Hasegawa Nyozekan and Liberalism in Modern Japan

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Author: University of Washington | Tacoma Mary L. Hanneman

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HASEGAWA NYOZEKAN AND LIBERALISM IN MODERN JAPAN


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Hasegawa Nyozekan in his later years making tea. Photo: Courtesy Kenneth B. Pyle. Box: Nyozekan’s signature.


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HASEGAWA NYOZEKAN AND LIBERALISM IN MODERN JAPAN

by

MARY L. HANNEMAN University of Washington, Tacoma


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HASEGAWA NYOZEKAN AND LIBERALISM IN MODERN JAPAN © Mary L. Hanneman 2007 This edition first published 2007 by GLOBAL ORIENTAL Ltd PO Box 219 Folkestone Kent CT20 2WP UK www.globaloriental.co.uk ISBN 978-1-905246-49-6 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the Publishers, except for the use of short extracts in criticism. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library

Set in 9.5/11pt Stone Serif by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester Printed and bound in England by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead, Tyne & Wear


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Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

vii 1

Chapter One:

Hasegawa Nyozekan

Chapter Two:

The Japanese National Character

5 34

Chapter Three: Taisho ¯ Democracy

58

Chapter Four:

Fascism and the Path to War

84

Chapter Five:

Postwar Japan

109

Conclusion

124

Bibliography

128

Index

137


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Acknowledgements

I

would like to thank Dr. Kenneth B. Pyle for his support and mentorship. Dr. Toru Takemoto also has helped and supported me in many ways over many years. I will always be grateful to Dr. William Richardson for his guidance at the University of Washington, Tacoma. I also thank my family and in particular my three children, Jim, Davy and Caroline Allen. Finally, I dedicate this book to the memory of my parents, Carl Frederick Hanneman and Donna Stewart Hanneman.


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Introduction

F

ar too often, historians have likened World War II to a knife that cut modern Japanese history in two. The subsequent American occupation of Japan, they say, completed the surgery by removing Japan’s “diseased” past from its present, enabling it to develop into a political, social, and economic democracy, a healthy model of its American doctors. This bifurcated view of Japan’s modern history has come under review as Japanese and American scholars alike ask whether postwar Japan is really a product of the Allied Occupation or rather the outcome of trends present from prewar times. This question is the latest version of one of the central questions of modern Japanese history, asked since the Meiji period: “How can Japan be both modern and Japanese?” Both questions assume a strict dichotomy between “modern” Japan, be it Meiji or postwar Japan, and its traditional past. Increasingly, historians have moved beyond this oversimplified dichotomy, showing that continuity between pre- and postwar Japan does indeed exist. Certainly, Japan experienced vast change in the decades following World War II. To identify that change as being a direct result of the Allied Occupation, however, is to ignore the dynamic set in motion by the Meiji Restoration. Just as the Meiji Restoration was not without its Tokugawan roots, so has postwar Japan been a continuation of trends set in motion as early as the Meiji and Taisho ¯ periods. It is the historian’s task, therefore, to identify aspects of this important continuity. Journalist and liberal social critic Hasegawa Nyozekan (1875– 1969) is an illustration of the continuity in modern Japanese history. A thoroughly “modern” intellectual, he dressed in traditional Japanese clothing throughout his life. He was a thin man, who wore his wavy hair long, and sometimes sported a mustache. His head was large, his face long, his jaw slightly protruding. His rapid speech was delivered in a soft baritone.1 “To follow Nyozekan’s life,” writes intellectual historian Tanaka Hiroshi, is to follow one hundred years of modern Japanese history.”2 As


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Hasegawa Nyozekan and Liberalism in Modern Japan

journalist and colleague Oya Soichi wrote, “Because he was active throughout Meiji, Taisho ¯ , and Sho ¯ wa, his was a giant presence that left a mark on the history of modern Japanese culture.”3 As a youth in early Meiji, Nyozekan received a most modern education, attending one of Tokyo’s first English language schools where he learned the latest in British Classical Liberal thought. This provided him with a thoroughly liberal outlook, which stayed with him his entire life. As Sharon Nolte explained, “Liberalism was a cluster of ideas in prewar Japan. . . the dignity of the individual, freedom of expression, the equality of the sexes, the legitimacy of popular participation in cultural creation and politics, progressive social engineering, and decolonization.”4 Nyozekan embraced all of these ideas, but his liberal strain was balanced by a deep respect for, and love of, Japanese tradition. After completing his formal education in British law in 1898, Nyozekan joined the staff of Kuga Katsunan’s newspaper, Nihon, identifying with Kuga and his call to “absorb the characteristics of the strong countries of the West and cultivate a Japanese essence.”5 Unlike many of his contemporaries at Nihon, however, Nyozekan never repudiated the West, or liberalism, instead integrating the liberal and nationalist strains that so characterized the modern Japanese experience. It was this integration of liberalism and nationalism, unusual in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Japan and almost extinct by the 1930s, that gave Nyozekan his unique perspective on Japanese society – a perspective that was at once objective and subjective, critical, yet loving. Nyozekan is important not only as an example of the link of continuity between pre- and postwar Japan; he was also part of the process of change in Japan. Japan possesses a highly developed and widely-read intellectual press.6 Thus, as a widely-published intellectual, Nyozekan wielded an unusually strong impact on the attitudes of the Japanese public. Both before and after the war he devoted his career as journalist and social critic to the establishment of liberal values in Japan, and to providing an intellectual framework for the creation of political democracy and social liberty. After his journalistic start with Kuga and Kuga’s colleague Miyake Setsurei, founder of the magazine Nihonjin, Nyozekan joined the staff of the Osaka Asahi shimbun in 1908. His career as a newspaper journalist with the liberal Osaka Asahi was short, however: in 1918, he resigned from the paper in protest against the Terauchi government’s repression of the press following that year’s Rice Riots. Cutting his ties with the newspaper world, he founded the magazine Warera (“We”) in 1919, a magazine designed to provide the kind of forum for social and political criticism he believed the news-


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Introduction


3

papers could no longer provide. Thus, he continued his efforts to promote the development of liberalism and democracy. By the 1930s, in the face of increased governmental repression and militarism, that struggle grew more and more difficult. After publishing one of his most important works, Nihon fuashizumu hihan (“A Critique of Japanese Fascism”) in November 1932, his magazine, by then called Hihan (“Criticism”), was forced to fold in 1934. This marked the beginning of a new and important phase in Nyozekan’s life and career. Shifting to more subtle tactics in the fight for liberalism, Nyozekan began his study of the Japanese national character, a study that would occupy him for the rest of his life. Nyozekan used his beliefs about the Japanese character as a way to appraise, judge, and critique Japanese society. This enabled him, during the war years, to channel his political and social commentary into the more discreet, but not necessarily less critical, form of Japanese cultural studies. This approach, camouflaged in the colors of that era’s emphasis on Japanese nativism (and anticipating Maruyama Masao’s later approach to criticism) allowed him to continue his critique. In this way, Nyozekan survived the war years while never repudiating his liberal perspective. The Occupation and postwar period saw a revival of Nyozekan’s influence, for now finally came the fruition of many of his liberal ideals for Japan.7 Suddenly in demand, he served in various government-related positions – including a position in the first postwar sitting of the Imperial Diet – and received many honors for his achievements. Nyozekan’s liberal and nationalist beliefs finally seemed reflected in the society around him. The image of a modern intellectual clothed in traditional garb best exemplifies Nyozekan’s unique blend of tradition and modernity. A liberal and a nationalist, he devoted his career to advancing the cause of liberalism in Japan using his understanding of the Japanese national character to evaluate Japanese society and to elucidate the continuities between Japan’s past and its present. As Nyozekan himself wrote in 1951, “It might be said, with perhaps a little exaggeration, that a Japanese who is still living and who was born in the early Meiji period has in his own lifetime covered a span which stretched over two or three centuries in Europe. I am, I think, one such Japanese.”8 NOTES 1

Kaji Ryuichi, “Hasegawa Nyozekan,” Bungei shunju 42:8 (August, 1964) 281; Tatsuno Ryu, “Hasegawa Nyozekan ron,” Chuo koron, 50:2 (February 1935) 283.


4 2

3

4

5

6

7 8

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Hasegawa Nyozekan and Liberalism in Modern Japan Tanaka Hiroshi, “Hyoden: Hasegawa Nyozekan: Shakaiha janarisuto e no michi,” Sekai, no. 482 (December 1985) 217. Oya Soichi, “Hasegawa Nyozekan no mittsu no kao,” Sandei mainichi, (November 30, 1969) 154. Sharon Nolte, Liberalism in Modern Japan: Ishibashi Tanzan and His Teachers, 1905–1960, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) vii. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Sekai no rekishi to jibun no rekishi: Seiyo bunka to watakushi no ayunda michi,” Genso, 1:6 (September 1947) 8. Herbert Passin, “Writer and Journalist in the Transitional Society,” in Lucian Pye (ed.), Communications and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963) 102–103. Oya, 155. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Japan’s ‘Cultural Democracy,’ A Challenging Interpretation of Japanese History,” Perspective on Japan: Atlantic Monthly Supplement, no. 1 (1955) 74.


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1

Hasegawa Nyozekan

B

orn in 1875, just seven years after the Meiji Restoration, Hasegawa Nyozekan’s life spanned most of Japan’s modern century. He died in 1969 at the age of ninety-three. Thus, Hasegawa Nyozekan was truly a “witness to a century.”1 But it was not just any century: this was the century of Japan’s transition from feudal military government to modern democratic nation. Nor was Nyozekan just any witness: as a liberal intellectual, social critic, and independent journalist, he not only recorded what he saw, but commented as well. In commenting on society he endeavored to change it, to mold public opinion and provide an intellectual basis for the growth of liberalism in Japan. Hasegawa Manjiro (his given name) was born the second son of a merchant family in Tokyo’s Fukugawa District.2 His father operated a lumberyard, but until his grandfather’s generation the family had been carpenters in service to the shogun.3 Thus, while Nyozekan’s upbringing was in tune with the spirit of Meiji, through his family and physical environment he experienced the spirit of Edo that lingered into the new age.4 Nyozekan’s family background had lasting impact on the formation of his ideas and on his writing. Growing up in Tokyo’s shitamachi, surrounded by the “stories and laughter . . . and the realities of life of the artisans,”5 he felt close to the artisan and laboring classes. Nyozekan himself engaged in carpentry throughout his life, enjoying cabinet-making and seal engraving well into his eighties.6 Nyozekan wrote about artisans and laborers and he wrote for them. His later concern for labor issues can be traced to his childhood environment, and his immersion in the study of Japanese history and culture was motivated at least in part by a desire to explain these things to the laboring classes whom he felt did not adequately understand their own heritage.7 Japanese intellectual historian Tanaka Hiroshi contends that Nyozekan’s artisan background


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contributed to the realism and humanism that were fundamental to Nyozekan’s thought.8 In 1881, at age six, Nyozekan began his education. At ten, his father sent him to live in lodgings run by Sugiura Jugo, who would soon be a founding member of the Seikyosha, the late 1880s, intellectual group that sought to forge a modern Japan through adapting Western borrowings to Japanese tradition. From Sugiura’s lodgings he attended the Honkyo shogakko.9 His elementary education was interrupted periodically by illness, a pattern that would be repeated during his college days.10 Like his family background, physical infirmity was a character-molding factor in his life. He attributed his lifelong pacifism and lack of interest in the military in part to this combination of factors: he recalled that as a youth he “had no interest in war or military toys [and]. . . never played wargames. When my friends played such games, I watched them disinterestedly.” 11 In the same way, he attributed his “scientific attitude,” “objectivity”, and “dislike for authority” to the periods of enforced rest and recuperation during his youth, when “a day without pain or suffering was a good day and I could expect only fleeting satisfaction or contentment.” 12 Nyozekan’s central characteristic as an intellectual and journalist was his liberalism, and this too undoubtedly began to take form under the influence of his earliest education. Nyozekan shared the experience of others of his generation for whom the new Westernoriented schools played a profound role in shaping ideas and consciousness.13 At age of eleven, without having graduated from elementary school, Nyozekan entered Nakamura Kaiu’s (Masanao) Dojinsha. Here he was instructed by Nakamura, founding member of the Meirokusha and translator of Samuel Smiles’s Self Help and J.S. Mill’s On Liberty.14 At the Dojinsha, which also emphasized Chinese and the Chinese classics, Nyozekan was first introduced to the English language.15 It was English that would be his undoing, however. At the age of twelve he failed the Dojinsha’s English examination and was compelled to return home.16 He then entered the Kyoritsu Gakko where he stayed until 1889, and at the age of fourteen he entered the course in French law at the Meiji Horitsu Gakko (now Meiji Daigaku) planning to take his father’s advice and become a lawyer.17 But already events were occurring that would draw him away from the law. In 1888 at age thirteen, Nyozekan had published his first piece, a short work entitled “Sozoro aruki” (“A Stroll”) in Shonen’en (“Boy’s Garden”), a tender beginning to his career as a journalist.18 That same year, Miyake Setsurei’s magazine, Nihonjin (“The Japanese”) was founded and Nyozekan, reading it eagerly,


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“secretly determined to become a newspaper journalist.”19 When Kuga Katsunan’s newspaper, Nihon (“Japan”) appeared the next year, he devoured that as well. Subscribing to Tokutomi Soho’s magazine, Kokumin no tomo (“The Nation’s Friend,” 1887) and later his newspaper, Kokumin shimbun (“The Nation,” 1890), Nyozekan compared Tokutomi and his Minyusha’s views to those of Miyake’s and Kuga’s Seikyosha.20 The Seikyosha’s ideas struck a responsive chord in him, and though he had not yet met his mentors, he had selected them. First, however, he needed to complete his formal education. At the age of eighteen (1893) he entered Tokyo Kogakuin (later Chuo Daigaku), enrolling in the department of English law. His college career was interrupted after only a year, however, when due to a combination of illness and the loss of his father’s business, he was forced to take a two-year break.21 During his convalescence he read extensively, pursuing his interest in psychiatry, psychology, and criminal law, and reading Chekov and Kropotkin in English translation.22 He wrote later that he treated the interval away from school exactly as though he were still in school, and thus did not feel it to be a particular misfortune.23 He also used the enforced vacation to pursue his writing, completing the short fictional piece “Futasuji michi” (“Crossroads”), which he published in 1898 in Shincho gekkan (“New Works Monthly”). The piece was wellreceived: one critic later went so far as to compare him favorably to Soseki, Tanizaki, and Akutagawa.24 In 1896, after retaking the entrance exams for Tokyo Hogakuin, Nyozekan resumed college as a sophomore.25 Attending Tokyo Hogakuin, a private university which, like other private universities, was more conducive to liberal ideas and attitudes than the imperial universities,26 Nyozekan received an education firmly grounded in English and French philosophy, avoiding the Germanbased education that was dominant in the imperial universities.27 This pro-English and anti-German emphasis stayed with him throughout his life. He graduated from Tokyo Hogakuin in 1898, fourteenth in a class of 200.28 About his college days studying law, Nyozekan later wrote, “I had no mind to do law; it was my father’s wish that I should do so. But my first and second years [at Tokyo Hogakuin] were absolutely superior because I had an interest in scholarly things.” Out of respect for his father, he attempted the bar examination, but held up by a rainstorm, he arrived late, and failed.29 Nyozekan’s real interest lay in journalism, a path his elder brother (Yamamoto Matsunosuke) was already pursuing, having moved up the ranks from the Yamato shimbun, which he joined in 1894, to the Tokyo Asahi shimbun,


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which he joined in 1898.30 This was a course Nyozekan too hoped to follow. He wrote: I planned to become a newspaper journalist because I wanted to emulate the top-ranking newspaper journalists of the day. These people were Fukuzawa Yukichi, Suehiro Tetsucho, Kuga Katsunan, Miyake Setsurei, Tokutomi Soho, Shiga Shigetaka: people who were not principally academics, but people who I thought were grounded in the insight of the journalist and the fundamentals of scholarship. At that time I coined the phrase “critics of civilization” for these people, and thought that I too would like to become a “critic of civilization.” (I didn’t know that the phrase “critic of civilization” had previously come into use and thought that I had made it up myelf.)31

As a critic of civilization, Nyozekan hoped to become a journalist who could “contribute to the formation of sound public opinion.”32 His mentor, Kuga, held journalism in high regard, and believed the independent journalist played a crucial role in working for the national interest, especially in a nation that was moving toward democracy.33 Nyozekan wanted a stake in shaping the liberal democratic nation he believed Japan would become. In the years immediately following his graduation from Tokyo Hogakuin, Nyozekan found himself once again forced to recuperate from a bout of ill-health. Although under doctor’s orders not to exert himself even by reading and writing, he used the period to do exactly that.34 He read English and French classics by Dickens, Thackeray, Zola, and Maupassant in English translation,35 and once sufficiently recovered, he spent much of his time reading at the Imperial Library at Ueno.36 There, he read the works of Spencer, Hume, Spinoza, Mill, Toqueville, and others,37 and was particularly drawn to Spencer.38 Spencer’s scheme of evolutionary social progress had attracted Tokutomi Soho and Miyake Setsurei before him, and now Nyozekan, too, found in Spencer a rich and promising prospect for Japan. His continuing interest in criminology and criminal psychology led him to the works of Cesare Lambroso and Enrico Ferri; he even began to study Italian so he could read these works in their original.39 During this time he read Marx and Engels for the first time, tackling the English translation of Marx’s Kapital and Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,40 later admitting he was “no match for Marx.”41 He also renewed his earlier fascination with Kropotkin, especially favoring the Russian anarchist’s Mutual Aid and his 1899 autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Nyozekan translated the latter work in a summarized version,


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which he published serially as Rokoku no uchimaku (“An Inside Account of Russia”) in Nihon in 1903.42 But Nyozekan’s great fascination continued to be the ideas of Kuga and Miyake and their Seikyosha.43 Having received an education firmly grounded in the Japanese and Chinese classics as well as in Western liberal thought, it was natural that Nyozekan be drawn to the Seikyosha ideas. The Seikyosha, founded in 1888 by Kuga, Miyake, and Shiga Shigetaka, was committed to strengthening Japan by adopting Western ideas and institutions. In contrast to Tokutomi’s Minyusha, founded a year earlier and dedicated to wholesale Westernization based on the premise that all progress was universal and followed a universal path, the Seikyosha held that borrowed ideas and institutions must be adapted to fit Japan. Adapting Western imports would enable the nation to maintain its cultural identity and thereby achieve equality in the international community.44 Integrating East and West in this way required a deep knowledge of Japanese history, culture, and tradition. In short, to adapt Western ideas and institutions to fit Japan required an understanding of the Japanese “national character.” Obviously, it required an understanding of the West as well. Thus, Seikyosha members could claim to be liberals in the Western mold, and at the same time, Japanese nationalists. This liberal-nationalist position was the philosophical foundation with which Nyozekan identified. Nyozekan wrote about the influence Kuga had on his thinking as a young man: “. . . for Kuga, the important point in nationalism was liberalism. As a youth I read [Kuga’s writings] Kinji kempo ko (’Recent Constitutional Thought,’ Nihon, December 28, 1888 to February 28, 1889) and Kinji seironko (’Recent Political Thought,’ Nihon, July 20 to August 30, 1890) and placed myself in the Nihon camp.” But, he continued, indicating the primacy of liberalism in his own thinking, “If Kuga had not comprehended (rikai) liberalism in such a way, even though I yearned [to belong to] Nihon, in all probability, I would have abandoned the group.”45 Nyozekan differed from his mentors, however, in that as Japan moved into its early phase of imperialism, marked by the SinoJapanese and Russo-Japanese wars, the nationalist element in Kuga’s and Miyake’s thought became more prominent, whereas Nyozekan, on the other hand, kept the nationalist element in balance with his liberalism. As Japan pursued imperialist goals in Asia, many Meiji liberals (including the Minyusha’s Tokutomi) retreated into the belief that patriotism demanded they reject Western influence and liberal ideas and embrace Japanese tradition. Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 was one that even Fukuzawa Yukichi, the model Meiji liberal, could not resist. So seductive were imperialism


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and military victory as signs of national strength, that after the Sino-Japanese War, “Even those who were [previously] unalloyed liberals [became] militarists.”46 Nyozekan wrote of Kuga: “As we entered the Meiji 20s, the trend in modern Japanese history reversed from a process toward liberalism to a process toward nationalism, and as this happened, Kuga’s standpoint also took this direction”. “Had I read Kuga’s ’[Gensei oyobi] kokusairon’ (’Essay on Current Politics and the World,’ April 3–22, 1893) before joining Nihon,” Nyozekan wrote, “I probably would not have felt in step with my colleagues at Nihon, since it did not match my own feelings at the time.”47 Maruyama Masao, whose father, Maruyama Kanji was a lifelong friend and colleague of Nyozekan’s, believed that nationalist elements were absent from Nyozekan’s thought from the start. In this respect, Maruyama felt, Nyozekan clearly differed from Kuga and Miyake.48 Nyozekan’s love for Japan was inspired by its culture, not directed toward its government. But in 1902, Nyozekan joined the staff of Nihon, thus fulfilling his youthful ambition.49 In addition to Kuga and Miyake, he joined such colleagues as Maruyama Kanji and Chiba Kamekichi, writing for a newspaper whose circulation in 1903 was about 10,000.50 The atmosphere at Nihon under Kuga was unlike that of any other newspaper. Differences in rank were minimized and even senior staff members like Kuga and Miyake were addressed with the simple “san” as opposed to “sensei.”51 Nyozekan remembered Kuga as a free-thinker who did not adhere rigidly to “isms” – he was not, in Nyozekan’s words, an “ism-ist.”52 Due to illness, Kuga resigned as editor of Nihon in 1906, and in 1907, Nihon merged with Miyake Setsurei’s magazine Nihonjin to form Nihon oyobi Nihonjin. Nyozekan later wrote, as of the end of an era, “I do not think an organization like Nihon shimbun, which Kuga led, will appear again in Japan, and this makes me feel intensely lonely.”53 Nyozekan felt his association with Nihon was a turning point in his career in journalism, one that gave him a deep awareness of the problems and issues confronting modern Japan.54 During his years with Nihon and Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, Nyozekan wrote on such topics as the importance of education for women, labor issues, criminal behavior and criminal law, and other social issues. It was while with Nihon oyobi Nihonjin that he first began to use the pen name “Nyozekan,” an ironic play on the idea of free time by a man who had none.55 Soon after the merger with Nihon, Nihon oyobi Nihonjin began to face financial difficulties and was unable to retain its complete staff. As a result, Nyozekan left Nihon oyobi Nihonjin in February 1908 to join the staff of the Osaka Asahi Shimbun, which, at that time, had


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a significantly larger circulation than the newer Tokyo Asahi Shimbun. Nyozekan joined the Osaka Asahi through an introduction by former Nihon colleague Ando Masazumi who had joined the Osaka newspaper just months earlier.56 He was joined at the Osaka Asahi by several of his earlier colleagues, including, at Nyozekan’s recommendation, Maruyama Kanji.57 Nihon colleague Chiba Kamekichi later wrote that Nyozekan possessed a “deep understanding of humanity” and that editor Torii Sosen greatly admired Nyozekan’s work from his Nihon and Nihon oyobi Nihonjin days.58 Partly as a result of the carry-over of writers from Nihon and Nihon oyobi Nihonjin to the Osaka Asahi – what Maruyama Masao called a “human migration”59 – the Osaka newspaper had a free intellectual climate that embraced, and was the embodiment of, Japanese liberalism.60 The Osaka Asahi was the leading voice and opinion-maker of the democratic and minponshugi ideals of the period of Taisho ¯ democracy.61 Nyozekan recalled that Murayama Ryohei, founder of both the Osaka and the Tokyo Asahi newspapers, believed that the role of the newspaper should be to bring about a democratic age.62 Moreover, Nyozekan himself became a leading voice in the Osaka Asahi and in the world of journalism. As city editor, a post he acquired in 1914, he and editor Sosen became the guiding force of the newspaper.63 These two, wrote Kako Onia, “Led the company in judgment and character, [and] were respected as the ’machines’ of public discussion.” 64 At the Osaka Asahi, Nyozekan developed his critical approach to problems confronting Japanese society and government. Nyozekan’s writing was not confined to the newspaper, however. He continued to contribute to Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, and in 1909 he published his first novel, Hitai no otoku. (“The Man with a Forehead”) 65 Originally entitled simply, “?” and published serially in the Osaka Asahi, the novel was warmly received by the critics. Natsume Soseki, already established as a leading literary figure, praised the book in a review in the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, declaring that “the interest [in the book] is totally in the opinions of the people in the book, the gathering of opinions on society, people and learning . . . that the book presents.”66 A month after the book’s publication Nyozekan had the opportunity to meet with Soseki, and the latter invited him to visit his literary group, the Shakaiha bungakusha.67 As Tokyo natives, “Edokko,” the two shared an affinity, and Nyozekan later recalled the nostalgia he felt upon hearing Soseki’s Tokyo accent in his adopted Osaka home.68 Soseki himself felt that Nyozekan’s development and nature resembled his own.69 In 1910, Nyozekan was sent to London to report on the EnglandJapan Exposition. Leaving Osaka in March, he traveled via the Trans-Siberian Railway, stopping in Moscow and Berlin before


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arriving in London in April.70 In London, while covering the Exposition, he attended the funeral of King Edward VII.71 His most fulfilling endeavor while in London, however, was a familiar one: reading. In his ample free time he read avidly of the English books and newspapers available to him and was especially drawn to the ideas expressed by British social theorist Hobhouse in The Metaphysical Theory of the State. He was also attracted to the works of anthropologist James Frazer, and read extensively of the various socialists of the English school. The reading background he acquired in England had a great impact on his own later writing about the state, about society, and about the Japanese national character. As legal scholar Matsumoto Joji has pointed out, “. . . the liberal aspect of Nyozekan’s character gradually expanded after his trip to England.”72 Before returning to Japan in November, Nyozekan traveled around Europe, visiting Paris and Rome before sailing back to Japan via the Suez Canal, with stops in Singapore and Hong Kong.73 Nyozekan published a book, Rondon (1912), about his experiences and reflections on London. But more serious matters occupied much of Nyozekan’s time. The second Katsura Cabinet’s harsh anti-socialist and anti-labor response to the Red Flag (Akahata) Incident of 1908 and the High Treason (Taigyaku) Incident of 1910 sparked concern among some intellectuals over the retreat from a relatively free intellectual atmosphere to one of growing government control. Nyozekan’s editorials critical of the government’s high-handed behavior in the High Treason Incident marked the beginning of his journalistic confrontation with the government.74 The government’s handling of the Red Flag and High Treason incidents, coupled with the Katsura Cabinet’s policy of expanding Japanese interests in Asia created a backdrop for conflict among members of the Osaka Asahi staff. The conflict arose between the Seikyosha group of liberal staffers, gathered around editor Sosen (a group which was also opposed to the political party the Seiyukai, and believed the influence of partisan politics should not be brought into the paper) and the “anti-liberals,” gathered around Nishimura Tenshu.75 Antipathy between the two groups intensified, and, in March 1914, publisher Murayama Ryohei replaced editorin-chief Nishimura and city editor Tohen Katei, with Sosen and Nyozekan respectively.76 Hasegawa wrote that while Nishimura commanded great respect, he was not qualified to be editor of a newspaper whose role was to lead the fight for democracy.77 The victory of the Sosen-Nyozekan editorial policy was short-lived, however: battle lines were drawn and would resurface in the aftermath of the 1918 Rice Riots controversy.


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Under the combined Sosen-Nyozekan leadership the Osaka Asahi broadened its role as a force to “bring about a democratic age.” When World War I broke out, for example, Nyozekan editorialized that England and France would prevail over German militarism because they possessed democratic cores. At the same time, he expressed his belief that Japan would turn away from the German example of social and political organization and instead follow the example of the democratic nations.78 The liberal character of the Sosen-Nyozekan leadership was manifested too in the 1916 serialization of Kawakami Hajime’s Bimbo monogatari, an indictment of modern society and an important step in Kawakami’s progression toward Marxism. In 1917, the Osaka Asahi staff was strengthened by the addition of Oyama Ikuo, a leading figure in the promotion of democratic ideals, along with Marxist economist Kushida Tamizo.79 The newspaper thus attempted to provide a foundation for democratic ideals in Japanese society. It also provided Nyozekan with a wide circle of liberal associates who would prove valuable after his resignation from the Osaka Asahi. These were colleagues who, with Nyozekan, were opposed to the Terauchi government and its policies. They first attacked the Terauchi government in print for its transcendental cabinet.80 Reiterating its earlier complaints against the Katsura government, the Osaka Asahi also attacked the Terauchi government’s aggressive foreign policy. Immediately prior to becoming Prime Minister, Terauchi had been the first Governor General of Korea, where he instituted a policy of harsh military control over the Japanese colony. These issues set the tenor of the conflict between the Osaka Asahi and the Terauchi government, and, as Maruyama Masao pointed out, established the Osaka Asahi as one of the Terauchi government’s primary opponents.81 When Terauchi announced his plans for the Siberian Expedition in August 1918, the Osaka Asahi responded with an attack against this “pointless” intervention.82 The announcement of the Siberian Expedition helped touch off the Rice Riots. In stark contrast to the ecstatic public support for Japan’s military gains of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, the Siberian Expedition proved unpopular. Intellectuals viewed the move as a government ploy to stir up patriotic sentiment to distract growing popular domestic dissatisfaction, dissatisfaction that was largely the result of post-World War I inflation and skyrocketing rice prices. To the popular mind, on the other hand, the Siberian Expedition served as confirmation of rumors that the government was stockpiling rice to provision the troops.83 The Rice Riots broke out in Toyama Prefecture in early August 1918, when women from a small fishing village seized the rice


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supplies of local merchants who reneged on their earlier plans to lower prices. Unexpectedly, the minor uprising grew into a national movement affecting nearly every prefecture.84 After local police failed to quell the disturbances, the government dispatched troops. Thousands of civilians were arrested and 7,000 were charged. Many lost their lives in the chaos and some of those charged in the rioting were sentenced to death. The rioting itself ended in September, but the repercussions continued. Shortly after the rioting began, the Osaka Asahi came out in support of the rioters, criticizing the government for suppressing news about both the riots and the Siberian Expedition, which Nyozekan and others regarded as a contravention of democratic ideals.85 On August 17, the Osaka Asahi sponsored a mass rally in protest of the government’s attack on free speech. The wellattended rally drew 173 representatives from fifty-three newspapers.86 A week later, tempers ran even higher when representatives of eighty-six Kansai newspapers attended the “Conference of Kansai newspapers to denounce the Terauchi government.”87 In an August 26, 1918, article about this meeting, author Onishi Toshio quoted a phrase from the Chinese Book of History, writing, “A white rainbow has pierced the sun” (“hakko hi o tsuranuku”). In the original, the phrase alluded to grave problems in the empire,88 and the Japanese government and the right-wing interpreted it as a threat to the “sun,” the Japanese emperor, and as a call to revolution.89 Nyozekan refused to assert his authority as city editor to block publication of the article, and instead the article was pulled by the government.90 The government pressed charges against Onishi and the Osaka Asahi under the Press Law of 1909, using the “white rainbow” article as its focal point.91 As evidence against the Osaka Asahi the government also gathered “danger spots” that had appeared in Asahi essays in the year and a half prior to the September 1918 trial. Many of these essays bore Nyozekan’s by-line.92 The Terauchi Cabinet fell on September 29, and was replaced by Hara Kei’s Seiyukai government, but the new government, following the same policies as its predecessor, added its own violent tactics to the effort to control the intellectuals and the press.93 Contributing to the conflict was the fact that many of the Osaka Asahi staffers were anti-Seiyukai. Under the Press Law of 1909, the government threatened to suspend publication of the newspaper and publisher Murayama was personally threatened by a right-wing group. In the face of these professional and personal threats, Murayama resigned as publisher on October 15, 1918. Shortly after Murayama’s resignation, Nyozekan too resigned. Editor-in-chief Sosen resigned as well, as did Oyama Ikuo, Maruyama Kanji, and Kushida Tamizo.94 In Tokyo,


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members of the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun resigned in solidarity with their Osakan colleagues.95 Thus, the editorial board of the Osaka Asahi was purged in a clean sweep. According to Maruyama Masao, Nyozekan was one of the government’s primary targets, attacked for his anti-government essays and his supposed “anarchistic” leanings.96 The slew of sudden resignations broke the Osaka Asahi’s “traditional spirit” – the liberal democratic character for which it was known.97 After his resignation from the Osaka Asahi, Nyozekan chose to pursue his journalistic career independent of any outside affiliation. He expressed his feelings about his resignation in a letter to Miyake Setsurei: “. . . I do not feel particular regret; I spent nearly ten years there. I have accomplished enough . . .”98 Nyozekan quit the newspaper because he understood the constraints on free expression created by its commercial nature.99 Nyozekan, understanding the newspaper’s need to protect its business interests, commented that ultimately, the Asahi “could not avoid discarding its ideological commitment.”100 Having separated himself from the Asahi, Nyozekan remained an independent journalist for the rest of his career, protecting his own ideological interests from similar threats. Nyozekan founded the magazine Warera (“We”) in 1919 in an attempt to maintain a journalistic forum free from censorship from any quarter, be it government or business. Nyozekan and his partner, Oyama Ikuo, using their former positions of leadership at the Osaka Asahi as springboards, founded Warera in order to continue the “strict neutrality” which they believed was the tradition of the Osaka Asahi.101 In his inaugural essay for the magazine, “Osaka Asahi kara, Warera e,” Nyozekan declared the purpose of the new magazine to be a “forum for the examination of society,” stating his intention to “adhere to the principles [of a national conscience and social justice].”102 Nyozekan envisioned a magazine that would not only examine society, but one that would encourage the expansion of liberalism. He believed politics and society were inextricably linked, and that through this linkage, each would influence the other. By affecting change in either realm, Warera would have an impact on the other.103 Nyozekan was joined in this endeavor by many of his former colleagues from the Osaka Asahi, who brought with them the ideals of social justice, democracy, and the “safe nationalism” that had been the cornerstones of the pre-1918 Osaka Asahi.104 In addition to Oyama, colleagues from the Osaka Asahi who joined Warera included Maruyama Kanji and Chiba Kamekichi. Others who eventually became affiliated with the group were Yoshino Sakuzo, Kawakami Hajime, and Ouchi Hyoe. Warera came to comprise a


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collection of what Oya Soichi called the most progressive “star writers” of Japan’s intellectuals and journalists.105 Warera continued publication until 1930 when its name was changed to Hihan (“Criticism”). Hihan would survive for the next four years, finally folding in 1934. As editor of these magazines, Nyozekan enjoyed his most productive and busiest period, a time of intellectual growth and intense scrutiny of the ever-changing political scene. One of Warera’s first challenges came in 1920, when its staff rallied to support Tokyo University economics professor Morito Tatsuo in the so-called Morito Incident. Morito was arrested and prosecuted by the government for publishing an article discussing the “anarchist communism” of Russian radical Peter Kropotkin. The article came under government fire for its sympathetic depiction of the ideal society envisioned by Kropotkin. The trial lasted from Jaunary to October and became a leitmotif for freedom of speech and academic freedom. Adhering to the principles that led to Nyozekan’s resignation from the Osaka Asahi, Warera defended Morito, devoting the entire February and March 1920, issues to articles on intellectual freedom. In an article analyzing the dimensions of the Morito Incident, Nyozekan once again expressed his and the magazine’s commitment to providing a forum for free speech and beliefs about the importance of free speech to a free society.106 Nyozekan and other Warera staffers contributed similar articles to Kaizo, Chuo koron, and Taiyo. The Morito Incident was merely the most visible of numerous similar incidents that year in which the government invoked the Press Law of 1909 to suppress “dangerous” thought. Oyama Ikuo believed the Morito Incident and Warera’s response were the start of a trend toward increased criticism of the state and social policy, a trend that had been prohibited by the academic tradition of the bureaucracy that dominated Japan’s top universities.107 Nyozekan too wrote about this emerging trend in an article in Warera entitled, “Kokka to shinri to no kosen jotai” (“The State of War between the Nation and Truth”).108 The war, as Nyozekan characterized it, would only intensify in the coming decades, and Warera would continue to fight. Thus, Nyozekan used the pages of Warera to air his ideas about various political and social issues confronting Japan. In 1921, he published a collection of essays in a volume entitled, Gendai kokka hihan (“Critique of the Modern State”). This was followed the next year by a companion collection, Gendai shakai hihan (“Critique of Modern Society”). The publication of these two books established Nyozekan as a leading opinion-maker.109 Taken together, the books


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attempted to examine the evolution (in Nyozekan’s phrase, the “natural history”) of the institutions making up the state and society,110 offering, as one advertisement had it, “an impartial, scientific critique of the state and its politics.”111 Nyozekan relied heavily on Spencer’s model of social evolution and progress toward a final ideal. Thus, although they were published in the years immediately following the Morito Incident, the essays offer a generally positive assessment of the state’s ability to promote conditions necessary for the growth of individual liberty and social equality. He believed, however, that society itself must take the lead in compelling the state to abdicate its power to the people.112 The two companion books, however, contained darker undercurrents as well, revealing Nyozekan’s deep understanding of the Japanese social and political situation. While he looked on the state as a potentially positive force in the defense of liberty and equality, he also realized its potential to transgress that liberty and equality and to control society.113 He examined, for example, the role ideology played in the state, and argued in Gendai kokka hihan that ideology was a device the state used to convince its population to accept state control, and to thus allow the state even greater control over society.114 Indeed, this is exactly what Nyozekan saw happen in the years to come as the government honed the Emperor System ideology over the course of the 1930s. In 1923, Nyozekan suffered a series of personal and professional setbacks. In the spring, a bout of ill-health kept him bed-ridden for three months. Then, in September, the Warera offices and all of its publication materials were destroyed in a fire resulting from the Kanto Earthquake. Nyozekan’s home in Higashi Nakano escaped damage, however, and became a center for those of his friends and their families who lost homes in the quake. The day after the devastating earthquake, Maruyama Kanji and Koso Tsuyoshi brought their families to Nyozekan’s house, seeking refuge from the disaster. The Warera offices were moved from Kanda to Yotsuya and for a time, the new offices also provided lodging for a number of displaced colleagues.115 After missing several issues of publication due to the earthquake, Warera got underway again, as did Nyozekan. And his earlier views on the progressive evolution of the state grew increasingly pessimistic as the 1920s wore on. The trend toward increasing political liberty and social equality he had written about hopefully in 1921 in Gendai kokka hihan seemed more distant just a few years later. In 1926, in “Kanri kokka e no shinka,” (“Progress toward an Administrative State”), he wrote of the need for an administrative government founded on worker-based political parties, thus calling


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for an end to the bureaucratic system that had governed Japan since the Meiji era.116 This kind of critical stance against the government was tolerated in 1925 and 1926, but in a few years, Nyozekan and Warera became the focus of increased governmental pressure. Earlier, Nyozekan had stopped accepting advertisements in Warera, surviving on subscription money alone, with the aim of bringing the magazine an added measure of independence.117 By the end of the 1920s, however, the magazine was facing financial difficulties and in 1930, Warera merged with the magazine Shakai shiso, and took a new name, Hihan.118 In his short inaugural essay in Hihan, Nyozekan promised to continue Warera’s energetic critique of society, but in doing so he betrayed a hint of weariness and even anger: With this issue, Warera, which has continued to whip this obstinate mule [society] for twelve years, discards the name that for so long it has held as a symbol of strength. Henceforth, it will be known by the name, Hihan. If you have a spur, and kick the obstinate mule somewhere, will it move? This is our problem, and the solution to our problem, which does not change for all our work, is new vigor, new weaponry, new methods, and, therefore, a new name.119

After the Manchurian Incident of 1931, Nyozekan and Hihan had to kick more subtly, as the government tightened its control over society and escalated its suppression of the press. Nevertheless, Nyozekan continued to pursue his progressive politics and in September 1931 he acted as chairman when the Sovieto tomo no kai (Friends of the Soviet Union), possibly a front organization, reorganized into the Nisso bunka kyokai (Japan-Soviet Cultural Society).120 A year later, he presided over the founding of the Yuibutsuron kenkyukai (Society for the Study of Materialism).121 The Yuiken, according to Nyozekan, was purely a scholarly group, established to make an academic study of materialism.122 Meanwhile, Nyozekan had to deal with governmental censorship when the May, 1932, issue of Hihan was banned for “antimilitary and antiwar sentiment.”123 Despite increased governmental control, or perhaps because of it, in November 1932, Nyozekan published Nihon fuashizumu hihan (“Critique of Japanese Fascism”). Initially banned, the book later came out in heavily censored form. Matsumoto Joji recalled that, “in order to read it, one had to endure countless pencilled-out passages.”124 The book, as Nyozekan described it, is a group of critical essays about the political process in Japan from 1929 to 1932,


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describing political trends that in Nyozekan’s view at the time had culminated in the emergence of fascism with the 1931 Manchurian Incident.125 By publication time, Japan had witnessed not only stepped-up hostilities in Manchuria, but also the effective end to party government brought about by the May Fifteenth Incident. It is clear that by the time he wrote Nihon fuashizumu hihan, Nyozekan was confirmed in his conviction that Japan was following world trends, presented in Gendai kokka hihan a decade earlier. These trends, however, were reactionary rather than progressive, and Nyozekan now saw this. Matsumoto Joji wrote, “The obstinate mule was proceeding in the opposite direction than Nyozekan had expected – indeed, it was beginning to run blindly [in the opposite direction].”126 That the mule was gaining speed became increasingly apparent after the publication of Nihon fuashizumu hihan. A new, darker era was heralded by the Kyoto Incident in 1933, in which Education Minister Hatoyama Ichiro forced the resignation of Kyoto University law professor Takigawa Yukitoki for alleged leftist sympathies.127 The incident incited the last major student movement until after the war,128 and according to Nyozekan, was, like the Morito Incident over a decade earlier, an occasion for the Mombusho to trample on academic freedom and interfere in university politics.129 Most significantly, it marked the expansion of the government’s repressive measures to include not only avowed socialists but liberals as well. Now not only Hihan, but Nyozekan himself was suspect and, in November 1933, Nyozekan was arrested under suspicion of membership in the Japan Communist Party. The Yomiuri shimbun headline blared, “Mr. Hasegawa Nyozekan arrested as communist sympathizer this a.m. at Nakano residence.”130 Certainly, it was his position as editor of the critical Hihan, as well as his membership in organizations like Sovieto tomo no kai and Yuibutsuron kenkyukai that prompted his arrest, but the ostensible reason at the time was an alleged contribution of two yen to the MOPR, a Soviet organization for International Red Aid.131 According to Japanese intellectual historian Matsumoto Sannosuke, the actual story is that Nyozekan gave funds to his friend Hososaku Kanemitsu, who himself gave the money to the Communist Party.132 In fact, Nyozekan himself was not impressed with the Bolshevik record in the Soviet Union, and had expressed his serious reservations about the dictatorial regime in Gendai kokka hihan.133 Nyozekan’s was just one of many such arrests: shortly after he was taken, a number of other Yuiken members were also arrested including Hani Goro, Konno Takeo, Oka Kunio, Ishii Tomoyuki, and others.134


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After a brief investigation, the police cleared him of the charge. Simultaneously, the Tokyo nichi-nichi published a statement by Nyozekan under the headline, “Suspicions Completely Cleared – Nyozekan Tells His Story.” While similar in some respects, this was not an example of the tenko that swept through the Japanese intellectual community in the 1930s. In his statement he did not excoriate the Communist Party, nor did he condone the government’s militaristic policies. He did not disavow his colleagues or point an accusing finger at anyone or anything but society itself. It was, nevertheless, a mild “self-criticism,” in which he described his own behavior in the contemporary social and political milieu saying, “As a social critic, I could not protect my critical conscience without regulating my own standards almost too rigorously. These days, society in general is exceedingly loose, and it seems that people do not discipline their own behavior [i.e. they accept ultranationalist propaganda too easily]. So that even opponents of the Communist Party tend to find themselves playing the role of sympathizer.” But as he told a reporter later, “I don’t really understand Marxism very well. Especially that dialectical materialism: I can’t accept that as is.”135 Like his friend and colleague Oyama Ikuo, with whom he shared many ideas, Nyozekan never “went” with communism.136 While Nyozekan’s statement after his arrest was not the aboutface that others were making at that time, his experience in the late 1930s nevertheless marked the end of his membership in leftist organizations. Soon thereafter, in the spring of 1934, Hihan succumbed to the financial difficulties that grew out of the reactionary tide of the times. This marked the end of Nyozekan’s fifteen years of publishing a monthly magazine. Matsumoto Joji believed this was a turning point for Japan, which lost a critical forum for monitoring society and politics.137 It most definitely marked a turning point for Nyozekan, whose life of frank criticism came to an end138 if only until after the war. For the first time in fifteen years, Nyozekan found himself without a forum that he himself controlled. (In 1934, however, he began a column, “Ichi-nichi, Ichi-dai,” which ran in the Yomiuri evening edition for six and a half years, and he continued to publish in other journals and in books.) At the same time, it was obvious that he lacked not only a forum for his ideas, but the freedom to express those ideas. Thus, the events of 1933 – his arrest and release, the end of Hihan, and the ratcheting up of governmental repression – all combined to push Nyozekan in a new direction. This new direction was toward the study of Japanese history, culture and society. By turning his attention to these topics, Nyozekan ended his sparring match with the government that had


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lasted since his time with the Osaka Asahi. In fact, however, he did not abandon his critical stance, he instead modified the form the criticism took, now using much more subtle means. An article published in Kaizo in mid-1935 entitled “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento” (“A Reexamination of the Japanese Character”) inaugurated this new direction, and between 1935 and the end of the war he published almost exclusively in the field of cultural studies. Writing on the Japanese national character, he continued his battle against fascism and militarism, arguing that the Japanese were by nature and history a democratic and pacific people. The nationalism of his early years with Nihon continued to have a clear influence: a nationalist who fiercely loved his country and its culture, he did not confuse that with uncritically supporting the government and its policies. Nyozekan believed the “best way to oppose the power of violence is with the power of the pen.”139 While Ishibashi Tanzan turned to the writings of Nichiren during World War II, abandoning his pragmatic liberal subject matter in despair as a way to survive the war years,140 Nyozekan undertook cultural studies motivated in part by a rereading of Motoori Norinaga. Nyozekan looked at Motoori’s National Learning Movement as “an ideological weapon of the national resistance movement against the bakufu” and saw his own activity in a similar light. Later, some called the work of the last half of Nyozekan’s life the “New National Learning.”141 As the world squared off for war, Nyozekan retreated more deeply into his “tactic” of subtly criticizing Japanese society and government through cultural studies. His last overtly political and critical acts came in September 1935 when he published a short essay condemning Italian aggression in Ethiopia, a veiled criticism of similar Japanese behavior in China.142 In May 1936, just months after the abortive February Twenty-Sixth Incident, he participated in a round-table discussion entitled “What is Liberalism?” with Ishibashi Tanzan, Miki Kiyoshi, and others in which he argued that the social democracy of contemporary England was the embodiment of liberalism.143 Later in 1936, Nyozekan published a long essay entitled “The Educational and Cultural Background of the Japanese,” in which he presented many of the ideas developed more fully in his later work, The Japanese National Character. In this essay, which was originally a lecture, he analyzed the Japanese character and culture, concluding that “Even among ourselves the essential quality of the civilization of Japan is not always fully understood.”144 Nyozekan complained that the Japanese did not clearly understand their own character, and, he implied, therefore succumbed to ultranationalism and


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militarism. Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai (The Society for International Cultural Relations), which published “The Educational and Cultural Background of the Japanese,” had a foreign audience in mind, and viewed the essay as a means to “dispel the mistaken ideas upon which many of the world’s misadventures have been based.”145 Thus, while Nyozekan tried to resist fascism and war by explaining the Japanese to themselves, he was inextricably drawn into the web of explaining Japan to the outside world. Despite his intention, as Japan mobilized its population for war, Nyozekan was inevitably pulled into the intellectual atmosphere that accompanied the times. The extent to which he actively or passively supported the government and its war aims is a crucial issue that we must briefly examine here, but which will be dealt with more fully later. Nyozekan’s membership in the Sho¯wa kenkyukai constituted his closest involvement in the government’s war effort. Nyozekan served in Prince Konoe’s “brain-trust on domestic and foreign affairs” established in 1936 after the February Twenty-Sixth Incident to advise him on national policy in Asia.146 As a cultural “generalist” in the suborganization, the Bunka mondai kenkyukai (Research Committee on Cultural Problems), he was a contributor to, but never chief author of, some of the Association’s publications on cultural policy.147 For example, he helped to compile philosopher Miki Kiyoshi’s Shin Nihon no shiso genri (“Principles for a New Japan”) which attempted to legitimize the war with China by calling for Asian cooperation under Japanese leadership. Such cooperation depended upon “liberating” China from Western imperialism and returning Asia to Asian control.148 Andrew Barshay argues that the ideas in Shin Nihon shiso no genri were consistent with ideas Nyozekan presented earlier in Kaizo and other places.149 Indeed, some of the more benign points in the report did reflect Nyozekan’s ideas. The report, for example, praised the Japanese ability to absorb foreign influences, and to assimilate conflicting ideas.150 These are points Nyozekan makes in his studies of the Japanese national character. But taken as a whole, Nyozekan’s concentrated work on the Japanese character during this time makes it clear that he was in fact building his own case against the government’s aggressive policies in Asia. Some of the articles Nyozekan published during this time were indeed garnished with provocative titles, but as Tanaka Hiroshi points out, Nyozekan’s consistent message was that the “Japanese should respect the living standards of other people and the cultures of other areas” and that the “spiritual strength” being touted by the government at the time was something that in fact, the people did not understand.151 His argument in Nihon-teki seikaku, the


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centerpiece of his cultural and national character studies during the early war years, was wholly directed against Japanese fascism and militarism. In short, he refused to provide the answers the military and bureaucracy wanted him to provide. In 1939, just as the war was breaking out in Europe, Nyozekan’s friends presented him with a refurbished farmhouse in Kamakura, providing him with a retreat away from Tokyo. For Nyozekan, a true “Edokko,” the Kamakura house was also a symbolic retreat from Tokyo and the policies represented by the government – a retreat very much in keeping with his own withdrawal from overt political and social criticism into the realm of Japanese cultural studies. That same year, Nyozekan founded the Kokumin gakujutsu kyokai (Association for National Arts and Sciences) with Shimanaka Yusaku. According to Yamaryo Kenji, “the standpoint of the group can be summarized as ’nationalistic’ (kokuminteki), and while this is certainly a heated word, the Kokumin gakujutsu kyokai was above accepting the nationalism of that time; moreover, it expressed an intent to level rational criticism against this [the contemporary brand of nationalism].”152 The group included many of Japan’s “top scholars,” like Kuwaki Genyoku, Takahashi Seiichiro, Makino Eiichi, and writer Masamune Hakucho.153 Several members of the Association were former colleagues of Nyozekan’s from the Yuiken, among them Miki Kiyoshi, a central figure in the Association, as well as a key member of Prince Konoe’s Sho¯wa kenkyukai, who had lost favor with the government by 1941. In addition to Miki, the group was composed of a number of men who, from the government’s perspective, were of questionable political lineage, including Nishida Kitaro, Tsuda Sokichi, Baba Tsunego, and others. Under constant pressure for the Army Information Bureau, the Association had a difficult time, but continued to meet throughout the war years.154 Another of Nyozekan’s colleagues in the Kokumin gakujutsu kyokai, Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, wrote the famous wartime chronicle Ankoku nikki. In this despairing diary he discussed his colleagues and friends and their attitudes toward the war. Of Hasegawa, the pessimistic Kiyosawa wrote, “. . . I visited with Hasegawa Nyozekan. [He is a] fine man of great integrity. These kinds of fine men have great difficulty concerning the war.” Kiyosawa identified with Nyozekan, writing that Nyozekan, too, was soon fed up with the war. Kiyosawa related a conversation in which Nyozekan revealed his disgust with the war: “Those scholars who say Japan’s weaponry is inferior are gradually being sent packing. Then they appoint people who will mouth the official line. So there is no reason to import knowledge from abroad. The authorities from the Meiji era,


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that noisy lot, were shut up. Now it is exactly opposite [from the Meiji era].”155 The latter half of the war was an especially difficult time for Nyozekan, who responded with silence. His written output fell off dramatically in the last three years of the war. At the end of May 1945, the fire-bombing that had begun earlier in the spring destroyed Nyozekan’s Tokyo house, burning his library of over 40,000 volumes turning them into piles of ash he called “mountains of wisdom.”156 Nyozekan’s Kamakura retreat became his fulltime residence for the next decade.157 With the end of the war, Nyozekan emerged from his period of silence into a frenzy of activity. Seventy years old at war’s end, Nyozekan was about to enter one of the busiest periods of his life. Within months of Japan’s surrender, he resumed his life of writing. In his first postwar essay, “Make ni jojiru” (“Taking Advantage of Defeat”), Nyozekan wrote that the Japanese people should use their defeat in war as an opportunity to gain a correct understanding of liberalism.158 Another article written soon after the end of the war, “Minshushugi no rekishi-teki hatten” (“The Historical Development of Democracy”), addressed the need for the Japanese to learn about the developmental process of Western democracy.159 After years of treating the issue of liberalism in Japan obliquely in his national character studies, these essays developed Nyozekan’s conviction that postwar Japan could finally provide the conditions for the growth of liberalism. In many respects, postwar Japan became the country Nyozekan had envisioned in his early says with Warera and Hihan, and now, rather than just observe and analyze, Nyozekan would be an active participant. As one who had espoused liberal ideas in prewar Japan, Nyozekan was called upon to be a part of Japan’s postwar democratization. One of the Occupation’s first areas of focus was education. Nyozekan, who had written frequently on student and education issues, was selected to serve as a member of the Japan Education Reform Committee. This committee, in conjunction with the American Education delegation, was to design a curriculum for education that would supplant the militaristic and ultranationalistic wartime curriculum that had characterized the war years.160 In March 1946, Nyozekan served as an Imperial appointee to the House of Peers in the last session of the Imperial Diet. Thus, for the first and last time, Nyozekan held an official political post, ironically in the very body that had censured him as a “dangerous liberal” in prewar days. That same spring, Nyozekan was appointed delegate to the National Arts Board.161 In 1948, he was honored


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with the Award for Cultural Merit, an award Tokutomi Soho also received. Writing about the award, Nyozekan mused, “I am not useful in practical endeavors. Writing, writing on society is all I can do. When it comes to cultural contributions, I ask myself why I received this cultural award, and even I do not understand.”162 Thus postwar Japan really did see, as Oya Soichi called it, a “Nyozekan boom.”163 But Nyozekan’s most important activity continued to be his writing. In his old age, Nyozekan persisted in the goals of his youth: to observe and at the same time help shape the society he lived in. Postwar Japan proved much more amenable to this endeavor. Finally, Nyozekan saw Japan begin to fulfill many of the trends he had identified and championed since the heady days of Taisho ¯ and earlier. Women’s suffrage, the labor movement, freedom of speech and academic freedom, the liberalization of education – the postwar movement toward establishing these goals in society represented the direction Nyozekan believed Japan was heading in since he started his career at the end of Meiji. Now these trends were coming to fruition, aided, but not caused by, the Allied Occupation. Much of Nyozekan’s postwar writing was concerned with the question of Japan’s role in the international community, a question of great relevance as Japan regained its sovereignty and forged its alliance with the United States. Articles in Chuo koron, Kaizo, Sekai, and other magazines and journals explored Japan’s position in the postwar world, and expressed Nyozekan’s vision of Japan as a neutral industrial nation, an echo of the early Fukuzawa Yukichi and of the liberal nationalist position of his Seikyosha mentors.164 In 1950, still living in Kamakura, he spoke with a friend about finding land on which to build himself a house. He didn’t need to buy the land, he said, just to rent it for twenty-five years. Asked why twenty-five years, he explained that he was now seventy-five years of age and planned to live to be a hundred, so twenty-five years would be just right.165 In fact, he never built that house for himself: in 1953 he was given a house in Odawara by a group of over 200 friends and colleagues.166 He dubbed the house “Hachioso” in honor of his approaching eightieth birthday and it became the home of his retirement.167 Nevertheless, he continued to participate in the intellectual and cultural life of the country, and entertained a wide variety of scholars, both foreign and Japanese, at Hachioso, including Sidney Hook, Morton White, Kenneth B. Pyle, Ishibashi Tanzan, Maruyama Masao, Ouchi Hyoe, and others. In 1967, he published a collection of his conversations with some of these people, Nyozekan Hachioso taidan (“Nyozekan’s Hachioso Talks”).168


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Nyozekan’s “retirement” was broken in 1956, when as participant in an international intellectual and cultural exchange sponsored by John D. Rockefeller III, he lectured throughout the United States.169 While in the U.S., he served an extended guest lecturership at Columbia University, sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation.170 His travels took him throughout the United States and in addition to New York, he visited San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Washington D.C., Cambridge, and Williamsburg, Virginia, everywhere lecturing on Japanese culture. His return to Japan took him to Montreal and through Europe, where he revisited some of the places he had seen first as a young reporter for the Osaka Asahi.171 Upon returning to Japan, Nyozekan entered more deeply into his retirement, spending most of 1957 convalescing from an illness. Now advanced in age, the constitutional weakness he had suffered since childhood was taking its toll and his niece, Yamamoto Kako, moved into his Odawara house to serve as his caretaker. When his health permitted, he appeared on radio and television shows for interviews and cultural discussions. Otherwise, he adhered to a regular schedule of writing until two o’clock in the afternoon, then relaxing with tea and a stroll through town, often accompanied by his niece, for twenty or thirty minutes of “idle time, away from his thoughts.”172 Always a dog-lover, (he professed to liking dogs better than humans, claiming to understand them better)173 he derived great pleasure from his dog, a Scotch Terrier named Jack. In his old age, he returned to his youthful background by practicing carpentry, customizing his house with bookshelves and other items. By the mid-1960s, Nyozekan’s health began to decline more rapidly, and increasingly, he confined his activity to writing. Early in 1969, his loss of appetite resulted in dangerous weight loss, and his doctor urged him to enter the hospital. He resisted hospitalization, also refusing the injections prescribed by his doctor.174 At further urging, however, he entered the hospital in July, where he died on November 10, 1969, three weeks before his ninety-fourth birthday. Nyozekan’s long and productive life was eulogized by Ouchi Hyoe at funeral services several days later. Ouchi praised Nyozekan for his lifelong “fight for democracy.”175 Nyozekan’s life spanned three eras of modern Japan, and through his fight against fascism and his adherence to the belief that the Japanese were by nature a peaceful and democratic people, he tried to construct an ideal Japan. Nyozekan’s ideal Japan, the past and future Japan, was depicted in his studies of the Japanese national character.


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NOTES 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8 9

10 11

12 13

14

15

16 17 18 19

George Seldes, Witness to a Century: Encounters with the Noted, the Notorious and the Three SOBs, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987). Nyozekan’s and Seldes’s lives resembled one another in many respects. Both were journalists who became disillusioned with the journalism establishment and left to start their own publications designed to serve as critical “watchdogs” of society and the media. Both lived to advanced ages, both felt society was closer, rather than further away from, the goals to which they had devoted their lives, namely, greater individual liberty. Takashima Seiei (ed.), Hasegawa Nyozekan shu, gendai chisei zenshu, vol. 32 (Tokyo: Nippon shobo, 1961) 280. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Sekai no rekishi to jibun no rekishi, Genso, 1:6 (September 1, 1947) 7. Hasegawa Nyozekan, Aru kokoro no jijoden, in Shimonaka Kunihiko (ed.), Sekai kyoyo zenshu (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1963) 231. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Shokunin katagi,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, (Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 107. Kaji Ryuichi, “Kaisetsu,” in Aru kokoro no jijoden, in Shimonaka Kunihiko (ed.), Sekai kyoyo zenshu (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1963) 433. Tanaka Hiroshi, Hyoden: Hasegawa Nyozekan: Shakaiha janarisuto e no michi, Sekai, no. 482 (December 1985) 219–20. Tanaka, “Hyoden,” 219. Ikeda Hajime, Hasegawa Nyozekan “kokka shisho” no kenkyu, (Tokyo: Yusan shuppan, 1981) 396. Ikeda, 395. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Anchi-miritarisuto no mago,” quoted in Tanaka Hiroshi, “Hyoden: Hasegawa Nyozekan: Shakaiha janarisuto e no michi,” Sekai, no. 482 (December 1985) 222. Tanaka, “Shakaiha janarisuto,” 226. Kenneth B. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural Identity, 1885–1895, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969) 10. Tanaka Hiroshi, “Nihon ni okeru riberarizumu no choryu – Kuga Katsunan, Taguchi Ukichi kara Hasegawa Nyozekan e,” Hitotsubashi ron 97:2 (1987) 181. Sera Masatoshi, et al., Hasegawa Nyozekan: hito, jidai, shiso to chosaku mokuroku, (Tokyo: Chuo Daigaku, 1985) 16. Tanaka, “Shakaiha janarisuto,” 225. Tanaka, “Shakaiha janarisuto,” 225. Tanaka, “Shakaiha janarisuto,” 230. Yamaryo Kenji, “Shakai hihan no kenron,” Asahi janaru (ed.), Nihon no shisoka, vol. 3 (1963) 70.


28 20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48

49

50

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Hasegawa Nyozekan and Liberalism in Modern Japan Tanaka, “Shakaiha janarisuto,” 228. Ikeda, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 397. Tanaka, “Shakaiha janarisuto,” 226; 228. Hasegawa Nyozekan, Watakushi no joshiki tetsugaku, (Tokyo: Chuo Daigaku, 1987) 282. Tanaka, “Shakaiha janarisuto,” 231. Takashima, Gendai chisei zenshu, vol. 32, 282. Sharon Nolte, Liberalism in Modern Japan: Ishibashi Tanzan and His Teachers, 1905–1960, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) 5. Tanaka, “Shakaiha janarisuto,” 227. Tanaka, “Shakaiha janarisuto,” 227. Hasegawa, Aru kokoro no jijoden, 355–6. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 24; 26. Hasegawa, Aru kokoro no jijoden, 407–408. Review of Hasegawa Nyozekan’s Shimbunron in Contemporary Japan, XVI: 10–12 (October-December 1947) 492. Pyle, New Generation, 93. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 28. Tanaka, “Shakaiha janarisuto,” 228. Ikeda, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 397. Tanaka, “Shakaiha janarisuto,” 229. Hasegawa, Aru kokoro no jijoden, 408. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 28. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 28. Hasegawa, Aru kokoro no jijoden, 328. Hasegawa, Aru kokoro no jijoden, 328. Matsumoto Joji, “Kaisetsu,” Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 412. Matsumoto was a legal scholar and prewar statesman under Foreign Minister Shidehara and main author of the first draft of Japan’s postwar constitution, rejected by SCAP. Pyle, New Generation, 5. Hasegawa, Aru kokoro no jijoden, 420. Tanaka, “Shakaiha no janarisuto,” 222. Hasegawa, Aru kokoro no jijoden, 421. Emphasis added. Maruyama Masao, “Nyozekan-san to chi-chi to watakushi: Maruyama sensei o kakomu zadankai,” in Sera Masatoshi, et al. (eds.), Hasegawa Nyozekan: Hito, jidai, shiso to chosaku mokuroku, (Tokyo: Chuo Daigaku, 1985) 305. Yamaryo Kenji, “Aru jiyushugi janarisuto: Hasegawa Nyozekan,” in Shiso no kakgaku kenkyukaishu: kyodo kenkyu: Tenko, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1959) 319. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 33.


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53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61

62

63

64 65 66

67 68 69

70

71 72 73 74


29

Hasegawa, Aru kokoro no jijoden, 417. Tokyo Daigaku, “Hasegawa Nyozekan-shi o kakonde: kaiso, hoho, Nihon bunkaron,” Shimbun kenkysho kiyo, no. 13 (1965) 74. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Nihon shimbun to ’Kuga-san’ no insho,” Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, 869 (September 1, 1923) 118. Hasegawa Nyozekan, Aru kokoro no jijoden, 432. Tanaka, “Shakaiha no janarisuto,” 234. Tanaka, “Shakaiha no janarisuto,” 234. Maruyama Masao, “Nyozekan-san,” 277. Tanaka, “Shakaiha no janarisuto,” 221. Maruyama Masao, “Nyozekan-san,” 277. Tanaka Hiroshi, “Hyoden: Hasegawa Nyozekan: Seiji, shakai kakumei to kokusai heiwa o motomete,” Sekai, no. 483 (January 1986) 240. Ito Tomihito, “Warerasha soritsu no jidai-teki kaikei,” Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu geppo, vol. 6 (June 1969) 1. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “sekai no rekishi to jibun no rekishi: shiso genron kikan no kindai-teki henkaku,” Genso, 1:7 (October 1, 1947) 20. Sumitani Etsudai, et al. (ed.), Osaka Asahi no hitobito: Hasegawa Nyozekan no shakai shiso,” in Nihon shakai shugi-shi: Taisho¯ demokurashii no shiso, (Tokyo: Hoga shoten, 1963) 96. Tanaka, “ Seiji, shakai kakumei,” 241. Takashima (ed.), Gendai chisei zenshu, vol. 32, 283. Natusme Soseki, Hitai no otoku yomu, in Sera Masatoshi, et al. (eds.), Hasegawa Nyozekan: Hito, jidai, shiso to chosaku mokuroku, (Tokyo: Chuo Daigaku, 1985) 200. Tanaka, “Shakaiha no janarisuto,” 220. Hasegawa Nyozekan quoted in Tanaka, “Shakaiha janarisuto,”, 220. Chiba Kamekichi, “Hasegawa Nyozekan no insho,” quoted in Tanaka, Shakaiha no janarisuto,” 221. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 43. While a student in Berlin he met with Koizumi Shinzo, then an exchange student studying economics, and later an anti-Marxist professor of economics. Koizumi taught, and later debated against Nozaka Sanzo. At Koizumi’s urging, Nyozekan read Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan ,43. Matsumoto Joji, “Kaisetsu,” Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5, 413. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 42. Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei,” 242. The Red Flag Incident occurred on June 22, 1908, when several red-flag bearing socialists left a socialist meeting and were arrested by the police. Among the fourteen arrested was Osugi Sakai. The Incident brought down the Saionji Cabinet. The High Treason Incident of May-June 1910, occurred when police interrogated several hundred socialists and anarchists throughout Japan, twenty-six of whom were eventually


30

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84

85

86 87

88 89 90 91 92 93 94

95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

104 105 106

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Hasegawa Nyozekan and Liberalism in Modern Japan charged with conspiring to assassinate the emperor. Of these, twelve were executed. Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei,” 241. Ikeda, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 399. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 48. Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei,” 242. Ikeda, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 400. Ito, “Warerasha soritsu,” 2. Maruyama, “Nyozekan-san,” 282. Ito, “Warerasha soritsu,” Andrew Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) 151. Oya Soichi, Kamen to sugao: Nihon o ugokasu hitobito, (Tokyo: Tozai bunmeisha, 1953) 35–6. Tanaka Hiroshi, “Hasegawa Nyozekan no janarizumu-kan: Zasshi ’Warera’ no hakkan o megutte,” in Tanaka Hiroshi (ed.), Kindai Nihon ni okeru janarizumu no seiji-teki kino, (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobo, 1982) 222. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan, 152. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan, 152; Tanaka, Seiji, shakai kakumei, 243. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan, 152. Tanaka “Hasegawa Nyozekan no janarizumu-kan,” 222–3. Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei,” 243. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan, 152. Ikeda, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 400. Ito, “Warerasha soritsu.” Torii went on to establish the Taisho¯ nichi-nichi shimbun, but the paper soon collapsed. Yamaryo, “Shakai hihan no kenron,” 69. Maruyama, “Nyozekan-san,” 282. Yamaryo, “Shakai hihan no kenron,” 69. Letter to Miyake quoted in Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei, 245. Tanaka, “Hasegawa Nyozekan no janarizumu-kan,” 223. Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei,” 244. Yamaryo, “Shakai hihan no kenron,” 74. Sumitani, “Osaka Asahi no hitobito,” 97. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Osaka Asahi kara, Warera e,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969) 361. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan, 160. Oya Soichi, Kamen to sugao, 36. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Morito Tatsuo kyoju hikka jiken no ronri-teki kaibo,” Warera, 2:2 (February 1, 1920) 83–95.


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Hasegawa Nyozekan 107

108

109 110

111 112 113 114 115 116

117 118 119

120 121 122 123 124 125

126 127

128 129

130 131 132 133 134 135


31

Tanaka Hiroshi, “Seiji, shakai kakumei,” 254; see also, Oyama Ikuo, “Shakai kagaku ni okeru kenkyu no jiyu,” Warera, 2:3 (March 1, 1920) 20–30, particularly 24–5. Hasegawa Manjiro, “Kokka shinri to no kosen jotai,” Warera, 2:3 (March 1920) 7–20. Tanaka, Shakaiha no janarisuto,” 221. Hasegawa Nyozekan, Gendai kokka hihan in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969) 36. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 68. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan, 163–9. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan, 279 Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan, 170–2. Maruyama, “Nyozekan-san,” 285–8. Hasegawa Manjiro, “Kanri kokka e no shinka: Kokka kodo no shikeitai no daiyon, kanrikodo no tsuzuki,” quoted in Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei,” Sekai, no. 483 (January 1986) 253. Tanaka, “Hasegawa Nyozekan no janarizumu-kan,” 225. Ikeda, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 403. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Warera kara, Hihan e,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969) 377–8. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan, 204. Maruyama, “Nyozekan-san,” 294. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan, 205. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan, 204. Mastumoto, “Kaisetsu,” 414. Hasegawa Nyozekan, Nihon fuashizumu hihan in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969) 278. Matsumoto, “Kaisetsu,” 414. In 1945 Hatoyama founded the Japan Liberal Party. The Japan Liberal Party constituted a majority in the Diet in 1946, but Hatoyama was purged by SCAP and unable to serve as prime minister. The post was filled by Yoshida Shigeru. Rehabilitated in 1951, Hatoyama succeeded Yoshida as prime minister in 1954 and headed three different cabinets between December 1954 and December 1956. Maruyama, “Nyozekan-san,” 296. Maruyama Masao, “Takigawa jiken no koro,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu geppo, vol. 4 (March 1970) 4–5. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 110. Yamaryo, “Aru jiyushugi janarisuto,” 325. Conversation with Matsumoto Sannosuke, July 30, 1987. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan, 175. Yamaryo, “Aru jiyushugi janarisuto,” 325. Yamaryo, “Aru jyushugi janarisuto,” 325, 326, 329.


32 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143

144

145

146

147 148

149 150 151 152 153

154 155

156

157 158

159

160 161 162 163

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Hasegawa Nyozekan and Liberalism in Modern Japan Sumitani (ed.), “Osaka Asahi no hitobito,” 99. Matsumoto Joji, “Kasisetsu,” 415. Matsumoto Joji,“Kaisetsu,” 414. Tanaka, “Hasegawa Nyozekan no janarizumu-kan,” 223. Nolte, Liberalism in Modern Japan, 266–7. Matsumoto Joji, “Kaisetsu,” 416. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 115. Tanaka Hiroshi, “Hyoden: Hasegawa Nyozekan: Senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” Sekai no. 486 (March 1986) 314. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Educational and Cultural Background of the Japanese,” S. Sakabe, translator (Tokyo: Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai, 1936) 26. Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai, “Foreword” to “The Educational and Cultural Background of the Japanese,” S. Sakabe, translator (Tokyo: Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai, 1936) iii. James B. Crowley, “Intellectuals as Visionaries of the New Asian Order,” in James William Morley (ed.), Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) 321. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan, 215. William Miles Fletcher III, The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan, (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1982) 112. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan, 215. Fletcher, The Search for a New Order, 111. Tanaka, “Senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” 318. Yamaryo, “Aru jiyushugi janarisuto,” 332. Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, Ankoku nikki: Sho¯wa junananen, jugatsu kokonotsu – nijunen gogatsu itsutsu, (Tokyo: Hyoronsha, 1980) entry for May 1, 1944, 313. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 123. Kiyosawa, Ankoku nikki, entry for April 3, 1945, 620; entry for July 19, 1944, 351. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Maruzen to watakushi no rokujunen,” Gakuhatsu, 49:1 (January 1, 1952). Takashima, Gendai chisei zenshu, vol. 32, 287. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Make ni jojiru,” Bungei shunju, 23:6 (December 1, 1945) 1–4. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Minshushugi no rekishi-teki hatten,” Shukan Asahi, (January 6, 1946) 30–4. Tanaka, “Senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” 320. Tanaka, “Senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” 320. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 136. Oya Soichi, “Hasegawa Nyozekan no mittsu no kao,” Sandei Mainichi (November 11, 1969) 155.


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165

166

167

168

169

170

171 172 173

174 175


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Hasegawa Nyozekan, et al., “Zadankai: Nihonjin o susumubeki michi,” Kaizo, (October 1, 1951) 48–63, esp. 60–1. Omori Isamu, “Hyaku-sai,” Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu geppo, vol. 1 (October 1969) 3–4. Conversation with Tanaka Hiroshi, July 29, 1987. According to Kenneth B. Pyle in a conversation on June 26, 1991, Nyozekan’s Odawara house was a country villa originally owned by Yamagata Aritomo. That Nyozekan would inhabit the house of Yamagata, the chief architect of the Meiji military, is somewhat ironic. Fukuoka Seiichi, “Hachioso no ki,” in Sera Masatoshi, et al., Hasegawa Nyozekan: Hito, jidai, shiso to chosaku mokuroku, (Tokyo: Chuo Daigaku, 1985) 225. Tanaka, “Senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” 325. Also, Fukuhama Tatsuo (ed.), Nyozekan Hachioso taidan, (Tokyo: Sogo tosho, 1967). Haru Matsukata Reischauer, Samurai and Silk: A Japanese and American Heritage, (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986) 334–5. Yamamoto Kako, “Oji Hasegawa Manjiro,” in Sera Masatoshi, et al., Hasegawa Nyozekan: Hito, jidai, shiso to chosaku mokuroku, (Tokyo: Chuo Daigaku, 1985) 241. Takashima, Gendai chisei zenshu, vol. 32, 288. Yamamoto, “Oji Hasegawa Manjiro,” 244. Honda Kiyoshi, “Inu no suki-na Nyozekan,” Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu geppo, vol. 2 (December 1969) 4. Yamamoto, “Oji Hasegawa Manjiro,” 242. Ouchi Hyoe, “Okina okina ga inakunatta: Hasegawa Nyozekan no koto,” in Sera Masatoshi, et al., Hasegawa Nyozekan: Hito, jidai, shiso to chosaku mokuroku, (Tokyo: Chuo Daigaku, 1985) 175–6.


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2


T

he 1930s marked a professional turning point for Nyozekan. When government repression curtailed free expression in the middle of the decade, Nyozekan turned his attention away from overt political and social criticism and focused on the study of the Japanese national character. His first essay on the subject, “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento” (“A Re-examination of the Japanese Character”), was published in Kaizo in 1935 when he was sixty years old.1 Even prior to the publication of this article, however, Nyozekan relied on his ideas on the national character to illustrate his beliefs and opinions on politics, society and culture.2 Nyozekan continued writing about the national character throughout the war and postwar years, using his assessment of the Japanese national character to critique Japanese politics and social developments. Writing about the very political and social dynamic that would ultimately severely limit his freedom of expression, in 1932 he published Nihon fuashizumu hihan (“Critique of Japanese Fascism”). In this book, he leveled an attack against the growth of what he clearly saw as a Japanese brand of fascism encompassing the intertwined elements of political repression at home and military aggression abroad. The book, initially banned and later released in a highly censored form, attacked the trend toward chauvinistic nationalism, violent and reactionary politics, military aggression, and territorial expansion.3 In Nyozekan’s estimation, these trends had come to fruition in the 1931 Manchurian Incident and the government’s submission to the military fait accompli. Motivated to pursue national character studies by his opposition to these trends, he focused his critical efforts against them. But because open criticism of the government was no longer tolerated, he expressed his criticism subtly, via his national character studies. While Japanese fascism was his immediate focus, the more fundamental aim in his character studies was to demonstrate to the Japanese people their


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national legacy of a liberal spirit. With this underlying goal, the message in his writing on the national character changed little from prewar to postwar, despite the drastic change in Japan’s objective circumstances.4 Nyozekan’s character studies form the core of his thought, and just as he used his study of the national character to adjudge his society, a review of his work in this area provides a means of understanding his views on Japan’s course through the Meiji, Taisho ¯ , and Sho ¯ wa eras. The roots of Nyozekan’s character studies lay in the atmosphere of change that surrounded him in his youth. The enormous social, cultural and political change heralded by the Meiji Restoration’s disbanding the military government and adopting a constitutional monarchy created an intense pressure to understand the real Japan that lay beneath these myriad changes. The answer to the question of identity was of utmost importance to Japan, the answer was key to the nation’s future. Thus began the quest to define the Japanese national character. The Seikyosha, Nyozekan’s intellectual forbears, and its rival group, the Minyusha, were among the first to embark on this search. Later, firmly established in his own career, Nyozekan also focused his attention on the meaning of the Japanese national character and used these studies as a way to analyze, evaluate, and critique the changes Japan was undergoing during his own lifetime. Members of both the Seikyosha and the Minyusha felt compelled to define the national character, or kokusui, a phrase coined by Shiga Shigetaka of the Seikyosha, to mean “national essence” or “nationality.”5 None questioned that Japan possessed a unique national character: the problem was to define it.6 In the face of Western imperialism in East Asia, defining the Japanese character was considered necessary to preserving national autonomy. Kokumin no tomo, the Minyusha magazine, editorialized, “If a nation knows itself – its strong points, its shortcomings, its goals, its means – then it will be able to act independently.”7 Likewise, Kuga Katsunan of the Seikyosha claimed, “The best defense for the Japanese is ‘national self-knowledge.’ ”8 While both groups agreed that understanding the Japanese character was crucial to preserving the state, they disagreed on the exact nature of the national character and how the information should be acted upon. Tokutomi Soho and his colleagues in the Minyusha (founded in 1886) believed self-knowledge was a necessary first step toward eradicating all traces of the national character and that only by eliminating all vestiges of this character, which he said was “. . . unprogressive . . . acquiescent . . . irrational,”9 could Japan hope to survive as an independent nation in the modern world. The


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backward traits of the past must be swept away to make room for a future of progress and independence, fundamental values of the West that members of the Minyusha believed had enabled it to advance. Thus, the Minyusha called for the wholesale Westernization of Japanese society. The Seikyosha on the other hand, acted on their knowledge of the Japanese character quite differently, believing instead that the national character must be preserved. The Seikyosha, established in 1888, about a year after the Minyusha, was also concerned with strengthening the nation and protecting its independence, but aimed to do so by stemming the tide of unfettered adulation and imitation of the West. Theirs was not a backward or reactionary vision – indeed, Seikyosha members too hoped for a future of progress and independence, a nation that could stand up to the West. But they believed this would not – in fact could not – be achieved at the expense of the Japanese identity. Thus, the Seikyosha prescription for Japan included borrowing from the West, but demanded that Western borrowings be made compatible with Japan’s culture and heritage;10 be made compatible, in short, with the Japanese national character. The Seikyosha magazine, Nihonjin, expressed this in an 1889 article: “We differ from those who rashly believe that preservation of the kokusui means merely preservation of old things inherited from our ancestors and who mistakenly believe that we want to resist Western things and close the road to innovation and progress.”11 Nyozekan’s own Seikyosha heritage was clearly evident when he echoed this in 1933, writing, “No progress whatsoever is possible through rigid adherence to a simple traditional outlook, but equally impossible is progress without any basis in tradition.”12 Seikyosha members agreed on this position, but held no similar unanimity of opinion on what exactly constituted the Japanese national character. The Seikyosha “manifesto,” “Yohai kokusuishugi o shodo suru” (“Advocating a Doctrine of National Essence”), published in 1889, defined kokusui as an “intangible spirit,” the “special property of one country,” and something that “could not be copied by another country.”13 But failing to take the “manifesto” to its logical conclusions, the Seikyosha shied away from defining exactly what that “intangible spirit” was. Nevertheless, individual members of the group did attempt to provide their own descriptions of the national character and how it was formed. These are worth investigating because they form the backdrop to Nyozekan’s own later investigations of the Japanese national character. It proved far easier to explain how the national character was formed than to describe it exactly. For Shiga, a central Seikyosha


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figure, the national character resulted from the influence of the natural environment and the cultural patterns that emerged from man’s relationship with the environment.14 But Shiga found it difficult to actually define the Japanese national character, at best offering only a vague description, saying it was “. . . diametrically opposed to the West’s,” which he said was “. . . selfish, commercial and mercenary.” The Japanese national character, he reported, was rooted in “harmony.”15 Like Shiga, Miyake Setsurei believed the national character was formed by the natural environment, the “geography, climate and soil, and features of . . . [the] . . . land.”16 But Miyake’s argument had a twist: the Japanese were descendents of the Mongols, and, therefore, he reasoned, the natural environment that had shaped the Japanese character was in fact Mongolian. In so doing, he accounted for Japanese traits which, when held in comparison to the West, were negative. He also provided an outlet for change, necessary in light of Japan’s Meiji era challenges: since the national character arose in a foreign place, the Japanese, now in their own environment and having developed their own history and culture, had an opportunity to change it. And Miyake felt there were indeed aspects of the national character that demanded change. For the most part, he accepted the judgment that the Japanese were encumbered by a “lack of perseverance. . . frivolousness. . . content with small success. . . constant imitation,” and that they were “. . .people haughty toward those below and currying to those above, untutored and lecherous; people who find no enjoyment in reading . . . lacking in . . . self-reliance and imagination; people who break promises, who lack camaraderie and are difficult to unite; people who lack inventiveness.”17 Nevertheless, Miyake believed an effort could be made to “increase [the Japanese peoples’] inventive nature, preserve qualities of sturdy honesty, and nurture the spirit of independence.”18 In this way could the Japanese national character be salvaged, strengthened, and saved. Kuga Katsunan’s view of the origins of the Japanese national character was more specific to Japan than either Shiga’s or Miyake’s. Kuga believed the national character arose out of Japanese history, but in particular that “. . .the culture of Japan derived from the Imperial Household. . .[and]. . . the Imperial Court.”19 The Japanese national character as defined by Kuga then, contained the values and ethics catalogued most succinctly in the Imperial Rescript on Education: “filial piety, brotherly affection, marital harmony, and the loyalty of all to the Imperial Throne.”20 Therefore, according to Kuga, one of the most distinctive features


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of the Japanese national character was the national unity and social harmony that grew out of the unique relationship between ruler and ruled. These ideas had fascinated Nyozekan as a youth; this was his intellectual heritage. From this background, Nyozekan went on to develop his own views of the Japanese national character, and, as mentioned earlier, even called his inaugural essay on the subject a reexamination of the Japanese national character.21 Although his views often conflicted with those of his early Meiji mentors, his investigation, like theirs, was motivated in part by trying political, social, and cultural times. Nyozekan too believed that understanding the national character was the key to charting a positive course for the future. In 1938, he wrote: “Japanese civilization since the Meiji era has raised countless new, vastly complex questions to test the modern Japanese. If they are to deal with them successfully, the vital need is a strict appreciation of the traditional characteristics of Japanese civilization, and a conscious determination to preserve its virtues and remedy its shortcomings.”22 An earlier warning, written in 1935, was even more pointed: In politics. . . there is no little food for thought, especially as a certain section of the nation seems to be inclined to imitate what is happening in the country which is in the least favorable position in Europe. To point out clearly the merits of the Japanese national character as shown in history will prove immediately useful to the Japanese themselves as well as to foreigners interested in Japan and its people.23

As did his mentors, Nyozekan referred to the Japanese national character as a yardstick for understanding contemporary social and political trends throughout his career as a critic. By the mid-1930s, Nyozekan was searching for a way to continue his life as a writer and critic of Japanese society despite increased governmental control of the press. The story of Nyozekan’s career since his Osaka Asahi days was one of trying to work around government repression to buy for himself, and his public, a measure of freedom of thought and expression. In 1918, he left the Osaka Asahi in protest against the Terauchi government’s handling of the Rice Riots and started the magazines Warera and later Hihan, both intended to function as forums for the free expression of ideas. After the publication of a heavily censored version of Nihon fuashizumu hihan in 1932, and his arrest in 1933, the sixty-year-old Nyozekan continued to seek an outlet for social commentary and criticism. When he decided to pursue character studies exclusively, it was in part because he had


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lost his previous arenas of activity24 and now needed a “safe” way to critique society. In 1938, Nyozekan published his major work on the subject of the national character, Nihon-teki seikaku (“The Japanese National Character”). The book went through nine printings between December 1938 and September 1941, selling 112,000 copies in these years just prior to the outbreak of the Pacific War.25 In 1966, the book gained a readership abroad when it was selected by UNESCO for publication in a series of works on modern Japanese philosophy, and translated into English as The Japanese National Character: A Cultural Profile.26 Yamaryo Kenji believed that Nyozekan coined the phrase Nihonteki seikaku, which itself contained an implicit criticism of the government and its policies – Nyozekan was finding a method of “engag[ing the government] in battles in the same arena.”27 The phrase became popular around the time Nyozekan published his 1935 article in Kaizo. Bemused by the extent of the phrase’s popularity, Nyozekan recounted the story of a teacher who told his class, “The food with the strongest Japanese character is konnyaku.”28 What then, did Nyozekan mean by the term “national character”? How was it formed, and how did it influence the thought and behavior of the Japanese people? After first looking at the forces Nyozekan believed shaped the national character, we will look at his approach to the study of the national character. Finally, and most importantly, we will analyze his use of the subject as a weapon against the government. Like his early mentors, Nyozekan also believed Japan possessed a national character all its own.29 The national character was in turn reflected in individual character, and in “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento” he wrote that a nation’s character “fundamentally controls the mental and behavioral tendencies of [a] people.”30 The influence of a nation’s character is difficult to escape as it “forms the fixed disposition of a people’s consciousness and behavior to the extent that it can be called fundamental.”31 In the same essay, Nyozekan discussed the formation of a nation’s character, which he said is “not predetermined like the instincts of animals, but is cultivated by long history, and grows in concert with the development of social and cultural forms.”32 While most countries do not have a past spanning thousands of years, in the case of Japan, a country with a “continuous history built over thousands of years,” that character grew out of an extremely long history.33 Thus, “because the national character arises out of complex surroundings, like the individual character, it is completed gradually by repeated errors, failures, and countless tests; again like the individual


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character, it eventually comes to have a particular fixed tendency in its way of coping with its surroundings and with history.”34 Having developed over a long period of history, the Japanese national character, he wrote, “continue[s] to hold aspects of ancient, medieval, and modern culture in the present day.”35 The “complex surroundings” out of which national character is formed include interrelated natural, economic, political, and social conditions that exact a certain response from the people. Japan’s natural environment, according to Nyozekan, contributed to a character that was moderate and rejected extremes. The Japanese environment, unlike that of the Chinese – a familiar frame of reference for Nyozekan and his readers – proved familiar rather than forbidding, approachable rather than awesome; the country’s landscape, he wrote, “foster[s] a feeling of mildness, delicateness, and intimacy.”36 The temperate climate in which the bulk of the population lived reinforced this overall lack of extremes, creating a “garden-like mildness and gentleness,” that “kept people from becoming either hot-tempered or cold-blooded.”37 Moreover, because Japan was an island nation, all things operated on an exceedingly small scale. Islanders, he wrote, cannot entertain ridiculous dreams, they cannot build large empires like those that exist on large continents.38 This intimate natural environment inspired the Japanese people’s closeness to nature, which in turn reflected the diversity and balance Nyozekan believed were characteristic of Japanese civilization.39 Economic conditions, many of them closely related to natural conditions, also shaped the national character. Nyozekan wrote that because flat land for building and farming was scarce in Japan, life operated on a very small scale.40 Traditionally, the economy had also operated on a small scale, as demonstrated by family farms worked in intensive agriculture. Japan lacked the large-scale agriculture characteristic of European serfdom. In Japan, Nyozekan noted, legal codes restricted the enlargement of personal property.41 As reflected in its agriculture, the Japanese economy emphasized quality over quantity.42 As a result, economic conditions, like natural conditions, reinforced the rejection of extremes, and traditionally, the country had no “unequal amassing of wealth on a large scale.” Nor, on the other hand, did the country suffer widespread poverty.43 Political factors, too, affected the course of development of the Japanese national character, exerting a unique influence. Most influential was the fact that the Japanese achieved national unification through peaceful means. This peaceful unification, Nyozekan wrote, was a “national heirloom” for the Japanese,44


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because it was accomplished “not by means of arms, but by diplomatic negotiations.”45 No large wars of unification took place,46 nor was unification forced by an outside power, real or imagined. Nyozekan described the opposition between the early Izumo and Yamato clans, noting that the country was never divided into competing states, and that the clans ultimately united in their belief in a common ancestor.47 Based on a common belief in family ties, this peaceful unification was both cause of and caused by the racial homogeneity of the Japanese. Thus, political and social unity reinforced one another, and the imperial family, whose resulting position was unimpeachable by military might, became the focus of national unity.48 Even writing in the charged atmosphere of prewar Japan, Nyozekan explained the origins of political unity not by resorting to spiritual or mythological terms, but with reference to the historical and anthropological information available to him. Finally, social conditions also played a part in shaping the national character. The Japanese state coalesced out of the “spontaneous integration of primitive races,”49 and from this integration of races developed the Japanese belief in a common ancestor. But Nyozekan disputed this belief, writing that in fact, there was “no such thing as a common ancestor.”50 Thus, Nyozekan viewed the integration of the Japanese people as a prosaic and peaceful process and spurned the idea, hallowed by the prewar and wartime government, of Japan as a family state. Nevertheless, Nyozekan conceded that this fallacious belief, combined with a high degree of racial homogeneity, had in the past prevented social strife and promoted national unity. In addition to racial homogeneity, Nyozekan believed the Japanese possessed an extraordinary cultural homogeneity as well. Very early in its history, Japan possessed a national language, and soon after entering the historical era (i.e. the Yamato period, in the sixth century), the Yamato dialect had spread nationwide – a stark contrast to Europe, which, through Latin, achieved a “national” language only in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.51 This linguistic homogeneity promoted national unity and harmony, and served to spread a common culture throughout the country.52 Not only was a common culture spread across the nation, but it was spread across the classes, Nyozekan argued, and he, therefore, termed Japan’s traditional society a “classless” society, noting numerous examples of cultural forms that were practiced by people of all classes. The poetical forms waka, renga, and haiku were all written and recited by aristocrats and commoners alike. “In short,” Nyozekan wrote, “the lower classes appreciated upper class culture,”53 and “even though cultural forms were born of the upper


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classes, they pervaded the lower classes.”54 Japan possessed a uniquely homogeneous society, and the “classless” quality of the culture led Nyozekan to call Japan a “cultural democracy,”55 a concept that became a cornerstone of his effort to promote democracy in Japan. These natural, economic, political, and social conditions, in combination with historical developments, produced a unique Japanese character. Both before and after the war, Nyozekan explored the nature of this character, developing his polemic against fascism in Japan and supporting the native growth of liberalism. Through his research, Nyozekan arrived at an understanding of the Japanese national character as being “almost self-contradictorily diverse.”56 Contradictions exist in the character of any nation: in the late 1890s, Frederick Jackson Turner described the American character as “ruggedly individualistic,” while just fifty years earlier, Alexis de Toqueville found Americans to be a nation of conformists.57 But Nyozekan believed it was precisely this kind of contradiction that gave a nation its strength. The more diverse a nation’s character, the more capable it would be of evolution and development. The diverse elements of a national character are called upon to cope with the demands of different periods. Nyozekan noted that “. . . one or the other of these opposing characteristics is always to the fore in the history of the nation, depending on which of them is more necessary in the particular historical setting of the time.”58 These contradictions notwithstanding, Nyozekan believed a certain steady core of qualities made up the Japanese character; qualities that constituted the “most permanent aspects of the Japanese character [and were] preserved throughout [various historical] changes.”59 In both prewar and wartime writing on the subject, he developed his view of a Japanese national character whose core consisted of such qualities as liberalism, pragmatism, realism, tolerance, internationalism, and pacifism: qualities that meant the Japanese national character was naturally opposed to the fanatical nationalism and militarism of Japanese fascism. Nyozekan derived these conclusions from studying Japanese history, culture, art, and literature. And yet, perhaps he needed only to study himself: the qualities he ascribed to the Japanese character seem an apt description of his own character. Possibly not realizing how strongly it may have applied to his own work, he wrote in 1938: “A Japanese discussing the psychological make-up of his own race tends accordingly to stress those aspects which he possesses himself and to overlook the other aspects.”60 For Nyozekan, one of the overriding features of the Japanese character was its grounding in everyday life. “To me,” he wrote, “the


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most important thing for humankind [ningen ni totte] is everyday life.”61 From Nyozekan’s perspective nearly all of the features of the Japanese character emerged out of the day-to-day existence of the people. Calling Japanese civilization a “civilization of actual life,” he pointed to the arts for a graphic example of this, noting that “all the fine arts of Japan are intended for use in everyday life.” The tea ceremony demonstrates this, as does Japanese painting, which, Nyozekan noted, is designed to enhance an overall setting, not to stand alone as an independent aesthetic. Thus, a scroll was hung in a tokonoma not to draw attention to itself but to contribute to the mood of the room or the occasion. Nyozekan contrasted this with the German aesthetic “which considers art to be the expression of an independent life of its own.”62 Thus, Nyozekan implied that the importance of this feature lay in part in its rejection of German ways and ideology, a veiled but pointed reference in the political atmosphere of the late 1930s. Grounded as it was in everyday life, one of the central features of the Japanese national character was realism. “The mainstream of Japanese thought,” he wrote in 1935, “has always been realistic in spirit and never detached from objective circumstances.”63 In making his point, Nyozekan drew on examples from Japanese literature, arguing that from the earliest times, Japanese literature displayed a very modern realism.64 Here Nyozekan revealed the influence of Motoori Norinaga, whose eighteenth century study of the ancient Japanese texts emphasized the ineffability of nature, but also the stark realities of human life.65 As an example of this, Nyozekan, relying on Norinaga’s study of the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters), pointed out that the ancient history recorded in the Kojiki is “matter-of-fact history in no way distorted by ideology.” Moreover, he wrote, again following Norinaga (and again by extension attacking contemporary ideology and its German roots), the gods of Japanese mythology were very human, lacking “the heroic qualities of those in the legends of other countries.”66 The Manyoshu, an eighth century collection of nearly 4,500 poems, also demonstrated the realistic character of the Japanese, and Nyozekan pointed to the spontaneity of its poetry, which expressed “ordinary personal sentiments.”67 Nyozekan also singled out the Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji) as evidence of the Japanese tendency toward realism. Like Norinaga, who in his study of the Genji monogatari, entitled Tama no ogushi, wrote that the work was a realistic depiction of human life,68 Nyozekan too looked on the realism in the Genji monogatari as an example of the traditional realism of the Japanese national character. Not only did it depict reality in a straightforward manner, it was written in the


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colloquial language, bringing it that much closer to the everyday life of the people.69 The realism of the Japanese character influenced the people in a number of ways, Nyozekan believed, contributing to the Japanese tendency to reject extremes and embrace balance in all things. Reinforced by the moderate natural conditions of the Japanese islands, Japanese realism contributed to the Japanese aesthetic taste for simplicity and naturalness. When nature is overwhelming, man is faced with the choice of either submitting to it or overcoming it, Nyozekan wrote; the moderate conditions in Japan allowed the Japanese simply to accept nature as it was.70 This then, gave the Japanese their temperate and balanced character. In a 1935 article, however, Nyozekan conceded that “there are individual extremists and limited sections that lean too far in one direction or the other, but the nation as a whole has succeeded in keeping to a golden mean, helped by the mutual restraints the two extremities exercise.”71 Thus, he implied, the true character of the Japanese rejected the extremism demanded by Japanese fascism and opted instead for the moderation of Anglo-American liberalism.72 Indeed, as he wrote after the war, Nyozekan felt that “Japanese civilization possesses an English-style characteristic of standing between the extremes of progressivism and conservatism,” and that the Japanese intuitively sought out English-style civilization.73 Rejecting extremes, the Japanese character developed a quality of restraint and “control of feeling” which Nyozekan felt was another of the fundamental principles underlying Japanese culture. The “characteristics of moderation, simplicity, and restraint [have been] apparent since ancient times” and were displayed, for example, in the self-control and discipline valued in samurai culture. For Nyozekan the significance of this self-restraint lay in his hope that moderation would ultimately prevail even in the heated political climate of the 1930s. He wrote in 1938 that “A not inconsiderable portion of the Japanese are prone to occasional impulsive or fanatical attitudes, yet not once so far have such lapses into extremity caused confusion at any vital point in history. At really crucial times, the Japanese have always maintained their self-restraint and ability to think again.” At these crucial points in Japanese history, he wrote, “the conciliatory outlook, born of patience and selfcontrol . . . [wins]. . . the day over the more impetuous, exclusionist outlook.”74 Another important corollary of the Japanese tendency toward realism was the accompanying rejection of idealism. Again Nyozekan referred to the Japanese national character’s grounding in everyday life. Nyozekan viewed the Japanese grounding in reality


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as so thorough and deeply rooted that the nation even lacked a philosophy. The Japanese people, he wrote in a 1962 essay entitled “Tetsugaku no nai bunmei koku” (“A Civilized Country without a Philosophy”), stress action over philosophy.75 “How we think is, in short, how we live,” he wrote; for the Japanese people, Nyozekan believed, action molds thought.76 Without a philosophy, the Japanese people instead possessed “an innate fondness for practical manifestations of philosophy in every activity of life, even if they have made but little progress in the pursuit of philosophy as an ideology.”77 Once again, Nyozekan distinguished contemporary Japan from Germany, rejecting the abstract idealism of German philosophy. Nyozekan pointed out that “In Japan there has been no metaphysics of conceptual philosophy, except what has been handed down to us, in the past, from China and India, and, today, from Germany.”78 The Japanese, in their lack of philosophy, mirrored the British, who also had never developed their own philosophy. Nyozekan felt that British thought was “grounded in the realities and experiences of life,” and cited Bertrand Russell, who called British philosophy a “philosophy that negates [hitei suru] philosophy.”79 Thus, he believed, the Japanese were especially in tune with the English character and culture, and naturally inclined toward liberalism.80 While Nyozekan disparaged the post-Meiji borrowing from Germany, he felt that cultural borrowing itself, and the adoption of foreign imports, were very much a part of the Japanese character. In “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento,” Nyozekan emphasized just how fundamental was this feature of the Japanese national character: “. . .our national character, more than displaying an exclusionary tendency based on strong reaction to the needs of a particular situation, is grounded in the tendency toward assimilation that has been fostered over a long history.”81 With this tendency to assimilate came an openness that enabled the Japanese to recognize and accept features of foreign civilizations that were superior to their own. At the same time, however, the strong national character of the Japanese allowed them to maintain their own cultural uniqueness in the midst of foreign borrowing. The echo of Nyozekan’s early Seikyosha mentors reverberates here, as he writes of the Japanese ability to “absorb foreign cultures without the loss of its national consciousness.”82 In a 1936 article, he reached back to Japanese antiquity for an example of this ability, noting the side-by-side existence of Chinese-style Buddhist temples with native Japanese tradition as reflected in Shinto shrines.83 In a more modern example, from the 1960s, he pointed to the coexistence of the kimono and the “mini-skaato” (which


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young women wore, he noted, “some centimeters above the knees”)!84 The combination of old and new, native and foreign, “blended together like two scenes of a twice-exposed photograph,” reflected the polarity that existed as part of the Japanese national character.85 This polarity bespoke the strength of the Japanese character: “Instead of losing their individuality under a burden of foreign ideas, [the Japanese] have been able to strengthen it by controlling the circumstances under which the foreign ideas have been absorbed.” The strength of the Japanese national character, then, provided a creative component in the assimilation of foreign culture, as the Japanese “utilized their leaning toward imitation to develop what is inherent in themselves.”86 The resulting adaptations made the native developments far more important than the foreign borrowings.87 A particularly apt example of this ability to adapt foreign elements to Japanese culture came from the literature of the court women of the Heian era. The female authors of such works as the Genji monogatari and Makura no soshi were educated in the Chinese classics and Chinese characters. Taking this as their point of departure, they developed not only a phonetic script that was vastly more suited to the Japanese language than were Chinese characters, but a whole literature that was uniquely Japanese in subject and outlook.88 Thus, the assimilative quality of the Japanese national character had a creative component. Nyozekan wrote that, in much the same way, the creative tradition of borrowing meant that the rapid modernization of the Meiji era was in no way out of character for Japan.89 In this way, Nyozekan relied on his Seikyosha heritage, writing about the creative potentialities of foreign borrowing, but recognizing the need to adapt that borrowing to the Japanese tradition. Most importantly, however, in pointing out the assimilative character of the Japanese, Nyozekan was arguing against the trend toward fascism that swept Japan as he immersed himself in national character studies. For Nyozekan, the real significance of defending the openness and tolerance of the Japanese was the implied argument against the nationalism and virulent exclusionism of the late 1930s.90 A plea for international liberalism and coexistence emerged in Nihon-teki seikaku: The long-standing tendency of the Japanese to combine in one age, or in one individual, both the traditional and the modern is a trait of Japanese civilization which should perhaps be welcomed as a model for the national culture as a whole. If the ability to live in harmony with others without losing his own individuality is the most desirable quality for the individual in society, then surely


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the most desirable civilization is that which demonstrates the same capacity.91

Indeed, Nyozekan believed Japan possessed the ability to live in harmony within the international community, and he bolstered this belief with his views on the Japanese national character. Japan’s rapid adoption of foreign, especially Western, culture since the Meiji era, was an indication of its “strong disposition toward international sociability.”92 As Nyozekan wrote, “Nationally, racially, and religiously, the Japanese people are absolutely not intolerant.”93 This openness, and “international sociability,” provided a basis for Nyozekan’s belief that the Japanese were an inherently peaceful people. In an article entitled, “Nihonjin no heiwasei to rakutensei,” written seven months after Japan’s surrender, he acknowledged the international assessment of the Japanese as a bellicose people. But once again pointing to the diverse nature of the Japanese character, he wrote that “while the Japanese had a bellicose side, they possessed an extremely peaceful side as well.”94 Nevertheless, it was the peaceful aspect, Nyozekan felt, that dominated. As pointed out earlier, for Nyozekan, Japan’s peaceful unification under the Yamato clan set the tone for the fundamentally pacifistic character of the Japanese.95 Turning also to the Manyoshu and the essentially nonmilitaristic nature of its poetry, he reinforced his conclusion that the Japanese were basically a peaceful people.96 Thus, once again, Nyozekan made evident his view that Japan’s quest for domination in Asia was an aberration from the norm established by the Japanese national character.97 These were Nyozekan’s views of the Japanese national character. But they were views which, containing his arguments against Japanese fascism, he necessarily presented subtly. In the late 1930s, Nyozekan’s primary motive in studying the Japanese character was to continue to fight against the ultranationalism and militarism of Japanese fascism. He had not abandoned his goal of fighting for liberalism in Japan, but he had certainly lost ground. By the mid1930s, he found his aim was a matter not simply of fostering liberalism, but of trying to remove the major obstacles to liberalism that had developed. In Nyozekan’s estimation, liberalism remained a valid system, and the West, with the exception of Germany, whose philosophy he had always rejected, remained a valid model. He wrote in a 1935 essay, “There are Japanese who would pretend that they have nothing to learn from the West except what pertains to material civilization. But in my opinion they are sadly mistaken. The spiritual culture of the nations of Europe and America is still teeming with products born of a fine traditional spirit.”98 Thus, not


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only did Nyozekan use his national character studies to level an attack against Japanese fascism, but more fundamentally, as a way to continue his struggle to promote liberalism in Japan. When Nyozekan narrowed his focus on national character studies, he “entered the enemy’s own ring.”99 As the government propagated the ultranationalism of Japanese fascism, presenting its military aggression in Asia as a “mission,” Nyozekan fought an intellectual war against the government, using ideas from his national character studies as weapons. His struggle was indeed an intellectual one, as he used his own ideas to counter those put forth by the ruling bureaucracy. While recognizing the importance of preserving the Japanese character, in 1938, he called into question the government-sponsored mythology of Japanese superiority, writing, “The sense of superiority accompanying tradition is itself a working of . . .[an] . . . unconscious mental process. It goes with the necessity of the preservation of the culture, which, however it [the sense of superiority] may seem to be the result of intellectual judgment, is not really so in fact.” He continued his criticism using English conservatism to veil his actual target, writing that, “Although the tradition [of conservatism] undoubtedly has its value as part of the national character, English pride in it stems less from an intellectual assessment of its worth than from an irrational, almost psychological need.”100 The ancient Japanese texts, the Kojiki and the Manyoshu, provided him with some of the intellectual ammunition he needed in his opposition to government propaganda. Through research into these texts and into Japanese history and culture, Nyozekan sought to define the Japanese national character and thus highlight the disparity between original Japanese beliefs and sentiments and the “artificially constructed thought of the governing bureaucracy.”101 He hoped to convince the Japanese people (and perhaps reassure himself) that the original Japanese nature differed dramatically from the image the government was promoting. In this way, Nyozekan carried on in his calling as a “man of ideas” and a man of conscience. As mentioned earlier, the influence of Motoori Norinaga is clear in Nyozekan’s work, and he was inspired to devote himself to the tactic of character studies in part by a rereading of Norinaga.102 Norinaga (1730–1801) was one of the founders of the eighteenth century National Learning Movement that called for a renewed study of the ancient Japanese classics. Nyozekan’s first extensive reading of Norinaga was in the early years of Taisho ¯ and this reading informed his views well in advance of his first works focusing exclusively on the national character.103 The National Learning


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49

Movement led the restoration of Shinto in the late 1700s, although it remained for one of Norinaga’s followers, Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) (who Nyozekan pointed out was “often described as a degenerated Motoori Norinaga”104), to develop this into the narrow chauvinism that rejected all outside influence.105 The National Learning Movement also provided a foundation for government propaganda in the 1930s, another reason for Nyozekan’s interest in it. But more importantly, Nyozekan saw in Norinaga a man with whom he shared a goal: to sift out of Japanese culture, history, and literature what was genuinely Japanese and what was “adulterated.”106 Nyozekan endeavored to do the same: he wanted to “reexcavate” Japan.107 In his effort find the true Japanese character, Nyozekan, like Norinaga, turned to the Manyoshu for part of his investigation. In his 1933 article, “Manyoshu ni okeru shizenshugi” (“Naturalism in the Manyoshu”), Nyozekan analyzed the poetry of the Manyoshu, viewing the compilation, like Norinaga, as an expression of native Japanese sentiment largely uncolored by foreign influence, “not dominated,” he wrote elsewhere, “by any artificial perfect morality.”108 Building on this, he developed his subtle protest against contemporary social and political trends pointing out that, “among the fifty poems composed by members of the Imperial House . . .very few are suggestive of moral or politico-social instruction,” and that “the collection contains nothing exciting the military spirit or stimulating patriotic sentiment.”109 In his 1935 article “re-examining” the Japanese national character, Nyozekan used the same tack of analyzing the Japanese past as a means of telling contemporary Japanese about themselves. His message was at odds with the aggressive militarism and ultranationalism that was being expressed in Japan’s policies in Manchuria, China, and Korea. He wrote: “. . .in ancient days, the Japanese people developed an extremely tolerant international spirit, and thus in today’s world can take pride in having this ancient culture . . . [that is] . . . exactly opposite from the isolationist character of the Tokugawa period.” “Tokugawa isolationism,” Nyozekan wrote, “was not the product of any religious or racial prejudice inherent in the Japanese character but rather grew out of government efforts to promote it as a political necessity.”110 By extension he implied, the contemporary government was once again promoting military aggression and isolation from the international community as a political necessity. Likewise, the Tokugawa suppression of Christianity was not undertaken out of religious prejudice, he wrote, but it too was seen as a political move to protect against imperialism: Western missionary efforts in China were seen as the thin end of the


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wedge, to be followed by government-sponsored imperialism.111 Thus Nyozekan believed the current government was again inciting isolation and fanaticism by claiming a spurious “political necessity.” In Nihon-teki seikaku, Nyozekan again looked to the past, defending liberalism by turning to the mid-Tokugawa period for a pointed analogy to Japan’s isolation and the government-sponsored imperial myth in the mid-1930s. In the mid-Tokugawa period, under the influence of such men as Hirata Atsutane, the results of Norinaga’s return to Japanese roots gave way to the rejection of Confucianism and Buddhism, despite the many features of these philosophies the Japanese had adapted to their culture. “This movement,” he wrote, “was also [the result of] exclusion and a feeling that pressure was being exerted by foreign countries . . . Strengthening the unity of the nation required the resuscitation of a national consciousness; the most natural and effective way to achieve this was to rely on the conceptual model of a state unified around a national family, as in ancient Japan.”112 Now, he implied, the government was once again responding to external pressures, this time promoting its own narrow vision of the Japanese national character based on the concept of kokutai and the emperor system ideology. Believing that the true Japanese character had a natural proclivity to liberalism, he pointed out that during the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese people instinctively opted for English thought, and this was due, Nyozekan believed, to the traditional character of the Japanese and of Japanese culture. Japan naturally inclined toward “AngloSaxon culture” and the liberalism it represented, he felt, because Japan too had experienced its own “Japanese Renaissance.”113 This renaissance, which began in the seventeenth century under the stable Tokugawa government, involved the “discovery of man” and led to the development of humanism (which, however, Nyozekan readily admitted was “even vaguer than the imprecisely-defined humanism of the West). The Japanese Renaissance grew in opposition to the official Tokugawa Confucianism, and Motoori Norinaga played a key role. Nyozekan explained that, for Norinaga, the ideals of Confucianism were artificial constructs, “created with the aim of imposing some unity of a state and society.” The newly-developing humanism of the Japanese Renaissance “freed men and society from the intellectual sway of Buddhism and Confucianism and treated man and his environment as actualities in their own right,” wrote Nyozekan.114 As a result, Japan underwent social, political, and cultural growth that provided a native tradition of incipient individualism which in turn supported the growth of liberalism. In terms of its native tradition, Nyozekan felt, Japan most resembled England among the European countries.115


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But Nyozekan explained that the failure of these seeds of liberalism to take root immediately was due to the fact that by the Meiji 20s (1880s), the governing bureaucracy adopted German-style thought.116 Nyozekan believed that Japan’s subsequent descent into war and militarism, the “un-Japanese ultranationalism of the Sho ¯ wa era,” was largely due to the country’s “conversion to an idealism imported from another country and absolutely separate from the Japanese.”117 In the process of modernization then, the Japanese opted for German philosophy, applying the German model in politics, the military, and social policy. By the second decade of Meiji, the German model had replaced the English model in Japanese politics and culture. The phrase “Japanese spirit, which appeared in the 1930s, reflected this borrowed German model: “The words ‘Japanism’ and ‘Emperor system,’ created [by the bureaucracy] at this time [Sho ¯ wa] had no connection to Japanese myth or Japanese psychology, but instead were just the Japanese version of German ideology.”118 Nyozekan later pointed out that the Japanese attempt to borrow German philosophy resulted in the implementation in Japan of an extremely immature philosophy.119 In 1936, Nyozekan again turned to Norinaga to warn against the contemporary wave of philosophical borrowing when he wrote that Norinaga “objected to the borrowing of Chinese and Indian philosophies. He pointed out the meaningless nature of such neo-plagiarism by saying that the essential qualities of the Japanese spirit rest on a foundation of not setting up any empirical philosophical categories.” Perhaps it was a note of confidence in the Japanese when Nyozekan continued this thought writing that “Japanese books on philosophy [which are] direct adaptations into the Japanese language from their original Western languages . . . are usually unintelligible even to ordinarily intelligent readers.”120 Thus Nyozekan, writing in the mid- and late 1930s, rejected the Japanese turn to the German model which began in the first decades of Meiji and was revived in a more ideological manifestation with dire consequences in the 1930s. Nyozekan felt unequivocally that German philosophy was antithetical to the Japanese character. Reflecting on this situation after the war, he wrote in 1962: It is only since the Meiji era that Japanese history swerved off the course it had been following since ancient times. At the beginning of the Restoration Japan had been adopting Anglo-American culture. With Germany’s victory over France in the FrancoPrussian War, however, Japan was attracted by the history of the rise of this new power in Europe and from the 1880s switched


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from the pursuit of French and British culture and followed the German pattern in the constitution, legal system, politics, education, and academic work. The leaders in politics, the bureaucracy, and academic life would have nothing but Germany. In Germany at that time, the Imperial house, the Junkers, the military, and the bureaucratic politicians were lording it over the citizens and the Japanese authorities applied the German methods in Japan. Following the imperialism of Germany, herself a latecomer in the field – Japan pursued in the Manchurian Incident and the Pacific War, a chauvinism quite out of step with the times, and so incurred her first defeat in history.

Nyozekan’s method in his character studies clearly aimed to promote liberalism in the face of Japan’s growing fascism. In the 1930s, this was one of the few remaining effective ways to oppose the government. But throughout his career, his beliefs about the Japanese national character provided him with a means of assessing developments in Japanese politics and society. In the face of growing fascism, Nyozekan clung to his vision of the Japanese national character as inherently liberal and believed that but for the aberration of fascism, the natural progression of Japanese history would lead to the full development of a liberal character. In his character studies, he tried to explain to the Japanese people the qualities of pragmatism, realism, tolerance, internationalism, and openness that conditioned their response to their world, and hoped this intellectual fight against fascism would hold open the door for liberalism in Japan. Both before and during the war, Nyozekan engaged in a searching investigation of the Japanese character, trying to achieve for himself and for his fellow Japanese an understanding of their nation at war, but also trying to provide himself with an outlet for subtle criticism of the government’s aggressive policies abroad and repression at home. To understand more fully the development of his attitudes on the Japanese national character, Japan’s future course, and his devotion to the cause of liberalism requires an examination of his work during one of the most active and most formative periods of his career, the period of Taisho ¯ democracy. NOTES 1

2

Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento,” Kaizo, 17:6 (June 1, 1935) 2–20. A short newspaper column entitled “Nihon-teki seikaku no shiren” (“A Test for the Japanese National Character”) (Ichi-nichi, ichi-dai,”


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3

4 5

6 7

8

9 10 11

12

13 14 15

16

17 18 19

20

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Yomiuri shimbun, evening edition, January 31, 1935) is actually Nyozekan’s first published piece using the phrase “Nihon-teki seikaku,” predating the Kaizo article by six months. A few examples of his use of the national character concept in earlier critical pieces can be seen in works like “Kokka-teki kanjo to kokusai-teki seigi” (“National Feeling and International Politics”) Chuo koron, 36:9 (August 1, 1921) 85–93; “Taisho¯ jidai no kokka-teki teiko to sono shinriteki tokucho” (“The Statist Tendency of the Taisho ¯ Era and its Psychological Characteristics”) Taiyo, 33:2 (February 1, 1927) 47–52; “Kodo no taikei to shite no shakai” (“Society as a System of Behavior”) Shakaigaku zasshi 39 (July 1, 1927) 1–15; “Shizenshugisha to shite no Motoori Norinaga” (“Motoori Norinaga as Naturalist”) Kaizo, 12:3 (March 1, 1930) 32–49. Andrew Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) 194–6. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan, 220. Kenneth B. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural Identity, 1885–1895, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969) 67. Pyle, New Generation, 84. Kokumin no tomo, “Gaijin no yugen hatashite ikubaku no kachi aru,” June 22, 1889, quoted in Pyle, New Generation, 84. Kuga Katsunan, Tokyo dempo, June 13, quoted in Pyle, New Generation, 75. Pyle, New Generation, 36. Pyle, New Generation, 35. “Yohai kokusuishugi o shodo suru,” Nihonjin, May 18, 1889, quoted in Pyle, New Generation, 70. Hasegawa Nyozekan, The Japanese Character: A Cultural Profile, John Bester, translator, (Tokyo: Kodansha International, Ltd., 1966) 101. Pyle, New Generation, 70. Pyle, New Generation, 68. Shiga Shigetaka, “Yamato minzoku no sanseiryoku,” Nihonjin, July 3, 1888, quoted in Pyle, New Generation, 68. Seppo Koji (pseudonym for Miyake Setsurei) “Nihon jinmin koyu no seishitsu” Toyo gakugei zasshi, January and February, 1883, quoted in Pyle, New Generation, 61. Seppo Koji, quoted in Pyle, New Generation, 61. Seppo Koji, quoted in Pyle, New Generation, 62. Kuga Katsunan, “Kinji kenpoko,” serialized in Tokyo dempo and Nihon, December 28, 1888 to February 28, 1889, quoted in Pyle, New Generation, 95. Kuga Katsunan, “Shido ron,” Nihon, November 3, 1890, quoted in Pyle, New Generation, 127.


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24

25

26

27

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30 31 32 33

34 35

36 37

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Hasegawa Nyozekan and Liberalism in Modern Japan Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento,” 2. Hasegawa Nyozekan, The Japanese Character: A Cultural Profile, 58. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “The National Character of the Japanese,” Contemporary Japan, LLL:4 (March 1935) 550. Ouchi Hyoe, “Okina okina ga inakunatta: Hasegawa Nyozekan no koto,” in Sera Masatoshi, et al., Hasegawa Nyozekan: Hito, jidai, shiso to chosaku mokuroku, (Tokyo: Chuo Daigaku, 1985) 180. Matsumoto Joji, “Kaisetsu,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 416. Hasegawa Nyozekan, The Japanese Character: A Cultural Profile, John Bester, translator, (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1966). Yamaryo Kenji, “Shakai hihan no kenron,” Asahi janaru (ed.), Nihon no shisoka, vol. 3 (1963) 80; Nanbara Shigeru in conversation with Maruyama Masao, quoted in Yoshikuni Igarashi, “The Unfinished Business of Mourning: Maruyama Masao and Postwar Japan’s Struggles with the Wartime Past,” Positions 10:1 (2002) 203. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Meiji, Taisho¯, Sho¯wa, sandai no seikaku,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 380. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Nihon-teki seikaku,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 10–11. Hasegawa, “Nihon-teki seikaku,” 2. Hasegawa, “Nihon-teki seikaku,” 4. Hasegawa, “Nihon-teki seikaku,” 2. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Zoku Nihon-teki seikaku,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 169. Hasegawa, “Nihon-teki seikaku,” 10–11. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Dento no jizoku,” “Nihon bunmei no to-go,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 409. Hasegawa, “Nihon-teki seikaku,” 16. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Educational and Cultural Background of the Japanese,” (Tokyo: Kokusai bunka shinkokai, 1935) 17–18. Hasegawa Nyozekan, Nihon kishitsu, (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobo, 1950) 4; 3. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Shizenbi to jinkobi,” Nihon bunmei no to-go, in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 404. Hasegawa, “Nihon kishitsu,” 4. Hasegawa, “Educational and Cultural Background,” 18. Hasegawa, “Nihon-teki seikaku,” 16. Hasegawa, “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento,” 9. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Bunka-teki minshushugi,” in Watakushi no joshiki tetsugaku, (Tokyo: Chuo University, 1987) 127.


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50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65

66

67

68 69 70 71 72

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Hasegawa, “Educational and Cultural Background,” 18. Hasegawa, “Bunka-teki minshushugi,” 127. Hasegawa, Nihon kishitsu, 16, 21. Hasegawa, “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento,” 4. Hasegawa Nyozekan, Nihon bumnei no seikaku, (Tokyo: Nihon kokusai kyoiku kyokaihen, 1966) 11–12. Hasegawa, “Bunka-teki minshushugi,” 141. Hasegawa, “Bunka-teki minshushugi,” 128–9. Hasegawa, “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento,” 71–3. Hasegawa, “Bunka-teki minshushugi,” 141. Hasegawa, Nihon-teki seikaku, 21. Hasegawa, Nihon bumnei no seikaku, 71–2. Hasegawa, “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento,” 5. David M. Potter, “The Quest for the National Character,” in John Higham (ed.), The Reconstruction of American History, (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). Hasegawa, “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento,” 5. Hasegawa, “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento,” 5. Hasegawa, The Japanese Character, 87. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Nichijo seikatsu,” Chuo hyoron, 75 (April 20, 1961) 92. Hasegawa, The Japanese Character, 27–31. Hasegawa, “The National Character of the Japanese,” 549. Hasegawa, “Bunka-teki minshushugi,” 137. William Theodore deBary (ed.), Sources of Japanese Tradition, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958) 524–35. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Japan’s ‘Cultural Democracy’: A Challenging Interpretation of History,” in Perspective on Japan: Atlantic Monthly Supplement, no. 1 (1955) 75. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Manyoshu ni okeru shizenshugi: Kakumei ni okeru seiji keitai to no kankei,” in Gendai Nihon bungaku zenshu, vol. 94 (Tokyo: Shoma shobo, 1958) 300. “Manyoshu ni okeru shizenshugi was originally published in Kaizo 15:1 (January, 1933) 68–87. Because of its subject matter, this essay may be considered a direct forerunner to Nyozekan’s work dealing with the Japanese national character. deBary, Sources of Japanese Tradition, 532–5. Hasegawa, “Bunka-teki minshushugi,” 137. Hasegawa, “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento,” 10. Hasegawa, “The National Character of the Japanese,” 545. Hasegawa, Nihon kishutsu, 29–30; Hasegawa, “Meiji, Taisho¯, Sho¯wa, 365–82, passim., Tanaka Hiroshi, “Hyoden: Hasegawa Nyozekan: Senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” Sekai, vol. 486 (March 1986) 318.


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81 82 83

84

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95 96 97 98

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Hasegawa Nyozekan and Liberalism in Modern Japan Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Tasusei to ryokokusei,” Nihon bunmei no to-go, in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 397. Hasegawa, The Japanese Character, 29, 34, 89, 93. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Tetsugaku no nai bunmeikoku,” Nihon bunmei no to-go, in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 400. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Watakushi ga tetsugaku o kataru,” Riso, 65 (June 1, 1936) 127. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Modernism in Japan,” Contemporary Japan, V:1 (June 1936) 67. Hasegawa, “Educational and Cultural Background,” 9. Hasegawa, “Bunka-teki minshushugi,” 133. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “The Nature of Japanese History,” Nihon samazama, (Tokyo: Taihorin, 1962) 4. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento,” 7. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Educational and Cultural Background,” 12. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Nihon-teki bunka kankaku no tokucho,” Nihon hyoron, 11:8 (August 1, 1936) 5. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Ryokokusei: Nihon bunmei no tokucho,” Chuo hyoron, 100 (September 20, 1967) 38. Hasegawa Nyozekan, The Japanese Character, 149; Hasegawa, “Tasusei to ryokokusei,” 396–8. Hasegawa, “The National Character of the Japanese,” 545. Hasegawa, “Nihon-teki bunka kankaku no tokucho,” 5. Hasegawa, “Educational and Cultural Background,” 16. Hasegawa, “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento,” 7. Tanaka Hiroshi, “Hyoden: Hasegawa Nyozekan: Senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” Sekai, no. 486 (March 1986) 318. Hasegawa, The Japanese Character, 61. Hasegawa, “The National Character of the Japanese,” 554. Hasegawa, “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento,” 7. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Nihonjin no heiwasei to rakutensei,” Sekai bunka, 1:2 (March 1, 1946) 47. Hasegawa, “Bunka-teki no minshushugi,” 127. Hasegawa, “Manyoshu ni okeru shizenshugi,” 304. Hasegawa, “Japan’s ‘Cultural Democracy’,” 77. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “The Japanese and Foreign Culture,” Contemporary Japan, IV:2 (September 1935) 228. Tanaka, “Senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” 315. Hasegawa, The Japanese Character, 99. Tanaka, “Senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” 315, 318. Matsumoto, “Kaisetsu,” 416.


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106 107 108 109

110 111

112 113 114 115

116 117 118 119 120

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Sera Masatoshi, et al., Hasegawa Nyozekan: Hito, jidai, shiso to chosaku mokuroku, (Tokyo: Chuo Daigaku, 1985) 116. Hasegawa, “The National Character of the Japanese,” 548. Tetsuo Najita, Japan: The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Japanese Politics, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) 58–9; deBary, Sources of Japanese Tradition, 508–10, 540–42. deBary, Sources of Japanese Tradition, 509. Matsumoto, “Kaisetsu,” 416–17. Hasegawa, The Japanese Character, 96. Hasegawa, “Naturalism in the Manyoshu,” Contemporary Japan, I:4 (March 1933) 700. Hasegawa, “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento,” 7. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Nihonjin to shukyo,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 336. Hasegawa, “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento,” 3. Hasegawa, “Japan’s ‘Cultural Democracy’,” 77. Hasegawa, The Japanese Character, 131, 143,146, 144. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Nihon no hyumanizumu,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 308. Hasegawa, “Meiji, Taisho¯, Sho¯wa,” 375, 381. Hasegawa, Nihon kishitsu, 39; “Meiji, Taisho¯, Sho¯wa,” 381. Tanaka, “Senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” 316. Hasegawa, “Tetsugaku no nai bunmei koku,” 400. Hasegawa, “Modernism in Japan,” 68, 67–8.


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3

Taisho ¯ Democracy

T

he period of great change that is called Taisho ¯ democracy proved to be one of the busiest times of Nyozekan’s life. In these early years of his career as a journalist, Nyozekan threw himself into his chosen calling as a “critic of civilization.” In addition to writing books, he wrote and traveled for the Osaka Asahi Shimbun, and after leaving the newspaper, launched two successive magazines. The period of Taisho ¯ democracy spurred Nyozekan’s hopes of seeing the trend toward liberalism fulfilled in Japan. But before the period was over, his hope gave way to disillusion with the course of political trends. Taken at face value, and ignoring the undercurrents of authoritarianism present in the Meiji period (for example, the emperorcentered Meiji Constitution), the Taisho ¯ period seemed the next step in a natural evolution toward participatory democracy. The period was characterized by the implementation of policies that supported democracy, for example the move toward government conducted by the lower house of the Diet consisting of representatives popularly elected by universal manhood suffrage. This kind of government and society, intellectuals believed, was possible under the Meiji Constitution and could be achieved through gradual and peaceful change.1 But the aspirations for democratic change were not just limited to intellectuals: according to Sugimura Takeshi, a journalist active at the time, the Taisho ¯ period was an era during which, “In terms of the thinking of the masses, the imported ideas of Western democracy flowed into the country . . . this was the thread that ran through the Taisho ¯ era.”2 In the international arena, the guiding principles of Taisho ¯ democracy advocated an end to Japan’s aggressive policies in Asia and urged Japanese membership in the international community. The brief ascendancy of these guiding principles defines the period of Taisho ¯ democracy better than dates, for this era of prewar


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Taisho¯ Democracy


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liberalism extended beyond the Taisho ¯ reign (1912–26) from which it derives its name. Liberal currents were evident in Japanese politics as early as the late nineteenth century. The Popular Rights Movement, for example, “sought the establishment of a popularly-elected system of parliamentary government (minsei giin) based on the theory of ¯ politnatural rights and popular sovereignty.”3 But it was the Taisho ical crisis, several decades later, which seemed to set Japanese politics on the course toward true democracy. In December 1912, following the new emperor’s accession to the throne in July, the army forced the collapse of the second Saionji cabinet. Despite public outcry against the strong-arm tactics of the army, the genró appointed Katsura Taro as Saionji’s replacement. The appointment of Katsura, who was strongly identified with clique government, intensified the public outcry, which coalesced into the “Movement to Protect Constitutional Government” under Inukai Tsuyoshi and Ozaki Yukio, former leaders of the earlier popular rights movement. Katsura was forced out of office. Thus, the popular movement to protest against government tactics in the Taisho ¯ political crisis demonstrated the burgeoning liberal trends in Japanese society. By strengthening the role of the parties, it also contributed to progress toward two-party government, ultimately culminating in Seiyukai leader Hara Kei’s appointment to the premiership in 1918. The year 1918 was critical in the period of Taisho ¯ democracy for other reasons as well. Indeed, Andrew Barshay has called 1918 the “crucial fulcrum” of the era. That August, popular distress over the inflation and financial dislocation of the war years erupted in the Rice Riots. Intellectuals, notably journalists like Nyozekan, protested for more abstract reasons: not only were they opposed to the anti-Soviet Siberian Expedition, they were also inflamed by the government’s repression of the press and the remote nature of domestic politics as reflected in the persistence of “transcendental cabinets.” But it was the nationwide popular protest over skyrocketing rice prices that prompted Prime Minister Terauchi Masatake to call out 92,000 troops4 that had the more immediate impact in bringing about the resignation of Terauchi’s transcendental cabinet. This resignation provided the opening for Hara’s party government, and although the transcendental cabinet was not yet dead, it was dying and by 1924 had expired. The year 1925 brought another benchmark of Taisho ¯ democracy with the passage of the universal manhood suffrage bill. The simultaneous passage of the Peace Preservation Law, however, took the shine off this victory of liberal principles, and like the Terauchi government’s press censorship in the midst of the Rice Riots, it hinted


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at the darker side of political trends in the Taisho ¯ period. Nevertheless, the period of Taisho ¯ democracy still had a few more years of life. Labor made some gains in the mid-1920s and, at the same time, the Diet enacted social welfare legislation to ease the lot of the people. But this too, had its somber undertones: as Kenneth B. Pyle argues, the Japanese bureaucracy, enjoying the “advantages of followership,” passed social welfare laws in an effort to prevent the “social diseases” they saw spreading in the West, which they feared carried the germ of revolution. Thus, these “enlightened” acts actually constituted a rejection of liberalism and laissez-faire policies.5 A counterpoint to these political developments was the onset of an agricultural depression in the early 1920s. In response to depression in the agricultural sector, the government turned to its colonies in Korea and Taiwan to supply rice for home markets, contributing to the development of a more aggressive foreign policy.6 This rice import policy in turn worsened domestic rural conditions by providing competition with the already embattled Japanese farmer. But economic hardship in the rural sector proved beneficial to the military, as villagers became more easily swayed by the ultranationalist and anti-foreign propaganda promoted by the military.7 Moreover, the military effectively co-opted the existing village structure to gain a following in the countryside.8 Enlisting in the army, young villagers reinforced the military’s turn to foreign aggression, made easier by its legal independence from civil authority. This aggressive trend found expression in the 1928 murder of Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin by young members of the Kwantung Army who subsequently went undisciplined by the army for their actions. This initiated a chain of events that culminated in the Manchurian Incident of 1931. This event, and the government’s acquiescence, signaled the end of the period of Taisho ¯ democracy, and, for Nyozekan, the onset of Japan’s fascist phase.9 Nyozekan’s career closely followed the eddies of Taisho ¯ history. He has been called a “child of Taisho ¯ democracy,” and “a new thinker of a new age.”10 As a journalist, he belonged to the professional group most fervent in its support of the principles of Taisho ¯ democracy.11 It was during this period, when Nyozekan was in his mid-thirties, that this career began to blossom: “During the agitated period of Taisho ¯ democracy,” writes Kaji Ryuichi, “Nyozekan looked fixedly at the world, thought about the man in the street, and taking up his pen, rose to the top of the world of Japanese thought in one stroke.”12 In joining the staff of the Osaka Asahi Shimbun in 1908, Nyozekan cast his lot with the leading liberal voice of the day. 13 His


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identification with the liberal character of the newspaper was exceedingly strong. He wrote: “Just as the people of society, such as merchants, artisans, officials, and the like have appearances and speech that immediately identifies them with their function, newspapers and newspapermen also possess this peculiarity . . . One could determine which newspaper the journalist worked for according to his appearance, vocabulary and attitude.”14 The “attitude” of Nyozekan and his colleagues at the Osaka Asahi was focused on publicizing and promoting the social and political issues around which the period of Taisho ¯ democracy turned.15 Thus, Nyozekan’s defiant resignation form the Osaka Asahi in 1918, the year Barshay called the “crucial fulcrum” of the period of Taisho ¯ democracy, proved to be a fulcrum in Nyozekan’s life as well. Newly independent after leaving the newspaper in protest against the government’s repression of the press during the Rice Riots, he clung to the liberal ideals he believed the Osaka Asahi had once embodied, and began his own magazine, Warera. As editor of Warera, Nyozekan used its pages to express his views on the various events and issues confronting Japan in the latter half of the Taisho ¯ period. Although it continued publication under the name Hihan, Warera’s demise in 1930 roughly coincided with the Manchurian Incident of 1931, the event that signaled the end of Japan’s shortlived experiment with liberalism in the prewar period and the onset of what Nyozekan called Japanese fascism.16 Participating in Taisho ¯ democracy as a liberal journalist, Nyozekan was fascinated with the philosophy of the press and the role of the newspaper in society, and in 1929 he began to write on the subject.17 In Shimbunron, published in 1947, Nyozekan explored the role of the newspaper in society, emphasizing the newspaper’s positive role in contributing to the formation of public opinion.18 He felt that as a journalist, he was in a position to have a significant impact on society. That role, as Nyozekan played it, was as proselytizer of democratic principles. Tanaka Hiroshi comments that Nyozekan’s views, arising from his dedication to both democracy and journalism, were in line with James Bryce’s statement that “In a large country, the newspaper makes democracy possible.”19 Democracy and journalism were interrelated in Nyozekan’s mind; he believed that “. . . the healthy state of journalism and the healthy condition of society always reciprocate, and that the healthy development of newspapers is an indication of healthy social condition.”20 The press in general, and newspapers in particular, Nyozekan believed, could play a dynamic role in bringing about social change. In his book, Shimbun, Nyozekan explained that the newspaper was the “expression of social consciousness.” As this social consciousness


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was oppositional in nature, the newspaper was to express the viewpoints of various opposing groups in society.21 As a journalist then, Nyozekan saw his role as one who could focus the expression of social consciousness and be an advocate for various oppositional groups in society: labor, women, the intelligentsia. Moreover, as members of the Osaka Asahi, Nyozekan and other leading staffers, including Maruyama Kanji and Sugimura Takeshi, understood their roles as journalists as being intermediaries between the state and society, advocates of social needs to the government. This role was even more important in the absence of universal suffrage and social representation in government.22 As Nyozekan noted shortly after his resignation from the Osaka Asahi in 1918, the authority of opinion presented in that paper, and the sympathy it generated in the general public, caused fear among the government, political parties, and industrialists.23 Indeed, if the government measured the threat of the leading newspapers by circulation figures, it may have found reason to fear. By 1917–18, shortly before the mass resignation from the Osaka Asahi that Nyozekan led, the liberal Osaka newspaper reached one million readers daily.24 Nyozekan, even at this early point in his career had a large audience. While with the Osaka Asahi, Nyozekan continued to contribute to Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, and, after leaving the paper, he also published in journals like Kaizo, Taiyo, and Chuo koron. Because of technological advances, improved management, and the growth of advertising, the circulation of journals like these doubled in the early years of the twentieth century. But most significant to this growth was the expansion of the reading public. While these “general interest journals” certainly wielded an influence on intellectuals and bureaucratic elites, Sharon Nolte has pointed out that “even a fairly abstruse journal like Chuo koron could be seen in the hands of a worker or farmer during the Taisho ¯ era.” By 1919, Chuo koron’s circulation had shot up from 5,000 copies to 120,000 copies.25 While Warera never achieved these stunning circulation figures, it ultimately reached a readership of 7,000. This figure becomes more significant in light the fact that, in order to preserve the integrity of the magazine, Nyozekan refused to accept advertising as a means of raising revenue, instead surviving on subscription income alone.26 The liberalism that informed Nyozekan’s support for Taisho ¯ democracy came from a variety of sources. He enjoyed a liberal education and upbringing in the early days of Meiji, and, in his adulthood, studied Western thought intensively, achieving a keen and accurate grasp of Western and especially English thought.27 Nyozekan possessed a deep knowledge of the theory of liberalism as


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well as the history of its development in Europe, and this did not fall prey to the misunderstandings that marred the possibility of its success in prewar Japan.28 These misunderstandings were explained by men like Ishibashi Tanzan, liberal economist and editor of the Toyo keizai shimpo (“Oriental Economic Journal”), who believed that liberalism’s chances in Japan were severely damaged because it had arrived in Japan on the coattails of “Western imperialism and military pressure.”29 But perhaps more practically, many other intellectuals and members of the government bureaucracy came to fear the perceived chaos of a society based on individual liberty, especially the social dislocation they observed as an accompaniment to laissez-faire industrial growth in the Western European countries. Even Nyozekan’s early mentor, Kuga Katsunan, showed alarm at this prospect, and wrote on the merits of national socialism as a means of saving Japan from the effects of the “social disease” apparent in the West. Many believed that liberalism in Europe “had allowed social conditions to deteriorate until upheaval threatened,” and they feared the same outcome for Japan.30 Nyozekan did not advocate simple economic liberalism, a la Adam Smith, but called for social liberalism as well. Tanaka Hiroshi writes that Nyozekan progressed beyond the standpoint of liberal democracy with its narrow economic interpretation of liberty, and showed an awareness of social and class issues, and the necessity for a democracy to address the needs of the workers as well as the capitalists.31 At the same time, Nyozekan warned against social legislation “bestowed from above,” believing that a crucial distinction existed between this, which would allow the government to gather to itself authoritarian power, and social policy which arose from a popularly-elected body of representatives.32 Like Ishibashi Tanzan, Miki Kiyoshi, and others, Nyozekan looked to the English parliamentary system and the social legislation enacted under the British Labour Party in the 1920s as the exemplary manifestation of liberalism, a model of social democracy that Japan might try to emulate.33 In this way, Nyozekan’s understanding of liberalism in its economic, social, and political dimensions prevented him from a similar decline into the “comfort” of authoritarianism. Nyozekan, who aimed to be a “natural historian of the state,” was well-versed in the theory of liberalism and Western political theory, having read Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Mill, Smith, and Bentham.34 He was most strongly influenced, however, by two British authors, Leonard T. Hobhouse (1864–1929) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903).


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Nyozekan introduced the ideas of Hobhouse to a Japanese audience in the pages of Warera in 1920.35 It is little wonder that the liberal Nyozekan was drawn to the University of London sociologist, especially the ideas expressed in the books, Liberalism (1918) and The Metaphysical Theory of the State (1918). Indeed, Nyozekan, who valued practicality and simplicity, may have felt a certain kinship with Hobhouse whose views he described as “plain” and “matter-of-fact.”36 In Liberalism, Hobhouse examined the elements of liberalism and the “historical progress of the Liberalizing movement,” pointing to civil, economic, social, and domestic liberty. Hobhouse also wrote of the necessity of “control and restraint” in preserving liberty and the right of all members of society.37 Nyozekan too attached great importance to these qualities and frequently wrote about the control and restraint he believed were inherent in the Japanese national character; qualities he understood to be essential to the survival of liberty.38 In looking at political systems, Hobhouse noted the vital importance of the community’s right to “enforc[e] the responsibility of the executive and the legislative to the community as a whole.” Nyozekan agreed, and like Hobhouse he believed this could only be achieved through a parliament regularly elected by universal suffrage.39 Thus, Nyozekan borrowed Hobhouse to promote his own arguments in support of a pluralistic government and social democracy.40 In Liberalism, Hobhouse also analyzed the relationship between national and international liberty. He wrote on the basic incompatibility of liberalism and imperialism, noting that while a conquering nation that uses force to exert control over its colony may proclaim its liberalism, it is in fact “maintaining a system which must undermine its own principles,” and that the conqueror “forfeits his liberty as long as he retains his power.”41 These were the very ideas that Nyozekan would introduce later as he argued against Japanese aggression in Asia.42 Hobhouse’s The Metaphysical Theory of the State, however, had an even stronger impact on Nyozekan’s thinking, and these were the ideas Nyozekan wrote about in his 1920 Warera articles. These articles appeared just a year before the publication of Nyozekan’s ground-breaking Gendai kokka hihan, a book which shows the strong imprint of Hobhouse’s ideas.43 As Nyozekan pointed out, The Metaphysical Theory of the State was an attack against Hegelian statism and Hegel’s “idealized exaltation of the state.”44 Hobhouse contrasted the metaphysical view of the state with the “democratic or humanitarian view.”45 While the former view, as Nyozekan explained, holds that the “raison d’e¯tre of the state is itself,” the latter view regards the state as a means, a “servant of humanity [that


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must be] judged by what it does for the lives of its members.”46 In Japan, according to Tanaka Hiroshi, the metaphysical view of the state translated into a demand for “absolutist conversion and submission to the state based on the divinity of the emperor; [in which] the individual became buried in the absolute nature of the state . . . Humanity was held in contempt . . . and militarism that negated international peace was promoted.”47 Finally, Hobhouse presented an idea that was deeply in tune with Spencerian views on social evolution, writing that while the metaphysical view of the state held the state up as the “supreme achievement of human organization,” the democratic view of the state was that “the sovereign state is already doomed, destined to subordination in a community of the world.”48 Thus, Nyozekan’s thinking on the nature of social change and the relationship between the state and the individual was also strongly influenced by his reading of British philosopher Herbert Spencer. Nyozekan identified with Spencer, as with Hobhouse, on a personal level. He wrote in his autobiography that from the time of his early reading of Spencer around 1903, he felt a kinship with Spencer and his lifestyle: Spencer too had a weak constitution, lived his life as a bachelor, had no livelihood but writing, and was self-taught and devoted to the life of the mind. Nyozekan’s first introduction to Spencer came when he read “Tetsugaku kenteki,” by his mentor, Miyake Setsurei, in 1890.49 Although he read everything of Spencer’s he could find, he was most influenced by two works, Man versus the State (1884) and Education: Moral, and Physical (1854–59). In 1939, in the midst of the “clamor against liberalism,” Nyozekan wrote a book about Spencer, Supensaa, for an Iwanami series on philosophy.50 Like the national character studies he published around the same time, Nyozekan used the book to criticize the fascist trends sweeping the country, relying on his explanation of Spencer to comment on contemporary Japanese conditions.51 As editor of the London Economist in the mid-nineteenth century, Spencer was a prominent thinker in the heyday of British Liberalism and his cohorts included J.S. Mill and other leading liberals.52 Like Mill, Spencer was a champion of the principle of individual rights over state power. The state, he believed, should impose no “coercive restraints” upon the individual except to punish crimes against other individuals or their property.53 But these principles were not unique to Spencer. He is singled out instead as the “first philosopher of evolution”54 who applied Charles Darwin’s newly outlined theory of evolution in the natural world to society, an application later termed Social Darwinism. In his life of writing, Spencer focused his attention on society and the


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formation of human groups and governments which, he believed, developed through an evolutionary process. In both Principles of Sociology (1876–96) and Man versus the State, Spencer elucidated his principle that the state must be based on voluntary, rather than compulsory, cooperation. He believed that human society in Europe, and especially in England, had evolved through what he called the militant phase, characterized by compulsory cooperation (e.g. military draft) and had achieved government in which “voluntary cooperation became the universal principle.” This had been achieved through an evolutionary process in which the “social structure produced by war, and appropriate to it, slowly became qualified by the social structure produced by industrial life and appropriate to it.”55 Tokutomi Soho, leader of the Minyusha who called for wholesale Westernization, was especially drawn to these ideas of Spencer’s, believing that the evolutionary pattern Spencer set forth was universal. Tokutomi placed the modernizing Japan into Spencer’s schema of the transition from militant to industrial society. Nyozekan’s Seikyosha mentors too, especially Miyake, were taken with Spencer’s vision of the inevitability of human social evolution. The industrial society Spencer described was characterized by democratic, representative government, and displayed the qualities necessary to such a society: “humanity, beneficence, honesty, independence, individual initiative, self-reliance, and a more qualified patriotism.”56 But Miyake was not constrained by what Tokutomi felt was the universalism of Spencer’s message – Tokutomi’s conviction that what was true for Western Europe would necessarily define the Japanese experience. Miyake argued that as social evolution continued on a global scale, the nation-state, and not the individual, became the unit of competition that propelled the process forward. And so, while the European nations in the industrial phase had attained the highest stage of social evolution yet accomplished, Miyake believed it was nevertheless necessary for Japan to preserve its own culture as a way of offering contrasting “concepts of value” to enable the evolutionary process to continue apace.57 Through his own reading, and through the influence of his Seikyosha mentors, Nyozekan carried these liberal beliefs with him as he embarked on his career as a journalist and as Japan experienced the period of Taisho ¯ democracy. These attitudes formed the bases of Nyozekan’s thought and action during this frantically busy time of his life. As a member of the Osaka Asahi Shimbun in the early years of Taisho ¯ democracy, Nyozekan found a perfect niche for himself, a


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liberal journalist writing for Japan’s leading liberal newspaper. From this arena, Nyozekan presented his ideas to the largest readership of any daily newspaper.58 Reflecting on his work at the Osaka newspaper in 1959, Nyozekan wrote, “As a reporter for the Osaka Asahi, my job was to keep a fixed eye on the government, and in so doing, I was [considered] a suspicious character (chui jimbutsu).” He found this role, in the beginning at any rate, “very gratifying.”59 Fixing his eye on the government, he wrote in support of the demands for democracy that characterized the Taisho ¯ era. Chief among these was the demand for representative constitutional government. Nyozekan advocated a democracy that would satisfy both political and social demands. Since no social democracy could be achieved without political democracy, the first necessity was the ¯ “perfection of constitutional government.”60 When the Taisho political crisis of 1912–13 exposed the flaws in Japan’s constitutional government, Nyozekan wrote an article for Nihon oyobi Nihonjin entitled “Koshitsu kyoiku no shin seishin – Kunshu no kyoiku ni kansuru shiken” (“The New Spirit of Education in the Imperial Household – A Personal View Concerning the Education of the Monarch”). In this article, he fired a salvo in the movement to protect the constitution and ensure its operation in the contemporary political milieu, criticizing the persistence of transcendental cabinets. In a bold stroke in support of “proper” constitutional monarchy, he wrote that it was necessary to review the “sovereign from the standpoint of the mysterious and saintly view that separates the emperor from the people.”61 Political demands were the first hurdle for Japan early in the era of Taisho ¯ democracy, but in addition to this, Nyozekan developed ideas on many other aspects of the social democracy he advocated. On the topic of feminism,62 Nyozekan was ahead of his time, writing, for example, on the “superiority of women.” 63 He extolled the important historical role women played in the intellectual life of the country, pointing to women’s role in creating a native Japanese literature as in Genji monogatari and other literary works of the Heian court.64 In a picture book, Girls of Japan, for which he wrote an introduction, Nyozekan pointed out that “women have played an important part in the history of their country, not only in politics, but in literature and the fine arts.”65 The fact that women now occupied a position subordinate to men, Nyozekan explained, was because “women were relegated to the background of social life when the country was placed under a military regime, and they ceased to play, as before, their part in the cultural life of the family ¯ era, whose women’s moveand the community.”66 In the Taisho ment was dominated by the group Bluestocking, led by Hiratsuka


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Raicho, Nyozekan advocated that women become active, participatory members of Japanese society and government. In calling for women’s suffrage as he did, Nyozekan was indeed ahead of his time; most who agitated for expanding the franchise disregarded women. As Nyozekan explained, “That the activists in the regular election movement disregard women is something no one feels more urgently than I, and soon this deficiency must be rectified.”67 In Gendai shakai hihan, published in 1920, Nyozekan examined the division of the sexes and the role this had in shaping society. He wrote that, as in the animal world, the division of labor in human society has been determined by women’s reproductive role.68 This role placed women in a central and powerful position in society, Nyozekan believed. But in capitalist society, dominated by the “imperatives of the production process,” Nyozekan felt this model no longer fit, as men and women alike had the same relationship to the industrial society. In industrial society, women, like men, sold their labor in the market; childbearing was merely an additional role women were required to play.69 Thus, Japan’s industrialization provided a more profound explanation for the decline in the position of women than did the earlier militarization of society. In Japan’s industrializing society, Nyozekan felt that “society’s center of gravity [was] shifting from women to men.”70 (It is striking that he believed society’s center of gravity had ever been female.) Examining the role women played in the new industrial society, Nyozekan’s concern for women, his “fueminizumu,”was part of his larger concern with labor in general. Nyozekan attributed his identification with and concern for labor to his childhood spent among the artisans of Edo.71 Just as he advocated the vote for women, Nyozekan believed it vital to the interests of the working class to enact universal suffrage and create a truly representative parliament. Necessary for securing these and other gains were labor unions, which Nyozekan believed must be recognized. It was only when the laboring classes gained political power that the social needs of the people could be properly addressed without the danger of expanding the authoritarian power of the government.72 The solution to this problem, Nyozekan believed, “lay in the gradual adoption of cooperative management of labor and capital.”73 Nyozekan enjoyed his niche as a journalist with the Osaka Asahi, and used the opportunity to express his liberal views to the utmost, as seen in his positions on various issues developed during his years with the paper. But, by the late nineteen-teens, there surfaced trends in Japanese politics that would take Japan in a new and ominous direction. At the same time, Nyozekan too shifted


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directions in his career and in his thinking. The year 1918 proved a critical turning point. Nyozekan entered the period of Taisho ¯ democracy believing, in Spencerian fashion, that the process of social evolution would gradually and peacefully move Japan toward social democracy that in turn would democratically and equitably answer the needs of the various groups in society. Events of the late nineteen-teens, however, led Nyozekan to reflect on and change this assessment. In August 1918, high rice prices led to the outbreak of rioting in a small village in Toyama prefecture. Led by women, the rioting unexpectedly spread across the country and the government responded by sending troops to restore order. In the popular mind, high rice prices resulted from the government’s stockpiling rice to provision troops for the Siberian Expedition of the same month.74 The rioting indicated the withdrawal of popular support for military operations that had characterized Japan’s 1904–5 war with Russia. Soon after the rioting began, the Osaka Asahi announced its support for the rioters, and criticized the government for its suppression of news about the riots and about the Siberian Expedition. Nyozekan and many of his colleagues at the newspaper viewed the government’s suppression as an attack against democratic ideals in general and the Osaka Asahi’s support for democratic ideas in particular. When Onishi Toshio ¯, of the Osaka Asahi wrote an article about the intellectual protest against government censorship and repression, he quoted the Chinese Book of History writing, “A white rainbow has pierced the sun” (“hakko hi o tsuranuku”), which in the original alluded to problems in the empire. The Japanese government, however, interpreted the phrase as a threat to the emperor and a call to revolution, immediately demanding that publication be stopped.75 When Nyozekan, as city editor, refused to stop publication, the government stepped in and pulled the article, bringing charges against Onishi and the Osaka Asahi.76 In preparation for the September 1918 trial, the government gathered Osaka Asahi articles from the previous year and a half which it also deemed dangerous. Many of these articles were Nyozekan’s.77 In October, when the government threatened to suspend publication of the Osaka Asahi for violating the Press Law of 1909, the editor, Murayama Ryohei, resigned. Shortly thereafter, Nyozekan resigned in protest and was joined by other staffers including Torii Sosen, Oyama Ikuo, and Maruyama Kanji. Thus, the Rice Riots of 1918 pitted the government bureaucracy and the liberal intellectuals, most heavily represented in the ranks of journalism, against one another. This disturbance, and the government’s authoritarian response, led Nyozekan to abandon his


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consensual view of politics and society and to begin to view society as an arena of conflict. This move to the conflict model of society was common among liberal intellectuals in the middle years of Taisho ¯. The conflict model, in Ralf Dahrendorf’s words, held that social “coherence and order are founded on force and constraint, on the domination of some and the subjection of others.”78 The voluntary cooperation that was, according to Spencer, supposed to be characteristic of industrial society, was no longer apparent, and Nyozekan’s assurance that Japan’s transition to liberal democracy was well underway began to crumble. This new assessment of society, and Nyozekan’s alarm at the authoritarian turn in Japanese politics, fueled his desire to establish a new forum for the discussion of liberal ideas. As a result, in February 1919, Nyozekan, with the help of Oyama Ikuo, founded the magazine Warera. The new conflict model of Japanese society found its clearest expression in the pages of this new magazine. In series of articles for Warera, Oyama Ikuo laid the theoretical groundwork for the new concept of society, writing, “struggle among social groups is the motor of evolution . . . and the origin of political and social inequality.” Human society, Oyama argued, was composed of discrete groups competing with one another to advance their own interests. In the extreme form, the outcome of this competition was war. But the struggle also led to the formation of the state, as the stronger group asserted its power over the weaker, cementing its domination in law and building a government. In contemporary society, the competing groups were in fact classes and thus, Oyama believed, “the state became the means by which the dominant class exploited the weak economically.”79 The conflict model informed Nyozekan’s thinking as well, and provided the intellectual basis for his writing in Warera. This mode of thinking was readily apparent in his sometimes bitter and cynical inaugural essay for Warera entitled “Osaka Asahi kara, Warera e.” Nyozekan opened this article, which set the tone for the new direction in his thought, with a statement that not only reflected his new attitude but hinted at how dramatic the awakening was for him: “Leaving our mother’s womb, shivering in the chilly atmosphere and issuing a piercing cry, we are made to unconsciously experience the fact that human life is nothing but desperate struggle and effort.” But it was not a meaningless struggle, as he wrote in the same essay: “Throughout human history, it has always been that this struggle and effort alone is the basis of progress and improvement.”80 This hopeful chord, struck in what is otherwise a bitter essay, was a reverberation of Nyozekan’s adherence to the ideal of


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constitutional government, despite his cynical view of the essentially coercive nature of government. In “Osaka Asahi kara, Warera e,” which appeared soon after his resignation from the newspaper, he wrote, “. . . as argument is unavoidable, people who cannot use their tongues will use their fists.” Nyozekan insisted on the importance of securing constitutional government in Japan: “. . .what we countrymen should be working for among ourselves, is that the political liberty that was established in the Western nations, will develop here. This is a demand that precedes all other demands in substance. If the demands of a great number of people are established in an orderly manner, there will be no anxiety about the peace of our country in squeezing perfection from constitutional government.” He believed that the Japanese must not only be allowed to exercise their political rights, but must be educated as to how to do so.81 At the same time, Nyozekan could not ignore the growing repression and reaction of the government as expressed in its response to the Rice Riots and other incidents. He intended Warera to carry on the tradition of the Osaka Asahi, destroyed by the government’s reaction to the Rice Riots, of being an outlet for free expression and an example of “appropriate” nationalism or as Nyozekan himself expressed it, “safe (‘anzen-naru’) nationalism.” 82 Nyozekan was concerned about repression at home, and as these signs were reinforced by Japanese colonial ambitions on the international scene, which he argued, like Hobhouse, were incompatible with democracy at home,83 Nyozekan, his attitudes colored by the darker character of the conflict model, became increasingly alarmed. Nyozekan’s alarm began to find expression in the pages of Warera from its first issue, and it was in “Osaka Asahi kara, Warera e,” writes Tanaka Hiroshi, that Nyozekan fired his first shots in his battle against ultranationalism. Nyozekan’s “safe” nationalism, like his liberalism, formed a cornerstone to his life as an intellectual. Nyozekan’s nationalism “mixed political liberty, social equality, and international peace,” and reiterated the minponshugi goal of creating a governmental structure that would enable popular participation in politics.84 His was a nationalism, he explained in Aru kokro no jijoden, “born of Japanese history . . . modern democratic nationalism.”85 Matsumoto Sannosuke has argued that this “democratization of nationalism” may have been the most important intellectual contribution of Taisho ¯ democracy. At the same time, however, it also became one of Taisho ¯ democracy’s most severe limitations for it failed to adequately address the issue of the relationship between the state and the individual and the state assumed preeminence over the individual.86


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Nyozekan decried the extreme nationalism he feared was gaining ground, that which he felt grew out of “feudalistic and reactionary thinking in which there is no democratic view.” 87 Nationalists of this ilk, Nyozekan wrote, “used the will of the emperor and dressed the monarch in the absolutist clothes of inviolable sanctity.”88 This brand of nationalism, Nyozekan wrote in “Osaka Asahi kara, Warera e,” was an “anti-foreign nationalism” that fostered the attitude of “believing absolutely in my country.” This nationalism viewed the state as transcendent and insisted on the belief in “single and peerless moralistic values that transcend the interests of [other] states.” Moreover, he continued, this extreme nationalism maintained that there was “extreme danger to the peace of the nation and to harmony in social life,” which he cautioned was in itself “extremely dangerous.” Already in 1919, Nyozekan warned the nation of the “physical and spiritual isolation in which [Japan was] entrapped.’’89 One of the first battles the magazine fought against this strident nationalism came in the Morito Incident. The 1920 Morito Incident revolved around the arrest of Tokyo University economics professor Morito Tatsuo who by writing an article sympathetic to anarchistic communism, had violated the newspaper law. His ten-month trial reiterated all the basic themes of the earlier Osaka Asahi Hikka Incident that had led to Nyozekan’s resignation from the paper. In the Morito case, academic freedom was added to the themes of freedom of speech and discussion. Nyozekan and his colleagues at Warera took the opportunity presented by the Incident to attack the government from their own forum and published a wide variety of essays in support of Morito and calling for freedom in the academy and for the press. The article in question in the Morito case was an essay on Piotr Kropotkin’s anarchism entitled “Kuropotkin no shakai shiso no kenkyu” (“A Study of Kropotkin’s Social Thought”) which in fact never advocated anarchism. It was published in the Tokyo University Economics Department journal, edited by Ouchi Hyoe. Nyozekan criticized the Mombusho for its demand that the distribution of the journal be halted. He also criticized the Ministry for failing to support academic freedom. He refused to accept the government’s position that Morito was a government official by virtue of his position at the imperial university who was therefore bound to refrain from research or writing that might be contrary to national interests.90 Academic freedom, Nyozekan maintained, should have no state-imposed limits. While supporting Morito, Nyozekan nevertheless criticized Morito and his colleagues at Tokyo University for submitting to government pressure so readily and cooperating with the government


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in withdrawing the journal. He was also critical of Morito, who had been suspended, for going ahead and resigning his professorial post. Why, Nyozekan asked, did the professors not wage a legal battle before meekly complying with the government’s demands?91 Nyozekan felt their behavior simply highlighted the encroachment the government had already made into free thought and discussion. He wrote: In this incident, although the government may not be aware of having given hints, the ‘withdrawal’ [of the journal] before the ‘prohibition’ and the ‘temporary retirement’ [Morito’s resignation] before the ‘prosecution’ – does not the independent treatment of these matters in themselves show the growing unease [of the general public]?92

In championing Morito’s cause, Nyozekan’s essays in Warera again showed his insight into the seriousness of the challenge to Japan’s fledgling democracy: he believed that the weakness of the battle over the Morito Incident presaged the fate that was to befall civil and intellectual liberty in general in the years to come. Indeed, the case foreshadowed the case of legal scholar Minobe Tatsukichi, an oft-cited example of Japan’s mid-1930s descent to fascism. Minobe, a proponent of the famous “organ theory,” resigned from Tokyo Imperial University in 1934 and was driven from the House of Peers the following year as a result of accusations that his theory demeaned the emperor. In his case too, his position at Tokyo Imperial University set him up for attack as an “official” of the government. And yet fifteen years prior to the Minobe case, Nyozekan identified these repressive trends in the government’s action against Morito and wrote, “In the current state of affairs among the Japanese, the explanation [for the suppression of the press as in the Morito case] is that the publication of left-leaning research will destroy public peace.” “Of course,” he went on to explain, “ ‘public peace’ is a subjective [thing],” and therefore he implied, was not to be determined by the government.93 Nyozekan’s confrontation with the government in the Osaka Asahi Incident and the Morito Incident worked a profound change in his thinking, which, as we have seen, resulted in his viewing social and political changes through the lens of the conflict model. By the early years of the 1920s, these experiences and the new direction in his thinking led to the publication of two major works. With the publication of these books, Gendai Kokka hihan (1921) and Gendai shakai hihan (1922), Nyozekan’s reputation as a leading opinion maker was established.94 Using his


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Spencerian background, Nyozekan looked at the institutions of the state and society and how they evolved, attempting what he called in the preface to Gendai kokka hihan a “natural history of the state.”95 Both volumes consisted primarily of essays first published in Warera and demonstrate Nyozekan’s new critical stance as he directed his attack against the bureaucracy, the political parties, and the very structure of the government. Nyozekan’s thinking in these books, according to Matsumoto Sannosuke, was “representative of the intellectual in battle against established modern ideals and values,” and as such was “a step ahead of his time.”96 The ideas Nyozekan presented in these books stayed with him throughout the Taisho ¯ period. In Gendai kokka hihan, the crumbling of Nyozekan’s belief that liberal democracy might grow naturally out of contemporary Japanese social and political conditions was evident as was his awareness of the growth of the dangerous nationalism he identified earlier in his essay “Osaka Asahi kara, Warera e.” With stark clarity, he targeted the bureaucracy and the political parties as the major obstacles to the progress of democracy in Japan and blamed them for, in Hegelian fashion, placing the state above the individual and promoting the metaphysical theory of the state.97 Noting this fundamental flaw, Nyozekan denounced contemporary political regulations established by the bureaucracy as “nothing but a process by which to shift mass politics to absolutism by the few.” The bureaucracy, however, was only partly to blame;” he cited the political parties as the “engine of absolutism.” “Today’s politicians,” he wrote, “become merchants carrying out the will of merchant nations, and can be seen as running amuck as capitalists and political managers.” Capitalism in Japan was sick, Nyozekan believed, because it functioned to negate politics.98 The failure of capitalism in Japan meant that democracy failed to find fertile soil, and, for this too, Nyozekan blamed the bureaucracy and the political parties. Relying on his knowledge of the history of Western democracy, Nyozekan noted that in Europe, the bourgeoisie was at the forefront of the construction of the modern democratic state. In Japan, on the other hand, the bureaucracy and political parties led in building a modern state. Attempting to emulate the West and thus ensure Japanese national strength, the parties protected capitalism. But protecting capitalism in this way was unnatural, coming as it did from above rather than being fought for from below as in the West. This unnatural protection of capitalism, Nyozekan believed, gave rise to militarism and led to the devaluation of the twin pillars of democracy, a national assembly and public discussion. In this way, Japan tried to copy the West, but


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the move toward capitalistic democracy was led by the government, not the citizenry. Japan, in trying to copy the West, built a structure, but the structure lacked a soul. In the midst of its crisis of modernization, the Japanese state turned to repression as a means of preserving its power. The ideological foundation to this repression was the Hegelian philosophy of the metaphysical state and the construction of the emperor system. Nyozekan wrote: “When it is necessary to control a majority, rather than controlling its will mechanically, it is necessary to cause the majority will to become the same as that of the despot.”99 Nyozekan’s criticism of capitalism and view of conflict as the central dynamic of social and political life certainly contributed to the authorities’ identification of him as a Marxist, an identification that later led to his arrest under suspicion of membership in the Communist Party. But Nyozekan was neither a Marxist nor a communist, and despite his harsh criticism of the modern Japanese state, he was not opposed to the state itself nor did he advocate revolution. Indeed, Nyozekan recognized the necessity of the state, which he believed could play a part in bringing about social democracy.100 Maruyama Masao noted that, “In the end, Hasegawa Nyozekan never became a communist. Although he had an economic view of history, he disliked the language of dialecticism.”101 Oya Soichi agreed with this assessment, writing that, “As a thinker, Nyozekan at one time indicated an inclination toward Marxism and socialism, but in the end, he did not tune in with this.”102 In Nyozekan’s estimation, the role of the modern state was to provide the proper environment for the growth of liberty and equality.103 For this to happen, a functioning parliament was necessary, one in which political parties were truly representative of their constituency. But their constituency must also comprise all of the Japanese people, and so Nyozekan advocated universal (and not just male) suffrage and the legalization of labor unions.104 Made representative in this way, the constituents would be the people, the “working masses,” who, in their alignment with political parties, would provide the needed counterbalance to the otherwise overwhelming bureaucracy.105 Throughout Gendai kokka hihan, Nyozekan recognizes the state as part of a larger whole, which is society.106 Thus, his 1922 work Gendai shakai hihan continues many of the themes he began in Gendai kokka hihan, a point which he acknowledged in the preface to the work. The book, Nyozekan wrote, presents an examination of the “process of the development of a consciousness based on a particular class composition,” and looks at “the realities of the process of social evolution.”107


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The process of “social evolution,” Nyozekan believed, was an ever-repeating cycle of destruction and recreation: Every institution in society evolves because it “contains the organic components of its own collapse,” and out of this collapse the institution is once again created.108 In constructing this model of the process of social evolution, Nyozekan relied on his Spencerian convictions, but also on the conflict model he adopted in the years immediately before the publication of the book. Thus, in Gendai shakai hihan, he examined the “realities of life” by “delv[ing] into the meaning of class.”109 Setting himself apart from the Marxists, Nyozekan viewed class not in narrow economic terms, but rather saw class as a function of broader currents in society including culture, economics, and politics. Class, according to Nyozekan, consisted of people grouped together by virtue of their way of life.110 Despite his broader view of class, however, Nyozekan wrote in Gendai shakai hihan that throughout history, society had been divided into two extreme groups, the propertied and the property-less classes. But he wrote that while many factors influenced the differences between the classes, the primary differences boiled down to “an issue of spare time and spare money.”111 Thus, while “property” in Nyozekan’s schema was primarily material, it was not exclusively material, and his expanded class view included the intangible aspects of culture that separate groups, like spare time and leisure. The division of society into classes gave rise to class culture, Nyozekan wrote, and at the core of the existing system was the “alienation of the human nature of the property-less class by the propertied class.” Because the “superior” (yushu) class dominates the culture, it determines the character of the culture.112 For Nyozekan this meant that society was dominated by a few, while for the masses, “human desires and the enjoyment [pleasures] of life are not granted.”113 In a society whose culture was determined by the propertied classes, where “spare money and spare time” enabled them to meet their physical and psychological needs, the laboring masses were denied the ability to meet these needs. Again Nyozekan departed from the Marxists by refusing to accept the idea that work was beautiful or soul-satisfying. Some kinds of labor, Nyozekan insisted, were simply physically exhausting and mentally dulling, and nothing could change this fundamental fact. “There is no question,” he wrote, “that coal mining is unpleasant and oppressive work . . . In a society in which the material and spiritual aspirations of human life are strong, one cannot after all hope that those who mine coal will do so with mechanical indifference.”114


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Believing that the pain of labor could never be overcome in any system, Nyozekan nevertheless felt that a system of government and society could be devised that would bring workers and work more into line with society at large and by which their needs and desires could be more adequately fulfilled. This system would require that “those who bear the most pain hold the most power.”115 As we have seen, however, Nyozekan rejected the goals and methods of the Marxists and counseled against revolution. Most importantly, he never advocated worker-ownership of the means of production. He believed instead that workers’ problems could be solved with “mutual management by workers and capitalists,” such as was practiced in industrialized countries in the West.116 In criticizing the collusion between government and capital in Japan, Nyozekan saw the need for greater influence for workers. But he believed this influence must first be political. In the conclusion to Gendai kokka hihan, however, Nyozekan advocated the “legal and peaceful” development of worker-based political parties so that the political system would truly represent the bulk of the population and “give rise to democratic politics [in Japan] as in the West.”117 In Gendai shakai hihan, too, Nyozekan looked to liberal democracy as the goal and answer for Japanese society. The views he expressed in his two Critiques continued to guide his thinking throughout the remaining years of the period of Taisho ¯ democracy. But these ideas were responsible for his being the object of increased governmental pressure and isolation as a liberal intellectual in the late 1920s. Later in life, looking back at the Taisho ¯ period and assessing the movement for democracy that blossomed in Japan during that brief time, Nyozekan realized that the conditions for democracy in Japan were simply not right. In an interview in 1965, he admitted that Taisho ¯ democracy was a “translated democracy” (honyaku ¯ period, he wrote, the Meiji “intellecdemokurashii).118 By the Taisho tual and ideological quest for freedom and democracy” led to a “blind adherence to ‘democratic’ theories by the intellectual class, theories which, as far as the roots of Japanese society were concerned, belonged to the future and were quite divorced from reality.”119 As he explained in his 1950 autobiography, Aru kokoro no jijoden, “in terms of world history, the Taisho ¯ democracy movement was two or three centuries late.”120 In other words, Japan, having failed to create the social, political, economic and intellectual foundations of liberalism in the Middle Ages, when European society was changing in this direction, was not ready for the imported liberal ideas when they arrived in the Meiji period. Even by the


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Taisho ¯ era, much change had to be accomplished before liberal democracy could establish roots in Japan. Nevertheless, the Taisho ¯ period proved an important legacy for the development of liberal democracy in postwar Japan, and, as Sharon Nolte pointed out in Liberalism in Modern Japan, “To a surprising extent, Taisho ¯ reformers anticipated the direction of postwar ¯ period provided society.”121 Nyozekan too believed that the Taisho an important basis for future democracy and that the democratization of Japan under the Allied Occupation “followed a course which the history of the modernization of Japan and of the Japanese themselves would have taken anyway if left to its natural tendency.”122 But Japanese history did not follow a smooth course from the Taisho ¯ period. Before Nyozekan and his countrymen would see democracy fulfilled in Japan, they would have to endure the descent into fascism and war. NOTES 1

2 3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Sharon Nolte, Liberalism in Modern Japan: Ishibashi Tanzan and His Teachers, 1905–1960, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) 169. Sugimura Takeshi, “Jidai to shimbun”, Sekai, no. 103 (July 1954) 171. Tetsuo Najita, Japan: The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Japanese Politics, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) 162–4. Andrew Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) 20, 148. Kenneth B. Pyle, “The Advantages of Followership: German Economics and Japanese Bureaucrats, 1890–1925,” Journal of Japanese Studies, 1:1 (Autumn 1974) 127–32, 142. Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945–1947, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) 51. R.P. Dore and Tsutomi Ouchi, “Rural Origins of Japanese Fascism,” in James William Morley (ed.), Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) 198. Richard J. Smethurst, A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism: The Army and the Rural Community, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) xix–xx. Hasegawa Nyozekan, Nihon fuashizumu hihan, in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969) 278. Tanaka Hiroshi, “Hyoden: Hasegawa Nyozekan: Shakaiha janarisuto e no michi,” Sekai, no. 482 (December 1985) 219; Yamaryo Kenji, “Aru jiyushugi janarisuto: Hasegawa Nyozekan,” in Shiso no kagaku kenkyukai: kyodo kenkyu: tenko, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1959) 319;


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14 15

16 17

18

19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26

27

28 29 30 31

32 33 34


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Matsumoto Sannosuke, Kindai Nihon no seiji to ningen: sono shiso-teki kosaku, (Tokyo: Kobunsha, 1966) 133. de Bary (ed.), Sources of Japanese Tradition, 719. Kaji Ryuichi quoted in Tanaka, “Shakaiha janarisuto e no michi,” 218. Ito Tomihito, “Warerasha soritsu no jidai-teki kaikei,” Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu geppo, vol. 6 (June 1969) 1. Hasegawa Nyozekan, Shimbun, (Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha, 1928) 18. Tanaka Hiroshi, “Hyoden: Hasegawa Nyozekan: Seiji, shakai kakumei to kokusai heiwa o motomete,” Sekai, no. 483 (January 1986) 241. Hasegawa Nyozekan, Nihon fuashizumu hihan, 278. Tanaka Hiroshi, Hasegawa Nyozekan no Shimbunron, Part 2, Shimbun kenkyu, no. 425 (November 1986) 76. Tanaka found that Nyozekan wrote over eighty pieces – books, essays and articles – on the subject of the press, most dealing specifically with the newspaper. Review of Hasegawa Nyozekan’s Shimbunron in Contemporary Japan, XVI: 10–12 (October-December 1947) 492. Tanaka, “Hasegawa Nyozekan no Shimbunron,” Part 2, 77. Review of Shimbunron, 492. Hasegawa, Shimbun, 4–5. Barshay, State and Intellectual, 147–8; Sugimura, “Jidai to shimbun,” 179–82, esp. 171, 173. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Osaka Asahi kara, Warera e,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969) 369. Barshay, State and Intellectual, 147. Nolte, Liberalism in Modern Japan, 24. Sera Masatoshi, et al., Hasegawa Nyozekan: Hito, jidai, shiso to chosaku mokuroku, (Tokyo: Chuo Daigaku, 1985) 61; Tanaka Hiroshi, Hasegawa Nyozekan no janarizumu-kan: Zasshi Warera no hakkan o megutte.” In Tanaka Hiroshi, (ed.), Kindai Nihon ni okeru janarizumu seiji-teki kino, (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobo, 1982) 225. Maruyama Masao, “Nyozekan-san to chi-chi to watakushi,” in Sera Masatoshi, et al., Hasegawa Nyozekan: Hito, jidai, shiso to chosaku mokuroku, (Tokyo: Chuo Daigaku, 1985) 303–305. Tanaka Hiroshi, “Senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” 315. Nolte, Liberalism in Modern Japan, 336. Pyle, “Advantages of Followership,” 131; 42. Tanaka Hiroshi, “Nihon ni okeru riberarizumu no choryu – Kuga Katsunan, Taguchi Ukichi kara Hasegawa Nyozekan e,” Hitotsubashi ron, 97:2 (1987) 164–5. Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei,” 251. Tanaka, “Senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” 314. Tanaka Hiroshi, “Hasegawa Nyozekan no ‘kokka kan’ – Seio kokka genri no juyo to dojidai shiteki kosatsu,” in Nenpo seijigaku: “Nihon ni okeru Seio seiji shiso” shoshu, (March 1975) 176.


80 35

36 37

38

39

40 41 42

43 44 45 46

47 48 49

50 51

52

53

54

55

56

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Hasegawa Nyozekan and Liberalism in Modern Japan These articles were: Hasegawa Manjiro, “Hegeru-ha no jiyu ishi setsu to kokka – kagaku-teki kokka kan ni taisuru Hobuhausu-kyoju hihan o shokai su,” Warera, 2:1 (January 1, 1920) 26–36; Hasegawa Manjiro, “Zettai-kokka setsu ni taisuru shakaigaku-teki hihan: Hobuhausu-kyoju no zettai koku setsu no hihan,” Warera, 2:2 (February 1, 1920) 39–50. Hasegawa Manjiro, “Zettai-kokka setsu” 50. Leonard T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (New York: Holt and Co., no date) 21; 21–45; 40. Hasegawa Nyozekan, The Japanese Character: A Cultural Profile, John Bester, translator, (Tokyo: Kodansha International Ltd., 1965) 29–30, 89–90. Hobhouse, Liberalism, 45; “Hasegawa Nyozekan no shakai shiso,” in Nihon shakai shugi-shi: Taisho demokurashii no shiso, (Tokyo: Hoga shoten, 1963) 97. Tanaka, “Hasegawa Nyozekan no ‘kokka kan’,” 176. Hobhouse, Liberalism, 42–3. See, for example, Hasegawa Nyozekan, Kokka kodo ni okeru sakkaku: Manshu jiken ni okeru hyogen,” Hihan, 2:11 (December 1, 1931) 77–91. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 68. Hasegawa Manjiro, “Hegeru-ha no jiyu setsu to kokka,” 27. Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State, 137. Hasegawa, “Zettai-kokka setsu,” 40, Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State, 137. Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei,” 250. Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State, 137. Hasegawa Nyozekan, Aru kokoro no jijoden, in Shimonaka Kunihiro, (ed.), Sekai kyoyo zenshu, (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1963) 408. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 123. Yamaryo Kenji, “Nyozekan to Supensaa,” Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu geppo, vol. 7 (July, 1970) 8. According to Sharon Nolte in Liberalism in Modern Japan, Machida Chuji, who founded the liberal Toyo keizai shimbun (“Oriental Economic Journal”), was also influenced by Spencer and modeled his journal after Spencer’s. (Nolte, 15). Albert J. Nock, “Introduction,” in Herbert Spencer, Man versus the State, (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1940) vii. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1951) 178. Herbert Spencer, Man versus the State, (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, Printers, 1940) 58–62. Kenneth B. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural Identity, 1885–1895, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969) 39–42, 150–51, 39. Pyle, The New Generation, 151.


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59 60 61

62

63

64

65

66 67 68

69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76

77

78

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80 81


81

In 1909 the circulation of the Osaka Asahi was 30,000, according to Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 38. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 39. Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei,” 248. Quoted from Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Koshitsu kyoiku no shin seishin – Kunshu no kyoiku ni kansuru shiken,” Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, no. 613 (September 1, 1913) 61–73 in Sera, 46. Nyozekan used the word “fueminizumu” as furigana attached to characters reading “joshi hon’I in Gendai shakai hihan” (Senshu, vol. 3, 226) and later used the same furigana with the characters for “joshi shugi” in “Anchi-fueminisuto to shite no Banado Sho,” Kaizo, 12:9 (September 1930) 2–17. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Joshi no yuetsu,” in Shinjitsu was kakuitsuwaru, Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969) 22. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “The Character of Japanese Women,” in Contemporary Japan, VIII:5 (July 1939) 665. Review of Hasegawa Nyozekan, Girls of Japan, in Contemporary Japan, IX:4 (April 1940) 491. Hasegawa, “The Character of Japanese Women,” 665. Nihon shakai-shugi shi, 97–8. Hasegawa Nyozekan, Gendai shakai hihan in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 222–3. Barshay, State and Intellectual, 182. Hasegawa, Gendai shakai hihan, 223. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Shokunin katagi,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 7 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 107; Tanaka, “Shakaiha janarisuto e no michi,” 219–20. Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei” 251. Nihon shakai-shugi shi, 98. Barshay, State and Intellectual, 151. Tanaka, “Hasegawa Nyozekan no janarizumu kan,” 222. Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei,” 243; Barshay, State and Intellectual, 152. Ikeda Hajime, Hasegawa Nyozekan ‘kokka shiso’ no kenkyu, (Tokyo: Yusan shuppan, 1981) 400. Peter Duus, “Liberal Intellectuals and Social Conflict in Taisho ¯ Japan,” in Victor Koschmann and Tetsuo Najita (eds.), Conflict in Modern Japanese History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) 412. Peter Duus, “Liberal Intellectuals and Social Conflict,” 425–6, 426–7, 427. Hasegawa, “Osaka Asahi kara, Warera e,” 347. Hasegawa, “Osaka Asahi kara, Warera e,” 365, 367, 365.


82 82

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89 90 91 92

93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102

103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116

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Hasegawa Nyozekan and Liberalism in Modern Japan Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei,” 247; Hasegawa, “Osaka Asahi kara, Warera e,” 367. Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei,” 247. Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei,” 246, 249, 247. Hasegawa, Aru kokoro no jijoden, 350. Matsumoto Sannosuke, “Taisho¯ chishikijin no shiso-teki tokucho,” in Kindai Nihon seiji shiso, vol. 2, Hashikawa Bunso and Matsumoto Sannosuke (eds.), (Tokyo, 1972) 172. Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei,” 246. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Ware ga gendai seiji ni okeru sekai-teki teiko,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969) 261. Hasegawa, “Osaka Asahi kara, Warera e,” 354, 355, 355. Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei.” Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei,” 255. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Morito Tatsuo kyoju hikka jiken no ronri-teki kaibo,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 409. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Morito Tatsuo kyoju hikka jiken,” 405, 406. Tanaka, “Shakaiha janarisuto e no michi,” 221. Hasegawa Nyozekan, Gendai kokka hihan, in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969) 36. Matsumoto, Kindai Nihon seiji shiso shi, 181. Hasegawa, Gendai kokka hihan, 96, 83. Hasegawa, Gendai kokka hihan, 255–6, 241, 256. Hasegawa, Gendai kokka hihan, 271, 225. Barshay, State and Intellectual, 166. Maruyama, Nyozekan-san to chi-chi to watakushi, 301. Oya Soichi, “Hasegawa Nyozekan no mittsu no kao,” Sandei Mainichi, (November 30, 1969) 155. Barshay, State and Intellectual, 166. Nihon shakai shugi shi, 97–8. Barshay, State and Intellectual, 167. Barshay, State and Intellectual, 167. Hasegawa, Gendai shakai hihan, 14. Hasegawa, Gendai shakai hihan, 14. Matsumoto, Kindai Nihon seiji shiso shi, 182. Matsumoto, Kindai Nihon seiji shiso shi, 182 Hasegawa, Gendai shakai hihan, 21, 22. Hasegawa, Gendai shakai hihan, 22, 46, 22. Matsumoto, Kindai Nihon seiji shiso shi, 182. Hasegawa, Gendai shakai hihan, 116–17. Hasegawa, Gendai shakai hihan, 139. Nihon shakai-shugi shi, 98.


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119 120 121 122


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Hasegawa, Gendai shakai hihan, 275. Tokyo daigaku, “Hasegawa Nyozekan–shi o kakonde: kaiso, hoho, Nihon bunka-ron,” Shimbun kenkyusho kiyo, no. 13 (1965) 78. de Bary (ed.), Sources of Japanese Tradition, 893–4. Hasegawa, Aru kokoro no jijoden, 224. Nolte, Liberalism in Modern Japan, 341. de Bary (ed.), Sources of Japanese Tradition, 891.


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4


I

n a 1932 column in the Yomiuri shimbun, Nyozekan reflected bitterly on the killing of his beloved dog, Tochi, writing, “It befits a fascist age that Tochi, who knew only love and no hatred, should be killed.”1 Bidding farewell to his dog, Nyozekan also abandoned his Taisho ¯ era hopes of seeing the trend toward democracy fulfilled in Japan. Rejecting the Taisho ¯ path toward democracy, Japan in the 1930s instead pursued a path of repression at home and military aggression abroad. As domestic and international tensions heightened, the repressive and aggressive tendencies that lay beneath the great superficial change of Taisho ¯ boiled to the surface. The 1930s were transitional years not only for Japan but for Nyozekan as well. Reflecting on Japan’s crisis, in 1932 Nyozekan published Nihon fuashizumu hihan (Critique of Japanese Fascism). While heavily censored, the book was published nevertheless. In just a few more years, however, the attitudes and opinions Nyozekan presented so frankly in Nihon fuashizumu hihan would no longer be tolerated. This would be made dramatically apparent with Nyozekan’s arrest in 1933. His arrest and the demise of his magazine, Hihan, a year later, made the mid-1930s a turning point for Nyozekan. Although never committing tenko as a liberal, Nyozekan’s ability to pursue his life of criticism was inevitably affected by government repression and the wave of tenko that swept the Japanese intellectual community in 1933. After 1935, Nyozekan shifted his tactics from open critique of the government to an “indirect attack” via national character studies.2 Using this method of criticism, Nyozekan continued his life as a journalist and “critic of civilization” throughout the war years. Yet even this approach began to give way to silence. As the crushing weight of fascism and war bore down on the free expression of dissenting views, the volume of his writing dwindled in the first years of the war. Nyozekan


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found himself truly living out his dictum of “Danjite okonawazu” (“Be firm in not taking action”). In March 1930, Warera, which Mizushima Haruo, the first editor of Kaizo called the “school of Nyozekan,” was published for the last time.3 After ten years in publication, the magazine, which to ensure its own independence relied entirely on subscription money,4 faced insurmountable financial difficulties. To retain a forum for his ideas, in May 1930, Nyozekan merged the magazine with another, Shakai shiso, and called the product Hihan.5 Following a tradition he began with the founding of Warera, he penned an essay to mark the establishment of the new magazine entitled, “Warera kara Hihan e.6 In this essay, which revealed a less patient and angrier attitude than the earlier “Osaka Asahi kara, Warera e,” Nyozekan lamented that in spite of vast superficial change, the foundations of Japanese society had in fact changed very little. While the “mo-bos” and mogas” of Japan’s version of the Jazz Age expressed their free-spirited individualism on the dance floor, political outlets for such expression remained limited. The new age of democracy Nyozekan envisioned during the Taisho ¯ era had not come, despite his efforts to spur it along in the pages of Warera. “Looking at Japanese society in the last ten years from one angle,” Nyozekan wrote, “brings to mind the physiologist’s assertion that the human body is entirely renewed every seven years; looking at it from another angle, one is reminded of the biologist’s assertion that absolutely no change whatsoever can be seen in the body of the ant from the Ice Age to the present.”7 Nyozekan was a biologist: Japanese society had not changed in any fundamental way. Nevertheless, in Hihan, Nyozekan was still searching for a way to change society, and he retained hope that it could indeed be changed. He likened society to an obstinate mule, one that Warera had “continued to kick . . . for twelve years.” Now, Nyozekan wrote in 1930, the effort to foster change in society required “new work, new weaponry, new methods,” and thus, “a new name,” Hihan.8 “Warera kara Hihan e” also betrayed a certain weariness that had crept into Nyozekan’s approach. Yes, he would continue to “kick” society, but “will it move?” he asked. The Nyozekan who inaugurated Hihan was a more mature (he was fifty-five years old) and less idealistic man than the one who began Warera ten years earlier. As Ouchi Hyoe said in his eulogy for Nyozekan in 1969, “He tried to construct an ideal Japan.”9 By 1930, however, that idealism was severely tested. Indeed, there was less to be idealistic about. The trend toward extreme nationalism, with its repression at home and aggression and militarism abroad that Nyozekan had identified in Warera’s opening essay were now, ten years later, becoming more


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pronounced. In the first issue of Hihan he wrote of the “generally reactionary trend in the world today,” and thus while Warera’s battle had been to move society forward Hihan had simply to try to keep society from losing ever more ground to the forces of reaction.10 In this struggle against reaction, Nyozekan critiqued the Japanese government and bureaucracy from the standpoint of liberal democracy, and his primary focus was the ultranationalism he saw develop in the late 1920s and early 1930s.11 As this nationalism grew ever more pernicious, Nyozekan’s approach began to change. He later wrote: “[My] essays critical of the course of Japanese politics shifted of their own accord into a ‘critique of Japanese fascism.’ ”12 Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome sparked prompt interest in fascism among Japanese scholars, but for five years Japanese research into fascism went no further than an investigation of its development in Italy. In 1927, Akasaka Seishichi broke the barrier and published an article entitled, “Fuashizumu to Nihon” (“Fascism and Japan”). A year later, Nyozekan wrote his first piece to focus specifically on fascism in Japan. The article, “Reisei ni shikoshite fuashizumu o keikai seyo” (“A Level-headed Warning about Fascism”), examined the police round-up of communists in March, 1928, and the subsequent dissolution of the Ronoto (Farmer-Labor Party) under the invocation of the Peace Preservation Law. In the article, Nyozekan’s fears that fascism might easily develop in Japan were grimly apparent.13 The subsequent establishment of a new bureau within the Home Ministry invested with controlling the police and for monitoring speech and assembly, and myriad other aspects of the people’s lives, gave heavy weight to Nyozekan’s assessment. Signs of government repression at home were mirrored in events abroad. On July 1, 1930, Nyozekan and Hihan sponsored a roundtable discussion on “Imperialism and Colonial Policy (“Teikokushugi to shokumin seisaku”), anticipating the ultimate outcome of the Manchurian Incident that occurred slightly over a year later.14 Portents of Japan’s ambitions in Manchuria had been apparent to discerning onlookers like Nyozekan for several years. In the spring of 1927, Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi’s “Positive Policy” outlined Japan’s continental interest, emphasizing the country’s stake in Manchuria as separate and distinct from its interests in China itself. The policy, therefore, stressed the need to keep Manchuria outside of Chinese jurisdiction, a status that was threatened by Chiang Kaishek’s recently completed Northern Expedition. To protect Japanese interests in Manchuria, Tanaka sent troops to the Shandong peninsula in the summer of 1927. The Kwantung Army bolstered the


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regime of warlord Zhang Zuolin, endangered by Chiang’s drive to unify China. But staff officers of the Kwantung Army, hoping to find Zhang’s son Zhang Xueliang more amenable to Japanese interests and also wishing to widen hostilities in the area and thereby push Japan’s advantage in Manchuria, conspired to murder the warlord with a bomb in June, 1928. Hostilities did not ensue, however, and within six months Zhang’s son joined the Guomindang in resisting the Japanese. The Tanaka cabinet fell as a result of its handling of the affair, but most important to Japan’s future was the fact that the staff officers who perpetrated the incident went unpunished. Two years later, staff officers undertook a similar attempt to expand Japanese influence in Manchuria, engineering an explosion on the South Manchurian Railway outside of Mukden on September 18, 1931. The Kwantung Army blamed the bombing on the Chinese and moved swiftly to occupy the area. Although the government in Tokyo weakly endeavored to call a halt to the plot, it was incapable of doing so. Unable and unwilling to control its army, the government responded by accepting the Army occupation of Manchuria as a fait accompli. Within months, Japan established the puppet state of Manchukuo. When China took its case to the League of Nations and Japan was censured by the Lytton Commission Report, Japan simply withdrew from the League, taking a fateful step toward international isolation that Nyozekan had warned against in “Osaka Asahi kara, Warera e” in 1919.15 The Manchurian Incident held sinister significance for Nyozekan, who saw in it the culmination of the trend toward fascism in Japan. The Incident forms the pivotal event around which his Nihon fuashizumu hihan revolves.16 According to Nyozekan, in the six months prior to the Incident, conditions in Japan conformed to the systematic fascisization of the country.17 Nyozekan strongly believed that conditions within a nation were directly reflected in its relations with the outside world. A nation that did not respect the will of its own people could never respect the will of the people of another nation.18 Showing his opposition to the Hegelian theory of the metaphysical state (an attitude that had guided his writing during the Taisho ¯ era) Nyozekan decried the contemporary form of Japanese nationalism that exalted the state over the individual and held to his belief that the conquest of other peoples was anathema to the good of the state.19 Writing in Hihan shortly after the Manchurian Incident, Nyozekan traced the history of Japan’s aggressive stance in Asia, noting that signs of Japan’s ambitions long predated the course of events that were unfolding in Manchuria in the early 1930s. He observed that Japan’s aggressive policy toward the rest of Asia had roots that


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reached as far back as Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s attempted subjugation of Korea. The trend became particularly pronounced from the middle of the Meiji period, after which “the Sino-Japanese and the RussoJapanese wars were the outgrowth of our continental policy,” he wrote.20 For Nyozekan, these antecedents to the Manchurian Incident were proof that it was a long time in coming. In November 1932, Nyozekan published Nihon fuashizumu hihan (Critique of Japanese Fascism). Before this book appeared, Hihan had already been banned twice for “disrupting public peace and order.”21 Nihon fuashizumu hihan, which consisted primarily of essays previously published in Hihan, Chuo koron, Kaizo, and Keizai orai, first appeared on November 20, 1932. Nyozekan wrote in the preface to the book that “. . . these days . . . there is no room left for argument,” and indeed, on November 24, the government banned the book from distribution.22 Finally, three weeks later, it was reissued in a heavily censored version, filled with “x”s to block out words and phrases the government found objectionable.23 Unlike the few other books being published on fascism at that time, Nihon fuashizumu hihan was, Nyozekan explained, “more than an abstract discourse on fascism itself . . . [but rather a] comprehension of the concrete manifestations of Japanese political phenomena.” As we have seen, for Nyozekan the concrete manifestations of Japanese fascism lay in the Manchurian Incident and its aftermath. The Manchurian Incident represented, finally, the outbreak of open military aggression. There was no denying, Nyozekan wrote, that “in Manchuria, our country’s systematic aggression” was readily apparent.24 “The action of military power in Manchuria,” he plainly stated, “is fascism.”25 This kind of naked military aggression abroad constituted one of the primary characteristics of fascism26 and for Nyozekan highlighted his belief that international military aggression was absolutely incompatible with domestic liberty. Nyozekan’s identification of fascist trends and the opening shots of war fits well with what Japanese historians now call the “Fifteen Year War.” Within Japan itself, the repercussions of the Manchurian Incident set the stage for the further development of fascism. In 1932, the May Fifteenth Incident signaled the end of the party cabinets whose advent in 1918 held such promise as a sign of expanding democracy. Planning a coup d’état to destroy the political parties and other democratic institutions and thus “restore” direct imperial rule and an intimate relationship between the emperor and the people, ultranationalist elements among young naval officers assassinated Seiyukai Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi and attacked Seiyukai headquarters. Although the coup attempt failed


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to establish the so-called “Sho ¯wa Restoration” and all participants were arrested, the government was lenient in dealing with the conspirators. Replacing Inukai was Saito Makoto, former governorgeneral of Korea (1919–27 and 1929–31). Saito put in place a “cabinet of national unity” with representatives from the military, bureaucracy, and parties, thus ending the practice of party cabinets. In Nihon fuashizumu hihan, Nyozekan once again expressed his dismay over party politics in Japan, writing that the party system had never developed beyond a mere mechanical structure and was incapable of truly serving the people. So for Nyozekan, cooperative government, as displayed in this “revival of cooperative cabinets,” was devastating to parliamentary pluralism and was another primary component in the fascist state.27 How did fascism, marked by military aggression abroad and political repression and “cooperative government” at home, develop in Japan, Nyozekan asked. At the core of Nyozekan’s analysis of Japanese fascism was his view of Japan as a late-developing capitalist country. Nyozekan began Nihon fuashizumu hihan with a short analysis of Italian fascism. Japan, he wrote, closely resembled Italy in that it was “still not sufficiently developed as a capitalist state.” Enlisting a theme he first began ten years earlier in Gendai kokka hihan, Nyozekan contended that because the government’s role in Japan’s capitalist development was writ large, the formation of an independent and oppositional bourgeoisie was impeded. Nyozekan explained that in a country in which capitalism has had a late start, the formation of classes and class influence that could represent the interests of the “small and middle capitalists,” which were the core of bourgeois democracy (burujoa demokurashii), was retarded. The small and middle capitalists were deprived of political influence. In the early throes of democratization in Europe, the institution of parliament was formed, Nyozekan wrote, “to destroy the dictatorship of the aristocracy.”28 In Japan or any late-developing capitalist country, however, the link between monopoly capitalists and the government created an overwhelming force, one which “small and middle landowners and small and middle capitalists” failed to oppose and which overpowered this would-be bourgeois, making way for the development of Japan’s fascist state.29 Under these conditions a properly functioning parliamentary system could never exist. Nyozekan believed that parliamentary development in Japan had stopped short, forming merely the structure of the institution yet lacking the inner workings to make it work. Continuing the denunciation of party politicians in Japan that he began in Gendai kokka hihan, Nyozekan wrote, “professional politicians are merely tools for the struggles of the capitalists.”30


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In Nyozekan’s view, fascism did not preclude the existence of a parliament, it merely required that the parliament not function as a body representing competing interests in society, thus denying the working class any political power. Indeed, Nyozekan described Japan’s fascism as “legal” (koho) or “cold” (korudo) fascism. This kind of fascism, “more self-possessed and gradual” than Mussolini’s fanatical fascism,31 was not established via a violent coup to overthrow the existing authority, but was built within the power structure itself. Party politicians and the bureaucracy gradually overran independent political forces within the country and, Nyozekan found, co-opted various rural political groups making them an integral part of the fascisization of the country.32 The parties, which might have been the mechanism for leading the struggle for political power between the bourgeoisie on the one hand and the aristocracy and bureaucracy on the other, were merely the “engine of the struggle for advantage between one group of capitalists and another.”33 The very elements in society that, with the political parties might have opposed the authority of the government in its collusion with monopoly capital, viz. the small and middle capitalists, failed to do so because they feared the possibility of chaos and disorder. The left provided the only example of opposition, but disapproving of their methods, the small and middle capitalists instead opted for law and order and themselves became part of the fascist movement.34 In the methodical development of “cold” fascism, all was done in the name of national unity. The government handled the conspirators in the Manchurian Incident with leniency, and, unable to control its army in the field, Tokyo went along rather than admit to itself or reveal to others any lack of national unity. While the government prosecuted the conspirators in the May Fifteenth Incident, they were widely regarded as patriots and they also received lenient treatment. Saito’s “cabinet of national unity” brought an end to party cabinets and eliminated even what might have been a loyal opposition. The fanatical nationalism and call for unity that marked Japan’s response to the domestic and international crises of the late 1920s and early 1930s recalled a similar response to the crises of the late nineteenth century. Consciously or unconsciously, Nyozekan recognized a repetition of the pattern that led to Japan’s wars with China and Russia that spanned the turn of the century. In Nihon fuashizumu hihan he warned with chilling accuracy that, “In Japan’s case, the danger of the Manchurian Incident moving toward a second world war and a demand for the general mobilization of the population is clear.”35


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A recurrence of war was possible in a world that ignored its history. In exploring reasons for the genesis of fascism in Japan, Nyozekan maintained that Japan had failed to learn the lessons of World War I. While for the Western democracies World War I was a moral battle to preserve democracy against dictatorship, Japan, Nyozekan said, joined the Allies in the war blindly, lacking any consciousness of the moral issues that motivated their comrades in arms. When the end of the war brought the establishment of the League of Nations, and an attempt to translate the ideal of “selfdetermination” into reality, Japan, Nyozekan believed, remained tied to nationalism, imperialism, and militarism.36 This argument, made originally after the end of World War I, contains the roots of Nyozekan’s belief that it was Japan’s status as a late-developing capitalist nation that contributed to the conditions for fascism. As we have seen, as a result of late-developing capitalism, the Japanese government was able to assume huge power in conjunction with monopoly capitalists. But in addition, because Japan was undergoing capitalist development a century later than the West, it was simply out of step with much of the world. While the West pursued its colonial ambitions in the nineteenth century, Japan fought to avoid the fate that befell China. When, at the end of the century Japan emerged as a nation seeking equality on the world stage, it too sought to expand its territory. Whether it was the engine of monopoly capitalism that drove Japan in its territorial ambitions, as Nyozekan believed, or whether Japan was again simply modeling itself after the Western pattern of imperialism, by the time Japan pursued this approach, the rules had changed. And, by this time, Nyozekan wrote, the world no longer held any virgin land for colonization. As a result, Nyozekan pointed out, Japan battled both China and Russia over Korea, and after these wars, went on to Manchuria to force its rights there.37 Japan engaged in this aggressive military pursuit of territory precisely as the West was phasing out of it. Thus, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Japan’s aggression in Asia went against the grain of the newly-evolved Western (excluding German) ideals of international justice and liberty. As a result, while Japan fought in Asia, the Western world’s hostility provided a perfect rallying point for national unity. Out of step with the West, Japan fought first a spiritual, and, by 1941, an actual, war against the West. Modern Japan was not only out of step with the West, but, in a sense, it was out of step with itself. In the course of modernization, many Japanese felt the country had broken its link to the past. Nyozekan wrote, “Around the time of the Russo-Japanese War, Japan’s brilliant ‘present’ had no connection to the recent past. . .


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tomorrow was isolated from yesterday.”38 The rapidity of change led to an identity crisis in the late nineteenth century,39 and once again, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Japanese were questioning themselves and their role in the world. Out of the “chaos” of Taisho ¯ democracy, many perceived a need for a return to order. The plaintive question was, “Is our country beginning to fall apart, and if so, what can be done about it?”40 The answer, for many, lay in the authoritarianism of fascism. The question of identity was not merely personal, but institutional as well. Japan’s identity as a democratic nation was not secure. This, too, contributed to Japan’s fascisization. “In a country in which general democracy is not fixed,” Nyozekan wrote, “fascism may easily develop.”41 In Nyozekan’s estimation, Japan in the early 1930s was indeed a country in which democracy was not fixed. Japan’s status as a late-developing capitalist country also explains the lack of a clear identity. In trying to catch up in capitalist development Japan broke with its past. But the break was not complete, for without a foundation for the growth of a modern bourgeois democracy, such as characterized the West, Japan harked back to the past, creating a hybrid government and economy that was modern in form, but which at the same time, “retained the remnants of feudal military government.”42 The schizophrenic nature of the hybrid was revealed in the Meiji Constitution. The Constitution recognized representative government, but at the same time it severely limited the authority of the Diet. The emperor’s power outweighed that of the parliament. The Privy Council too, Nyozekan wrote, “was a curio of feudal government [that possesses] more power than the parliament itself.”43 The independence of the military high command, which was not responsible to the Diet, was another peculiarity of the political structure laid out by the Meiji Constitution, and demonstrated the persistence of feudal institutions into the modern age.44 Nyozekan showed how the contradiction between liberalism and authoritarianism – between a democratic future and the feudal past – which characterized Japan’s political institutions and its economic structure was laid in place in the 1880s and surfaced in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The lack of understanding of liberalism that underlay the creation of these institutions emerged with serious consequences for Japan’s turn to fascism. In the 1890s, after Japan’s early Meiji immersion in liberalism, more and more Japanese intellectuals came to view liberalism as a foreign import, a product from the West, and, as such, according to Takayama Chogyu (1871–1902), editor of Taiyo, “totally incompatible with our national polity and national character.” By the late 1880s and


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early 1890s, the era of progressive change that marked the early Meiji period “gave way . . . to an era of narrow-minded, aggressive nationalism.”45 Fukuzawa Yukichi himself, the very model of a modern liberal in the 1870s, retreated from liberalism and embraced militarism after the Sino-Japanese War in 1895.46 (Fukuzawa’s “change of heart” was in fact foreshadowed as early as 1874 when he wrote, for example, that Japan should “emulate the spirit of Western civilization to preserve Japan’s national polity.”47 Liberalism, he hinted even then, should not be prized for its own protection of the individual, but rather in order to strengthen the nation.) Just as international concerns at the turn of the century – the Sino-Japanese War and later the Russo-Japanese War – prompted a retreat from liberalism, the combination of international and domestic tensions in the late 1920s and early 1930s prompted a similar withdrawal. Nyozekan’s view of liberalism was not muddied by misunderstandings like Fukuzawa’s, but he was well aware of these misunderstandings in others, and saw how this contributed to the development of fascism in Japan. In Nyozekan’s analysis then, fascism in Japan grew out of the country’s status as a late-developing capitalist country. As a latecomer to capitalism, following in the footsteps of the industrialized countries and trying to catch up, collusion between government and capital was strong. No bourgeois democracy developed. Parliamentary and party politics failed to truly represent the Japanese people. According to Nyozekan, this was the genesis of “cold” fascism. Also contributing to fascist development in Japan was the absence of a clear national identity. Combined with an incomplete understanding of liberalism, domestic and international tensions created the conditions under which these circumstances could lead to fascism. The repression of dissent by degrees, in keeping with the gradual establishment of “cold” fascism, began with the elimination of radicals, as in the 1928 round-up of communists and labor unionists that Nyozekan wrote about in “Reisei ni shikoshite fuashizumu o keikai suru.” In May 1933, Education Minister Hatoyama Ichiro forced Kyoto University law professor Takigawa Yukitoki to resign his post for alleged leftist sympathies. As he had in the past, Nyozekan used the pages of Hihan to register his protest against the Mombusho’s intrusion on free speech and academic freedom.48 Nyozekan’s arrest in November 1933 demonstrated that the scope of the government’s repression had extended to liberals, even though Nyozekan was ostensibly arrested for communist connections. Early in the morning of November 22, eight days before his


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fifty-eighth birthday, Nyozekan was summoned to appear at the Nakano police station where he was questioned by a detective from the Metropolitan Police Headquarters. One might speculate that Nyozekan faced this situation with his characteristic cool resignation – preparing him for the possibility of an indefinite stay, friends brought him a blanket and some clothing. Nyozekan was released after midnight and allowed to return home although the investigation continued into December.49 The pretext of Nyozekan’s summons to the police station was a two yen contribution he had ostensibly made several months earlier to a Soviet organization for international red aid, MOPR or moppuru.50 Matsumoto Sannosuke writes that Nyozekan was arrested for a contribution to the Japan Communist Party, but reports that Nyozekan actually gave money to his friend, Hososaku Kanemitsu, who gave the money to the JCP.51 Whatever the pretext for his arrest, the authorities targeted Nyozekan for a broad range of activities and associations rather than for any one specific act. As Nyozekan himself later pointed out, because of his line of work, he was a “suspicious character.”52 Two activities in particular must have stood out as red flags, so to speak, to the authorities. One was Nyozekan’s position as chairperson of the Sobieto tomo no kai (Friends of the Soviet Union) which became the Nisso bunka kyokai (Japan-Soviet Cultural Association) at the time Nyozekan assumed the post in September 1931. It is not clear whether the Sobieto tomo no kai was a “front organization” set up by the Comintern, but Nyozekan’s association with this group does not chime with his liberalism. Nyozekan may have had various motives for joining such a group, among them the fact that the Soviet Union was at that time one of the main forces of anti-fascism in the world. Within the next year-and-ahalf, Nyozekan was at the core of a group of intellectuals who formed a variety of anti-fascist and anti-Nazi organizations including the Gakugei jiyu domei (Arts and Sciences Freedom Alliance).53 His participation in the Sobieto tomo no kai not only clashes with his liberalism, but also with his harsh criticism of the Soviet regime. His criticism was not the bitter disappointment of one whose hopes for a new Utopia had been dashed, nor did he accept the basic assumptions of Bolshevism but find its execution lacking. Instead he criticized the dictatorship imposed in the Soviet Union by the Bolshevik leadership, writing, for example, in Gendai kokka hihan in 1922 that “In Russia, after the tsar’s despotism (sensei) has come Lenin’s despotism.”54 Thus, Nyozekan’s association with this group, his “friendship” with the Soviet Union, was not based on admiration for that regime, nor any conviction that Japan should


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somehow emulate the Soviet Union. It did, however, arouse the suspicion of the authorities. Most importantly, it was Nyozekan’s position as chairman of the Yuibutsuron kenkyukai (Society for the Study of Materialism) in the fall of 1932, that made him an object of suspicion to the police and contributed to his arrest. The name clearly suggests a Marxist connection, but the group was, according to Nyozekan, a “free organization” to study materialism and devoted to “independent research and mutual exchange.”55 Maruyama Masao remembered attending a meeting of the Yuiken as a high school student and listening to Nyozekan explain the association’s aims. The Yuiken, Nyozekan said, “Has no connection to any political movement, but is an association entirely [dedicated] to the scholarly study of materialism and academic research.” Nyozekan’s declaration was sincere, and not made merely for the benefit of the police representative attending the meeting who, upon hearing these words, stood up, pounded his sword on the floor and shouted, “The speaker must stop!”56 Asked about the Yuiken in an interview in the 1960s, when an admission of Marxist beliefs would have merely shown that Nyozekan was finely in tune with the intellectual community, he reiterated that the Association’s study of materialism was purely academic and had “no connection [to Marxism].”57 Nevertheless, according to the police, Nyozekan was the “heart of the Yuiken” and for this reason alone, was suspicious.58 By the time of Nyozekan’s arrest, Tanaka Hiroshi argues, the press had been virtually silenced (and had silenced itself) on liberal issues, viewing liberalism as more dangerous than fascism.59 Many liberals were sufficiently distressed by Japan’s situation that they abandoned their liberalism and opted for fascism. In June 1933, Nabeyama Sadachika and Sano Manabu, leaders of the Japan Communist Party issued statements from prison disavowing their adherence to communism and publicly proclaiming their allegiance to the government orthodoxy. This began a wave of similar repudiations of the faith, known as tenko, that had a startling effect not only on radicals, but on the Japanese left in general. Sano and Nabeyama touched off a storm of tenko, dramatically changing the intellectual climate that spread across Japan in the last half of 1933. Tenko, this strange intellectual phenomenon of 1930s Japan, was a turning away from past beliefs, a repudiation, specifically, of communism. In addition to turning away from communism, tenko also signified a public acceptance of the government ideology that promoted ultranationalism, aggressive militarism, and the emperor system. In short, tenko in its strict sense amounted to a solidification of Japanese fascism as former communists cast


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away their beliefs and gave allegiance to their state and emperor and all this stood for. More widely construed, however, tenko could simply mean the active or passive repudiation of any belief at odds with the government orthodoxy. Thus, even liberals, through their action or inaction, might commit tenko by abandoning their former beliefs and taking up with the government. We must analyze Nyozekan’s own response to this dramatic “about face” in the intellectual world, and his reaction to his own arrest. In light of the wave of tenko, that many Japanese intellectuals were engaging in at this time, did Nyozekan too commit tenko? Japanese intellectual historian Yamaryo Kenji believes that Nyozekan did in fact commit tenko, but that it was a gradual process initiated by his arrest in 1933. Yamaryo argues that after 1933 Nyozekan began to turn his back on the principles that had guided him in his life as a critic. Nyozekan’s tenko did not come as a sudden revelation, but was a drawn-out and less dramatic process whereby “little by little [his] principles were buried in a mountain of sand.”60 The end of Hihan in 1934 and Nyozekan’s involvement in the study of the Japanese national character were steps in this process, Yamaryo believes. Tanaka Hiroshi, on the other hand, writes that Nyozekan did not undergo tenko, that his case “does not fit [into the category of] tenko.” Tanaka argues that the new direction Nyozekan took after 1933 “did not constitute a disavowal of his principles but was a way of continuing his criticism prudently and legally.” He even speculates that because of the effectiveness of this new direction “the authorities were stamping their feet with vexation [that they had ever arrested him].”61 Accordingly, we have two conflicting theories. How did Nyozekan respond to the intellectual metamorphosis of mid-1933 and his arrest later that year? We shall see that he did not commit tenko. He stood by his principles, but found new ways to express them. In July 1933, one month after Nabeyama’s and Sano’s startling declarations, Nyozekan published an article in Hihan entitled simply “Tenko.” By this time, Nyozekan had experienced the effects of the censor’s pen in his Nihon fuashizumu hihan and two issues of Hihan had been banned. His essay on tenko was therefore oblique in its approach and criticism. Nyozekan chose to put tenko into an historical context, declaring that “ ‘Tenko’ is not just a craze of the eighth year of Sho ¯wa [1933],” but that “history – especially Japanese history – is the history of ‘tenko’.” He saw tenko as the necessary retreat prior to a leap that ultimately propelled society forward. In Japanese history, he believed, tenko had been a vital historical force. Tenko, Nyozekan wrote, is “like the athlete in the running high


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jump – before the leap comes the [momentary] withdrawal.” Nyozekan cited numerous instances of national tenko that had been decisive in shaping Japanese history. The Buddhist-inspired Taika reforms had been preceded by the reactionary Shinto revival of the Mononobe clan. The Meiji Restoration, too, was preceded by a period of insular xenophobia.62 Each example of national tenko Nyozekan cited showed that in his estimation, Japan’s period of reaction was always manifested as anti-foreignism, a rejection of outside influence: jingoism, which he equated with “jimmu-goism.”63 In 1935, Nyozekan wrote about the tenko that preceded the Meiji Restoration: On the eve of the Restoration of 1868, when a wave of antiforeignism plunged the whole nation into great excitement, those few Japanese with presence of mind kept themselves apart from the general furor and sought to study Western sciences and the world situation. They alone proved able in the years that followed to stand at the helm of the nation in a manner that won for them distinction in upholding the traditional national spirit of twenty centuries’ duration.”64

Japan’s current stage of reaction, or tenko, Nyozekan believed, was the crisis of a capitalism whose anti-foreign military aggression, he hoped, might somehow be the prelude to another leap forward. Nyozekan closed his essay with a question: “. . . will the ‘tenko’ to imperialism prompt a leap forward?”65 Obviously not valuing imperialism for its own sake, Nyozekan put it in the context of world history, viewing it as a possible reaction that would precede the establishment of social democracy in Japan. Western imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resulted in the conflagration of World War I, which in turn opened many areas of the world to an expansion of democracy. Nyozekan had abandoned his hope that Japan’s path to democracy would be smooth – indeed, the path would be rough, but Nyozekan hoped he might be one of “those few Japanese with presence of mind” who could help the country on its way to the establishment of democracy. Like the wave of tenko, Nyozekan’s arrest forced him to reflect on what was happening to him and to his country. On December 12, 1933, about three weeks after his arrest and release, Nyozekan published an essay in the Tokyo nichi-nichi shimbun under the headline, “Suspicions Completely Cleared – Nyozekan Tells His Story.” As Nyozekan’s first public statement after his arrest, his first public reaction to coming face to face not just with the censor, but with


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the government itself, the message is important. Did it signal a repudiation of his beliefs? Nyozekan began the short essay by declaring himself “essentially a law-abiding person.” Indeed, he was, and he believed that criticism of the government, such as he engaged in, should and must be entirely legal. He was arrested as a communist sympathizer, but in the essay he denied connection with the Communist Party.66 As he had never been a member of the JCP, nor embraced communism or Marxism, this can hardly qualify as tenko in the strict sense. Nyozekan was not a student of Marxism, despite his connection to the Yuiken, which had aroused the authorities’ suspicions, and after the war he reported that he had never supported or approved of Marxism. In fact, because he believed that Marxism and liberalism were antithetical,67 any repudiation of Marxism and of the Japan Communist Party was surely not a denial of former beliefs but support for the liberalism that guided his thinking. Though he believed that liberalism and Marxism were antithetical, Nyozekan wrote in the article that “[These days] even opponents of the Communist Party find themselves playing the role of sympathizer.”68 From Nyozekan’s perspective, those who were critical of the government in any way naturally found themselves allied with the communists. Those who defended free speech, for example, found themselves defending the communists’ right to free speech. Although Professor Takigawa was not in fact a communist, this was the role Nyozekan and Hihan had assumed in defending him in the Kyoto University Incident, a role not unlike that of Edward R. Murrow, for example, during the McCarthy era in the United States. Nyozekan also used the article to attack the government for imposing a state of repression on society that was eroding human relations and destroying the community. “What will happen to society as a whole if friends cannot trust their fellows and neighbors are suspicious of one another?” Nyozekan asked. Recall the government’s intrusion into Nyozekan’s private interaction with a friend, when he gave money to Hososaku Kanemitsu, who gave the money to the JCP. That which was private had become public. Nyozekan continued, “The Japanese are still cohesive, but will they continue to have this cohesion? This is a major problem, more fundamental than that of the communist party.”69 The government’s intrusion into private life was threatening society itself. No, these two important 1933 articles did not constitute Nyozekan’s tenko. He was not a communist, despite his affiliations with communist associates and associations and so, in writing these articles, he was not turning against anything he had previously held


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dear. In writing them, he certainly did not repudiate his liberalism, but in fact used the opportunity to once again level criticism against the government. Just as important, Nyozekan never espoused the government ideology. But it was Nyozekan’s turn to character studies after the demise of Hihan that most clearly shows he did not commit tenko but maintained his critical stance against the government. While the wave of tenko in 1933 and his arrest did not foster a tenko of his own, 1933 was perforce a turning point for Nyozekan. His arrest effectively ended his career as editor of his own magazine, a phase of his life that had lasted for fifteen years. A scant three months after his arrest Hihan folded, publishing its last issue in February 1934. The magazine had been facing financial problems for some time.70 Amidst government repression and a dwindling audience for Nyozekan’s message of liberal dissent, the magazine simply could not continue. As the war years approached, Nyozekan, who lost this and other forums for expression, encountered financial difficulty as well.71 Because of his modest bachelor lifestyle, however, his needs were few and this hardship was bearable. It also meant that he never felt he had to toe the line ideologically simply in order to support himself. Now, at age sixty, Nyozekan began a new phase in his life. For the first time in fifteen years Nyozekan was without a journalistic stage that he controlled himself. He continued to publish in the major intellectual journals like Kaizo and Bungei shunju, and he began a column in the Yomiuri shimbun, “Ichi-nichi, ichi-dai,” which lasted through 1940. But repressive conditions and his lack of editorial control meant that Nyozekan lacked his earlier freedom to write frankly about the issues that concerned him. In light of his (and Japan’s) new situation, Nyozekan needed a new approach. The first indication of what this new approach to his critique of Japanese government and society would be was contained in his June 1935 article entitled, “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento” (“A Reexamination of the Japanese Character”).72 With this article, Nyozekan launched his investigation of the Japanese national character. Using the oblique method of criticism he developed in this investigation, Nyozekan maintained his position of dissent against the government and defense of liberalism throughout the difficult war years. A clear connection exists between the criticism in Nyozekan’s character studies and his earlier, more open criticism. His new approach actually continued a line of thought he began in Nihon fuashizumu hihan in 1932. Nyozekan devoted an entire section of that book to an examination of “Japanism” (“Nihon-shugi”).


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“Japanism” had fascinated Nyozekan’s intellectual mentors in the Seikyosha. Unlike the aggressive ultranationalist version of Japanism of the 1930s, however, the Seikyosha had embraced a Japanism that integrated a nationalistic concern for Japanese independence with liberal democratic values.73 In looking at Japanism, its origins and its link to fascism, Nyozekan began to formulate his critical approach of “entering the enemy’s own ring.”74 Japanism, Nyozekan saw, had not changed in thousands of years. It was timeless and could fit into any historical context: hence its “rebirth in twentieth century Japan.” The twentieth century version of Japanism, Nyozekan wrote, “had not advanced much beyond its primitive form,” and preached a narrow, nationalistic vision of the Japanese as descendents of the gods and their country as the “land of the gods.”75 Ten years earlier, Nyozekan argued in Gendai kokka hihan that the state used ideology as a way to legitimatize and reinforce its control over society. In the fascisization of Japan, Nyozekan saw this new, pernicious version of Japanism as a lure to bring the intelligentsia into the government camp, ideologically integrating them into the state and uniting them with the ruling elite.76 Working from this intellectual foundation, Nyozekan’s national character studies proved the most effective way for him to get his message across during the ten years from the mid-1930s to the end of the war; the best way to avoid government censorship while maintaining his beliefs and his drive to write about those beliefs. Through his national character studies, Nyozekan sought to “maintain a mental equilibrium” apart from the “nationalist upheaval.”77 He countered the government’s Japanism and its appeal to a mystical, spiritual, and religious-based ideology of the state with a logical, historical argument about the Japanese national character. In this way, he survived the war years with his principles intact. From 1935 until the end of the war, most of Nyozekan’s criticism of the government was cloaked in his national character studies. But his Yomiuri shimbun column, “Ichi-nichi, ichi-dai,” did give him a weekly outlet in which he occasionally expressed his views on current events. In the fall of 1935, Nyozekan wrote several columns in response to Mussolini’s aggression in October of that year, which, like Japan’s occupation of Manchuria, brought League of Nations sanctions against the aggressor. Shortly before Mussolini’s invasion, Nyozekan wrote a column entitled, “I-E wa tatakau ka?” (“Will Italy and Ethiopia Fight?”). By directing his criticism against Italy and its threat to Ethiopia, Nyozekan criticized Japan for its aggression against Manchuria several years earlier. He warned that Italian aggression in Ethiopia might be the spark to ignite a world war.


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Calling on the League of Nations to curb Italian aggression he wrote, “A world vote is now necessary.” But he feared “a repeat of the world’s great failure of two years ago,” referring to the League’s failure to reverse Japan’s annexation of Manchuria.78 After these columns on the Ethiopian crisis in 1935, however, Nyozekan’s criticism was rarely even this direct. Rather than comment on actual events, Nyozekan chose to pursue his criticism through a more general social commentary. In November 1938, however, he devoted an “Ichi-nichi, ichi-dai” column to a discussion of “kokuminfuku,” the issue of a national uniform that was then being touted. Here, he subtly promoted the value of individualism that lay at the core of his liberal beliefs by questioning the need for such regulation in society. “. . .Why should we change to a national uniform? Why regulate uniformity in what is diverse?” he asked.79 For Nyozekan, who dressed in traditional Japanese style, one’s clothing was a significant expression of individuality. And interestingly enough, in the late 1930s and throughout the war years, Nyozekan seemed to wear Western dress more often, perhaps making a fashion statement of his own to protest against ultranationalism. Robbing people of this form of expression would be to deny them even the most basic building blocks of a liberal society. After Japan’s 1937 invasion of the Chinese mainland, as Japan’s war machine swung into action, Nyozekan’s criticism became more and more enveloped in his character studies. At the same time, he was called upon by the state to join the intellectual front of the war effort. Now, for the first time in his life, Nyozekan found himself thrust into league with the state when he was requested to join the Sho¯wa kenkyukai. The Sho¯wa kenkyukai was the official “brain trust” established by Prime Minister Prince Konoe in 1936 after the February Twenty-sixth Incident. Just when his highly critical book, Nihon-teki seikaku was published in 1938, Nyozekan was asked to joint the Bunka mondai kenkyukai (Cultural Issues Research Association), a sub-group of the Sho¯wa kenkyukai led by philosopher Miki Kiyoshi. The group was invested with the task of formulating a “comprehensive plan for a new Japan” to provide a philosophical foundation for Japan’s “search for a new order” in China and the rest of Asia.80 Although faced with the task of finding a unifying philosophy for Japanese military aggression in Asia, the group was full of members who, like Nyozekan, had questionable political pedigrees from the government’s point of view. As leader, Miki Kiyoshi was a prime example. Closely associated with Marxist philosophy, he was arrested in 1930 as a communist sympathizer. After a wartime stint in Manila as a journalist, he lost his taste for the war effort and


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returned to his study of philosophy. Arrested again in March 1945 and imprisoned for his renewed contact with the left, he died in prison one month after the end of the war. Despite its unorthodox make-up, the group provided the government with a means of integrating the intelligentsia into its general mobilization of the population for war, a need Nyozekan had predicted in Gendai kokka hihan. In 1939, the Bunka mondai kenkyukai produced a report, Nihon no shiso genri (“Principles for a New Japan”), which, by calling for Asian cooperativism under Japanese direction, attempted to legitimize Japanese aggression in China. The “Principles” called for the liberation of Asia from Western imperialism, a return of Asia to the Asians. Japan must be at the center of a new Asia, leading the way in the development of a new East Asian Culture, just as Greece had been the center of the ancient world.81 It is impossible to divine the originators of the ideas contained in the “Principles”: Miki Kiyoshi’s name appears as the sole author. But it was a group effort and Nyozekan’s imprint is evident. This imprint, however, does not damn Nyozekan as being ideologically in tune with the Sho¯wa kenkyukai. If Japan were to become the new cultural center of Asia, the “Principles” reads, it would have to “create a ‘new East Asian culture’ of world significance. . . on the basis of the cooperation of all races in East Asia.”82 Because of the “breadth of [its] heart,” this would not be difficult for Japan. Throughout its history, the country had absorbed and adapted foreign influence. An important and recurring theme in Nyozekan’s Nihon-teki seikaku, which appeared just months before the report, was Japan’s ability to borrow and adapt from foreign cultures in developing it own culture. According to Nyozekan, this showed a Japan whose true nature was open, progressive and tolerant: The welcome with which the Japanese have received the incursion of other races and other beliefs is not paralleled in the world. Over a long history, the Japanese have advanced more as a result of their friendly and progressive character than with the exclusive and conservative character. For this reason, our national character is distinguished by its assimilative tendency, cultivated over a long history, rather than by the exclusionary tendency shown in reaction to certain situations.83

Thus, while it is impossible to determine just whose ideas made it into the report, it seems that Nyozekan, in this “command performance” with the Bunka mondai kenkyukai may have contributed his thinking on the assimilative and adaptive nature of Japan. When he


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brought out this theme in Nihon-teki seikaku, however, Nyozekan stressed not the narrow goal of Japan “extend[ing] its sphere of influence over the Asiatic continent,”84 expressed in the “Principles”, but rather the Japanese ability to live in the community of nations, a Japan that “from prehistoric times. . . has had modern-international relations, that is, peaceful economic exchange.”85 While Nyozekan’s membership in the Bunka mondai kenkyukai was in essence reluctant, his participation in the Kokumin gakujutsu kyokai (Association for National Arts and Sciences) was voluntary. Nyozekan was a founding member of this group, which was established in early 1940 under the direction of Shimanaka Yusaku, president of the liberal Chuo koron, which by the late 1930s was increasingly the object of government disapproval.86 The group numbered among its twenty-six founding members intellectuals from a wide variety of fields including former Yuiken members like philosopher Miki Kiyoshi (also head of the Bunka mondai kenkyukai), journalists Kiyosawa Kiyoshi and Baba Tsunego, and author Shimazaki Toson. Its members also represented a wide variety of political views, from Ryu Shintaro, “an admirer of the Italian theory of fascism,”87 to Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, author of the foreboding wartime diary, Ankoku nikki. About Nyozekan, Kiyosawa later wrote in his diary, “. . . I visited with Hasegawa Nyozekan. [He is a] fine man of great integrity. These kinds of fine men have great difficulty concerning the war.”88 Despite its disparate membership, the Kokumin kagaku kenkyukai seems to have been dominated by “these kinds of fine men.” The aim of the group was to promote cultural research and interchange from a national and international point of view. The group’s “nationalism” was very much in keeping with Nyozekan’s own levelheaded nationalism and that of his early Seikyosha mentors. According to Yamaryo, the “national” (kokumin-teki) viewpoint of the Kokumin gakujutsu kyokai was “above entering the nationalistic conditions of the time [and] expressed an intent to level rational criticism against this.” The group’s internationalist perspective was reflected in its statement of purpose: “The new culture of modern Japan does not aim to construct [itself] in isolation from world culture; therefore on one hand, the association will work to introduce research on the Japanese, who have attained world standards, to foreign nations, and on the other hand, will not forget our esteem for the excellence of Western culture which has helped the Japanese.”89 The group held lectures and published papers on various topics. Nyozekan, for example, in keeping with his immersion in national character studies, delivered a lecture in 1940 on “The


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Culture of Words” (“Hanashi kotoba no bunka”). Although the group managed to continue meeting throughout the war years, it was constantly harassed for its activities by the Army Information Bureau.90 By the time Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and engaged the West in war, Nyozekan’s outlets for expression had become extremely limited. His Yomiuri shimbun column was defunct, and virtually all his publications focused on the national character. And while he maintained an outlet for himself in this way, he also increasingly resorted to silence. In the early 1940s, the volume of his writing dwindled dramatically and, by 1943, his output was barely a quarter of what it had been in the heady days of Taisho ¯ democracy when he wrote to a receptive audience in his own magazine. In 1939, a group of Nyozekan’s friends gave him a refurbished farmhouse in Kamakura in a belated celebration of his sixtieth birthday (he was then sixty-four).91 As government harassment increased and the war approached, Nyozekan immersed himself more and more into his national character studies. Just as his character studies provided him with a strategic retreat from direct criticism, Kamakura provided a symbolic retreat from Tokyo and all it had come to stand for. Though his study of the national character was a retreat, it constituted a tactical retreat. For only in this way was Nyozekan able to level his liberal critique against the government and continue to fight, in his own way, to see democracy fulfilled in Japan. NOTES 1

2

3 4

5

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7

8 9

Sera Masatoshi et al., Hasegawa Nyozekan: hito, jidai, shiso to chosaku mokuroku, (Tokyo: Chuo Daigaku, 1985) 294. Tanaka Hiroshi, “Hyoden: Hasegawa Nyozekan: senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” Sekai, no. 486 (March 1986) 315. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 100. Tanaka Hiroshi, Hasegawa Nyozekan no janarizumu kan, in Tanaka Hiroshi (ed.), Kindai Nihon ni okeru janarizumu no seiji-teki kino, (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobo, 1982) 225. Ikeda Hajime, Hasegawa Nyozekan “kokka shiso” no kenkyu (Tokyo: Yusan shuppan, 1981) 403. The essay actually appeared in the last issue of Warera, 12:2 (March 1, 1930). Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Warera kara Hihan e,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969) 377. Hasegawa, “Warera kara Hihan e,” 377, 378. Tanaka Hiroshi, “Hyoden: Hasegawa Nyozekan: shakaiha janarisuto e no michi,” Sekai, no. 482 (December 1985) 216.


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Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Kaidai no yue,” Hihan, 1:1 (May 1, 1930) 3. Some of Nyozekan’s colleagues at Hihan were Kaji Ryuichi, Matsumoto Joji and Kushida Tamizo. Tanaka Hiroshi, “Hyoden: Hasegawa Nyozekan: Hihan no jidai to Nihon fuashizumu bunseki,” Sekai, no. 485 (February 1986) 317. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Nihon fuashizumu hihan”, in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969) 278. Tanaka, “Hihan no jidai to Nihon fuashizumu bunseki,” 316: Akasaka’s article was published in Gaiko jibo. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 45. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Osaka Asahi kara, Warera e,” Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai) 355. Hasegawa, Nihon fuashizumu hihan, 278, 277–408, passim. Tanaka, Hihan no jidai to Nihon fuashizumu bunseki, 316. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Osaka Asahi kara, Warera e,” 359. Tanaka Hiroshi, “Hyoden: Hasegawa Nyozekan: seiji, shakai kakumei to kokusai heiwa o motomete,” Sekai, no. 483 (January 1986) 256. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Nihon no burujoajii no tairiku seisaku to shimaguni seisaku: Manshu jiken no sokumenteki kaishaku,” Hihan, 2:9 (October 1, 1931) 81. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 102. The two banned issues were December 1931 and May 1932. Hasegawa, Nihon fuashizumu hihan, 278; Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 106. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 106. Hasegawa, Nihon fuashizumu hihan, 278, 343. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Jissen-teki fuassho no momoku jinko ron,” Hihan 3:1 (January 1, 1932) 100. Hasegawa, Nihon fuashizumu hihan, 278. Hasegawa, Nihon fuashizumu hihan, 337, 334. Hasegawa, Nihon fuashizumu hihan, 281, 324. Tanaka Hiroshi, “Hasegawa Nyozekan: ‘chokokka shugi’ to ‘fuashizumu’ ni koshite,” in Komatsu Shigeo and Tanaka Hiroshi (eds.), Nihon kokka shiso, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 1980) 310–11. Hasegawa, Nihon fuashizumu hihan, 337. Hasegawa, Nihon fuashizumu hihan, 325, 348, 279, 290 and passim. Andrew Barshay, The State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) 195. Hasegawa, Nihon fuashizumu hihan, 325. Tanaka, “ ‘Chokokka shugi’ to ‘fuashizumu’ ni koshite,” 310. Hasegawa, Nihon fuashizumu hihan, 338. Tanaka, “Seiji, shakai kakumei,” 258. Hasegawa, “Nihon burujoajii no tairiku seisaku to shimaguni seisaku,” 81–2, 81.


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Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Sekai no rekishi to jibun no rekishi,” Genso, 1:6 (September 1, 1947) 10. Kenneth B. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural Identity, 1885–1895, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969) 3, 189. Peter Duus, “Liberal Intellectuals and Social Conflict in Taisho ¯ Japan,” in Victor Koschmann and Tetsuo Najita (eds.), Conflict in Modern Japanese History, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) 415. Tanaka Hiroshi, “Hasegawa Nyozekan no ‘kokka kan’: Seio kokka genri no juyo to dojidai shiteki kosatsu,” in Nenpo seijigaku: “Nihon ni okeru Seio seiji shiso” shoshu, (March 1975) 197. Hasegawa, Nihon fuashizumu hihan, 316. Hasegawa, Nihon fuashizumu hihan, 316. Royama Seito, “Kaisetsu: Hasegawa Nyozekan-shi no shiso-teki tokucho: sono gendai kokka to seiji no hihan o chushin to shite,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969) 417–18. Pyle, New Generation, 193, 188. Tanaka, “Shakaiha janarisuto e no michi,” 222. Fukuzawa Yukichi, Outline Theory of Civilization, David A. Dilworth and Cameron G. Hurst, translators, (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1973) ix. Maruyama Tetsuo, “Takigawa jiken no koro,” Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu geppo, vol. 4 (March 1970) 4–5. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 110. Yamaryo Kenji, “Aru jiyushugi janarisuto: Hasegawa Nyozekan,” in Shiso no kagaku kenkyukaishu: kyodo kenkyu: tenko, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1959) 325. Matsumoto Sannosuke, “Jidai no hihansha Hasegawa Nyozekan no sekai,” 388; conversation with Dr. Matsumoto Sannosuke, July 30, 1987. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 39. Barshay, State and Intellectual, 204, 282, 189, 204. Hasegawa Nyozekan, Gendai kokka hihan in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969) 128. Hasegawa Nyoekan, “Yuibutsuron kenkyukai no soritsu ni tsuite,” quoted in Yamaryo, “Aru jiyushugi janarisuto,” 330. Maruyama Masao, “Nyozekan-san to chichi to watakushi: Maruyama Masao sensei o kakomu zadankai,” in Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 295. Maruyama was arrested for attending the meeting. He was questioned, mainly about Nyozekan, and soon released. Tokyo Daigaku, “Hasegawa Nyozekan-shi o kakonde,” 78. Yamaryo, “Aru jiyushugi janarisuto,” 326.


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Tanaka, Senchu, sengo o ikinuite, 314. Yamaryo, “Aru jiyushugi janarisuto,” 330. Tanaka, “Hihan no jidai to Nihon fuashizumu bunseki, 325. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Tenko,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969) 331. Hasegawa, “Tenko,” 331–2. Hasegawa, “The Japanese and Foreign Culture,” Contemporary Japan, IV (September 1935) 226–7. Hasegawa, Nihon fuashizumu hihan, 332. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Utagai mattaku hararete – Nyozekan-shi shizuku ni kataru,” Tokyo nichi-nichi shimbun, (December 12, 1933) quoted in Yamaryo, “Aru jiyushugi janarisuto,” 326. Tokyo Daigaku, “Hasegawa Nyozekan-shi o kakonde,” 78. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Utagai mattaku hararete” quoted in Yamaryo, 326. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Utagai mattaku hararete” quoted in Yamaryo, 326. Tanaka, “Hihan no jidai to Nihon fuashizumu bunseki,” 323. Tanaka, “Senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” 310. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento,” Kaizo, 17:6 (June 1, 1935) 2–20. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan, 184. Tanaka, “Senchu, sengo o iknuite,” 315. Tanaka, “Senchu, sengo o iknuite” 384, 376–7. Barshay, State and Intellectual, 171, 201. Hasegawa, “The Japanese and Foreign Culture,” 226. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Ichi-nichi, ichi-dai: I-E wa tatakau ka?” Yomiuri shimbun, (evening edition) September 19, 1935, quoted in Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 115. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Ichi-nichi, ichi-dai: Kokuminfuku?” Yomiuri shimbun, (evening edition) September 18, 1939, quoted in Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 120. William Miles Fletcher, The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 112. William Miles Fletcher, The Search for a New Order, 112. William Miles Fletcher, The Search for a New Order, 112. Hasegawa, Nihon-teki seikaku, in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970). Fletcher, The Search for a New Order, 110. Hasegawa, Nihon-teki seikaku, 65. Yamaryo, “Aru jiyushugi janarisuto,” 332. Barshay, State and Intellectual, 216–17. Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, Ankoku nikki: Sho¯wa junananen, jugatsu kokonotsu


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kara Sho¯wa nijunen, gogatsu itsuka (Tokyo: Hyoronsha, 1980) entry for April 3, 1945, 620. Yamaryo, “Aru jiyushugi janarisuto,” 332. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 125, 123. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 122.


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5

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n May 1945, Allied firebombs demolished Nyozekan’s Tokyo home. A scant three months later, the Soviet Union entered the war, American atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war ended, and Japan was left ruined and devastated. Just as the bombs were intended to destroy the country’s will to fight, the Allied Occupation was directed toward rooting out the aggressive ultranationalism that fueled Japan in its fifteen-year war. But if the way of life that had permeated Japan during those years was to be destroyed, a new one must be created, and the American goals were to democratize and demilitarize the country. Was there a native Japanese foundation that could provide a base for these goals? As he had argued in his national character studies, Nyozekan believed there was. Nyozekan had dedicated his career to promoting the growth of liberalism in Japan. Having remained true to his liberal principles and committed to his course, Nyozekan found that in the postwar years his course had become mainstream. The Japanese people saw Nyozekan’s ideas as a native expression of the postwar order. And, as Andrew Barshay suggests, Nyozekan’s prewar thought might be viewed as the “ ‘prehistory’ of certain postwar trends.”1 In his life and thoughts Nyozekan is an example of the continuity that exists between pre- and postwar Japan, but more importantly, after World War II, Nyozekan sought to make this continuity apparent to his countrymen. Before the war, Nyozekan worked for the expansion of liberalism. During the war his veiled critique of the government was aimed at keeping liberal principles alive. With the war finally over, Nyozekan endeavored to show the Japanese the native roots of the Occupation-directed democratization. It was Nyozekan’s fate that his twilight years, the last quarter of his life, would be spent during a period of great national change. He was seventy years old when the war ended, and, as a leading elder


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in the intellectual world, he was called on to take an active role both in directing the change his country was experiencing, and in commenting on it. Thus, his “retirement years” found him nearly as busy as he had been as a younger man during liberalism’s blossoming in the Taisho ¯ era. The postwar years saw no dramatic new directions in Nyozekan’s thought, rather a further development, in Japan’s changed circumstances, of the liberal ideas and ideals upon which he had built his career. In many ways postwar Japan represented a vindication for Nyozekan. Not only had the country’s experience of fascism come to a disastrous end, but with the fascist government purged, it seemed the liberalism that Japan flirted with in the Taisho ¯ era would be back to stay. Nyozekan was not one to gloat, but a certain satisfaction with the situation was apparent in “Make ni jojiru” (“Taking Advantage of Defeat”), one of his first postwar articles. “There is a phrase that says, ‘Take advantage of victory,’ ” he wrote, “but none that says, ‘Take advantage of defeat.’ But looking at Japan now, I somehow feel there’s a need for this new phrase, ‘Take advantage of defeat.’ ”2 Nyozekan realized that the postwar situation offered the Japanese the opportunity to finally develop the trends toward democracy that were inherent within them.3 The article advised the Japanese to take the opportunity afforded them by the end of the war to gain a proper understanding of liberalism and democracy. “Today’s Japanese should thoroughly but carefully uncork both liberalism and democracy,” he wrote. Taking this a step further, he wrote that in a healthy political system, all sorts of ideas must be allowed to compete and therefore urged the Japanese to learn about communism and socialism as well.4 As an observer of, and as we shall see, a sometime participant in the change that followed Japan’s defeat, Nyozekan continued to pursue a theme he had followed since the beginning of his career: to understand a changing Japan and how it fits together with its past. He also sought to understand Japan’s place in the international community. These questions were as important to Nyozekan and postwar Japan as they had been to his Seikyosha mentors in the Meiji era. With defeat came the Occupation of Japan, an essentially American affair managed primarily by General Douglas MacArthur. To achieve its goals of demilitarization and democratization in Japan, the Occupation instituted far-ranging political, economic, and social reforms. After an abortive Japanese attempt, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) ordered an American rewrite of the constitution. This new 1947 Constitution retained the emperor as a symbol of the state, but invested sovereignty in the


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people. The Diet was reformed and granted prerogatives previously held by the emperor. The cabinet was made responsible to the Diet. The Constitution guaranteed fundamental human rights and as part of this guarantee, women were granted the right to vote. The Constitution also contained the famous Article 9, whereby Japan renounced as a sovereign right the use of force as a means of settling international disputes. In a political atmosphere finally free from the authoritarian contradictions of the Meiji Constitution, political parties of all stripes were allowed and encouraged. Operating on the premise that the collusion between government and monopoly capital had contributed to Japan’s military aggression – echoing Nyozekan’s argument on the development of fascism in Nihon fuashizumu hihan – the Occupation endeavored to dissolve the financial and industrial combines, the zaibatsu, that had dominated the business economy. Introducing democracy into the economy, the Occupation undertook a policy of land reform designed to reduce tenancy and build a class of owner-cultivators. Similarly, through legislation, the Occupation encouraged the growth of an independent labor movement. To effect democratization in society, the Occupation targeted education, reforming it in both form and content. A single-track system modeled on American lines was implemented to replace the elitist multiple-track system put in place during the Meiji period, and numerous universities were established in order to open higher education to more people. The content of education was altered and the militaristic and nationalistic values that had helped fuel the Japanese war machine were replaced by civic values befitting a democracy. The goal was to produce an independent citizenry not, as before, a loyal and subservient subject. Thus, the Occupation began with a vision of a peaceful, democratic Japan, an agrarian Japan that would live quietly and unassumingly with its Asian neighbors. But just two years into the Occupation, with the communists in the ascendant in China and the deterioration in U.S.-Soviet relations, the thrust of the Occupation changed. This “reverse course” signaled by MacArthur’s abrupt about-face in banning a general strike scheduled for February 1947, sought to create a stable Japan that would be a bulwark of American strength in Asia. The Occupation changed its goals and focused on creating an industrially – and to a lesser degree militarily – strong Japan. To this end, many of the more radical reforms of the first years of the Occupation were modified. MacArthur had the strong support of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru in the reverse-course policies. Indeed, Yoshida, who sought a strong and stable Japan, supported many of the more conservative


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Occupation policies and appeared to wield a good deal of power and influence in directing the course of the Occupation in conjunction with the Occupation authorities. By the same token, many of the earlier reforms, including the revised constitution and land reform, were originated by the Japanese themselves, only to be taken up by the Occupation authorities later.5 So, while the Occupation was the catalyst for change, the Japanese themselves in large part determined the direction that change would take. This was a point about which Nyozekan felt strongly, writing in 1952, just as the Occupation was ending, that the American reforms were “directed at the liberalization and democratization of Japan.” Despite this Occupation direction however, he believed that if left alone, “Japan itself and the Japanese people themselves would have followed this route and advanced in this direction naturally.”6 In this light, it is readily apparent why Nyozekan viewed Japan’s defeat and its tutelage under the Allied Occupation as an opportunity of which the Japanese must take advantage. Nyozekan himself certainly took advantage of Japan’s defeat, and ignoring his personal motto, “Be firm in not taking action” (“danjite okonawazu”),7 he spent the first few years after the war’s end in a flurry of activity. Having shied away from any direct connection to the government even during the Taisho ¯ era, when the war ended he uncharacteristically became involved in several governmental activities.8 In March 1946, Nyozekan became an Imperial appointee to serve in the Upper House of the last sitting of the Imperial Diet.9 In this capacity, he would have been involved in the debate over, and ratification of, Japan’s postwar constitution. Although rejected by SCAP, the first draft of the constitution, in fact, was written by Matsumoto Joji, a colleague of Nyozekan’s in the Hihan days. Nyozekan resigned his post in the Diet in March 1947, making way for a new Diet elected to conduct government according to the constitution that would go into effect in May of that year. In February 1946, Nyozekan assumed yet another position that put him in close contact with the government when he accepted a post with the Japan Education Reform Committee.10 Nyozekan was part of the Japanese sub-group of the Committee, which called itself the “Japanese Committee to Cooperate with the U.S. Mission.” To accomplish the “democratization of our education system,” read the report prepared by the group, “change must be broad, deep, and wide.” The Japan Education Reform Committee Report was written by committee and therefore it is impossible to determine the individual origin of the ideas it contains. But the contents of the Report are compatible with ideas Nyozekan had promoted throughout his journalistic career. In harmony with the Occupation’s goals and


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Nyozekan’s own liberal beliefs, the Report stressed the importance of encouraging “the student’s individuality . . . in order to develop a . . . democratic Japanese character.” For Nyozekan, who believed the Japanese were already inherently democratic, this meant simply removing social and political obstacles to the development of that character, something the report also suggested by calling for the “develop[ment] of the student [sic] spontaneous active character.”11 By calling for the unionization of teachers, the Report addressed an issue that had occupied high priority in Nyozekan’s political agenda since the 1920s. The government, advised the Report, “should encourage the movement [viz teachers unions] and moreover should aid in the continued healthy development [sic].” It pointed out the right to organize was “based on the guarantee of the constitution.”12 Japan’s new constitution was promulgated on November 3, 1946. A year later, in commemoration of the first anniversary of its promulgation, the government awarded five citizens with the Order of Cultural Merit. Nyozekan was among these five, which also included Yasuda Shinzaburo, Kihara Hitoshii, Asakura Bunzo, and one woman, Uemura Tsune. Nyozekan was honored with the award, announced the Asahi Shimbun, for his work in furthering democracy in Japan.13 The fact that even he was able to receive the award, Nyozekan remarked in a radio interview, was a sign of the changed political circumstances in postwar Japan.14 But asked to what achievements he attributed his winning the award, he joked that he “received it for achieving this advanced age despite my sickly constitution.”15 (He was seventy-two.) He commented that he could not do much, save write: “Writing, writing on social issues is all I can do.”16 Once again invoking his personal motto of uninvolvement after this flurry of public political activity in the early postwar years, Nyozekan returned to his life of observation and criticism. He spent his “retirement years,” the nearly twenty-five years between Japan’s defeat in 1945 and his death in 1969 much as he had spent the most active years of his career: writing. Writing on social issues in the postwar years, Nyozekan reflected on the Japanese past, present, and future. In his 1932 Nihon fuashizumu hihan Nyozekan wrote about the origins and expression of fascism in Japan. After the war he continued to reflect on this phase of Japan’s modern development and, building on the foundation of his work on the Japanese national character, he now added cultural components to his analysis of Japanese fascism. In his character studies, Nyozekan had always stressed the Japanese ability to borrow aspects of foreign cultures and adapt them to their


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own culture. In the past, this borrowing came from the Chinese continent. “Ancient Japan,” Nyozekan wrote in Nihon-teki seikaku, “inherited its civilization from the Asian mainland. Today, Japan is inheriting Western civilization. Japan has had to create its own civilization from these.”17 Nyozekan’s investigation of the Japanese national character implicitly and explicitly dealt with the question of how the Japanese had faced the issue of borrowing in the twentieth century, especially during the 1930s. In 1951, he published an essay entitled “Doitsugaku kara Igirisugaku e” (“From German Learning to English Learning”). In this essay he continued his examination of what he felt was Japan’s turn to German philosophy in the 1890s, the unfortunate flowering of this philosophy in the 1930s, and the return to English-style thought in the postwar period.18 Nyozekan had attacked German philosophy since the 1920s when he criticized the German concept of the metaphysical state in the pages of Warera.19 According to Nyozekan, the intellectual trends in the postwar period constituted a return to English, or “Anglo-Saxon” thought, because the Japanese national character was naturally in tune with the practical and pragmatic style it represented.20 Observing the Japanese response to the American Occupation and the changes Japan underwent in the postwar period, Nyozekan wrote, “The reason why the American Occupation was no problem to the Japanese was that even in the days of Germanized Japan, the common people had kept following British and American culture.”21 The liberal and democratic character manifested in the “English and American mentality,” Nyozekan believed, had been a part of the mentality of the Japanese “masses” (taishu) since Meiji. Looking back on Japan’s early postwar years in 1968, Nyozekan commented that the Occupation “was in no way forced [on Japan] by America or MacArthur,” but that in light of the English-American mentality of the bulk of the population, “MacArthur flowed with the current and adopted policies in accord with Japan’s structure.”22 Early in 1952, as the Occupation was drawing to a close, Nyozekan published a book, Ushinawareta Nihon: Nihon-teki kyoyo no dento (Lost Japan: The Tradition of Japanese Culture). The book was a review of Japan’s character, culture, and society, and of the many changes the country had experienced in the course of modernization. The Western countries, Nyozekan wrote, constituted the “heart” of modernization, and modernization in the West was an “independent, active . . . organic process.” For Japan (and other non-Western countries), whose entry into the process of modernization began with contact with the West, continuity with the past


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seemed to be completely broken. This is why, Nyozekan wrote, Japan appeared to be the “lost Japan.” In fact, however, no matter how much a society or nation may change, that development is never abrupt, but is always based on something within the history and character of that particular society or nation. In reviewing the myriad changes Japan had undergone since Meiji, and especially in the course of the Occupation, the changes were exactly in keeping with the path the country would have followed on its own. Thus, Nyozekan believed that the phenomenon of modernization contained certain universal elements, and he wrote that “in the countries of the world that have a history of modernization . . . the same development can be seen.”23 In Ushinawareta Nihon, Nyozekan catalogued the important changes that had come to fruition in postwar Japan. The five great reforms, as Nyozekan called them, included “the emancipation of Japanese women (through the right to vote), the encouragement of labor unionization, the liberalization of school education, the prohibition on institutions that entrapped people with terror, and the democratization of the economic structure.” As Occupation “directives” these changes came to Japan from the outside. But as we have seen, Nyozekan believed that given time, these were precisely the changes the Japanese would have arrived at on their own.24 Nyozekan had spent his career promoting exactly this kind of change. He had also devoted a great deal of energy to investigating why and how Japan had been derailed from the track to democracy that it seemed to be proceeding along during the early Taisho ¯ era. In Nihon fuashizumu hihan, Nyozekan had pointed his finger at the unhealthy collusion between government and big business that resulted from Japan’s status as a late-developing capitalist country, as well as the self-serving bureaucracy and the party politicians who were unresponsive to the peoples’ demands. Now, he once again reviewed Japan’s rocky path to democracy and wrote in Ushinawareta Nihon that the push for democracy in Japan came before the country or society could properly support it. “Ideologically and intellectually, freedom and democracy were mere imitations that jumped beyond the level of Japanese history,” he wrote. Nevertheless, he maintained, the process of modernization proceeded, and ultimately absolutism and aggressive ultranationalism were discredited by war. He wrote that “modernization provided for the emergence of the core of the real Japanese nation and people; a Japan that is solid, steadfast, free, and worthy of being called a democratic nation. Besides being the external structure of Japan’s political institutions, these are the fundamental conditions of Japan’s civilization.”25 With that external structure in place,


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Nyozekan was sanguine about the capacity of the Japanese national character to provide the internal machinery of democracy. “So long as Japanese history maintains the same character it has had the last several thousand years,” he wrote, “I am optimistic about the future.”26 As the Occupation drew to a close, the question of what shape their country’s future would take became an important issue for the Japanese. In 1951, Nyozekan participated in a symposium entitled “Nihonjin no susumubeki michi” (“The Path the Japanese Should Take”). Since the Meiji period, Japan had focused on rapid industrial and military development as a way of catapulting itself into the ranks of the advanced nations. But it had done so, Nyozekan argued in Nihon fuashizumu hihan and elsewhere, to the detriment of the human values of liberty and democracy. Now, Nyozekan believed, Japan must abandon its goal of being one of the world’s strongest countries and realize that the path of military power is a thing of the past. Instead, Japan should emulate the lesser (“jakusho”) nations like Switzerland, Holland, and Belgium, and develop itself into a “neutral industrial country,” and one which could raise the standards of living for its people.27 An even more immediate question for the future of Japan, however, was the conclusion of a peace treaty and the restoration of Japan’s independence. The peace treaty and Japan’s future role in the community of nations were inextricably linked issues. In October 1951, Nyozekan was among a number of intellectuals and academics asked by Sekai magazine to comment on the peace treaty for a special issue devoted entirely to a discussion of the peace treaty signed in San Francisco a month earlier. The issue sold out as soon as it hit the stands and five additional issues were published.28 Nyozekan’s contribution was a very brief piece entitled “Amari monku wa ienai” (“No Real Complaints”). Nyozekan, like many Japanese, favored the conclusion of a general peace, rather than a separate peace that would leave the Soviet Union out as a result of U.S. and Soviet disagreements about the nature of the treaty.29 He felt that the Soviets must accept the blame for the failure to achieve a general peace,30 but at the same time believed that some kind of positive interaction was necessary between the capitalist and socialist countries.31 With this in mind, he advocated that “the United States and the Soviet Union . . . work out a compromise, relaxing their nervous tension.”32 As a means for relaxing this “nervous tension,” Nyozekan was a strong supporter of the United Nations. When the San Francisco Peace Treaty was signed, bringing the Occupation to a close and ending Japan’s territorial claims in Korea, Taiwan, the Chinese


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mainland, and elsewhere, the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty was signed as well. This treaty opened the “American military umbrella” over Japan, allowing the stationing of U.S. troops and bases in Japan. Nyozekan believed that Japanese (and indeed global) security could best be provided through the United Nations, whose forces, he felt, should be strengthened “to the extent that no individual nations need their own armed forces.” Japan, he thought, could cooperate in this by “contributing manpower and industrial production.”33 Nyozekan’s support for the United Nations was part of his faith in the future of a world civilization. At the end of his life, Nyozekan, looking back on the aftermath of the war, commented that the vanquished in World War II were spared destruction by the victors because ever since the Taisho ¯ era the world had been developing toward the achievement of global democracy.34 Nyozekan foresaw that as this trend toward democracy grew, the United Nations would become an organization not simply of national governments, but a union of the people of the respective nations.35 Because of his Spencerian background, Nyozekan believed that the modern world was undergoing evolution from nations to societies.36 National political boundaries would ultimately dissolve and “the Nation states of today [would] unite and become mere regions and provinces of that world state,” he wrote of his vision in 1954.37 Nyozekan was well aware that the achievement of a world state was many centuries in the future. But most important in his vision of the future was his feeling that Japan could and would play a role in an integrated global community, whether as a “neutral industrial country” or a “region or province of that world state” in the centuries to come. Remaining true to his Seikyosha roots, however, Nyozekan did not envision a homogeneous world state of cultural uniformity and lost identity. Instead, he wrote, the future held the promise that “in the same way that the more a society advances, the more marked becomes the individuality of its members, so will . . . the peculiar cultures of different countries reach new stages of development.”38 Nyozekan allied himself with the Seikyosha at the start of his career because he believed in a Japan that could be both modern and Japanese. He embraced the modern value of liberalism, while never abandoning the nationalism that tied him to his traditional Japanese roots. Now at the end of his career, Nyozekan remained firmly committed to integrating universalistic values, like liberalism, with the unique identity of the Japanese. He saw a Japan that could henceforth retain its own individuality, its own personality, without sliding back into the narrow isolation it had suffered under


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during the war, but instead functioning as an integral part of the world community. He translated the liberal ideal he had for society – that society would protect the individuality of each of its members – onto a global scale and hoped that in the future the independence and individuality of each state would be protected while still operating together as a part of a whole.39 Nyozekan’s conception of a world state in which the constituent parts would retain their own individual character was a dramatic way of expressing, at the end of his career, values he held in common with liberal intellectuals of the Taisho ¯ era near the beginning of his career. In the push for democracy that characterized the Taisho ¯ era, Nyozekan’s friend and colleague, Oyama Ikuo, for example, had argued in favor of the compatibility between democratic government and Japanese notions of community. Representative democracy, Oyama believed, was more conducive to community than was autocracy, for while democracy created “a sense of common interest,” autocracy drew sharp lines in society that divided ruler and ruled.40 Here was a vision of Japan that saw both its universalistic and unique characteristics, a Japan that was both modern and Japanese. Like most Japanese, Nyozekan’s living conditions at the end of the war were strained. As noted earlier, having lost his Tokyo house to the firebombing raids in the spring of 1945, he took up permanent residence in the Kamakura farmhouse that a group of his friends had given him in 1939. By 1950, Nyozekan was ready to leave the house, which had also suffered the general impact of the war and which a friend characterized as “miserable-looking.”41 Although he looked for some land on which to build a new home for his retirement, in 1953 a group of over 200 of his friends and associates gave him a house in Odawara, a country villa originally owned by Yamagata Aritomo.42 He called the house Hachioso, to mark his upcoming eightieth birthday, and though an Edokko at heart, he loved this house in Odawara above all his earlier homes.43 At a party celebrating the gift of the house, his friend Omori Isamu joked with him that now that he had a house he had better take himself a bride. Nyozekan’s spirited reply to this suggestion reassured Omori of Nyozekan’s youthful vigor despite his advanced years.44 Although Nyozekan never brought a bride to his new home, he received many visitors there, and the house became something of a intellectual salon. Guests included both Japanese and foreigners, often Americans, and the topic of conversation often revolved around Japanese culture and the Japanese character.45 With philosopher Sidney Hook, Nyozekan talked of “Japan’s cultural democracy,” explaining his belief, first discussed in Nihon-teki seikaku, that


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Japan’s culture was a national one, in which the country’s various cultural forms were spread across the general population and not limited to small groups of the elite. Thus, while Japan had not always possessed political democracy, it always possessed cultural democracy.46 This cultural democracy was, according to Nyozekan, a “fortunate factor” in Japan’s ability, after defeat in war, to “reorganiz[e] the nation in the direction of modern history” and to pursue once again the spirit of liberalism that prevailed in the early Meiji period.47 Now Japan’s traditional cultural democracy could provide a foundation for political democracy. Some of the foreign visitors Nyozekan entertained at Hachioso were people he had met during his five-month trip to the U.S. in 1956. Accepting the offer of a Carnegie Foundation sponsored lectureship in Japanese culture from Columbia University in February 1956, at age eighty he traveled to the U.S. for the first (and only) time in his life.48 With his friend, Kaji Shinzo, then a visiting professor at Stanford University, Nyozekan traveled on both the west and east coasts of the U.S. In June, he spent a month in Europe where he went to London, Paris, Geneva, and Rome, revisiting some of the spots he had first seen as a reporter for the Osaka Asahi shimbun in 1910.49 The trip took its toll on Nyozekan, however, and he spent most of 1957 recovering from the strain.50 This was the burden of old age. But old age also had its advantages, enabling Nyozekan to take the long view of the Japanese past. One article which took this sort of long view was his 1959 “Meiji, Taisho¯, Sho¯wa: sandai no seikaku” (“Meiji, Taisho ¯, Sho ¯wa: The Character of Three Eras”). In this article, Nyozekan discussed the direction of Japanese history during its rapid modernization since the Meiji Restoration. Noting the continuities and discontinuities in modern Japanese history, he wrote that even the three eras of modern Japan could be further divided according to their characters. He looked at the development in tandem of two important strains in Japanese history. One of these strains was the Anglo-American spirit that guided the opening years of the Meiji Restoration and continued to wield its influence into the Taisho ¯ era, the “age of the movement toward democracy.” The other was the authoritarian German ideology adopted in the second decade of the Meiji era that led to the imperialistic aggression of the Sho ¯wa period. Interestingly, both of these were borrowed traditions. But Japan, as Nyozekan pointed out many times, in its tradition of borrowing, had the ability to adapt foreign borrowings to make them truly Japanese. As before, Nyozekan remained clear in his own mind that it was the liberal spirit which represented the “traditional character of Japanese


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history,” and which, though a borrowed influence, resonated with the true character of the Japanese.51 The liberal spirit of the early Meiji period, characterized by AngloAmerican culture and civilization, Nyozekan wrote, was national in scope and “extended definitely and substantially into the life [of the people] as a whole.” The Germanization of Japanese culture, on the other hand, was limited to the small but, unfortunately, influential upper echelons in the bureaucratic, academic, and intellectual worlds. Japan’s turn to German ideology ultimately led to its defeat in war.52 Finally defeated in war, Japan was freed to return to the liberal spirit that was in tune with its traditional character. But now, the nation was able to reinforce that traditional liberal character in a concrete way with the formation of democratic government. In making this assessment of Japan’s modern history, Nyozekan relied on the central theme that had guided his thinking and his career: his belief in liberalism and his study of the Japanese national character. The course of modern Japanese history and the establishment of democratic institutions in the postwar period meant that in his lifetime Nyozekan saw come to fruition many of his hopes for a liberal Japan that was able to retain its own national character. Thus, less than three-quarters of a century after the foundation of Nyozekan’s first intellectual family, the Seikyosha, in 1888, the group that sought to foster a Japan that was both modern and Japanese, the nation had achieved that balance between modernity and tradition by establishing a liberal democratic nation that remained true to its traditional roots. Nyozekan’s health began to fail in the mid-1960s. By then in his nineties, Nyozekan had outlived many of his contemporaries, despite a weak constitution that on several occasions throughout his life forced him to spend long months in rest and recuperation.53 Nevertheless, Nyozekan, perhaps driven by his sense of history, hoped to live to be one-hundred years old.54 Early in 1969, however, his health deteriorated and after much urging, he entered Odawara Municipal Hospital in July. He died in his sleep on November 11, 1969, just weeks before his ninety-fourth birthday. He was attended by his niece Yamamoto Kako, who had served as his live-in caretaker in the final years, and several other relatives.55 His funeral was attended by over 200 people, and eulogies were delivered by Minobe Ryokichi, mayor of Tokyo and son of Minobe Tatsukichi, and Nyozekan’s lifelong friend, Ouchi Hyoe.56 “Nyozekan,” Ouchi said in his simple eulogy, “never let go of his firm belief that . . . [from ancient times] . . . the Japanese had been a democratic and peace-loving people.”57 In his life and work, Ouchi said, Nyozekan was truly an original.58


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NOTES 1

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6 7

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Andrew Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) 225. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Make ni jojiru,” Bungei shunju, 23:6 (December 1, 1945) 2. Hasegawa Nyozekan, Ushinawareta Nihon: Nihon-teki kyoyo no dento, (Tokyo: Keiyusha, 1952) 275. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Make ni jojiru,” 3. Peter Duus, The Rise of Modern Japan¸ (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1976) 241. Hasegawa, Ushinawareta Nihon, 275. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Koi fu konan,” Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 7 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 231. Other prewar and wartime associates of Nyozekan’s assumed government posts after the war as well, among them Matsumoto Joji, a former member of Hihan. Matsumoto served as Minister of State in the first postwar cabinet of Shidehara Kijuro (October 1945 – May 1946). Morito Tatsuo, whom Nyozekan and Warera had defended against government censorship in the Morito Incident in 1920 became Minister of Education in the Katayama Tetsu cabinet (March 1948 – October 1948). The Occupation looked for individuals with longstanding (viz., prewar) liberal track records to serve in the various political and bureaucratic posts, so it is not at all surprising that some of Nyozekan’s former colleagues would have been called upon. Sera Masatoshi, Hasegawa Nyozekan: Hito, jidai, shiso to chosaku mokuroku, (Tokyo: Chuo Daigaku, 1985) 134. Tanaka Hiroshi, “Hyoden: Hasegawa Nyozekan: senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” Sekai, no. 486 (March, 1986) 320; Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 134. “JERC [Japanese Education Reform Committee] Report, 27 December, 1946: Part II: Opinion,” National Archives, Suitland, Maryland, folder 17-B, CIES, Educational Division, Administrative files, 1947–1949; Box f5391, pp. 7, 18, 19. JERC Report, 15. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 136; quoting from “Bunka no hi o kazaru: Goshi ni bunka kunsho,” Asahi shimbun, November 2, 1948. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 136; quoting from “Bunka no hi o kazaru: Goshi ni bunka kunsho,” Asahi shimbun, November 3, 1948. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Nyozekan -shiki kenkoho,” Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 7 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 320. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 136; quoting from Tokyo Asahi shimbun, August 21, 1963. Hasegawa Nyozekan, Nihon-teki seikaku, in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 66.


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Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Doistugaku kara Igirisugaku e: Gakumon naiyo no jishusei no tame ni,” Chuo hyoron, 11 (January 20, 1951) 5–19. Hasegawa Manjiro, “Hegeru-ha no jiyu ishi setsu to kokka: tetsugaku-teki kokka kan ni taisuru Hobuhausu kyoju no hihan o shakai suru,” Warera, 2:1 (January 1, 1920) 26–36; “Zettai-kokka setsu ni taisuru shakaigakuteki hihan: Hobuhausu-kyoju no zettai kokka setsu no hihan,” Warera, 2:2 (February 1, 1920) 39–50, esp. 40. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Japan’s Cultural Democracy: A Challenging Interpretation of Japanese History,” Perspective on Japan: Atlantic Monthly Supplement, no. 1 (1955) 77; “Nihon no hyumanizumu,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 308. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “The Nature of Japanese History,” Nihon samazama, (Tokyo: Taiho rinkakuhen, 1962) 3–4. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Meiji no taiwa,” Part One, Sogo janarizumu kenkyu, 5:1 (January 1, 1968) 6. Hasegawa, Ushinawareta Nihon, 2, 3, 275, 2. Hasegawa, Ushinawareta Nihon, 275. Hasegawa, Ushinawareta Nihon, 279, 275. Hasegawa, “The Nature of Japanese History,” 4. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Zadankai: Nihonjin no susumubeki michi,” Kaizo, 32:11 (October 1, 1951) 61. “Views on Peace and Security: A Symposium,” in Contemporary Japan, 1952, 372. Tanaka, “Senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” 323. “Views on Peace and Security,” 376. Tanaka, “Senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” 323. “Views on Peace and Security,” 376. “Views on Peace and Security,” 376. Hasegawa, “Meiji to no taiwa,” 5 Tanaka, “Senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” 323. Tanaka, “Senchu, sengo o ikinuite,” 323. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “A New Cultural Era for Japan in the Womb of Time,” Japan Quarterly, I:1 (October-December, 1954) 95. Hasegawa, “A New Cultural Era,” 94. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Meiji to no taiwa,” Part Two, Sogo janarizumu kenkyu, 5:2 (February 1, 1968) 33. Peter Duus, “Liberal Intellectuals and Social Conflict in Taisho ¯ Japan,” in J. Victor Koschmann and Tetsuo Najita (eds.), Conflict in Modern Japanese History, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) 418–19. Omori Isamu, “Hyaku-sai,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu geppo, vol. 1 (October 1969) 3. Conversation with Tanaka Hiroshi, July 29, 1987; Conversation with Kenneth B. Pyle, June 26, 1991.


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Postwar Japan 43

44 45

46

47 48

49 50 51

52 53

54 55 56

57

58


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Fukuoka Seiichi, Hachioso no ki, Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu geppo, vol. 7 (July, 1970) 1. Omori, “Hyaku-sai,” 5. Among the guests Nyozekan received at Hachioso included Maruyama Masao, Ishibashi Tanzan, Ouchi Hyoe, Kenneth B. Pyle, Morton White and J.D. Goheen. Fukuhama Tatsuo (ed.), Nyozekan Hachioso taidan, (Tokyo: Sogo tosho, 1967) 3. Hasegawa, “Japan’s Cultural Democracy,” 77. Yamamoto Kako, “Oji Hasegawa Manjiro,” in Sera Masatoshi, Hasegawa Nyozekan: Hito, jidai, shiso to chosaku mokuroku, (Tokyo: Chuo daigaku, 1985) 241. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 142. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 142. Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Meiji, Taisho¯, Sho¯wa: sandai no seikaku,” Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu,” vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970) 365. Hasegawa, “Meiji, Taisho¯, Sho¯wa,” 376; 365. Maruyama Kanji died in 1954, Oyama Ikuo in 1955, and Hani Motoko in 1957. Nyozekan delivered eulogies for Maruyama and Hani. Yoshino Sakuzo, Kawakami Hajime and Kushida Tamizo also died well before Nyozekan. Omori Isamu, “Hyaku-sai,” 4. Sera, Hasegawa Nyozekan, 148. Ouchi Hyoe and Minobe Tatsukichi, “Choji,” in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu geppo, vol. 3 (January 1970) 3–5. Ouchi Hyoe, “Choji,” Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu geppo, vol. 3 (January 1970) 3. Tanaka Hiroshi, “Hyoden: Hasegawa Nyozekan: shakaiha janarisuto e no michi,” Sekai, no. 482 (December 1985) 216.


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Conclusion

It might be said, with perhaps a little exaggeration, that a Japanese who is still living and who was born in the early Meiji period has in his own lifetime covered a span which stretched over two or three centuries in Europe. I am, I think, one such Japanese. Hasegawa Nyozekan, 19511

W

hen Hasegawa Nyozekan was born in Tokyo in 1875, that city still retained a strong flavor of Edo, with the grand daimyo residences of Yamanote and the “floating world” of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters. When he died in 1969, Tokyo Tower rose from the center of the city and the facilities of the 1964 Olympic Games dotted the landscape. Just seven years away from feudal government in 1875, by 1969 parliamentary democracy based on liberal principles was firmly established. And yet Nyozekan, who continued to dress in traditional Japanese clothing throughout his life, was in no way out of place as he moved among the hustle and bustle of modern Japan. In his own life, Nyozekan embodied the continuity he believed existed in the history of Japan’s modern century. From early in his career, Nyozekan was convinced that Japan’s transition to democracy was inevitable. From his very first positions with Nihon oyobi Nihonjin and the Osaka Asahi shimbun he devoted himself to helping Japan along the path of this transition. Not until the late 1920s would he realize that fascism, too, would be an inevitable part of this process. But even as the country sank deeper into the quagmire of aggression and isolation, Nyozekan never abandoned his hope for, and belief in, a democratic future for Japan. To deny democracy would have been to deny his own character. And for the Japanese people to deny their democracy, he believed, they too would have to deny their national character. Nyozekan’s liberal education and upbringing in the early years of Meiji, and the liberalism, practicality, and realism that constituted what he called his “English outlook,”2 meant that in the course of his life, he was both a part of, and apart from, the Japan in which he lived. During the early years of his career, writing for Nihon oyobi


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125

Nihonjin in the late Meiji, his liberal outlook placed him among a small but important group of intellectuals who sought to integrate liberal values and institutions in creating a new Japan that would nevertheless retain its unique Japanese character, its kokusui.3 By the Taisho ¯ era, writing for the Osaka Asahi, the country’s premiere liberal newspaper, and later starting his own magazine, Warera, Nyozekan was in the forefront of the group of liberal intellectuals who set the tone for the age, fostering a movement to turn away from autocratic government and toward constitutional, democratic government. As the prospects for liberal change faded in the 1930s, however, Nyozekan found himself apart from the main currents in Japanese society. Writing in Hihan and Nihon fuashizumu hihan, he critiqued Japanese government and society and explored the reasons behind Japan’s slide to fascism. And when swimming against that current became too dangerous, he “treaded water” by engaging in national character studies as a way to criticize the ultranationalist government on its own terms, with its own vocabulary. When the war ended, Nyozekan found himself once again in tune with the general trends of Japanese society. In the postwar period, what Oya Soichi called the “Nyozekan Boom” dramatically demonstrates the continuity between prewar and postwar Japanese history.4 Before the war, Nyozekan represented the important liberal intellectual element in Japan’s development as a modern nation. With the war over, this element once again came to the forefront. Though Nyozekan’s ideas of course developed throughout his life, in many ways he can be regarded as a fixed point in the compass of modern Japanese history. As the nation swerved to the right in the 1930s, off its course, Nyozekan stayed fixed at his point, waiting for the country to align itself once again with the liberal principles he represented. Nyozekan stayed fixed at his point, maintaining his liberal beliefs, because this was his nature. He believed Japan would ultimately align itself with this point because this was the Japanese nature. The Japanese national character, he believed, was inherently liberal and democratic. Nyozekan understood that one of the characteristics of the modern world was the increased pace of change. Thus, he believed that Japan, in its development as a democratic nation, had traversed in less than a century changes that Western Europe had experienced over the course of many centuries.5 It was in part Japan’s ability to adopt and adapt aspects of other cultures, one of the central features of the Japanese national character according to Nyozekan, that enabled it to do so. But this feature of the national character was not without unhappy circumstances. The liberal democracy that


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was worked out over time in the West (though not necessarily gradually or without violence) came to Japan in a series of crises. The crisis of opening to the West was Japan’s first challenge and the Japanese response was to strengthen itself by trying to modernize the country along Western liberal lines. But this could not be done without industrialization and the rapidity of this, too, brought crisis to Japan. Indeed, it was the need to catch up with the West in industrial development after a late start, and the accompanying collusion between government and capital, that led to the crisis of fascism in Japan, according to Nyozekan. Even the ultimate working out of democracy arrived under crisis conditions in Japan. Up against the wall after defeat in war, the Occupation demanded democratization of the Japanese – there was no alternative. Nyozekan believed there was indeed no alternative for Japan except democratization and that this was the path Japan had been heading down since the Meiji Restoration.6 But democracy was Japan’s only alternative he believed, not because the Occupation demanded it but because this was the destiny that the Japanese character had in store for the nation. The Japanese character itself, with or without crisis, ultimately demanded democracy. In comparing Japan’s convulsive course to democracy with that of Western Europe, Nyozekan was recognizing that certain universal principles were at work. In the latter years of his career, Nyozekan believed the world was headed toward becoming a world state, united under one government in which each of the world’s nations would be component states retaining their own unique characteristics. To be thus globally united would require a strong degree of shared values. These values would be the universal values of democracy, where each individual, capable of thought, capable of reason, was in turn capable of contributing to making the decisions of democracy. And yet, in recognizing these universals, Nyozekan was in no way predicting a future of global homogeneity. On the contrary, just as the individual is able to develop most fully under the conditions of democracy, Nyozekan saw a world where difference was valued and treasured. He envisioned a world governed as one, but consisting of many unique entities. In this way, he saw the continuity in modern Japanese history and answered the central question of Japan’s modern century: Yes, Japan can be both modern and Japanese. NOTES 1

Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Japan’s Cultural Democracy: A Challenging Interpretation of Japanese History,” Perspective on Japan: Atlantic Monthly Supplement, no. 1 (1955) 74.


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3

4

5 6


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Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Watakushi no Igirisu-kan,” Arubihon, 1:1 (June 1, 1949) 12. Kenneth B. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural Identity, 1885–1895, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969) 69–71. Oya Soichi, “Hasegawa Nyozekan no mittsu no kao,” Sandei Mainichi, (November 30, 1969). Hasegawa, “Japan’s Cultural Democracy,” 74. Hasegawa Nyozekan, Ushinawareta Nihon: Nihon-teki kyoyo no dento, (Tokyo: Keiyusha, 1952) 275.


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Hasegawa Nyozekan, “Nichijo seikatsu,” Chuo hyoron, vol. 75 (April 20, 1961). ——, Nihon bunmei no seikaku, (Tokyo: Nihon kokusai kyoiku kyokaihen, 1966). —— “Nihon burujoajii no tairiku seisaku to shimaguni seisaku: Manshu jiken no sokumen-teki kaishaku,” Hihan, 2:9 (October 1, 1931). ——, Nihon fuashizumu hihan (1932). Reprinted in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969). ——, “Nihonjin no heiwasei to rakutensei,” Sekai bunka, 1:2 (March 1, 1946). ——, “Nihonjin to shukyo” (1959). Reprinted in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970). ——, Nihon kishutsu, (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobo, 1950). ——, “Nihon no hyumanizumu” (1953). Reprinted in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970). ——, “Nihon shimbun to ‘Kuga-san’ no insho,” Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, vol. 869 (September 1, 1923). ——, “Nihon-teki bunka kankaku no tokucho,” Nihon hyoron, 11:8 (August 1, 1936). ——, Nihon-teki seikaku (1938). Reprinted in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970). ——, “Nihon-teki seikaku no saikento,” Kaizo, 17:6 (June 1, 1935). ——, “Nyozekan shi kenkoho” (1966). Reprinted in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 7 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970). ——, “Osaka Asahi kara Warera e” (1919). Reprinted in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 7 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970). ——, “Ryokokusei: Nihon bunmei no tokucho,” Chuo hyoron, vol. 100 (September 20, 1967). ——, “Sekai no rekishi to jibun no rekishi: Sei-O bunka to watakushi no ayunda michi,” Genso, 1:7 (October 1, 1947). ——, Shimbun, (Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha, 1928). ——, “Shizenbi to jinkobi,” in Nihon bunmei no to go” (1962). Reprinted in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970). ——, “Shokunin katagi” (1924). Reprinted in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 7 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970). ——, “Tasusei to ryokokusei,” in Nihon bunmei no to go (1962). Reprinted in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970). ——, “Tenko” (1933). Reprinted in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969). ——, “Tetsugaki no nai bunmei koku,” in Nihon bunmei no to go (1962). Reprinted in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970).


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Bibliography


135

——, Ushinawareta Nihon: Nihon-teki kyoyo no dento (Tokyo: Keiyusha, 1952). ——, “Ware ga gendai seiji ni okeru sekai-teki teiko” (1920). Reprinted in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969). ——, “Warera kara Hihan e” (1930). Reprinted in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969). ——, “Watakushi ga tetsugaku o kataru,” Riso, vol. 65 (June 1, 1936). ——, “Watakushi no Igirisu-kan,” Arubiyon, 1:1 (June 1, 1949). ——, “Watakushi no joshiki tetsugaku,” (Tokyo: Chuo Daigaku, 1987). ——, et al., “Zadankai: Nihonjin o susumubeki michi,” Kaizo, 32:11 (October 1, 1951). ——, “Zoku Nihon-teki seikaku.” Reprinted in Hasegawa Nyozekan senshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1970). INTERVIEWS

Matsumoto Sannosuke, Professor of Japanese Political Science and Intellectual History, Emeritus, Tokyo University, Tokyo, July, 1987. Kenneth B. Pyle, Professor of Japanese History, University of Washington, Seattle, June, 1991. Tanaka Hiroshi, Professor of Political Science, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, July, 1987.


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Index

Akasaka, Seishichiro, 86 Akutagawa, Ryunosuke, 7 Ando Masazumi, 11 Asakura Bunzo, 113 Baba Tsunego, 23, 103 Barshay, Andrew, 22, 59, 61, 109 Bluestocking, 67 Bunka mondai kenkyukai, 22, 102, 103 Chekov, Antonin, 7 Chiang Kaishek, 86, 87 Chiba Kamekichi, 10, 11, 15 Dahrendorff, Ralf, 70 Darwin, Charles, 65 Dickens, Charles, 8 Engels, Friederich, 8 Fascism, (see also Nihon fuashizumu hihan) 100, 113, 124 Ferri, Enrico, 8 Frazer, James, 12 Fukuzawa Yukichi, 8, 9, 25, 93 Gakugei juyu domei, 94 Gendai kokka hihan, 16,17, 19, 73–7, 94, 100, 102 Gendai shakai hihan, 16, 68, 73–7.

Hani Goro, 19 Hara Kei, 14, 59 Hatoyama Ichiro, 19, 93 Hegel, George, 64, 74, 75 Hihan, 3, 18, 20, 24, 38, 61, 84–8, 93, 96, 98, 99, 112, 125 Hirata Atsutane, 49, 50 Hiratsuka Raicho, 67 Hobbes, 63 Hobhouse, Leonard T., 12, 63–5, 71 Hook, Sidney, 25, 118 Hososaku Kanemitsu, 19, 94, 98 Hume, David, 8 Inukai Tsuyoshi, 59, 88,89 Ishibashi Tanzan, 21, 25, 63, 65 Ishii Tomoyuki, 19 Japan Education Reform Committee, 24, 112,113 Kaji Ryuichi, 60 Katsura Taro, 12, 59 Kawakami Hajime, 13, 15 Kihara Hitoshii, 113 Kokumin gakujutsu kyokai, 23, 103 Konno Takeo, 19 Konoe Fumimaro, 22, 23 Koso Tsuyoshi, 17 Kropotkin, Peter, 7, 8, 16, 72


138

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Kuga Katsunan, 2, 7–10, 35, 37, 63 “Jack,” 26 “Japanism”, 99, 100 Kaji Shinzo, 119 Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, 23, 103 Kokumin no tomo, 35 Kyoto Incident, 19 Kushida Tamizo, 13, 14 Kuwaki Genyoku, 23. Lambroso, Cesare, 8 Locke, John, 63 Lytton Commission, 87 MacArthur, General Douglas A., 110, 111, 114 Machiavelli, 63 Makino Eiichi, 23 Man versus the State (Herbert Spencer) 65, 66 Manchukuo, 87 Manchurian Incident, 19, 34, 60, 61, 87, 88, 90, 100, 101 Maruyama Kanji, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17, 62, 69 Maruyama Masao, 3, 10, 11, 13, 15, 25, 75, 95 Marx, Karl, 8 Masamune Hakucho, 23. Matsumoto Joji, 12, 18, 19, 20, 112 Matsumoto Sannosuke, 19, 71, 74, 94 Maupassant, 8 May Fifteenth Incident (1932), 88, 90 Miki Kiyoshi, 21, 22, 23, 63, 101, 102, 103 Mill, John Stuart, 6, 8, 63, 65 Minobe Ryokichi, 120 Minobe Tatsukichi, 73, 120

Minyusha, 35, 36, 66 Miyake Setsurei, 2, 6, 8, 9, 10, 15, 37, 65, 66 Montesquieu, 63 Morito Tatsuo, 16, 17, 19, 72–3. Motoori Norinaga, 21, 43, 48, 49, 50 Murayama Ryohei, 11, 12, 14, 69 Mussolini, Benito, 86, 100 Nabeyama Sadachika, 95, 96 Nakamura Keiu (Masanao) 6 National Character Studies (See also Nihonteki seikaku), 3, 21, 22, 26, 34–52 passim, 99–104, 109, 113, 114, 118–20, 125 Natsume Soseki, 7, 11 Nichiren, 21 Nihon, 2, 7, 9, 10, 11 Nihon fuashizumu hihan, 3, 18, 19, 34, 38, 84, 87–92, 96, 99, 111, 113, 116, 125 Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, 10, 11, 62, 67, 124 Nihonjin, 3, 6, 10, 36 Nihonteki seikaku (See also National Character Studies), 22, 39, 46, 50, 99, 102, 103, 114, 118 Nishida Kitaro, 23 Nishimura Tenshu, 12 Nisso bunka kyokai (Japan–Soviet Cultural Society), 18, 94 Occupation, 1, 3, 24, 25, 109–112, 114–6 Oka Kunio, 19 Onishi Toshio, 14, 68 Omori Isamu, 118 Osaka Asahi shimbun, 10–16, 38, 58, 60–2, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 87, 124, 125


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Index Osaka Asahi Incident, 69, 73 Ouchi Hyoe, 15, 25, 26, 72, 85, 120 Oya Soichi, 16, 25, 75, 125 Oyama Ikuo, 13–6; 20, 69, 70, 118 Ozaki Yukio, 59 Pyle, Kenneth B., 25, 60 Russell, Bertrand, 45 Russo–Japanese War, 13, 69, 93 Ryu Shintaro, 103 Saito Makoto, 89, 90 San Francisco Peace Treaty, 116 Sano Manabu, 95, 96 Seikyosha, 6, 25, 35, 36, 45, 46, 66, 99, 103, 110, 117, 120 Seiyukai, 59, 88 Shakai shiso, 18 Shiga Shigetaka, 8, 9, 36, 37 Shimanaka Yusaku, 23, 103 Shimazaki Toson, 103 Showa kenkyukai, 22, 101, 102 “Showa Restoration,” 89 Sino–Japanese War, 93 Smiles, Samuel, 6 Smith, Adam, 63 Sobieto tomo no kai, 18, 94 Spencer, Herbert, 8, 17, 63, 65, 66, 70, 76 Spinoza, 8 Suehiro Tetsucho, 8 Sugimura Takeshi, 58, 62 Sugiura Jugo, 6 Taiyo, 92 Takahashi Seiichiro, 23 Takayama Chogyu, 92 Takigawa Yukitoki, 19, 93, 98

139

Tanaka Giichi, 86, 87 Tanaka Hiroshi, 1, 5, 22, 61, 63, 65, 71, 95, 96 Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, 7 Tenko, 20, 95–9 Terauchi Masatake, 2, 13, 14, 59 Thackeray, 8 Tohen Katei, 12 Tokutomi Soho, 7,8,9, 25, 35, 66 Toqueville, 8, 42 Torii Sosen, 11, 12, 13, 69 Toyo keizai shimbun, 63 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 88 Tsuda Sokichi, 23 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 42 Uemura Tsune, 113 United States–Japan Mutual Security Treaty, 117 Warera, 2, 15, 16, 18, 24, 38, 61, 62, 70, 71, 73, 74, 85, 86, 125 White, Morton, 25 Yamagata Aritomo, 118 Yamamoto Kako, 26, 120 Yamamoto Matsunosuke, 7 Yamaryo Kenji, 23, 39, 69, 103 Yasuda Shinzaburo, 113 Yomiuri shimbun, 20 Yoshino Sakuzo, 15 Yoshida Shigeru, 111 Yuibutsuron kenkyukai, (Society for the Study of Materialism) 18, 23, 95, 98, 103 Zola, Emile, 8 Zhang Xueliang, 87 Zhang Zuolin, 60, 87

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