Introduction
In January of 1923, well-known political theorist Yoshino Sakuzō sounded an alarm: the recent proliferation of violence in Japan would not stop until it plunged society into a state of ‘anarchistic chaos’ (museifuteki konton).Footnote 1 Yoshino's warning about the disordering potential of violence appeared in the monthly general-interest journal Chūō kōron (The Central Review) as part of a series which denounced the state's tolerance of violent political organizations. And his voice was only one in a small but growing chorus that had recently begun to engage with, and criticize, the phenomena of violence (bōryoku) and violent groups (so-called bōryokudan) in political life.Footnote 2
Like Yoshino, many intellectuals who participated in this burgeoning discourse on violence are best characterized as ‘liberals’. This is admittedly a loose and messy term, whose meaning is contingent to the particularities of time and place. Yet there was a definable core to Japanese liberalism in the interwar period: some degree of concern for the individual, demands for freedom of thought and expression, and a dedication to the expansion of popular participation in politics.Footnote 3 These ideas were shared by those who wrote about the corrosive nature of violence—typically men in their thirties or forties who were products of, or professors at, elite institutions like Waseda University or Tokyo Imperial University. Many were critics who regularly contributed to, and in some cases published, the popular intellectual journals of the time. Taken together, they spanned a range of specialties across the humanities and social sciences.
These liberal intellectuals were shaken by what they perceived to be the spread of violence in their political world. Yoshino, for one, shot off his distress signal a little over a year after the assassination of Prime Minister Hara Takashi in November 1921. That the prime minister was felled by a ‘rightist’ was especially disturbing, as it epitomized what these intellectuals deplored: the profusion and increased visibility of what they characterized as right-wing violence, and the wielding of physical force by nationalist organizations that sought to threaten, intimidate, and coerce political opponents. It was this particular concern about the right-wing's use of physical force that sparked their discourse on violence. What perpetuated their dialogue was the firm belief that this violence (and for some, all political violence) was eroding whatever it was that they held dear—pacifism, civilization, culture, law, justice, and constitutional government. Above all, these apprehensions fuelled their profound fear of disorder. Instability was their most pressing concern, accompanied by a pragmatic desire for order in a society that seemed increasingly plagued by violence.
An exploration of the ways in which these thinkers talked about violence reveals a kind of liberalism that was not fundamentally sceptical of the state and did not shy away from concern for the nation. Others have commented on the statist and nationalist currents of Japanese liberalism. On the liberalism of the Meiji period (1868–1912), Germaine Hoston has argued that even from the first phase of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement in the 1870s, there was no objection to the idea of the state promoting the individual through progressive social policies.Footnote 4 By the Taisho years (1912–1926), as Sharon Nolte has pointed out, the laissez-faire and natural-rights theory espoused by the likes of Fukuzawa Yukichi and Ueki Emori in the late nineteenth century had been left behind. Liberal intellectuals and journalists viewed themselves as ‘the creation of the state, not its creator’ and did not oppose state power wielded in the name of industrialization and national independence.Footnote 5
This latitude granted to the state suggests that interwar liberalism is best characterized not as a kind of ‘negative liberty’ à la Locke or Adam Smith, who stressed the inviolability of a private sphere around the individual into which the state must not trespass, but as a ‘positive liberty’ informed by German idealism and Enlightenment rationalism. Positive liberty dealt not with freedom from restraint, but with the freedom to realize one's potential, to perfect oneself, to be, in Isaiah Berlin's words, ‘one's own master.’ Berlin, writing in 1958, was critical of the concept of positive liberty because the struggle for self-mastery leads to the identification of two selves, one of the ‘higher nature’ of reason, the other of the ‘lower nature’ of irrationality and uncontrollability. The danger, as Berlin saw it, was that the ‘true self’ could be defined as something beyond the individual, as some kind of ‘social “whole”’ such as a tribe, race, church, or state. Inherent in positive liberty was a tendency towards authoritarianism and totalitarianism because it encouraged individuals to surrender themselves to those outside of oneself (such as the state) deemed higher, more rational, more true. It also provided a justification for the coercion of others deemed less enlightened, ‘blind or ignorant or corrupt’.Footnote 6
This privileging of the state fed into an attendant tension at the crux of interwar liberalism—negotiation of the balance between protection of the individual and state intrusion. As Tomoko Akami has aptly pointed out, this was not unique to Japanese liberalism but was a ‘fundamental dilemma of liberalism in the age of mass-based democracy: how far the state could intervene against individual liberty for the sake of the welfare of the society as a whole’.Footnote 7 Japanese liberals who wrote about political violence struggled with such questions as the balance between the good of the individual and the needs of a whole, between the preservation of the individual and the importance of a collective identity. Critic and philosopher Miyake Setsurei, for example, spoke of the need to limit government authority and support the subjectivity of the individual, while also believing that the growth of individual ability should contribute to the state, humankind, and the world as a whole. Setsurei urged individuals to speak out and freely express their views on politics, but he criticized the kind of individualism that he saw as an almost selfish retreat into the private sphere.Footnote 8 His view of the state as not purposefully created by the people, but as a naturally occurring organic entity that encompassed both the state and the people, seems consistent with his cultural nationalism from the Meiji years that, as Kevin Doak notes, was intended to ‘strengthen the state’.Footnote 9 One of Setsurei's colleagues from the magazine Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, critic and journalist Hasegawa Nyozekan, was a bit more leery of the state. Widely known as one of the ‘great liberals’ of the pre-war years, he was primarily concerned with the concept of society, which he envisioned as a body of free individuals. Nyozekan argued that this society was best represented by political parties and parliament rather than by the bureaucracy. The state, he thought, was selfish, feudal, and private. Nonetheless, Nyozekan further argued that the state was part of society and that society needed the state. He embraced the idea that the state was to ‘assume a positive role in the realization of liberty and equality’.Footnote 10 Even champions of liberalism and democracy like Yoshino Sakuzō arguably ‘gave more emphasis to political participation than individual freedom from the state’.Footnote 11
Violence spoke directly and intimately to this negotiation between the reach of the state, the needs of society, and the protection of the individual—in the eyes of many liberals, violence seemed to throw both society and the nation into a peril that could only be staved off by state intervention.Footnote 12 In the face of the seeming profusion of organized, group violence, and out of fear for the instability and upheaval that would result, liberals confronted the question of how to control non-state violence.Footnote 13 In tackling this issue, they unavoidably bumped against what many political theorists have considered a fundamental responsibility of the state, namely, the maintenance of order.Footnote 14 The widely accepted idea that the state has a duty to provide stability and security resonated with the statist currents in liberal thinking and encouraged an embrace of state-provided order—the state, and the enforcement arm of the police in particular, became their only hope for quelling all non-state violence and imposing the order and stability that they so desired. The state, then, was viewed as the sole political organ with the power and authority, and responsibility, to police. This discourse on violence is thus not only a testament to liberal ambivalence about state power, but also to the ways in which liberals allowed violence to play on their anxieties and encourage statism in liberal thinking. There was a certain irony to the willingness of liberal intellectuals to freely express, at the level of democratic practice, their desire for the state to police and to order. Ultimately, their conceptions of the state and nation bolstered a state hegemony antipathetic to liberals, and compromised tenets at the heart of interwar liberalism.
Violence and Ideological Turmoil
The most concrete and immediate trigger that prompted liberals to take up the topic of violence in the early 1920s was the successive establishment, and violent activity, of antagonistic nationalist organizations.Footnote 15 Some of these groups had been formed earlier as outgrowths of Meiji-era nationalist movements; the Kokuryūkai (Amur River Society, 1901) being a prime example. But many such organizations were products of the years immediately following World War I—the Dai Nihon Kokusuikai (Greater Japan National Essence Association, 1919), Yamato Minrōkai (Yamato National Service Association, 1921), Dai Nihon Seigidan (Greater Japan Justice Group, 1922), and Sekka Bōshidan (Group to Prevent Turning Red, 1922) were among those regularly cited for their violence by liberal intellectuals, journalists, and organs of the state.Footnote 16 These groups espoused various ideas, from reverence for the emperor to aggressive imperialism, but what they all shared was a reactionary desire to crush the kind of activism inspired by the Russian Revolution. They took aim at socialists and anarchists through a campaign of violent intimidation and also attacked sites of liberal thought, such as the Osaka asahi shinbun (home at the time to Hasegawa Nyozekan). At one point in the autumn of 1918, ‘right-wing punks’ kidnapped the president of the liberal newspaper and left him at a local shrine, tied to a stone lantern and pinned with the following message: ‘On Heaven's Behalf We [Will] Execute This Traitor to Our Country’.Footnote 17 Particularly troubling to nationalist organizations was the growth of the labour union movement, as well as the militancy of labour strikes, which were increasing in length, size, and level of violence.Footnote 18 In response, a number of nationalist groups rallied their members to violently subdue strikers and coerce them back to work; what often resulted were violent clashes between nationalist ‘ruffians’ and striking labourers.
Liberals were among those who took jabs at these nationalist organizations by derisively labelling them ‘bōryokudan’ (literally ‘violence groups’), emphasizing that violence, not ideology, was their most characteristic feature. Drawing attention to the violence of these organizations was a way to undercut their ideological stances, suggesting that their thought was neither serious nor compelling. Mizuno Hironori was one critic who used the term ‘bōryokudan’ to underscore his view that they were nothing more than a ‘gang of thugs’ (burai no to) that dealt in threats and coercion. Mizuno's condemnation was rooted in his own pacifism, which he adopted during a transformative stint in Europe in 1918. Although he served in the Russo-Japanese War and had just been promoted to the rank of navy captain, a tour of World War I battlefields moved him to criticize militarism and embrace pacifism. To Mizuno, the objectionable violence of nationalist groups was not concealed or justified by their respectable names or flimsy ideology. Making a clear and invidious distinction between what he saw as the right's ‘bōryokudan’ and the left's ‘shisōdan’ (ideological groups), he sought to debase nationalist organizations as violent and ideologically bankrupt while painting the ‘ideological groups’ as non-aggressive and ideologically pure.Footnote 19 Similarly, economist Hayashi Kimio of Waseda University explicitly accused nationalist groups of resorting to violence because they did not have a sophisticated ideology. They fought with physical force, he argued, because they could not defeat their ideological enemies with speech. They were nothing more than ‘hotheaded, hard-nosed, frenzied Japanese men who do not like to lose, [so] if they get nowhere with their swords, then they tussle with their fists’.Footnote 20
One so-called ‘bōryokudan’ that was singled out for criticism was the Dai Nihon Kokusuikai, which at its peak had approximately 200,000 members and about 90 branches.Footnote 21 Members of the organization wielded violence against labourers in a number of strikes, including those at Yahata Ironworks (1920), the Singer Sewing Machine Company (1925), and Noda Shōyu (1927–1928).Footnote 22 The Kokusuikai also attempted to block the enactment of universal manhood suffrage, disrupted socialist meetings, and in a well-known incident of 1923, fought in the streets against over 1,000 supporters of the Suiheisha (The Levellers), an organization with a socialist bent that opposed discrimination against Burakumin.Footnote 23 The Kokusuikai justified their violence as expressions of loyalty to the imperial house and veneration of the hallowed ‘way of the warrior’. They evoked ideas of chivalry by casting themselves as ‘kyōkaku’ (‘men of chivalry’) who, like their predecessors from the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), espoused the slogan: ‘crush the strong and help the weak’. Among their stated goals was preventing the ‘corruption of national morals and beautiful customs’ and promoting ‘harmony between labor and capital’.Footnote 24
Miyake Setsurei directly attacked the ideological authenticity of the Kokusuikai. He alleged that a connection to any conception of a ‘national essence’ was dubious. The Kokusuikai name, thought Setsurei, had been given to the group by others after it was established.Footnote 25 Setsurei also attempted to debunk the myth of kyōkaku and their allegedly chivalrous behaviour, by bringing into question both the early modern history of kyōkaku and the Kokusuikai's claim to their legacy. The kyōkaku of the Tokugawa period, he argued, were not actually ‘Robin Hoods’.Footnote 26 In fact, their violence often contradicted their rhetoric. In the present day, the so-called kyōkaku had gambling bosses (bakuto no oyabun) and henchmen (kobun) among their ranks, all of whom menaced others. Quite contrary to the kyōkaku slogan, Kokusuikai members were persecuting the weak, threatening the minority, and bolstering the power of the majority. These kyōkaku of the modern era, asserted Setsurei, were not protectors of the weak, but were the strong—they wielded political power and financial influence, fought with force, and were, in short, tyrannical.Footnote 27 Mizuno echoed this view, mentioning how Kokusuikai ‘thugs’ (bōkan) had violently disturbed a legal gathering of workers and commenting on how kyōkaku had taken to tormenting labourers, who were the truly weak.Footnote 28
What was frustrating to liberals was not just the ideological and political challenge of nationalist groups like the Kokusuikai, but also the government's complicity in their violence. Even though physical force was wielded by those all along the political spectrum, the government seemed to turn a blind eye to the violence of those nationalist groups who forwarded agendas with which it sympathized. The Kokusuikai, for one, had been founded as a joint endeavour between Home Minister Tokonami Takejirō and yakuza bosses out of their shared concern for labour unrest.Footnote 29 It is not surprising, then, that the government appeared not to discourage the Kokusuikai's violent stifling of labour protests.
Perhaps even more worrisome than the political antagonism, and the injustice, was the tendency of nationalist organizations to fuel violent conflict. Kikuchi Kan, writer and founder of the influential literary journal Bungei shunjū, was especially offended by how the bureaucracy's complicity with nationalist groups encouraged ideological strife to become physical. Making reference to the founding of the Kokusuikai, Kikuchi warned that the bureaucracy was only inviting a forceful backlash by supporting the establishment of such an organization. Groups like the Kokusuikai would only provoke the emergence of those that opposed it; by fostering organizations that were advantageous to its causes, the bureaucracy had only ensured the rise of those that would be disadvantageous. What Kikuchi feared was the violent clash between all of these organizations, and he saw the Kokusuikai as an ominous harbinger of violent, ideological strife.Footnote 30 Similarly, former Waseda University sociologist Inoue Kinji implied that the government, in supporting the Kokusuikai, was condoning public displays of violence. And such tacit acceptance of violence fostered political bedlam.Footnote 31 By 1928, lawyer and politician Hososako Kanemitsu was remarking on how recent bōryokudan attacks, directed against the Labour Farmer Party (Rōdō Nōmintō) and its ideological allies, were a reflection of the radicalization of class conflict.Footnote 32 For many of these liberals, what was more worrisome than bōryokudan assaults aimed at them was the manifestation of ideological turmoil as physical struggle.
The Devolution of Civilization, Culture, and the Kokumin
To understand why violent, ideological convulsions were so feared requires an exploration of how liberal intellectuals thought about, and constructed, the general phenomenon of violence. Although their animus for criticizing violence was rooted in concerns about the proliferation of so-called bōryokudan, a number of liberals seized this opportunity to discuss violence more broadly, regardless of its political or ideological affiliations. Many concluded that all violence should be condemned. Mizuno, as a pacifist, had little tolerance for physical force, opposing the use of violence and ‘direct action’ (chokusetsu kōdō) by both rightists (utō) and leftists (satō) alike. He remained consistent in his position against violence, prohibiting its use not just by individuals and organizations, but by nations as well.Footnote 33 Socialist and Christian humanist Abe Isoo also disavowed violence, but did allow for two exceptions: state violence and the ambiguous concept of ‘just defense’ (seitō bōei). As a testament to the consistency in his beliefs, he not only criticized bōryokudan but also had few qualms about calling for an end to labour demonstrations.Footnote 34 By this time, the Waseda professor, journalist, and political activist was, after all, a moderate who had broken with the radical elements of the socialist movement that advocated a violent overthrowing of the state. Like Mizuno and Abe, Kikuchi too held that violence was wrong, regardless of righteousness of purpose.Footnote 35
This focus on the phenomenon of violence (the violent act itself), and not just the violent (who were wielding violence), was relatively new to the interwar years. In the Meiji period, the state, and certain newspapers and magazines, had painted negatively those who violently challenged state authority. Two prime examples were the activists of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement, and the political ruffians (sōshi) hired by the people's parties (mintō) who battled the government parties (ritō) in the early national elections.Footnote 36 Yet the Meiji state did not and could not disavow violence itself, for doing so would have raised difficult questions and weighty charges of hypocrisy about its own use of physical force. By the Taisho period, the state was less burdened by the revolutionary history of the Meiji Restoration, and two major wars had provoked thinking about the phenomenon of violence. In the interwar period, much more than in previous decades, violence itself and not just the violent actor was constructed as both a political and social problem.
What was so troubling about violence was that it represented, in various ways, that which was backward and uncivilized. For Sugimori Kōjirō, a Waseda University political scientist and sociologist, physical force was associated with the primitive. In the long sweep of evolutionary history from hunting and farming to using machines, from plunder to production, from individualism to groupism and socialism, violence was seen as a feature of the early stages of development. Just as violence was characteristic of the period of infancy in the life of a person, in Sugimori's mind, so too was it of the primitive period in the history of a society. What made violence so backward was not only its association with the unevolved and undeveloped, but also its very nature—coercion of the body robbed people of the opportunity to use the strength of consciousness (ishiki ryoku) and the mind (ishi kōsei ryoku). As the assault on the body trumped the power of the mind, people were deprived of the freedom to use reason, which Sugimori argued was the basis of culture and civilization. Violence (bōryoku shugi), or the triumph of the body over the mind, was thus the very denial of culture (bunka hitei shugi). So, presaged Sugimori, the socialization of violence would mean the annihilation of culture and, ultimately, the fall of society. The only way to avoid this fate and make progress would be to turn away from military prowess (buyū) and turn toward literary prowess (bunyū), so that violence would become nothing and culture would become everything.Footnote 37
Abe, too, set up violence (physical force) as the antithesis of civilization (reason). But he went further in suggesting that reason was not just bound up with ideas of civilization but also the practice of law and government. Reason, posited Abe, was the basis of law, and law was the basis of government decisions in a civilized country with a constitutional state. Because violence and reason were antithetical, a flourishing of violence suggested the absence of reason and justice, and by extension, fundamental flaws in the civilized, constitutional state. Conversely, a civilized country's culture valued law as an instrument for suppressing force. For Abe, absence of force and dependence on the law to carry out justice were benchmarks by which to measure the advancement of a culture.Footnote 38
In contrast to liberal socialist Abe's faith in the law, the more radical Marxist critic Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke viewed laws, not as a reflection of a social contract à la Rousseau, but as a means for social coercion (shakaiteki kyōsei) and a form of institutional violence (soshikiteki bōryoku) used by one class to dominate another. Violence may be a weapon of resistance wielded by the ruled, he noted, but more often than not, it was a weapon of oppression wielded by rulers. And the only difference between the violence of the oppressed and that of the oppressor was the legality of the latter—laws simply legalized the violence of the oppressor. Writing in the shadow of the Peace Preservation Law of 1925, Hirabayashi specifically pointed to this legislation which attempted to suppress communist and anarchist activism by severely restricting freedom of speech and assembly. Here, in Hirabayashi's eyes, was a prime case of how new laws were established to legitimize the violence of the ruling class.Footnote 39 It is worth noting, as an aside, that while a number of politicians, intellectuals, and journalists opposed the Peace Preservation Law, Abe (and, arguably, many of the liberals discussed here) seem to have been fairly quiet about its passage. This silence, at least when it came to publications on the subject, may have been due to a certain distance from those of the more radical left who vehemently opposed the law, and was in keeping with the general view that laws were rational and just instruments to maintain order.Footnote 40
Unlike Hirabayashi, Abe did not consider that the law could be perverted to legitimize and justify state violence, that it could be used by the state as an instrument against individuals. Accordingly, his voice was not among those who spoke out against the Peace Preservation Law, for he was convinced that the law would eradicate violence and dispense justice. At the root of this belief was a conception of the people as part of a national body in which the state would serve their best interests. This blurring of the line between the nation and its people was implicit in Abe's frequent use of the word ‘kokumin’ to refer to the ‘nation's people’.Footnote 41 Abe's was not a populist ethnic nationalism that challenged the state, about which Kevin Doak has written, but a vision of the people's integration with the state that was characteristic of the Meiji era's kokumin nationalists who sought to meld popular nationalism with the state.Footnote 42
For Mizuno too, the relationship between the kokumin and the state was not oppositional but cooperative. In the almost contractual arrangement he envisioned, the kokumin had a duty to obey the state, and the (civilized) state had a duty to protect the freedoms and rights of the kokumin. Mizuno described this connection between the state and the kokumin as a moral and spiritual union, and one that was at the foundation of the state's existence. If the state failed in its duty to defend the kokumin, then it had relinquished its authority and had no meaningful existence. To carry out its responsibilities, then, the state was to prohibit violence between kokumin and refrain from using violence against them. State violence was objectionable to Mizuno not necessarily because it could trample on the individual, but because the tolerance of any violence was ‘barbaric politics’ (yaban seiji; again, as opposed to ‘civilized politics’ or the ‘politics of reason’). Moreover, state violence would erode the kokumin's belief in the law and the authorities, fostering in them an inclination to repudiate the state. Of central concern was the kokumin's faith in the state, not the protection of individual rights and liberties.Footnote 43
In the thought of Abe and Mizuno can be seen shades of what Isaiah Berlin would later highlight as the ‘pitfalls of positive liberty’. Individuals had proven themselves to be of a ‘lower nature’, either acting violently and uncontrollably themselves as political ruffians or as members of ‘bōryokudan’, or else ignorant of the need to denounce all non-state violence. Abe, for example, criticized the kokumin for not understanding the corrosive power of violence and bemoaned those kokumin who did not grasp the simple principle that thought must be absolutely free, and violence must be absolutely prohibited.Footnote 44 The best hope for the individual was, as kokumin, to become a part of a whole that was led by the state. For it was the state that could serve as an example of enlightened behaviour, the state that had the greatest potential to realize a ‘higher nature’ of reason, rationality, and control.
With violence considered a barometer indicating a society's level of civilization and culture, questions arose about how to understand the condition of contemporary Japanese politics. Hasegawa Nyozekan was perhaps the least negative among those vocal on the subject, suggesting that the present was not nearly as violent as the past. He noted that violent coercion no longer led to serious disorder, and that the modern era had not witnessed violent peasant uprisings or an event like the Meiji Restoration. He explained that the so-called ‘rice riots’ of 1918 were the result of developments in communication, not symptomatic of a violent society. And looking beyond Japan to Italy, the smooth rise to power of Mussolini was indicative to Nyozekan of another ‘healthy’ country. Nyozekan acknowledged that violence was infesting contemporary society and politics to some extent, but called for a more careful examination of the degree to which violence was influencing the institutions of social life and violating the conditions of human life, implying that violence had not reached the point where everyone felt controlled by it. Given his assessment of violence as relatively benign, Nyozekan found concerns about a trend towards violence to be a kind of ‘societal pathology’ (shakai byōri). So overblown was this fear, he claimed, that it could be considered a form of hypochondria. Instead of focussing on violence as a sign of backwardness, he honed in on this so-called obsession with violence as a sign of Japan's modernity. Modern life was peaceful, Nyozekan claimed, for it had shifted away from the military to industry, from plundering by force to profit. Such peace had made people overly sensitive to violence. A man walking with a sword would now arouse fears of murder, harsh words or actions felt jarring, and throwing one's shoulders back and straightening one's elbows seemed violent. For Nyozekan, then, delusional fears of violence reflected modernity.Footnote 45
Most other liberals were not so nonchalant about the prevalence of violence in political life. Unlike Nyozekan, Miyake Setsurei saw the Tokugawa period reappearing in the present, finding the bravado with which strength was demonstrated (chikara jiman), and the pure fun enjoyed by those who fought, to be disturbingly reminiscent of the previous era. The people he witnessed fighting in the streets of Taisho Japan were all too similar to the loyalist activists who tried to overthrow the Tokugawa government, or to the political ruffians who interfered in the early general elections of the Meiji period. This resurrection of the past was not incidental, as Setsurei believed that pleasant memories of force from eras gone by encouraged violent behaviour in the modern period. The violent and the primitive might have been glossed over, but it continued to exist just beneath the surface.Footnote 46 Horie Kiichi, a journalist for Fukuzawa Yukichi's Jiji shinpō and a Keio University economist, agreed that violence (and that of violent groups in particular) reflected a return to the country's feudal past, to the age of warriors (bushi) and town soldiers or servants (machi yakko).Footnote 47 Setsurei also criticized Japan's attempt to follow in the footsteps of Italy as an adulation of force; although Nyozekan had used the example of Mussolini's rise in Italy to demonstrate the country's ‘health’, Setsurei evoked it as an illustration of backwardness. Japan's present condition was unsightly to Setsurei, as reason and logic fell victim to strength. His plea was clear: ‘Japanese civilization and culture should not be at a level so low’.Footnote 48
The Fear of Disorder and the Embrace of the State
Perhaps the shared concern most alarming to many liberals was what they considered to be the destabilizing and potentially destructive nature of violence. Some expressed their uneasiness in fairly muted terms, speaking of the ways in which violence perverted and confused, or hindered things from being as they should be. Philosopher and critic Tsuchida Kyōson, a former student of liberal essayist Tanaka Ōdō and Kyoto University philosopher Nishida Kitarō, understood violence as potentially disorienting. This was especially dangerous, he warned, when a dependence on force develops and the authority of those who rule to wield violence becomes so accepted that no one looks askance at restrictions on speech, prohibitions on the selling of publications, forced dissolution of gatherings, and violent constraints on the individual. When such violence becomes commonplace, it becomes all the more difficult to distinguish violence from non-violence, or as Tsuchida implied, unjustified from justified violence. Judgments made by those paralyzed by the habitual practice of violence were, at best, arbitrary.Footnote 49
For Kikuchi Kan, violence did not impede moral judgment but political progress. Kikuchi insisted that abstention from violence was central to the timely realization of societal reform (shakai kaizō), and that violent action to either hasten or hinder this process would only disrupt its natural development. Attempts at acceleration would lead to delay, and attempts at delay would lead to acceleration. Violence was, in this conception, an artificial and unnatural force that only obstructed political advancement.Footnote 50 Inoue Kinji also reflected on politics, arguing that violence inhibited the functioning of constitutional government. One of the strengths of constitutional government was, according to Inoue, the empowerment of those who acted in numbers—people could gain political power by banning together in support of any given opinion. Violence managed to undercut this fundamental virtue of constitutional government by allowing one man, willing to use physical force, to exercise significant power. By making numbers irrelevant, violence robbed people of a way in which they could exert political influence and thereby undermined the very foundation of constitutional government.Footnote 51
Shinmei Masamichi wrote explicitly about order, observing that force (jitsuryoku) and violence disturbed the order of the law (hō no chitsujo).Footnote 52 Shinmei, a sociologist and one time student of Yoshino Sakuzō, viewed the law (which seeks to confront force and rationally order reality) as antithetical to violence (which defies the legal order of the national society, or kokumin shakai). Writing in 1935, Shinmei's tone was measured and cool, perhaps to avoid censorship. Yet he did seem somewhat uneasy about violence challenging the rationalism of a law-governed country (hōchikoku) and the legal order of a modern national society. Shinmei reasoned that the root of such violence could be found in the failure of the bourgeois to rationalize society as a whole, beyond their own class. As a result, the middle and labouring classes fell outside of, and thus were denied, the legal rationalism of the free bourgeois. Although seemingly sympathetic with reactions against the corruption of the free bourgeois and the early movements against it, Shinmei notes that the violence (bōryoku shugi) of anarchists like Bakunin and Kropotkin lost their practical significance over time, and that even Sorel's violence had ceased to be a form of social criticism. Violence, as an emotional and irrational opposition to the legal order, had forsaken its potential to be an aggressive social critique. Yet this emotional and irrational violence continued to gain momentum by attracting the socially disadvantaged, constituting a threat to order and rationalism.Footnote 53
Others expressed similar anxieties in much stronger terms, evoking the dangers of anarchy and revolution. Abe Isoo underscored the power of violence to destroy, and warned that the self-perpetuating nature of violence would cause any ideological struggle which turned violent to spiral out of control. Although peaceful ideological jockeying could lead to societal progress, the physical manifestation of such differences would only encourage mob psychology and a swelling of ranks on all sides, making quite real the possibility of riots.Footnote 54 And Hayashi Kimio cautioned that the kind of violence that attempted to publicize or propagandize an ideology, from the assassination of a country's president to the explosion of an important bank or the arson of a big factory, sought only ‘emotional convulsion’ (kanjō gekidō). As such acts become publicized, they would create worldwide sensations that Hayashi likened to the eruption of a big volcano, a large earthquake, or a tsunami.Footnote 55
More than Abe and Hayashi, Yoshino Sakuzō was vociferous about the destabilizing potential of violence. As mentioned above, Yoshino cautioned that violence, destructive as it was to truth and justice, would almost inevitably result in ‘anarchistic chaos’. Violence, unleashed and uncontrolled in present-day society, was a corruptive influence that would only lead to the ultimate form of disorder: chaos.Footnote 56 Like Yoshino, Inoue Kinji dreaded disorder but was less concerned with anarchy than with revolution. Inoue read the proliferation of ‘direct action’ and violent groups as a reflection of dangerous and unhealthy revolutionary sentiment. These feelings encouraged political revolution, which had to be avoided because they spawned societal fear.Footnote 57 The concerns of Yoshino and Inoue were also shared by Mizuno Hironori, who spoke ominously of both anarchy and revolution. To Mizuno, the tolerance of (non-state) violence, especially by the state, had to do with the erosion of state discipline, law and public order (kokka kōki). Put succinctly, the sanctioning of violence was the sanctioning of ‘bloody revolution’ (ryūketsu kakumei). Mizuno did not distinguish between ideologies; nationalist violence would encourage socialist revolution, and socialist violence would encourage nationalist revolution. Both scenarios were undesirable because revolution, encouraged as it was by state endorsement of violence, would ultimately lead to anarchy.Footnote 58
Out of this profound fear of disorder, many liberals implored the state to bring order to a society seemingly plagued by the instability of violence. Although they were critical of state complicity with so-called bōryokudan as well as with police ineptitude, they also continued to believe in the ability, or at least the potential, of the state to crack down on violence. Much like theorists from Machiavelli to Max Weber, with whom they were familiar, they defined a state as having a monopoly on the use of force. Takayanagi Kenzō, a scholar of Anglo-American law and a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, considered maintaining social order the minimum duty of the state, which was to fight against those who wielded violence. Takayanagi subtly suggested that the state had previously focussed more on the violence of the left than the right, but instead of lingering on this perceived injustice, he believed the state was capable of impartially and strictly punishing all violent individuals and groups, regardless of their political orientation. Violence must be eliminated, he demanded, and as much support as possible should be given to those engaged in the administration of the law, namely the police, prosecutors, and judges.Footnote 59 Horie Kiichi, too, pointed to a specific part of the state—he named the police in particular as agents for controlling violence and criticized them for not yet having a proper plan to do so, for they shouldered the responsibility of protecting citizens (shimin) from dangers, such as thugs, in various aspects of their daily lives.Footnote 60 Like Takayanagi, Yoshino Sakuzō too defined the prevention of anarchistic chaos as one of the most important duties of the government and found it impermissible for those other than the state to possess force (chikara). Although acknowledging that there was a potential for authorities to abuse this power, the state's use of force was nonetheless deemed natural and necessary.Footnote 61
It was Abe Isoo who put the most faith in the ability of the state to ensure order. He was not, however, entirely naïve about the potential for state abuse of power. Writing in January 1923, he acknowledged that an individual or a state with too much strength would be likely to abuse it, and cited the specific example of police actions against the universal suffrage movement. Yet he was firm in his conviction that there were cases when the state needed to use force—state violence to enforce adherence to the law, and to prohibit non-state violence, was deemed acceptable.Footnote 62 Several months later, in August 1923, Abe sounded much less skeptical about state power. He did, like many of his colleagues, suggest that the state was letting right-wing indiscretions slide by. And yet he called for the use of police power against all who were violent, criticized the police for not being swift and vigorous in executing this task, and believed that police prohibition of violence would gradually lead to a decrease in violent incidents.
If the police force took the stand of forbidding all violence, then violent incidents would gradually decrease, and so it is undeniable that we would have less reason to worry. Of course, it would not be difficult for the state's police force to control the degree of violence that I have described. If the police force is insufficient, military force (heiryoku) could also be used, so from the government's position, violence should not be a matter of much concern.Footnote 63
Despite evidence to the contrary, Abe was convinced that the police and even the military could control all violence impartially and judiciously, without excess force. In May 1924, Abe published an article that was somewhat more cautious in tone, perhaps influenced by the September 1923 murders of ten labour union members and four others, as well as anarchist Ōsugi Sakae, his nephew, and feminist Itō Noe at the hands of the military police. Here, Abe was careful to acknowledge that state violence was not always just. Yet he called for greater police regulation of ballads (naniwabushi) and storytelling (kōdan) that romanticize violence as heroic, and urged the revision of national textbooks to steer the ‘nation's heart’ (kokumin no kokoro) away from violence. And he held to his position that the government and the state must control all violence.Footnote 64
Given this trust in the state, punishment of the violent was called for in terms that were sometimes quite harsh. Abe insisted that any single act of violence must be deftly dealt with by the police.Footnote 65 Inoue Kinji called for a ‘thorough policy of suppression’ towards all groups advocating violence and direct action, arguing that ‘thoroughly eradicating violent groups (bōryoku dantai) is a matter of great urgency’.Footnote 66 Even more colourful in language was Mizuno Hironori, who exclaimed that: ‘Society's vermin (gaichū) that intimidate and extort must be exterminated (bokumetsu) using the sternest of methods’.Footnote 67
The consequences of the state failing in its duty to restore order were rarely framed in terms of the good of the individual, usually of society or the state. Mizuno, for example, framed the incompetence of second-rate police, and the resultant lack of trust in the law, as a significant ‘danger to the state’.Footnote 68 Abe argued that the health of society and the state depended on the ability of the state to manage violence: ‘A state that is slow to control violence not only corrupts the societal order, but also endangers the foundation of the state itself.’Footnote 69 This position reflected Abe's stance as a moderate socialist influenced by German social democracy, which was not fundamentally skeptical of the state.Footnote 70 And all of these concerns about the society and the state were in keeping with the vision of the kokumin and the state as constituting one whole; it was assumed that the interests of the kokumin and the state were synonymous, that the kokumin would be best served by a healthy, and arguably strong, state.
In contrast to Abe and Mizuno, Hasegawa Nyozekan was exceptional in dwelling on the potential dangers of entrusting the police with too much power. Nyozekan noted that the state thought of the police as protective organs of the nation's life and capitalist life, not as agencies of the people's life (jinmin jishin no seikatsu). Because the police were shaped by the government, political parties, unions, and other influences outside the scope of everyday life, argued Nyozekan, they were not adequately autonomous and could not be expected to work toward the ideals of societal life (shakai seikatsu). Nyozekan thought it was pointless to blame the police for violence, or to complain about their ineffectiveness. He was, however, guardedly optimistic about their potential, suggesting that they could become influential in combating violence if they were able to stake out a more autonomous position. He did not abandon the possibility that the police could bring an end to violence.Footnote 71
Few, if any, of the liberals who advocated greater state control of violence addressed the question of who was to police the state. They certainly did not speak of the individual, the people, society, or the public, as constituting a body to guard against the overextension of state power. Abe, for one, saw the responsibility for dealing with violence resting first and foremost with the police and then with the ruling or capitalist class. He did stand up for the working class, demanding that it not be violently oppressed, but also did not consider anybody but the state and the ruling class as having the authority to regulate violence.Footnote 72 These thinkers also only flirted with the possibility that there were reasons why certain groups, such as labour unions, turned to violent tactics. The belief that freedom of speech and thought, combined with enforced prohibition of violence, could eliminate political violence suggests lack of sensitivity to issues of political marginalization and, indeed, the coercive power of the state. At least in the case of violence, the desire for order superseded concerns about the rights of the individual, class struggle, and state oppression.
The Impugnment of Political Parties and the Diet
While there was a certain optimism about the potential of the state to ensure order, there was no such faith in the political parties, or in the Diet to help restore political calm—they were more often seen as inextricably bound up with violent politics and contributing to, rather than taming, the violent political atmosphere. Abe Isoo was dismayed about the political ruffians who belonged to the political parties. Indeed, these hired ruffians were wielding physical force for individual politicians, cliques, and political parties in election campaigns, at speech meetings, and in the halls of the Diet. Many of them had been institutionalized into the political parties themselves as violent wings of their pressure groups (ingaidan). As politician Ozaki Yukio commented on late 1916 and 1917,
In the past, gangsters (sōshi) had frequently been employed in politics, but much less had been seen of them lately. With the emergence of the Terauchi administration [1916], however, the thugs (bōto) began to stalk again. They were at every public speech. I was attacked a number of times.Footnote 73
Abe lamented their presence in politics, as well as their role in the financial world as corporate extortionists (kaisha goro or sōkaiya, though Abe did not use these terms) who burst into the general meetings of companies.Footnote 74
Others were troubled by the degradation of the Diet and its parliamentarians. Tsuchida Kyōson claimed that the Diet was no longer a place for meetings but for fighting with violence, and suggested that it was no longer a parliament of the people (minshū no gikai).Footnote 75 And Inoue Kinji, commenting on the corruption of the Diet, argued that this platform of parliamentary politics that was intended to secure absolute freedom of speech was, by the despotism (ōbō) of the majority party, being turned into a ‘violent shambles’ (wanryoku no shuraba). He hoped that the era to come (implying unlike the current one) would be one of the people (minshū).Footnote 76 Especially vociferous in his criticism of the Diet and its members, along with the Seiyūkai and party politicians, was novelist and critic Uchida Roan. Uchida, in addition to painting Diet members as beset with greed and consumed with useless party matters, blamed politicians for providing a model of violent behaviour that tacitly legitimized the use of force. He bemoaned their example, which equated courage with shoving and hitting and kicking, and defined male honour as getting one's own way.Footnote 77
One particular incident that raised the ire of a number of journalists and intellectuals was a scuffle in the Diet in March 1926, sparked by parliamentarian Kiyose Ichirō's accusation that Seiyūkai President Tanaka Giichi was guilty of improper spending from a secret army expense account. In response to Kiyose's speech, Seiyūkai politicians stormed onto the dais and beat him, throwing the Diet into turmoil as fists flew in the chamber and pressure groups clashed in the hallways.Footnote 78 An outpouring of newspaper editorials skewered both the Diet and the Seiyūkai for a host of reasons—not valuing freedom of speech, disgracing the kokumin, jeopardizing constitutional government, and ‘normalizing the performance of the tragedy of bloodshed’.Footnote 79 Yoshino Sakuzō was among some 130 journalists and 20 scholars who gathered in Hibiya Park the following month, on 7 April, as part of the Convention of Journalists Who Reject Diet Violence (Gikai Bōryoku Haigeki Yūshi Kisha Taikai). The group issued a declaration and passed a resolution stating that:
repeated Diet violence was lamentable for constitutional government and a negative influence on the thought of the kokumin; the sanctity of the Diet should be respected; violence should be rejected to protect speech; political parties should undergo self-examination; and Diet members who were habitually violent should be expelled.Footnote 80
Although the state, as well as politicians, political parties, and the Diet were the objects of criticism, what was notable about the discourse on party politics was a marked lack of optimism that the practice of politics could be reformed. There were demands that politicians and the Diet leave behind its violent methods, but there was also a fear that they could not pull themselves out of what was amounting to an existential crisis. Miyake Setsurei, though hoping that the Seiyūkai and Kenseikai could become more like the liberal political parties they were intended to be, seemed resigned to the almost impossible difficulty of any improvement, much less the attainment of this ideal. In a piece that presented a short history of Japan's political parties, Setsurei opened by describing the Seiyūkai and Kenseikai as burdened by their predecessors. The earlier parties had passed on to their contemporary incarnations elements that were both good and bad; it was the poisonous aspects of this past that were the most tenacious. Purging the parties of these long-ingrained ills was proving to be extremely slow. Among the maladies passed on by history, explained Setsurei, was the tendency to deal with matters not with speech, but with force.Footnote 81
While the state might be faulted for taking its violence too far, not providing adequate policing, or even contributing to instability by cooperating with the likes of the Kokusuikai, there was still a sense that the state was ultimately responsible for and capable of maintaining order. Political parties and politicians, on the other hand, seemed to be at the very heart of the problem. One need only turn to party and parliamentary politics to witness the proliferation of non-state violence—politicians were hiring ruffians, Diet members themselves were tussling in the halls of parliament, and force was seen by many as an acceptable way of conducting political business. That the state, with its policing duties, was valued more than the political parties, with their governing duties, was clearly stated by Mizuno Hironori. He chastised a government that tolerated various kinds of violent groups for its own expediency only to leave behind a hundred years of misfortune for the state. Remarked Mizuno, ‘The life of a government is temporary. The life of the state is permanent’.Footnote 82 There was little sense that the political parties should have a role in policing—the responsibility for preserving order and for keeping the domestic peace was seen as resting with the state alone.
Conclusion
In the 1930s, many of the liberal voices that had participated in the discourse on violence in the previous decade fell silent. Far fewer articles were written or published on violence, and journals such as Chūō kōron did not run series on the subject as they had done in the past. With some exceptions like Sugimori Kōjirō, articles that did appear in their pages were either relatively new to the discussion, as Shinmei Masamichi was, or were less moderate than the liberals of the 1920s. Those who did write, like Marxist Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, were much more concerned with the coercive potential of state violence than with disorder and instability. Violence came to be framed in terms of an abuse, rather than a lack, of state strength and was squarely part of a larger discourse about state oppression and tyranny.
The absence of those who had previously been vocal was a reflection of the splintering and undoing of liberalism in the 1930s. Some, like Yoshino Sakuzō, simply did not live to witness much of the militarism, imperialism, and war that characterized this period. Some, like Mizuno Hironori, were gagged by state censorship. Because he continued to advocate pacifism and spoke out against the Pacific War, Mizuno's writings were frequently banned from publication. Some, like Miyake Setsurei, did not seem fundamentally opposed to wartime nationalism nor to the war itself; Setsurei accepted the Order of Culture from the government in 1943, two years before his death.Footnote 83
Others, like Abe Isoo and Hasegawa Nyozekan, supported the state. Abe, who had opposed the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War, stood behind Japan's war efforts by the late 1930s. When the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, Abe was serving as chairman of the Shakai Taishūtō (Social Masses Party) when the party promised to actively support Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro and declared that the Japanese invasion of China was a ‘holy war’ (seisen). By July 1939, Abe was arguing that in times of war, to follow orders was loyal and patriotic. He began to minimize the responsibilities of the kokumin to pay taxes and to vote, instead stressing that it was the kokumin's duty to serve in the military.Footnote 84 Like Abe, Hasegawa Nyozekan also served Konoe Fumimaro, working on cultural policy for the prime minister's brain trust, the Showa Kenkyūkai (Showa Research Association), and expounding theories on the source of Japan's national superiority.Footnote 85
For many of these liberals, the willingness to cooperate with the state was not a fundamental break from earlier thinking but was an extension or permutation of long-held convictions.Footnote 86 Much has been made of the apostasy (tenkō) of intellectuals in prewar Japan.Footnote 87 But Setsurei's cultural nationalism, Abe's trust in the state, and Nyozekan's blurring of society and nation were all a part of their liberalism before the 1930s.Footnote 88
The failure of liberalism to mount a challenge to the imperialist, wartime state, to protect potentially liberal institutions, and to offer a vision for liberal reform, rests as much on the shoulders of liberals themselves as it does on state oppression. This is not to minimize the devastating effects of censorship in all of its forms, from the removal of intellectuals from academic positions to the heavy hand of the press laws. Yet this discourse resonates with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's argument, drawing on but going beyond Gramsci, that the production of hegemony takes place at the level of democratic politics. For an articulatory practice to be considered hegemonic, as perceived by Laclau and Mouffe, it must engage with antagonisms and unstable frontiers, difference and contested meaning.Footnote 89 The liberal discourse on violence was such an articulatory practice in a field of competing hegemonies, itself a hegemonic practice that sought to partially fix meaning—liberal intellectuals and journalists ascribed certain values to the nation and inscribed the state with certain roles and responsibilities, giving meaning not just to the nation and the state but also to the diminished individual. Ironically, the hegemony created by these intellectuals and journalists was one that, because of its statism, ultimately reinforced state hegemony.
Liberals allowed their fears and anxieties about civilizational decay, disorder, and political instability to justify the privileging of an illiberal state and the virtual abandonment of those bodies (political parties and parliament) that arguably had the most liberal potential. The assumption that the state alone could use violence, and that this violence was legitimate when wielded for the sake of society or the nation, encouraged acceptance of the wartime Japanese state's actions as necessary and palatable. The willingness to call upon the state for domestic policing and international protection—without first considering the questions of who was to police the state, and what role the people should have in policing—ultimately promoted violence in one of its most destructive forms, and was devastating for the freedoms and rights of the individual.
