴⁴ This was true for intellectuals as well as for ordinary people who, directly encouraged by Marxists, now sought to form their own history-writing groups on an ad hoc basis. In the minds of local activists who formed history-writing groups in, for example, Ehime Prefecture on Shikoku Island, history was what had ‘changed the most between pre-war and post-war eras’.Footnote ⁴⁵ This was as true for many on the margins of Japanese society as it was for Marxist historians themselves.

In fact, by about 1950 the practice of history-writing became something akin to what Josephine Donovan calls ‘revolutionary praxis,’ or a ‘free, creative engagement in the world’ within the sphere of everyday life.Footnote ⁴⁶ All of the Marxist historians discussed in this paper, as well as the institutions to which they belonged, such as the Historical Research Association and the Association of Democratic ScientistsFootnote ⁴⁷, endeavoured to make history-writing a de-professionalized and popular activity accessible to virtually all classes, genders and regions of Japanese society. The most notable project was the Movement for a People's History (Kokuminteki Rekishigaku Undō), which began in 1950 and consisted of numerous cultural campaigns to bring history to the masses and to encourage ordinary people to write their own histories in their everyday lives.Footnote ⁴⁸ In conjunction with these activities, the movement also encouraged workers, farmers, housewives, mothers and others to directly take part in craft activities, poetry recitations, and even archaeological excavations. Like history-writing, these activities were also supposed to bring people together and solidify their shared interest in making Japanese society more equitable. As shown below, such activities often took wartime China (1937–45) as their model of cultural resistance and, conversely, presumed that Japanese history had no clues of its own to offer about these kinds of campaigns. In other words, Japanese Marxists sought to find their model of cultural resistance in places other than Japan's own modern socialist, anarchist, or Marxist traditions.Footnote ⁴⁹ Even though a vibrant pre-war tradition of Marxist cultural practice in resisting fascism and imperialism existed during the 1920s, for reasons as discussed below, many drew instead upon the example of China and left Japan's own radical past to collective silence.

The China that ‘Brought Socialism onto Asian soil’

In 1945 China was freed from Japanese colonial rule, but faced several more years of inner turmoil as a result of half a century of civil strife, division and dismemberment. Japan was, by contrast, from the 1950s already on its way to once again becoming an industrial and economic superpower. The cultural front known as the ‘Movement for a People's History’ represented an attempt to simulate certain elements in modern Chinese history. Why was the case of China so relevant? The answer had much to do with the temporal and spatial proximity of changes underway there: the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 by Mao Zedong inaugurated the first communist nation-state in Asia. This took place just as the Japanese Left was engaged in a fierce struggle with its own government and, as mentioned above, with Occupation's Reverse Course. For Japanese Marxists, China had by virtue of its successful revolution emerged victorious from Japanese imperialism. Because China had succeeded in repelling Japan, a colonizer and occupier, it could stand as a model for radical Japanese historians in their present struggles against American imperialism and ‘colonization’. Although arguably the allied victory over Japan had something to do with the emancipation of China from Japanese colonial rule, the Marxist reading of modern Chinese history focused exclusively upon China's war against Japan (kōnichi sensen) between 1937 and 1945 as a sufficient condition for eventual liberation and independence. Another important factor influencing their view of China was the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. For historians such as Ishimoda, Inoue, Matsumoto and Uehara (as for many workers, women, and ordinary people), the outbreak of war in Korea was proof that the United States of America had imperial designs upon all of East Asia and wished to make the entire region a bulwark against the USSR. As such, the reality of war taking place once again in East Asia was, for some on the Japanese Left, of far greater concern than whether or not Chinese wartime resistance alone actually succeeded in repelling Japan. Adding insult to injury, during the early 1950s Japanese heavy industry was involved in helping to supply armaments to United Nations forces in Korea and thus had, for many on the Left, been complicit in the remilitarization of East Asia in ways that violated the spirit of Article 9 of the post-war Japanese constitution.

Nevertheless, those familiar with Marxist doctrine might ask whether these Marxist historians shared Marx's own historical interpretations of China, India and Asia as being in conditions of historical stagnation.Footnote ⁵⁰ As the theory of ‘Oriental Stagnation’ goes, Asian states and economies were led by authoritarian leaders who had kept Asian peoples from reaching the level of development seen in the West.Footnote ⁵¹ As late as 1946 Japanese Marxist historians applied such dictums to China and Asia as a whole. Even in 1950 there were still residual beliefs in the theory of Oriental Stagnation. This is precisely why some came to the conclusion, following the Comintern Critique of Japanese capitalism in 1950Footnote ⁵² that, in order to change Japanese society, it would be necessary to seek a direct transition to socialism through a united front against American imperialism—as had just been done in China—rather than through a more gradual two-stage approach to revolution.Footnote ⁵³ Instead of seeking a democratic revolution as a first step toward communism some Marxists now urged an immediate socialist revolution that could leapfrog and obviate any political systems that included parliamentary democracy, the latter now seen as a tool of the reactionary elite and the American Occupation.Footnote ⁵⁴ This is also why the Japan Communist Party, from as early as 1947, declared the need for a ‘United National Front’ (Minzoku Tōitsu Sensen). By the late 1940s the idea of historical stagnation was coming to be replaced by a new mode of explanation regarding the history and relationship between Japan and China, as well as Japan and Asia as a whole. In this important sense, Japanese Marxists were confronting and dealing with what many have described as Marx's Orientalism in thinking about the non-West and the related penchant of Western anthropologists to declare Asians and Africans ‘peoples without history’.Footnote ⁵⁵

From as early as 1946, Japanese Marxists like Okamoto Saburō made it clear that they thought China was moving in the direction of ‘world proletarian socialist culture’ and that China's wartime (1937–45) national/cultural front against Japan had enabled it now to create a ‘revolutionary national culture’ based on progressive ideas that could unite the masses, particularly the rural peasantry.Footnote ⁵⁶ These observations were followed in 1948 with a ground-breaking paper by the China literary scholar, Takeuchi Yoshimi, entitled ‘Chinese and Japanese Modernity’. Takeuchi maintained that nineteenth-century Chinese literary figure and nationalist, Lu Xun (1881–1936), was successful in resisting the West and in developing an authentic form of subjective consciousness and revolution, which he considered to be an Oriental form of resistance to imperialism and capitalist modernity.Footnote ⁵⁷ In contrast to Japan's pre-war, catch-up mentality with Europe, Takeuchi argued that Chinese intellectuals such as Lu Xun were able to lay the groundwork for revolution, progress, and ultimately autonomy from European (and Japanese) rule. This was to become an important theme within Marxist approaches in the immediate years after 1948 and, in the words of historian Ishimoda Shō, also illustrated ‘the cruelty of the historical dialectic between’ China and Japan insofar as the historical fortunes of each country vis-à-vis the other were now reversed.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the radical Japanese gaze, China had come a very long way from its earlier designations as a place of stagnation, emptiness and vulnerability for those wishing to take advantage of it.

In 1949, the year of the establishment of the People's Republic of China, historians such as Kanda Shohachihei stood at the annual conference of the influential Historical Research Association in Tokyo and declared that Mao's China had irreversibly altered ‘the direction of world history’.Footnote ⁵⁹ So moving was China's example for Kanda and other Marxist historians that it helped provide historical legitimacy and inspiration to their now explicit goal of making history-writing a revolutionary cultural praxis that could lead to dramatic results in Japan. The logic behind this glossing over of historical events, in particular ignoring the fact that the allied victory over Japan had played some part in the historical process of China's liberation from Japan, served an important role in highlighting Chinese agency against Japanese oppression. Within this logic lay the assumption that an indigenous undercurrent of traditional Chinese culture, untouched by civil war and occupation, stood at the foundations of its social and political resistance to Japan. This basic position supposed that the experience of colonization and the rape of China by the imperial powers had not stripped it of its cultural traditions but had, to the contrary, awakened them to their ancient glory.Footnote ⁶⁰ Some Japanese Marxist historians were perhaps therefore convinced that Mao's China had persevered, not because of the allied victory in World War II, but in spite of it. It was, moreover, within this context that they looked to particular features of Chinese wartime resistance to Japan as examples of cultural unity that had helped bring about dramatic social and political transformations.

Unifying narratives of China's wartime (1937–45) past

The objective of what some Marxist historians in Japan called ‘national liberation’, however tenuous its historical foundations, also faced some very difficult socio-political problems. Most notable among these was the social contrast between Japan and China after World War II. While Mao Zedong had become the undisputed leader of China and had possessed an individual charisma that supported his rule over the People's Republic of China, the Japanese Left had no such leaders. In fact, Japan's painful experience with fascism had thrown into disrepute the kind of firebrand oratory seen not only in Mao's charismatic rule, but also in the more notorious examples of German or Italian fascism. Any Japanese public figures of the sort embodied by Mao Zedong, no matter what their ideology, would have most likely raised more alarm bells than calls to radical action. Thus the question for Japanese Marxist historians after the war had to do with finding ways to galvanize mass resistance in an environment where no charismatic leaders stood out from among the fray. Yet, this is also where the wartime example of China became useful, providing a historical legitimacy for the social project of organizing mass-level cultural activities such as Minwa, local theatre, folk crafts, archaeological excavations, singing and, most importantly, history-writing. Through these and other forms of cultural practice, historians and intellectuals hoped to foster a groundswell of activity that could lead to working-class unity and mass resistance. Under this divestiture of cultural practice—including the writing of history—from pretensions of high culture some Marxists sought to ignite a collective groundswell of activism that would sweep away both the Conservative Japanese government and the lingering influence of the American Occupation.

A central assumption behind the view of Japanese Marxists on Chinese national unification was that it would be essential to unify both intellectual and proletarian/popular forms of cultural activity and resistance. Through mass-level cooperation the Chinese had worked in unison for the common goal of liberation from Japan and the realisation of a people's nation that was no longer under the influence of any imperialist powers. In other words, anti-imperial activity could lead to national unification only if there was enough cooperation between intellectuals and the peasants and workers. Okamoto Saburō, for example, noted that in 1937 the National Front of the Chinese Communist Party created ‘national liberation troops’ (minzoku kaihōgun) comprising intellectuals, workers, farmers and petit bourgeoisie, who banded together to create a ‘fundamental revolutionary force’ to repel Japanese imperialism.Footnote ⁶¹ Similar views were also expressed by Saitō Akio, who maintained that during this period Chinese were able to resist Japanese rule through a kind of ‘political realism’ that exposed the dark side of everyday life.Footnote ⁶² According to Saitō, groups of travelling performers, students, and intellectuals helped to dramatize the suffering of ordinary people under colonial rule and helped to construct a ‘revolutionary national culture’ that could serve as the basis for a new socialist nation.Footnote ⁶³ Saitō also asserted that the cultural roots of China's strength lay in its ability to adapt to new historical conditions and crises, a trait which is, ironically, often attributed more to Japan than to China. He went on to declare that since the May Fourth Movement in China (1917–1921) the terrain of culture had been modified so that it could better resist imperialism. Others argued that this cultural paradigm was not only a lesson for Japan but also for other Asian nations undergoing the process of liberation from colonial rule. Kanda Shōhachihei went so far as to claim that China had given to Japan not only a historical example that could serve as a ‘strategic battle plan’ for how to wage a successful national/cultural front, but also a ‘notebook’ and a ‘theory for the national liberation for [all] colonial peoples’ in Asia.Footnote ⁶⁴

These interpretations were based on historical fact, insofar as Chinese intellectuals had moved to the countryside and brought with them urban forms of cultural practice (visual media like cartoons, newspapers, woodblock prints, street theatre and ‘spoken dramas’), which were added to more rural-based cultural forms like folk songs and storytelling.Footnote ⁶⁵ If this was a ‘decentralization’ or devolution of Chinese culture so that it could become the property of the working-class and those in rural settings, it was also meant to appeal not necessarily to class-consciousness, but more broadly to nationalist sentiment on a popular level.Footnote ⁶⁶ Japanese Marxist historians insisted that such forms of cultural practice had been effective precisely because they had helped bring about ‘the emergence of a new political culture’ that ‘instituted new values by transforming an elitist and urban popular aesthetic into a rural one’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Class struggle had become articulated and represented in terms of ‘aesthetic and cultural realms’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Of course, these appeals to agrarian culture represented a reaction against modernity because they divested culture away from industrialization, development and the urban middle-classes. They sought instead to locate cultural sensibilities and mass participation in what might be called a ‘rural imagination’ of sorts. According to Japanese Marxists, the historical narrative of Chinese agrarian cultural authenticity was designed to bring the entire Chinese nation together into a new phase of world history. Thus, similarly for historians in Japan, the accessibility and availability of cultural practice to the Chinese rural population represented an important means to enfranchising peasants, women, workers and students in order to create social cohesion and unity.

In spite of this unitary and rather self-contained narrative of how Chinese Marxists had popularized and utilized cultural imagery, early twentieth-century Chinese adaptations actually suggested that their development was complex and sometimes influenced by outside ideas and trends, including events within Japan itself. As Li Hsiao-t'i argues, Japanese folkloricists such as Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) were an important inspiration to Chinese thinkers like Zhou Zouren (1881–1936), who studied in Tokyo at the end of the Meiji era.Footnote ⁶⁹ Upon his return home in 1911, Zhou began thinking about ways to develop modern folklore studies in China.Footnote ⁷⁰ In fact, it is quite likely that Yanagita's paradigm of traditional rural village life as the font of cultural authenticity helped influence subsequent Chinese attempts to thwart off Western and Japanese colonial rule. In addition, literary critic and thinker Lu Xun studied in Tokyo at about the same time as Zhou (1902–1909).Footnote ⁷¹ By the end of the decade and the rise of the May Fourth Movement against the West in 1919, intellectuals such as Li Dazhao (1888–1927), inspired by the Russian Revolution, also began to follow the Soviet example in a more populist, and indeed radical, call for the ‘young intellectuals of China’ to go to the villages and to ‘liberate the great mass of Chinese peasants’.Footnote ⁷² In this sense, therefore, the cultural imagery of the agrarian village was an important aspect of the larger attempt to ‘mobilize mass culture’ ‘against imperialism and feudalism’, but it was by no means a purely ‘national’ construction.Footnote ⁷³

After World War II, earlier links between pre-war Chinese and Japanese Marxism were cast into oblivion. The revolutionary tradition of cultural Marxism against imperialism was now put forward as a distinctly Chinese modern tradition that could benefit Japan. Marxists were silent about Japan's colonial past in East Asia because, among other reasons, they sought to narrate current Japanese history in terms of colonial subjugation in the same historical plane (though at an earlier stage) as China. As noted above, there was among Marxists a very clear suspension of public memory of their own pre-war efforts to achieve various forms of revolutionary cultural practice on Japanese soil. For example, in passages and discussions of China there is virtually no mention of the historical existence of the Japanese proletarian culture movement of the 1920s. Even though the idea and practice of cultural Marxism enjoyed a vibrant period of development in the Taisho and early Showa years—in the form of literature, painting, worker's theatre, intellectual thought and history-writing campaigns—almost all reference to such cultural forms and movements was submerged in the desire to achieve a legitimate cultural synthesis based upon a modern tradition (i.e. in China) that no Marxist could refute.Footnote ⁷⁴ As far as many were concerned, pre-war Japanese Marxism had failed to mobilize the masses into revolutionary action and, therefore, had no rightful claim to the present age. Pre-war Japanese imagery of rural village life was, for early post-war Marxists, something that belonged to Yanagita Kunio—whose work they viewed within the historical context of nationalist imagery and the rise of ultra-nationalism. Thus, even though pre-war Japanese imagery of rural village life had been discredited, when borrowed from China it could become the font of Japanese revolutionary culture.

By rerouting historical narratives away from Japan's own past and instead locating them within Chinese history, historians like Matsumoto were able to argue that the pre-modern past represented as much of a moment of synchronicity between China and Japan as did the modern age one of ensnarement and conflagration. In claiming that many kinds of ‘revolutionary traditions’ could be brought to bear in the struggle for radical social change, Matsumoto believed that, from ancient times and into the Kamakura and Muromachi periods, a kind of ‘peaceful cultural exchange’ had taken place with China which had helped pave the way for the development of creative traditions in Japan itself.Footnote ⁷⁵ If Chinese civilization had provided a beacon for Japan in times past, Matsumoto theorized, it could equally do so in the present. Fellow Marxist historian Tōma Seita (b. 1913) took this argument one step further and asserted that East Asian cultures—Japan and China in particular—were historically and culturally linked in ways that provided for a possible new relationship between both countries. The history of the Japanese people could not be told without looking at cultural and ethnic ties to China that had helped to shape Japan over the course of its development.Footnote ⁷⁶ These ideas were also shared by proponents of a cultural revival between Japan and China, such as Takeuchi Yoshimi. As noted earlier, Takeuchi believed that an East Asian ‘concept of humanity’ which was rooted in Chinese civilization could become the basis for national liberation and a new kind of international system in Asia after World War II.Footnote ⁷⁷

Within Marxist theories of political development, the phenomenon of modern bourgeois nationalism (in contrast to the liberation nationalism of those under colonial rule) was generally rooted in middle-class patriotism and the rise of modern chauvinistic, militarised societies in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. These societies developed through economic exploitation of foreign lands, often in Africa and Asia, to feed economic growth and consumption at home. In other words, Liberalism and nationalism in modern states led to bourgeois internationalism, otherwise known as imperialism, and the great power competition seen, for example, in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth century rush to acquire influence in China. What some might call modern liberal internationalism was therefore seen by Marxists as a form of modern imperialism which had a somewhat dialectical relationship with the rise of the modern nation-state and the capitalist economies of Europe.Footnote ⁷⁸ Because these forms of nationalism/imperialism were seen as essentially linked and forming a kind of integrated circuit in world history, Japanese and Asian forms of national liberation, conversely, stressed not only internal liberation but also the liberation of international space and Asia in particular. No international space could ever become a vacuum; instead Munakata, Uehara and others hoped that old forms of nationalism and imperialism would be replaced by liberated socialist nations that could help create and sustain a new regional order in a decolonizing Asia.

The construction of an image of wartime China—as both an inspirational and tactical model by which the Japanese masses might shake off the economic and political influence of the United States of America—thus consisted of two complementary sides. In line with international political trends such as decolonization, Japanese Marxist historians focused upon the contribution that history-writing and other forms of cultural practice could make to the project that they referred to as Japan's ‘national liberation’. The flip-side to this equation, one that brought the role of post-war Asia directly into the picture, lay in the idea of a new form of ‘proletarian internationalism’ that could ground new forms of cooperation, co-existence, and mutual resistance.Footnote ⁷⁹ Historians like Uehara maintained that proletarian international alliances would replace the victimization of peoples through international aggression and the subordination of the interests of a people.Footnote ⁸⁰ Just as nationalism and imperialism were two sides of the same coin in the modern history of bourgeois states, conversely, for Marxist approaches, liberation nationalism and proletarian internationalism were legitimate responses to conditions of colonization and subsequent visions of post-colonial cooperation. In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Marxists in Japan sought to combine ideas of proletarian internationalism which they saw as being fundamentally different from the Western instrumental rationality (and pre-war Japanese irrationality) that had driven world history and imperialism into the modern period.

There were several conscious ways in which this image was designed to be something completely different from pre-war pan-Asianism. Most crucially, Japan was no longer at the centre of the story and was, instead, one link within a great chain of being ‘Asian’. This identity depended upon cultural attributes that could be deployed in arguments which relied upon civilizational ties rooted deep in common historical experiences. These experiences, which spanned ancient times to the modern colonial age, provided a narrative hearth from which social behaviour and psychology could be proposed as an alternative to observable and influential standards in world politics after World War II. Adding onto Marxist critiques of the world system a pinch of Asian civilizational magic, then, these historians hoped that the modern-day equivalent of ‘Asian values’ could in fact bring to an end the centuries-old domination of Western capitalism, imperialism and cultural predominance.Footnote ⁸¹ The early post-war Japanese Marxist narrative of China was, therefore, about much more than one nation alone; it was about how Japan might contribute to the decolonisation of Asia and the construction of a new framework for international relations that was neither Soviet nor American in character. Just as some pre-war Japanese Marxists had been quick to condemn the Japanese colonization of China, Korea and Southeast Asia, certain Marxists right after the war were quick to acknowledge the relevance of Asian decolonisation to Japan's own immediate present and future.

Conclusion: the inescapable modern gaze on China

These views of China can tell us much about the historical consciousness of Marxist historians in early post-war Japan. In The Past is a Foreign Country, author David Lowenthal reminds us that societies often look upon their own past in ways that seem self-selecting.Footnote ⁸² Marxists were very cognisant of what Japanese history had meant before 1945 and how it would need to be radically transformed in order to serve the needs of the present and future. However, rather than directly reclaim Japan's past, certain Marxist historians sought to redirect the question of Japanese history towards a present marked by China's independence and its departure from an Anglo-American system of hegemony that had driven western imperialism since the nineteenth-century. Convinced that Japan's past and its history had been completely discredited, they began once again to develop forms of cultural Marxism that ignored domestic traditions of pre-war cultural resistance. Even though it would have been possible to reclaim a ‘past’ from the Taisho era, which contained elements of interaction with Chinese Marxists and cultural movements against Imperial Japan, Ishimoda and other historians sought to substitute China's recent past for their own and quietly suppress modern Japanese proletarian traditions that had been an important part of the Taisho and early Showa periods.

Claiming the past as a kind of foreign country, Marxist historians had thus set their feet upon new historical ground. Unlike Meiji Japan, where many liberal intellectuals such as Fukuzawa Yukichi, as well as some socialists, often sought out European enlightenment and forms of middle-class material culture, after World War II China was no longer a feudal ‘Other’ languishing in the backyard of a modernising Japan. The end of foreign colonization in China and the larger movement towards decolonisation in Asia helped provide a springboard for Japanese Marxists to reassess China's overall contribution to modernity through the lens of Chinese cultural resistance to Japan's own imperial modernity. While Japanese pre-war romanticism towards China primarily took the form of Orientalist designations of Manchuria as a pristine vessel for Japanese colonization, Japanese romanticism of the early post-war variety focused more upon the flip-side of how Chinese cultural and political resistance to this colonisation eventually brought Chinese modernity onto a plane above that of Japan. Yet the post-war transference of this romanticism back onto Japanese cultural Marxism ultimately led to intellectual frustration—not over the direction of Mao's China, but instead over the direction of post-war Japan itself. Even though Japanese Marxists rarely criticized Mao's attempts at cultural campaigns after the founding of the People's Republic of China, nevertheless, they soon aimed for their own constructions of culture and romanticism towards China.

When compared with Meiji-era Orientalism towards China from all quarters, and early Showa-era romanticism of China by progressive intellectuals, post-war efforts to resolve the problem of the past brought China into a wider historical lens. At the same time, however, they also glossed over the problem of how Japan's past was in fact quite different from China. The post-war era was for Japan a post-colonial age, much as it had been for China. But the difference lay in where each had historically stood regarding the original problem of colonialism. The present ‘amnesia’ of the early post-war era did not belong only to those who wished to turn away from Asia but also to those who turned directly toward it. Or, without acknowledging the post-colonial moment of Japan in the past, it became difficult to solve the problem of how to reach an imagined (though in some ways quite real) stage of (post) neo-colonialism in its relationship with the USA; many of the issues discussed by early post-war Marxists remain salient social and political problems in twenty-first century Japan.

The first signs of overall disillusionment with the historical approach of these Marxists came with Ishimoda Shō's 1956 repudiation of the national liberation theme for Japan, which had seen in China's wartime past the key to Japan's present. There were two important sub-texts within the self-critiques of Ishimoda and other Marxists, one to do with the compatibility of Japan and China, the other more with how history-writing had lost its intellectual moorings after World War II. Regarding compatibility, even though Mao's China continued to be held in high esteem, historians like Ishimoda now conceded that there were, after all, fundamental differences between Japan and China. Ishimoda saw that part of the problem with historical campaigns for Japanese national liberation was that they had not taken Chinese history as an important metaphor, but had instead tried to graft Chinese history onto the Japanese social and cultural landscape.Footnote ⁸³ Although during the late 1950s and 1960s earlier ideas of revolutionary culture and proletarian nationhood continued to thrive in China, many intellectuals on the Japanese Left, including some Marxists, began to think about how to re-conceptualize ‘the masses’ (taishū) in ways that represented considerable departures from more proletarian-based conceptions.Footnote ⁸⁴ Another sub-text within their self-critique lay in the idea that, due to the Movement for a People's History, history-writing had lost its professional lustre and intellectual respectability. Ishimoda and his colleagues now charged that devolution of history-writing, so that it could be practiced at all levels of Japanese society, had sensationalised and overly politicised the discipline of history. At the same time, however, Ishimoda and others continued to hold fast to the notion that the mobilization of the working-classes required a kind of cultural independence from, yet vigorous engagement with, the more deleterious influences of domestic conservative politics, global capitalism and imperialism.

While not successful in achieving revolution, Japanese Marxists during the early post-war years did help to set in motion a ‘tectonic’ change in the historical landscape. The initial post-war push by Marxists to create history-writing movements for the benefit of all classes and regions within Japan, gradually set in motion the deconstruction of Japanese historical narratives and approaches within the imaginary boundaries of the nation. For instance, from the late 1950s their approach began to resonate in the development of various kinds of ‘small histories’ such as local women's history, and social and cultural history. The early post-war nationalisation of cultural narratives, therefore, eventually helped bring about the de-centring of Japanese history and the true democratization of history-writing beyond national narratives or macro socio-political objectives.Footnote ⁸⁵ Although perhaps not foreseen in 1950, Marxist-led cultural movements involving history-writing activities and groups did help to usher in a historiographical revolution of sorts, even though this has yet to be acknowledged in much of the literature on post-war Japan.Footnote ⁸⁶ Ultimately, then, the approaches discussed in this paper contributed less to making Japan in the image of China, and more to bringing Japanese history into a potentially self-critical and deconstructive phase, even though this was not the explicit intention of their approaches.

Early post-war Marxism in Japan also reminds us that its view of China reflected larger discourses and trends that were taking shape on the world stage, such as decolonization, regionalism and global capitalism. Yet, it is also true that Japanese views towards China in the early post-war era allow us to expand the way we view modernity as a whole. This is because early post-war Marxist perspectives on Chinese resistance to Japanese imperialism, and the formation of the People's Republic of China, were very much bound up with the Japanese desire to provide a response to many of the perceived problems associated with modernity after World War II. It was, in fact, from this kind of self-reflection that the Frankfurt School sought to rethink the notions of progress and development, based upon a critique of instrumental rationality that had historically sanctioned, among other things, the project of empire, colonial domination and even genocide.Footnote ⁸⁷ Within the overall goal of reaching a historical stage that lay beyond power politics and instrumental reasoning, it is possible to locate critiques of modern nationalism and internationalism (i.e., imperialism) that historically characterised, for example, German reflections upon the past and present. In fact, Dennis Dworkin draws some important parallels between cultural Marxism in post-war Great Britain and the Frankfurt School in Germany—analogies that may also be extended to the Marxist example in early post-war Japan.Footnote ⁸⁸

During the past several decades, however, arguments have come from a number of different quarters about the historical compatibility, or dissonance, of Japan and China in relation with each other. In contrast to both the Meiji era and the early post-war years, when many in the Japanese conservative political leadership saw China as the antithesis of Japanese modernity, it has been the intellectual, political, and economic elite in Japan who have begun to see modern Chinese synchronicity with Japan. This has recently developed into a double-edged political narrative whose borders are marked on one side by a return to the discourse of common cultural practices in the quest to find in China a long-term ally, and, on the other side, by those who see China as a rising empire in East Asia that will one day devour Japan. Yet, views of China by the Japanese elite today represent less of an inward gaze towards what ails Japanese modernity but more to a series of responses to shifts on the East Asian political landscape. It was, ironically, these kinds of shifts that half a century ago helped to bring about Japanese resistance to elements of globalization and American imperialism—trends in world history that are, arguably, still with us today.