china in the japanese radical gaze, 1945–1955

Modern Asian Studieshttp://journals.cambridge.org/ASS

Additional services for Modern Asian Studies:

Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click here

China in the Japanese Radical Gaze, 1945–1955

CURTIS ANDERSON GAYLE

Modern Asian Studies / Volume 43 / Issue 05 / September 2009, pp 1255 - 1286DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X08003867, Published online: 17 March 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0026749X08003867

How to cite this article:CURTIS ANDERSON GAYLE (2009). China in the Japanese Radical Gaze, 1945–1955. Modern Asian Studies, 43, pp 1255-1286 doi:10.1017/S0026749X08003867

Request Permissions : Click here

Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/ASS, IP address: 157.182.150.22 on 20 Nov 2014

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 20 Nov 2014 IP address: 157.182.150.22

Modern Asian Studies 43, 5 (2009) pp. 1255–1286. C© 2009 Cambridge University Pressdoi:10.1017/S0026749X08003867 First published online 17 March 2009

China in the Japanese Radical Gaze,1945–1955

CURTIS ANDERSON GAYLE

Japan Women’s University, Tama-ku, Kawasaki-shi, JapanEmail: [email protected]

Abstract

Japanese images of China have much to tell us about the way Japan sees itsown modernisation and its place in the international system. Contrary to popularbelief, Japan did not turn unabashedly toward the USA after 1945. During thefirst decade after World War II, a number of important Japanese radical historiansand thinkers decided that modernisation could be accomplished without the helpof the West. Just when many in Japan were looking to America and Europeas exemplars of modernisation, others looked instead to revolutionary Chinaand its past struggles against Japanese colonialism in the construction of a verydifferent historical position from that ordinarily associated with the early post-waryears. Certain Japanese historians, inspired by the push toward decolonisationin Asia, set about writing the history of the present in ways that alignedJapan with modern Chinese history. Even though China had just been liberatedfrom Japanese colonial rule, Japanese Marxists saw their own position—underAmerican imperialism—as historically and politically congruous with China’spast war of resistance against Japan (1937–45). Through campaigns to developa kind of cultural Marxism on the margins of Japanese society, they sought tobring about post-war Japanese ‘national liberation’ from American hegemonyin ways that consciously simulated past Chinese resistance to Imperial Japan.Replacing Japan’s own cultural Marxist traditions from the pre-war era with themore palpable and acceptable example of China, they also hoped a new form ofAsian internationalism could remedy the problem of Japan’s wartime past. Thehistorical irony associated with this discursive twist deferred to future generationsthe problem of how the Left∗ would come to terms with the past.

China and Japanese Modernization

Since the first pangs of modern consciousness in Japan, Chinahas served as a prism through which various manifestations and

∗ The term ‘Left’ refers primarily to Marxist-informed positions associated withvarious streams of both communist and socialist thought and politics. Within thecontext of the early post-war years, this paper looks at one specific group of historianswhose views were considered to be examples of radical history and politics.

1255

http://journals.cambridge.org


1256 G A Y L E C U R T I S A N D E R S O N

permutations in its self-image have come to the surface. At timesadulated, and at times admonished by various segments of Japanesesociety, China in the Japanese gaze has reflected ‘events’ taking placewithin Japan and in Japan’s larger relationship to international society.In this important sense, China has functioned less as an elementof similitude and far more as a perceived moment of historical andcultural difference to which some have aspired and others averred.Looking back at Japan’s modern encounters with the West, it alsoseems that China has functioned as a kind of weathervane for thepassions, fears and desires of intellectuals from a spectrum of differentpositions and ideologies. Just as modernization and globalization havenecessitated the creation and popularization of national identity,1 sohave they also required the creation of Others against which thesevocabularies of cultural identity and history can be located. Neitherthis sense of the modern nation nor the concomitant sense of its Othershave, however, been inevitable or transparent ‘things’ in themselves.2

Japanese images and representations of China, whatever theirflavour or function, have often been wrapped in layered tones ofhistorical complexity. During much of the Edo period (1603–1868),the existence of imperial China affirmed the ontological integrity ofa Sino-centric world order.3 Like a huge sun that burns the eyes iflooked at too closely, China was for many influential minds in EdoJapan a sprawling empire to be kept at a safe distance. Even beforethe arrival of Commodore Perry’s Black Ships in 1853, from the earlynineteenth-century the Mito School (or School of ‘National Learning’)had begun to assert the foreignness of Confucianism in order to makeJapan the new centre of an early modern Asia. Thus, even thoughthey did utilise Confucian themes of familial loyalty ensconced withinnativised versions of cultural essence and spiritual authenticity,4 MitoSchool scholars such as Sato Nobuhiro (1769–1850) sought to reverse

1 The view of nationalism as a process oriented toward modernization and themaking of national ideology can be found in John Breuilly, ‘The State and Nationalism’,in Monstserrat Guibernau and John Hutchinson (eds.), Understanding Nationalism(London: Polity Press: 2001), pp. 32–52.

2 These aspects are covered in Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen, The Myth ofContinents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press: 1997).See especially Chapter 1.

3 A historical overview of Japanese views towards China can be found in AndoHikotaro, Nihonjin no Chugokukan (Tokyo: Azekura Shobo: 1975).

4 Examples of this view can be found in Harry Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen:Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago and London: University of ChicagoPress: 1988).



C H I N A I N T H E J A P A N E S E R A D I C A L G A Z E , 1 9 4 5 – 1 9 5 5 1257

the presumed cultural and historical supremacy of China so thatJapan might gradually reconstruct its position in East Asia.5 Afterthe Opium War of 1842, and China’s series of humiliating lossesto England, previous Sino-centric worldviews in Japan became moresubject to widespread intellectual and cultural controversy, ridiculeand repudiation. From the early Meiji period (1868–1912) and thework of the ‘enlightenment thinker’, Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901),to various strains of pan-Asianism after World War I, the imaginedrole of China by Japan was one that gradually helped to certifyJapan’s claim to political superiority in Asia and its growing culturalambivalence towards Europe.6

Some of this cultural ambivalence has also existed towards Chinain much of the twentieth-century. Even though Fukuzawa, and morecontemporary thinkers from all walks of Japanese intellectual life,have claimed to understand the historical and cultural significanceof China in the context of Japanese modernity, there has neverbeen a consensus of any kind. Thus, while in the early stages ofJapanese modernity the language of race, colonialism and survivalof the fittest characterized modes of thinking about China, debatesin contemporary Japan focus on whether it is important to align withthe old empire (America), the emerging one (China), or whether amore inclusive regional Asian economic and political configurationwould be advantageous. One common element of recent debates hasbeen the belief that China has finally ‘awakened’ and that Japanmust, in one way or another, come to terms with its past conquestand exploitation of China in order to complete the task of historicalreconciliation.7 It may thus come as a historical surprise to somethat many Japanese historians, intellectuals, students, and cultural

5 Christopher Spilzman, ‘Between Pan-Asianism and Nationalism: MitsukawaKametaro and his campaign to reform Japan and liberate Asia’, in Sven Saaler and J.Victor Koschmann (eds.), Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: colonialism, regionalismand borders (London and New York: Routledge: 2007), p. 98.

6 For more on Japanese pan-Asianism in the interwar period, see Sven Saaler and J.Victor Koschmann (eds.), Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: colonialism, regionalismand borders. For more on Fukuzawa and China, see for instance Sushila Narsimhan,Japanese Perceptions of China in the Nineteenth Century: Influence of Fukuzawa Yukichi (NewDelhi: Phoenix Publishing House: 1999).

7 This argument is relevant not only to China but also to the Korean Peninsula.The task of historical reconciliation is complex and by no means complete. In fact,social and political enmity over the past and present remains an obstacle to this kindof reconciliation, in spite of the spread of Japanese popular culture in East Asia andthe presence of ‘things’ Japanese among the youth cultures of China and South Korea,not to mention Southeast Asia.




circles in early post-war Japan saw China at the apex of its prestigeand political influence at the very moment Japan began to expandits industrial capital as an engine of post-war export-led growth.This early post-war view towards China can tell us about images ofJapan’s own past, present and future, as well as how some saw apotential renaissance in Asia that did not depend upon the West, norupon a Hegelian view of world history with Europe, America, or evenJapan, as its epicentre.8 Just when national defeat in World War IIwas being transformed into a second chance at modernization and aplace in the modern capitalist world, certain Japanese historians andintellectuals saw in China the possibility of a path that had consistentlyeluded Japanese modernity in the Meiji, Taisho and early Showa years.Immediately after the war, an influential group of Marxist historiansand intellectuals began to hold up China as a kind of mirror fromwhich to gaze upon Japan’s historical scars and imperfections and,moreover, begin the process of [re]sculpting Japanese modernity andits place in Asian history in ways that diverged from more popularnarratives of reintegration into an American-led world order.

This paper takes a critical look at how the radical Left in Japanviewed China in transition after the war examines the historical andpolitical ironies associated with attempts to narrate modern Japanesehistory as a moment of post-colonial liberation. It does not, however,take on the much broader issue of differences between China andJapan in terms of the historical and social role of Marxism in thetwentieth-century.9 Although the radical historians discussed belowdid have an important voice in both the pre-war and early post-wareras, the social role and political influence of Marxism was quitedifferent in China to that in Japan. The immediate years after WorldWar II were, however, a time of survival and idealism rather thanof reflection. In spite of the decline of Marxist approaches in Japanafter the 1950s, the first ten years or so after the war were a timewhen anything seemed possible in an Asia that was beginning its ownmoment of decolonisation and finding its own voice.

This paper examines the ways in which a number of young Japanesehistorians and intellectuals saw China as the elixir to all that seemed

8 Yun Kon-cha, Nihon Kokuminron: kindai ni Nihon no identiti (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo:1997), Chapter 4.

9 A noteworthy example of a comparative look at Chinese and Japanese Marxismin the twentieth-century can be found in Germaine Hoston, The State, Identity, and theNational Question in China and Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1994).




to be ailing early post-war Japan. It argues that this phenomenonwas far more than the mere Japanese idealization of Mao Zedong’scharismatic powers of mass persuasion or mere rapture over theestablishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Instead,their views towards China brought to the surface raw frustrationsover what was taking place after the war in the name of Japanesedemocracy and modernity— both undeniably influenced by the UnitedStates. In contrast to others who saw it necessary to accept the logicof Asia as being on the ‘periphery’ of world history and modernity,10

those looking to China saw the possibility of reconfiguring the culturaland historical topography of Asia. They envisioned a new relationshipbetween Asia and modernity that could avoid the pitfalls of pre-war Japanese ultra-nationalism, Japan-centric pan-Asianism andimperialism. During an era in which Japan had just lost its own Asianempire and had been thrust into the project of refashioning modernitybased upon America and Europe as models, certain historians (and thecultural movements they organized) began to challenge this vision ofmodernity with their own historical interpretations of where Japanstood on the world stage and within East Asia.

Colonizing Japanese history in a decolonizing Asia

Although Japan has showed a resistance to imperialism, many agreethat China and Japan have shared an intertwined, if not similar,cultural heritage over the centuries which still overlaps in certainmodern traditions. After World War II Marxist historians in Japanfocussed on common cultural and historical traditions between Japanand China because they felt the modern struggle of Asian nations,including Japan, should be one of resisting the global integration ofcultures, economies and political systems at the hands of larger forcessuch as empires. Although at first glance it might seem that early post-war Chinese and Japanese history was heading in two very differentdirections, it was equally true that Japanese Marxist historians—looking out into the world at the formative stages of the Cold Warera—saw both nations as having common experiences in dealing with

10 The terminology used here is most notably associated with ImmanuelWallerstein. See Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein (New York:The New Press: 2000), pp. 71–105.




this uncomfortable phenomenon of forced integration and subjugationat the behest of more powerful historical forces.11

Before digging into the specifics of how and why certain Marxists sawsuch similarities and intertwined historical fates, it is first necessary topoint out that Marxism in much of the twentieth-century representedan important set of principles that had much to say about the everydayconditions of ordinary people in seemingly disparate regions of theworld. In a very crucial sense, Marxism has been infinitely more thana cold, materialist creed touting the primacy of economic conditionsover culture, identity, or memory. In their attempts to interpret andappropriate cultural traditions for very modern causes and objectives,certain thinkers and movements in China and Japan realised thepractical value of Marxism in working out issues related to thedevelopment of the ‘nation-state’. This began not after World War II,but in the early decades of the twentieth-century where, as GermaineHoston shows, indigenous traditions of revolutionary activity andthought began to emerge in both China and in Japan.12 These trendsparalleled, and were influenced by, larger movements in internationalMarxism such as The Third International (the international Marxistplatform organized by Moscow in 1919) which declared the worldwidestruggle against imperialism to be a central issue in the aftermath ofWorld War I.13 Marxist resistance to capitalism began more and moreto associate itself with the formation of movements that declared thetime ripe for national liberation and independence.

From the end of World War I and the beginning of the moderndecolonisation movement on the global stage, Marxism sought toadapt itself to social and cultural forms of resistance whose objectivewas achieving the independence of peoples (or nations), from NorthAfrica to the Middle East, Southeast Asia to East Asia, as well asEurope and the USA.14 As Michael Denning demonstrates, fromthe early 1920s various kinds of ‘cultural fronts’ (taking the form

11 The onset of the Cold War had an important impact on many Japanese Marxists,and others, during the late 1940s and early 1950s. See for example Curtis AndersonGayle, Marxist History and Postwar Japanese Nationalism (London: Routledge Curzon:2003), Chapter 4.

12 See Germaine Hoston, The State, Identity, and the National Question in China andJapan (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1994), especially chapters 6 and 7.

13 See for instance Michael Forman, Nationalism and the International Labor Movement:the Idea of the Nation in Socialist and Anarchist Theory (University Park, Pennsylvania:Pennsylvania State University Press: 1998).

14 Prasenjit Duara (ed.) Decolonization: perspectives from now and then (London and NewYork: Routledge: 2003).




of ‘proletarian literary clubs, workers theatres, camera clubs, dancetroops, choruses, and composers’ collectives’) emerged, not only inEast Asia but also in places like Eastern Europe and the UnitedStates of America.15 Dennis Dworkin likewise points out that, inpost World War II Britain, ‘cultural Marxism’ sought to developthe ‘autonomy of culture in social life’ through various ideas andcultural movements that departed from materialist readings ofMarxist ideas.16 These somewhat similar approaches were linkedby their common resistance to fascism, imperialism and theirdesire for a kind of national autonomy (or ‘national-popular’17)based on the primacy of the working-classes.18 Similarly, in theearly twentieth-century in China and Japan, Marxian-led culturalmovements organised by workers, intellectuals, artists and historiansbegan to take root.19 Their common object of consternation was theJapanese economic, political and military elite, who were not onlycreating a fascist regime at home, but who were also colonising China,Korea and Southeast Asia. Not only were various kinds of culturalfronts/proletarian cultural movements beginning to take hold in bothChina and Japan, but their growth was in many ways also a mutuallycooperative and trans-historical enterprise that sought out commonthemes, representations, and objectives.20 Indeed, the development ofproletarian cultural ideas and movements, or ‘fronts’, was something

15 See for example Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (London and New York:Verso: 1997), p. 64.

16 Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain (Durham and London: DukeUniversity Press: 1997), p. 4.

17 This term can be found in Bill Schwarz, ‘“The People” in History: the CommunistParty Historians’ Group, 1946–1956’, in Richard Johnson et. al. (eds.), Making Histories:Studies in History writing and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press:1982), pp. 44–95.

18 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (London and New York: Verso: 1997), p. 64.19 A general introduction to the concept of proletarian culture can be found

in David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (eds.), Antonio Gramsci: selections fromcultural writings (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press), 1985. See section I onProletarian Culture. The emergence of proletarian cultural ideas in Taisho era Japanhas recently been discussed in Curtis Anderson Gayle, ‘Intellectuals and the Dawningof “Proletarian Culture” in Japan, 1912–25’, paper presented at ‘Proletarian Cultureand Resistance in Pre-war East Asia’, International Workshop held on November 3,2006 at Leiden University, The Netherlands.

20 The topic of proletarian cultural resistance in pre-war East Asia has beenenjoying a revival of late. See the Fall 2006 issue of Positions: east asia cultures critique,Vol. 14, No. 2 (2006), entitled ‘Proletarian Arts in East Asia; quests for national,gender, and class justice’.




that took place in a mutually interactive way in pre-war China, Japanand Korea.

How could this have had any bearing upon early post-war Japan,which had just been the largest coloniser of Asia, including China?Modern Japanese and Chinese history existed within the unequalterms of colonizer and colonized, rather than on an equal planeof shared cultural resistance to historical forces and powers thathad overwhelmed them. How could themes of ‘national liberation’,common to cultural fronts in China and in pre-war Japan, have had anymutual relevance after 1945? From the summer of 1947, progressiveJapanese voices of many persuasions began to see a ‘Reverse Course’in the American Occupation policy as a harbinger of the return tofascism, rather than as the fulfilment of the original post-war promiseof democracy.21 There were a number of well-founded reasons tosupport such views, none more demonstrative than the rehabilitationof war criminals, including the architects of Japan’s wartime industrialpolicy in Manchuria, Kishi Nobusuke (1896–1987), who served asPrime Minister of Japan during the late 1950s. Kishi and otherwartime figures in the Japanese empire were basically relieved of anyofficial responsibility for their past actions by the Occupation, in whatwas called the ‘Reverse Course’. From about 1947 the OccupationAuthority, led by the United States of America, sought to enlist Japanin the larger regional and global effort to ‘contain’ Soviet communism,a policy first initiated by US President Truman in 1946.22 The objectiveof this policy shift was to develop Japan as an economic showcase forthe emerging American-led world order and, more finitely, to makeJapan a lynchpin in the effort to stave off communism in East Asia.Although recent studies have argued persuasively that in some specificareas, like education,23 it was actually the Japanese leadership ratherthan the Occupation that pushed for more conservative policies. Itis difficult to deny that the Occupation moved further away fromsocial reform and more towards social control and repression by the

21 See for instance Oguma Eiji, Minshu to Aikoku: sengo Nihon no nashonarizumu tokokyosei (Tokyo: Shincohsha: 2002). See also Yoshida Yutaka, Sengo Kaikaku to GyakuKosu (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Hirobunkan: 2004), pp. 64–75.

22 For the historical and regional context to Truman’s early Cold War policies inJapan see Robert M. Blum, Drawing the Line: The Origin of the American Containment Policyin East Asia (New York: Norton: 1982).

23 Hans Martin Kramer, ‘Just Who Reversed the Course? The Red Purge in HigherEducation during the Occupation of Japan’, Social Science Japan Journal, Vol. 8 No. 1

(2005), pp. 1–18.




summer of 1947, resulting in mass public demonstrations and strikes.Occupation crackdowns on a labourer’s right to strike, on Left-leaningmedia, public employees, as well as on the Japan Socialist Party andJapan Communist Party, infuriated those who had just several yearsearlier heralded the Occupation as the ‘liberation of Japan’ fromJapan’s own feudal and violent past.24

Young, visionary Marxist historians, such as Ishimoda Sho (1912–86), Inoue Kiyoshi (1913–2001), Matsumoto Shinpachiro (b. 1913),and Uehara Senroku (1899–1975), believed by about 1950 thatthis state of affairs constituted the virtual ‘colonization’ of Japan toAmerican imperialism.25 As a result, they began to organize whatmight be called a cultural front—whose centrepiece was history-writing by ordinary people—as a social and political means to ‘liberate’the Japanese working-class from a position of historical and politicalsubordination to the United States. If Marxist historians could presentJapan as the subject of Western imperialism in the same way Chinahad presented itself as the subject of Japanese wartime subjugation,they could begin to narrate and depict historical trajectories for Japanthat merged with those of China, and Asia more generally. Thismeant Japan was to be historically placed and politically positionedas a victim of Asian colonization, rather than as a colonizer of anAsia which had, in reality, just been released from Japanese colonialrule. While Marxists were acutely aware of Japan’s past and itsimperialism, much Marxist history from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s centred on how the Japanese nation (minzoku) was the victimof American imperialism and how, consequently, it was necessary tobegin a formal struggle for ‘national independence’ (minzoku kaiho).26

Japanese Marxists, viscerally aware of what Japan had done in times

24 Among those who at first heralded the Occupation as a form of liberation wasNosaka Sanzo. See Nosaka Sanzo, Nihon Minshuka no Tame ni (Tokyo: Jinminsha: 1948),pp. 76–83.

25 One of the best places to look for evidence of this mindset is Ishimoda Sho,Zoku: Rekishi to Minzoku no Hakken (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai: 1953).The background of Ishimoda and his colleagues was rather diverse: Ishimoda Shograduated from Tokyo University and specialised in pre-modern Japanese history.Inoue Kiyoshi was a Marxian historian central to the People’s History Movementand the historiographical inclusion of women during this period. Trained at TokyoUniversity, Inoue specialised in modern Japanese political history and later taughtat Kyoto University. Uehara Senroku was an influential historian and thinker withinthe People’s History Movement and a former Chancellor of Hitotsubashi University.Matsumoto Shinpachiro, heralding from Ehime, was a historian of pre-modern Japan.

26 Examples of this abound. See Bando Hiroshi (ed.), Minzoku no Mondai (Tokyo:Azekura Shobo: 1976).




past to China and Asia, began writing histories that portrayed theJapanese working-class and other marginalized voices as a historicaland political subaltern, co-axial to the larger stream of Asian peoplesseeking to take charge of their own destinies.27

Behind the notion of national independence lay the deeper issueof American Occupation and the implied contrast between Mao’sbeneficial policies and the more baleful ones of Westerners. Whileit is difficult to deny that the USA was (and still is) in some importantways neo-imperial, the question of whether the Occupation was themoral equivalent of pre-war fascism is far more complex. Under theOccupation, economic, social and political reforms did have an affect inmany areas, including the right of women to vote and the more generalfreeing up of labour unions and the Left to make their voices heard.This was perhaps why they saw interpreted crackdowns on unions andstrikes as a virtual return to the days of tyranny and fascism. Theearly days of ‘liberation’ at the hands of the Americans were in somegenuine ways undermined and betrayed by Cold War policies thataffected the Left and did speak to the recognition that both Americaand the West could no longer hold on to their predominant stature inAsia.

In this regard, the timing of the Marxist turn in historical narrativewas well-placed. It occurred within the larger context of the ‘tectonic’move to find a new ‘current history’ of Asia that crystallized in the1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia.28 In 1947, historians suchas Ishimoda had taken a great interest in accounts of how India wonindependence, in particular, Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India(a historical account of India before British rule right through toindependence). Inspired by Mao’s China and Nehru’s India, Japanrealised that the huge political shifts in Asia heralded a new age ofliberation and independence. Historically, European colonial powers

27 The term ‘subaltern’, originally put forward by Italian communist AntonioGramsci, refers to any person or group of inferior rank and station, whether because ofrace, class, gender, ethnicity, or religion. Subaltern Studies has taken the Gramscianidea of counter-hegemony to its concrete conclusion by stressing the sub-cultures anddaily lives of those who would claim that their existence is defined not by inclusion, butby exclusion and repression, not unlike Gramsci’s working-class subject. See GayatriChakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Sub-altern Speak?’, in Lawrence Grossberg and CaryNelson (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of IllinoisPress: 1988), pp. 271–316.

28 For general information on this topic, see Kristine Dennehy, ‘OvercomingColonialism at Bandung, 1955’, in Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann (eds.), Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: colonialism, regionalism and borders, pp. 213–25.




had acceded to powerful, indigenous movements which made all butinevitable their ascendancy to independence. The fascination withChina was far more than just admiration for its next door neighbour;it was a sign of much deeper interest in the transformation of East Asia,Southeast Asia and South Asia, as the fortunes of Europe declined.

The boldness of this approach put forward by Ishimoda andhis colleagues lay not only in the way it positioned Japanesehistory alongside Asian history, but also in how it viewed post-warJapanese democracy. For example, the liberal intellectual and politicalphilosopher Maruyama Masao (1914–1996) supported the idea ofparliamentary democracy and looked to Europe and the United Statesof America, believing that post-war modernity had to include a nation-state with a civil society and a strong middle-class that could standindependently of the state. Post-war Japanese capitalism was drivenmore by public expectation and public rationality than by the state, themilitary, or large industrial interests that had ‘shipwrecked’ Japan intimes past. Modernity for Maruyama thus meant the West, democraticmodernization, and a kind of bourgeois democratic revolution thatdid not necessarily entail a transition to socialism. Only these wouldinsure that the residue of Japanese feudal customs and traditions couldeventually be overcome and replaced by a more modern democracy.29

The worldview of Maruyama and other liberal intellectuals thereforewas linked to their perceptions about what kind of social systemwas necessary in post-war Japan. Most of all, Maruyama saw Japanas socially and historically apart from Asia insomuch as Japan hadhistorically already come full circle. Asian liberation nationalism ofthe early post-war era, in places like China, Indonesia and India, couldbuild upon nascent revolutionary traditions because they were justbeginning to enter a post-colonial phase and a new era of independencefor the first time.30 For Maruyama, a radical past marked by massresistance to Japanese colonialism had eliminated much of the oldfeudal society in places like China, Korea and Southeast Asia. Moderntraditions of radical political activity in such places could be countedupon to provide the kind of radical change that Japanese society, stillmired in feudal traditions, could not easily produce.31 Like Marxist

29 Maruyama Masao, Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics (New York:Oxford University Press: 1963).

30 Maruyama Masao, ‘Nationalism in Japan: Its Theoretical Background andProspects’, Ibid. pp. 135–156.

31 Ibid.




historians, therefore, Maruyama maintained that pre-war Japan hadno meaningful tradition of anti-imperialist nationalism or radicalcultural movements that could serve the present.

Although they shared many critiques with Maruyama regardingJapan’s pre-war past, some Marxist historians saw a very differentconfluence of historical opportunities and avenues open to them.One of their goals during the early post-war period was to showwhy Japan was in fact potentially just like China, Indonesia, orIndia. Historians, such as Matsumoto Shinpachiro, on the one handmade persuasive cases for the awakening of ‘revolutionary culturaltraditions’ (kakumeiteki dento bunka) in post-war Japan that couldlead to socialist revolution and ‘national independence’.32 On theother hand, they depicted Japan as one link within the larger Asiandrive toward liberation from colonial rule, global capitalism andthe realist balance-of-power equation integral to American foreignpolicy.33 In fact, historians such as Eguchi Bokuro, Toyama Shigekiand Uehara Senroku treated both the USA and the USSR as neo-imperialist leviathans. Yet, they based their claims not simply upon apreference for avoiding geo-political games or for achieving nationalindependence alone, placing emphasis upon what they held to beshared Asian cultural attributes that could be brought out in placeof the kind of realpolitik and fascination with military power whichplagued both camps during the Cold War.34 As certain historians sawit, Asian civilization and a tradition of tolerance, rooted in principles ofmutual respect rather than equations of fear and the threat of nuclearannihilation, offered the possibility for new forms of cooperation andharmonious relations.35 In place of instrumental reason and powerpolitics, they offered a view of cooperation, laced with appeals tohistorical and cultural bonds, to bring Japan and East Asia together inways that dodged issues of war-responsibility and why Japan was now

32 Matsumoto Shinpachiro, ‘Minzoku Bunka wo Ika ni shite Mamoru ka’, RekishigakuKenkyu, No. 154 (1950), pp. 36–43.

33 For an interesting look at the modern history of realist positions on theinternational system and the influence of the United States of America, see ModjtabaSadria, Kensho: Genjitsushugi—Kokusai Kankei no Otoshiana (Tokyo: Chuo UniversityPress: 1994).

34 See, Uehara Senroku and Munakata Seiya, Nihonjin no Sozo (Tokyo: Toyo Shokan:1952). Also Toyama Shigeki, ‘Futatsu no Nashonarizumu no Taiko’, in Bando Hiroshi,Minzoku no Mondai, p. 129.

35 Ibid.




suddenly on the same historical and political terrain as those whom ithad dominated just several years earlier.

There are two important points that should be pointed out here.Firstly, the approach of historians was in some ways a form of culturalessentialism that presumed Asian values to have their own unique andcontiguous magical powers. These values did not work in the pre-warera and the arguments of Marxists themselves suggested that ratherthan cultural necessity there was more of a historical and politicalmoment at hand that had indeed come with Asian decolonisation.Secondly, the insertion of Japan’s past into the trajectory of post-wardecolonisation glossed over the question of its own past in Asia. Thisis even more ironic because many Marxist historians, in particularUehara and Munakata, were concerned with history education andwith making history-writing itself a radical praxis of action that couldbe taken up on the popular level in, for instance, the Movementfor a People’s history of the early 1950s.36 This movement, led byMarxists such as Ishimoda, sought to bring history-writing into thedomain of everyday life among housewives, factory-workers, mothersand students as part of a sweeping drive towards greater working-class consciousness in all geographical areas of Japan. At the sametime, however, as Tomiyama Ichiro points out, in the immediateaftermath of empire and Japan’s reorientation to a minimalist sense ofnationhood, many Japanese intellectuals exhibited a kind of amnesiaover the past and substituted direct debate over Japan’s past witha more comfortable debate over the lack of Japanese individualsubjectivity (shutaisei) in the wartime past.37 From a very differentviewpoint, this perspective is also supported by Oguma Eiji, whohas recently argued that the early 1950s ‘re-evaluation of Asia’ byJapanese intellectuals on various sides of the political spectrum wasa way to intentionally cast aside the past and make it easier to bringJapan ‘back into Asia’.38

It is hard to claim that Marxists were not consciously aware of whathad been done in the name of Japan during the pre-war and wartimeyears, especially because many Marxists also felt the heavy hand of

36 This is discussed in greater detail in footnote 48 below.37 See Tomiyama Ichiro, Senjo no Kioku (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyoronsha: 1995).38 Oguma Eiji, ‘The Post-war Intellectual’s View of “Asia”’, in Sven Saaler and J.

Victor Koschmann (eds.), Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: colonialism, regionalismand borders, p. 98.




the Japanese state during this period.39 Marxists like Ishimoda wereunequivocal in the view that they had failed the pre-war masses inmobilizing and awakening them to blunt fascism. On a more subtlelevel, however, they at times tried to assuage and come to termswith what Japan had done in Asia by steering a new narrative andpolitical course for the Japanese working-class in the aftermath ofempire. By rearticulating a kind of pan-Asianist or ‘Third Way’ assomething completely different from pre-war versions of pan-Asianismthey claimed that, in contrast with the past, Japan could no longer beabove Asia but had instead to locate its political destiny within anAsia that looked very different from that of only a decade before.Ishimoda, Inoue, Matsumoto among others looked to China for aconceptual framework that would support their claims for reinventingJapan’s historical relationship with Asia. This was, in essence, a kindof strategic decision: the problem of Japan’s past in Asia could bevicariously resolved, they hoped, through a new framework of post-war Asia with China now at the historical and political helm.

Behind this decision lay a clear, though unmentioned, self-differentiation between post-war Marxist interpretations and pre-warversions of pan-Asianism. Historians and thinkers belonging to thepre-war Kyoto School sought to make Japan the epistemological andgeo-centric nexus of a new ‘world history’ during an age in whichJapan’s prevalence in Asia was both a historical and a political fact.40

The significance of attempts to ‘overcome the modern’ was, therefore,laden with political baggage equal to or even surpassing the disturbinghistorical positions of the Kyoto School. This is precisely why, asshown below in more detail, Marxists went to great pains to re-historicise their positions through historical (rather than ontologicalor racial) discourses of the ethnic nation.41 Although they did this bydistancing themselves from the Kyoto School and pre-war versions ofpan-Asianism (which they saw as irreversibly discredited), they didutilize elements of pre-war historical traditions (even though they

39 Many Marxists were forced to flee abroad or to cease their activities. Some, likeNosaka Sanzo, came back to a hero’s welcome in Japan after the war and helped toreinvigorate the radical Left. Some of this is detailed in John Dower, Embracing Defeat:Japan in the wake of World War II (New York: Norton & Company: 2000).

40 One interesting work on the Kyoto School is Narita Ryu’ichi, Rekishi wa ikaniKatarareru ka (Tokyo: NHK Books: 2001).

41 See Curtis Anderson Gayle, Marxist History and Postwar Japanese Nationalism(London: Routledge Curzon: 2003), especially chapter 5.




narrated these as being completely ‘new’) within the attempt to re-insert Japan into Asia.

By about 1950, Japanese Marxists were able to draw upon animportant modern Japanese tradition of Marxist cultural practice.42

The centre of this cultural Marxism, for those with the mostrespected voices on the radical Left (Marxist historians), lay in thepractice of history-writing as a means to organise a cultural frontagainst American imperialism. The reasons for the primacy of historyand history-writing in this objective were not hard to understand:historians (particularly Marxist historians) put forward the idea thathistory could now serve as an easily-accessible instrument for bothpersonal growth and national salvation. History-writing, and thediscipline of history as a whole, were now seen as being the antithesisof pre-war forms of history-writing (koku-shi) that had legitimized theimperial state and Japanese militarism.43 As Carol Gluck notes, duringthe first decade after World War II Marxist historians like IshimodaSho sought to diagnose the mistakes of the past in order to make abetter present.44 This was true for intellectuals as well as for ordinarypeople who, directly encouraged by Marxists, now sought to form theirown history-writing groups on an ad hoc basis. In the minds of localactivists who formed history-writing groups in, for example, EhimePrefecture on Shikoku Island, history was what had ‘changed the mostbetween pre-war and post-war eras’.45 This was as true for manyon the margins of Japanese society as it was for Marxist historiansthemselves.

In fact, by about 1950 the practice of history-writing becamesomething akin to what Josephine Donovan calls ‘revolutionarypraxis,’ or a ‘free, creative engagement in the world’ within thesphere of everyday life.46 All of the Marxist historians discussedin this paper, as well as the institutions to which they belonged,

42 Descriptions of the pre-war Marxist discourse on the nation in Japan can befound in Ibid.

43 Carol Gluck, ‘The Idea of Showa’, in Gluck and Stephen Graubard (eds.), Showa:The Japan of Hirohito (New York: W. W. Norton & Company: 1993), pp. 1–26.

44 Carol Gluck, ‘Sengo Rekishigaku no Metahisutorı’, in Yasumaru Yoshio (ed.),Nihon Tsushi vol. 1: Rekishi Ishiki no Genzai (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten: 1995), pp. 3–44.

45 This was a comment made directly to the author by members of the EhimeWomen’s History-Writing Circle in Matsuyama, July 2003.

46 See Josephine Donovan, Feminist Theory: the intellectual origins of American feminism(New York: Continuum: 1992), pp. 70–72. Donovan bases her adaptation of‘revolutionary praxis’ upon Gajo Petrovic’s, Marx in Mid-Twentieth Century (GardenCity: Doubleday: 1967), pp. 171–98.




such as the Historical Research Association and the Association ofDemocratic Scientists47, endeavoured to make history-writing a de-professionalized and popular activity accessible to virtually all classes,genders and regions of Japanese society. The most notable project wasthe Movement for a People’s History (Kokuminteki Rekishigaku Undo),which began in 1950 and consisted of numerous cultural campaignsto bring history to the masses and to encourage ordinary people towrite their own histories in their everyday lives.48 In conjunctionwith these activities, the movement also encouraged workers, farmers,housewives, mothers and others to directly take part in craft activities,poetry recitations, and even archaeological excavations. Like history-writing, these activities were also supposed to bring people togetherand solidify their shared interest in making Japanese society moreequitable. As shown below, such activities often took wartime China(1937–45) as their model of cultural resistance and, conversely,presumed that Japanese history had no clues of its own to offer aboutthese kinds of campaigns. In other words, Japanese Marxists soughtto find their model of cultural resistance in places other than Japan’sown modern socialist, anarchist, or Marxist traditions.49 Even thougha vibrant pre-war tradition of Marxist cultural practice in resistingfascism and imperialism existed during the 1920s, for reasons asdiscussed below, many drew instead upon the example of China andleft Japan’s own radical past to collective silence.

The China that ‘Brought Socialism onto Asian soil’

In 1945 China was freed from Japanese colonial rule, but faced severalmore years of inner turmoil as a result of half a century of civilstrife, division and dismemberment. Japan was, by contrast, from the1950s already on its way to once again becoming an industrial and

47 These were two of the most influential historical associations in the early post-warera and were composed not only of historians, but also of social scientists. They wereprogressive organizations whose membership was mainly Marxist or neo-Marxist.

48 For information on this movement see Oguni Yoshihiro, ‘KokumintekiRekishigaku Undo ni okeru Nihon Shizo no Saikochiku’, Jinbun Gakuho, No. 337

(2003), pp. 1–2.49 There are a number of works in English covering various aspects of this,

including John Crump, The Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan (London: PalgraveMacMillan: 1983) and Robert A. Scalapino, The Japanese Communist Movement, 1920–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press: 1967).




economic superpower. The cultural front known as the ‘Movementfor a People’s History’ represented an attempt to simulate certainelements in modern Chinese history. Why was the case of China sorelevant? The answer had much to do with the temporal and spatialproximity of changes underway there: the founding of the People’sRepublic of China in 1949 by Mao Zedong inaugurated the firstcommunist nation-state in Asia. This took place just as the JapaneseLeft was engaged in a fierce struggle with its own government and,as mentioned above, with Occupation’s Reverse Course. For JapaneseMarxists, China had by virtue of its successful revolution emergedvictorious from Japanese imperialism. Because China had succeededin repelling Japan, a colonizer and occupier, it could stand as a modelfor radical Japanese historians in their present struggles againstAmerican imperialism and ‘colonization’. Although arguably the alliedvictory over Japan had something to do with the emancipation of Chinafrom Japanese colonial rule, the Marxist reading of modern Chinesehistory focused exclusively upon China’s war against Japan (konichisensen) between 1937 and 1945 as a sufficient condition for eventualliberation and independence. Another important factor influencingtheir view of China was the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950.For historians such as Ishimoda, Inoue, Matsumoto and Uehara (asfor many workers, women, and ordinary people), the outbreak of warin Korea was proof that the United States of America had imperialdesigns upon all of East Asia and wished to make the entire regiona bulwark against the USSR. As such, the reality of war taking placeonce again in East Asia was, for some on the Japanese Left, of fargreater concern than whether or not Chinese wartime resistance aloneactually succeeded in repelling Japan. Adding insult to injury, duringthe early 1950s Japanese heavy industry was involved in helping tosupply armaments to United Nations forces in Korea and thus had,for many on the Left, been complicit in the remilitarization of East Asiain ways that violated the spirit of Article 9 of the post-war Japaneseconstitution.

Nevertheless, those familiar with Marxist doctrine might askwhether these Marxist historians shared Marx’s own historicalinterpretations of China, India and Asia as being in conditions ofhistorical stagnation.50 As the theory of ‘Oriental Stagnation’ goes,Asian states and economies were led by authoritarian leaders who

50 See Yun Kon-cha, Nihon Kokuminron: kindai ni Nihon no identiti, Chapter 4, for adiscussion of how this idea was applied to Japan.




had kept Asian peoples from reaching the level of development seenin the West.51 As late as 1946 Japanese Marxist historians appliedsuch dictums to China and Asia as a whole. Even in 1950 therewere still residual beliefs in the theory of Oriental Stagnation. This isprecisely why some came to the conclusion, following the CominternCritique of Japanese capitalism in 1950

52 that, in order to changeJapanese society, it would be necessary to seek a direct transition tosocialism through a united front against American imperialism—ashad just been done in China—rather than through a more gradualtwo-stage approach to revolution.53 Instead of seeking a democraticrevolution as a first step toward communism some Marxists now urgedan immediate socialist revolution that could leapfrog and obviateany political systems that included parliamentary democracy, thelatter now seen as a tool of the reactionary elite and the AmericanOccupation.54 This is also why the Japan Communist Party, from asearly as 1947, declared the need for a ‘United National Front’ (MinzokuToitsu Sensen). By the late 1940s the idea of historical stagnation wascoming to be replaced by a new mode of explanation regarding thehistory and relationship between Japan and China, as well as Japanand Asia as a whole. In this important sense, Japanese Marxists wereconfronting and dealing with what many have described as Marx’sOrientalism in thinking about the non-West and the related penchantof Western anthropologists to declare Asians and Africans ‘peopleswithout history’.55

From as early as 1946, Japanese Marxists like Okamoto Saburomade it clear that they thought China was moving in the direction of

51 See for instance Bryan Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism (London: GeorgeAllen & Unwin: 1980).

52 The historical background to the Comintern Critique of Japanese capitalism canbe found in Germaine Hoston, The State, Identity, and the National Question in China andJapan (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1994), pp. 422–426.

53 Following the pre-war Koza Faction position, many of the Marxists discussed inthis paper adhered to the two-stage theory of revolution, first a bourgeois democraticrevolution and then a revolution that would bring Japan into socialism. This formulawas, however, not so hard and fast as is usually assumed, especially during the early1950s.

54 After the 1950 Comintern Critique, Marxists like Ishimoda believed for a timethat a direct transition to socialism, as had taken place in China, was also the wayJapan had to go. This unofficial change in views is, however, often overlooked by thosewho assume a two-stage approach remained the order of the day.

55 See for instance, Bryan S. Turner, Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism (Londonand New York: Routledge: 1994). See also Nicholas Dirks, ‘History as a Sign of theModern’, Public Culture, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1990), pp. 25–33.




‘world proletarian socialist culture’ and that China’s wartime (1937–45) national/cultural front against Japan had enabled it now to createa ‘revolutionary national culture’ based on progressive ideas thatcould unite the masses, particularly the rural peasantry.56 Theseobservations were followed in 1948 with a ground-breaking paper bythe China literary scholar, Takeuchi Yoshimi, entitled ‘Chinese andJapanese Modernity’. Takeuchi maintained that nineteenth-centuryChinese literary figure and nationalist, Lu Xun (1881–1936), wassuccessful in resisting the West and in developing an authentic form ofsubjective consciousness and revolution, which he considered to be anOriental form of resistance to imperialism and capitalist modernity.57

In contrast to Japan’s pre-war, catch-up mentality with Europe,Takeuchi argued that Chinese intellectuals such as Lu Xun wereable to lay the groundwork for revolution, progress, and ultimatelyautonomy from European (and Japanese) rule. This was to become animportant theme within Marxist approaches in the immediate yearsafter 1948 and, in the words of historian Ishimoda Sho, also illustrated‘the cruelty of the historical dialectic between’ China and Japan insofaras the historical fortunes of each country vis-a-vis the other were nowreversed.58 In the radical Japanese gaze, China had come a very longway from its earlier designations as a place of stagnation, emptinessand vulnerability for those wishing to take advantage of it.

In 1949, the year of the establishment of the People’s Republicof China, historians such as Kanda Shohachihei stood at the annualconference of the influential Historical Research Association in Tokyoand declared that Mao’s China had irreversibly altered ‘the directionof world history’.59 So moving was China’s example for Kanda andother Marxist historians that it helped provide historical legitimacyand inspiration to their now explicit goal of making history-writinga revolutionary cultural praxis that could lead to dramatic resultsin Japan. The logic behind this glossing over of historical events,in particular ignoring the fact that the allied victory over Japanhad played some part in the historical process of China’s liberation

56 Okamoto Saburo, ‘Mao Zedong no ‘Shin Minshushugiron’’, Zen’ei, Vol. 1, No. 5

(1949), pp. 28–9.57 Takeuchi Yoshimi, ‘Chugoku no Kindai to Nihon no Kindai’, in Takeuchi Yoshimi

(ed.), Toyoteki Shakai Riron no Seikaku (Tokyo: Haku’ichi Shoin: 1948).58 Ishimoda Sho, Zoku: Rekishi to Minzoku no Hakken (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku

Shuppankai: 1953), pp. 430–1.59 This sentiment is expressed by Ishimoda in many places; see Ishimoda Sho,

Rekishi to Minzoku no Hakken (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai: 1953), p. 49.




from Japan, served an important role in highlighting Chinese agencyagainst Japanese oppression. Within this logic lay the assumption thatan indigenous undercurrent of traditional Chinese culture, untouchedby civil war and occupation, stood at the foundations of its social andpolitical resistance to Japan. This basic position supposed that theexperience of colonization and the rape of China by the imperialpowers had not stripped it of its cultural traditions but had, to thecontrary, awakened them to their ancient glory.60 Some JapaneseMarxist historians were perhaps therefore convinced that Mao’s Chinahad persevered, not because of the allied victory in World War II,but in spite of it. It was, moreover, within this context that theylooked to particular features of Chinese wartime resistance to Japanas examples of cultural unity that had helped bring about dramaticsocial and political transformations.

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

The objective of what some Marxist historians in Japan called ‘nationalliberation’, however tenuous its historical foundations, also faced somevery difficult socio-political problems. Most notable among these wasthe social contrast between Japan and China after World War II.While Mao Zedong had become the undisputed leader of China andhad possessed an individual charisma that supported his rule over thePeople’s Republic of China, the Japanese Left had no such leaders. Infact, Japan’s painful experience with fascism had thrown into disreputethe kind of firebrand oratory seen not only in Mao’s charismaticrule, but also in the more notorious examples of German or Italianfascism. Any Japanese public figures of the sort embodied by MaoZedong, no matter what their ideology, would have most likely raisedmore alarm bells than calls to radical action. Thus the question forJapanese Marxist historians after the war had to do with finding waysto galvanize mass resistance in an environment where no charismaticleaders stood out from among the fray. Yet, this is also where thewartime example of China became useful, providing a historicallegitimacy for the social project of organizing mass-level cultural

60 The pre-war proletarian culture debate in Japan indicates that cultural Marxismsupports both the view that old traditions can be put to new use and also the view thatnew traditions more flexible to radical socio-political objectives can be developed inmodern societies.




activities such as Minwa, local theatre, folk crafts, archaeologicalexcavations, singing and, most importantly, history-writing. Throughthese and other forms of cultural practice, historians and intellectualshoped to foster a groundswell of activity that could lead to working-class unity and mass resistance. Under this divestiture of culturalpractice—including the writing of history—from pretensions of highculture some Marxists sought to ignite a collective groundswell ofactivism that would sweep away both the Conservative Japanesegovernment and the lingering influence of the American Occupation.

A central assumption behind the view of Japanese Marxists onChinese national unification was that it would be essential to unifyboth intellectual and proletarian/popular forms of cultural activityand resistance. Through mass-level cooperation the Chinese hadworked in unison for the common goal of liberation from Japan andthe realisation of a people’s nation that was no longer under theinfluence of any imperialist powers. In other words, anti-imperialactivity could lead to national unification only if there was enoughcooperation between intellectuals and the peasants and workers.Okamoto Saburo, for example, noted that in 1937 the NationalFront of the Chinese Communist Party created ‘national liberationtroops’ (minzoku kaihogun) comprising intellectuals, workers, farmersand petit bourgeoisie, who banded together to create a ‘fundamentalrevolutionary force’ to repel Japanese imperialism.61 Similar viewswere also expressed by Saito Akio, who maintained that during thisperiod Chinese were able to resist Japanese rule through a kindof ‘political realism’ that exposed the dark side of everyday life.62

According to Saito, groups of travelling performers, students, andintellectuals helped to dramatize the suffering of ordinary peopleunder colonial rule and helped to construct a ‘revolutionary nationalculture’ that could serve as the basis for a new socialist nation.63 Saitoalso asserted that the cultural roots of China’s strength lay in itsability to adapt to new historical conditions and crises, a trait which

61 Okamoto Saburo, ‘Konichi Minzoku Toitsu Sensen no Keisei Katei’, pp. 16–18.62 This kind of realism depicted and dramatised through cultural forms for

revolutionary political change is often known as ‘proletarian realism’ in Japan, Chinaand within proletarian cultural movements more generally. See, for instance, HeatherBowen-Struyk, ‘Proletarian Arts in East Asia’, Japan Focus (online journal, 1 May2007).

63 Saito Akio, ‘Minzoku Bunka Sozo no Katei’, Rekishigaku Kenkyukai (ed.),Minzoku no Bunka ni tsuite: Rekishigaku Kenkyukai: 1952 Nendo Taikai Hokoku (Tokyo:Iwanami Shoten: 1952), pp. 140–142.




is, ironically, often attributed more to Japan than to China. He wenton to declare that since the May Fourth Movement in China (1917–1921) the terrain of culture had been modified so that it could betterresist imperialism. Others argued that this cultural paradigm was notonly a lesson for Japan but also for other Asian nations undergoingthe process of liberation from colonial rule. Kanda Shohachihei wentso far as to claim that China had given to Japan not only a historicalexample that could serve as a ‘strategic battle plan’ for how to wage asuccessful national/cultural front, but also a ‘notebook’ and a ‘theoryfor the national liberation for [all] colonial peoples’ in Asia.64

These interpretations were based on historical fact, insofar asChinese intellectuals had moved to the countryside and brought withthem urban forms of cultural practice (visual media like cartoons,newspapers, woodblock prints, street theatre and ‘spoken dramas’),which were added to more rural-based cultural forms like folk songsand storytelling.65 If this was a ‘decentralization’ or devolution ofChinese culture so that it could become the property of the working-class and those in rural settings, it was also meant to appeal notnecessarily to class-consciousness, but more broadly to nationalistsentiment on a popular level.66 Japanese Marxist historians insistedthat such forms of cultural practice had been effective preciselybecause they had helped bring about ‘the emergence of a newpolitical culture’ that ‘instituted new values by transforming an elitistand urban popular aesthetic into a rural one’.67 Class struggle hadbecome articulated and represented in terms of ‘aesthetic and culturalrealms’.68 Of course, these appeals to agrarian culture represented areaction against modernity because they divested culture away fromindustrialization, development and the urban middle-classes. Theysought instead to locate cultural sensibilities and mass participationin what might be called a ‘rural imagination’ of sorts. Accordingto Japanese Marxists, the historical narrative of Chinese agrarian

64 Rekishigaku Kenkyukai, ‘Sekaishi no Doko’, Rekishigaku Kenkyu, No. 138 (1946),p. 37. See also Rekishigaku Kenkyukai (ed.), Sekaishi no okeru Kihon Hosoku: 1949 NendoRekishigaku Kenkyukai Taikai Hokoku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten: 1949).

65 Chang-Tai Hung, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937–1945(Berkeley and London: University of California Press: 1994), pp. 271 and 279.

66 Ibid. pp. 280–281.67 This view of what happened during the war against Japan is expressed in Ibid.

pp. 275 and 278.68 See Liu Kang, ‘Aesthetics and Chinese Marxism’, in Tani Barlow (ed.), New Asian

Marxisms (Durham and London: Duke University Press: 2002), p. 175.




cultural authenticity was designed to bring the entire Chinese nationtogether into a new phase of world history. Thus, similarly forhistorians in Japan, the accessibility and availability of culturalpractice to the Chinese rural population represented an importantmeans to enfranchising peasants, women, workers and students inorder to create social cohesion and unity.

In spite of this unitary and rather self-contained narrative of howChinese Marxists had popularized and utilized cultural imagery, earlytwentieth-century Chinese adaptations actually suggested that theirdevelopment was complex and sometimes influenced by outside ideasand trends, including events within Japan itself. As Li Hsiao-t’i argues,Japanese folkloricists such as Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) were animportant inspiration to Chinese thinkers like Zhou Zouren (1881–1936), who studied in Tokyo at the end of the Meiji era.69 Upon hisreturn home in 1911, Zhou began thinking about ways to developmodern folklore studies in China.70 In fact, it is quite likely thatYanagita’s paradigm of traditional rural village life as the font ofcultural authenticity helped influence subsequent Chinese attemptsto thwart off Western and Japanese colonial rule. In addition, literarycritic and thinker Lu Xun studied in Tokyo at about the same timeas Zhou (1902–1909).71 By the end of the decade and the rise ofthe May Fourth Movement against the West in 1919, intellectualssuch as Li Dazhao (1888–1927), inspired by the Russian Revolution,also began to follow the Soviet example in a more populist, andindeed radical, call for the ‘young intellectuals of China’ to go tothe villages and to ‘liberate the great mass of Chinese peasants’.72 Inthis sense, therefore, the cultural imagery of the agrarian village wasan important aspect of the larger attempt to ‘mobilize mass culture’

69 Yanagita Kunio was one of the foremost Japanese pre-war researchers andproponents of folklore and folk culture. A number of interesting articles on Yanagitaand his concept of folk culture and the village can be found in Stephen Vlastos (ed.),Mirror of Modernity: invented traditions of modern Japan (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress: 1998).

70 Li Hsiao-t’i, ‘Making a Name and a Culture for the Masses in Modern China’,Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, Vol. 9 No. 1 (2001), p. 41.

71 For an introduction to the influence of Japanese intellectuals on Chinesedevelopment of proletarian culture, see Xu Mei-Yan, ‘The Japanese Influence onChinese Proletarian Culture’, Journal of Zhejiang Business Technology Institute, Vol. 3

No. 2 (2004), pp. 43–45.72 Li Hsiao-t’i, ‘Making a Name and a Culture for the Masses in Modern China’,

Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, Vol. 9 No. 1 (2001), p. 47.




‘against imperialism and feudalism’, but it was by no means a purely‘national’ construction.73

After World War II, earlier links between pre-war Chinese andJapanese Marxism were cast into oblivion. The revolutionary traditionof cultural Marxism against imperialism was now put forward as adistinctly Chinese modern tradition that could benefit Japan. Marxistswere silent about Japan’s colonial past in East Asia because, amongother reasons, they sought to narrate current Japanese history interms of colonial subjugation in the same historical plane (thoughat an earlier stage) as China. As noted above, there was amongMarxists a very clear suspension of public memory of their ownpre-war efforts to achieve various forms of revolutionary culturalpractice on Japanese soil. For example, in passages and discussionsof China there is virtually no mention of the historical existence of theJapanese proletarian culture movement of the 1920s. Even thoughthe idea and practice of cultural Marxism enjoyed a vibrant periodof development in the Taisho and early Showa years—in the form ofliterature, painting, worker’s theatre, intellectual thought and history-writing campaigns—almost all reference to such cultural forms andmovements was submerged in the desire to achieve a legitimatecultural synthesis based upon a modern tradition (i.e. in China) thatno Marxist could refute.74 As far as many were concerned, pre-warJapanese Marxism had failed to mobilize the masses into revolutionaryaction and, therefore, had no rightful claim to the present age. Pre-warJapanese imagery of rural village life was, for early post-war Marxists,something that belonged to Yanagita Kunio—whose work they viewedwithin the historical context of nationalist imagery and the rise ofultra-nationalism. Thus, even though pre-war Japanese imagery ofrural village life had been discredited, when borrowed from China itcould become the font of Japanese revolutionary culture.

73 Ibid. p. 32. See also Dagfinn Gatu, Village China at War: The Impact of Resistanceto Japan, 1937–1945 (University of British Columbia Press: 2007). However, Duringthe 1920s and early 1930s in Japan there was much debate by writers, thinkers andartists of various persuasions as to whether proletarian art should utilize ‘old’ forms oftraditional culture, or whether it should instead develop new kinds of artistic practiceand representation so as to make a more fundamental ‘break’ with the feudal past.See Curtis Anderson Gayle, ‘Intellectuals and the Dawning of ‘Proletarian Culture’in Japan, 1912–25’, pp. 21–30.

74 One good source in Japanese which discusses in detail both intellectual andmaterial manifestations of cultural Marxism is Soda Hidehiko, Minshu Gekijo: mohitotsu no Taisho Demokurashi (Tokyo: Shozansha: 1995).




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

Within Marxist theories of political development, the phenomenonof modern bourgeois nationalism (in contrast to the liberationnationalism of those under colonial rule) was generally rootedin middle-class patriotism and the rise of modern chauvinistic,militarised societies in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. Thesesocieties developed through economic exploitation of foreign lands,often in Africa and Asia, to feed economic growth and consumption athome. In other words, Liberalism and nationalism in modern statesled to bourgeois internationalism, otherwise known as imperialism,and the great power competition seen, for example, in the late

75 Matsumoto, Shinpachiro, ‘Kakumeiteki Dento ni tsuite’, in Toma Seita et al.(eds.), Rekishi ni okeru Shomondai: Koza Rekishi, Vol. 4 (Tokyo: Otsuki Shoten: 1956),pp. 190–91.

76 See for example Toma Seita, Nihon Minzoku no Keisei (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten:1951).

77 Takeuchi Yoshimi, Takeuchi Yoshimi Zenshu (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo: 1980),pp. 6–7.




nineteenth and early-twentieth century rush to acquire influence inChina. What some might call modern liberal internationalism wastherefore seen by Marxists as a form of modern imperialism whichhad a somewhat dialectical relationship with the rise of the modernnation-state and the capitalist economies of Europe.78 Because theseforms of nationalism/imperialism were seen as essentially linkedand forming a kind of integrated circuit in world history, Japaneseand Asian forms of national liberation, conversely, stressed not onlyinternal liberation but also the liberation of international spaceand Asia in particular. No international space could ever become avacuum; instead Munakata, Uehara and others hoped that old formsof nationalism and imperialism would be replaced by liberated socialistnations that could help create and sustain a new regional order in adecolonizing Asia.

The construction of an image of wartime China—as both aninspirational and tactical model by which the Japanese masses mightshake off the economic and political influence of the United Statesof America—thus consisted of two complementary sides. In line withinternational political trends such as decolonization, Japanese Marxisthistorians focused upon the contribution that history-writing and otherforms of cultural practice could make to the project that they referredto as Japan’s ‘national liberation’. The flip-side to this equation,one that brought the role of post-war Asia directly into the picture,lay in the idea of a new form of ‘proletarian internationalism’ thatcould ground new forms of cooperation, co-existence, and mutualresistance.79 Historians like Uehara maintained that proletarianinternational alliances would replace the victimization of peoplesthrough international aggression and the subordination of theinterests of a people.80 Just as nationalism and imperialism weretwo sides of the same coin in the modern history of bourgeoisstates, conversely, for Marxist approaches, liberation nationalism andproletarian internationalism were legitimate responses to conditionsof colonization and subsequent visions of post-colonial cooperation. Inthe aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Marxists in Japan sought tocombine ideas of proletarian internationalism which they saw as being

78 Toyama Shigeki, ‘Futatsu no Nashonarizumu no Taiko’, in Bando Hiroshi (ed.),Minzoku no Mondai (Tokyo: Azekura Shobo: 1976), pp. 114–121.

79 The historical and theoretical background to the idea of proletarianinternationalism can be found in Lenin, V.I., Questions of National Policy and ProletarianInternationalism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House: 1960).

80 Uehara Senroku, Uehara Senroku Chosakushu, vol. 12, p. 42.




fundamentally different from the Western instrumental rationality(and pre-war Japanese irrationality) that had driven world history andimperialism into the modern period.

There were several conscious ways in which this image was designedto be something completely different from pre-war pan-Asianism.Most crucially, Japan was no longer at the centre of the story andwas, instead, one link within a great chain of being ‘Asian’. Thisidentity depended upon cultural attributes that could be deployedin arguments which relied upon civilizational ties rooted deep incommon historical experiences. These experiences, which spannedancient times to the modern colonial age, provided a narrative hearthfrom which social behaviour and psychology could be proposed as analternative to observable and influential standards in world politicsafter World War II. Adding onto Marxist critiques of the world systema pinch of Asian civilizational magic, then, these historians hoped thatthe modern-day equivalent of ‘Asian values’ could in fact bring to anend the centuries-old domination of Western capitalism, imperialismand cultural predominance.81 The early post-war Japanese Marxistnarrative of China was, therefore, about much more than one nationalone; it was about how Japan might contribute to the decolonisationof Asia and the construction of a new framework for internationalrelations that was neither Soviet nor American in character. Justas some pre-war Japanese Marxists had been quick to condemn theJapanese colonization of China, Korea and Southeast Asia, certainMarxists right after the war were quick to acknowledge the relevanceof Asian decolonisation to Japan’s own immediate present and future.

Conclusion: the inescapable modern gaze on China

These views of China can tell us much about the historicalconsciousness of Marxist historians in early post-war Japan. In The Pastis a Foreign Country, author David Lowenthal reminds us that societiesoften look upon their own past in ways that seem self-selecting.82

81 The general discourse of uniquely ‘Asian values’ in Japan and Asia has beenaround since the Meiji era. See, for example, Tsubouchi Takahiko, Okakura Tenshinno Shiso Tanpo (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo: 1998). To reiterate, the Marxist version of thiswas rooted in a different historical perspective to that of the mainstream of modernJapanese discourse on this topic.

82 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress: 1988).




Marxists were very cognisant of what Japanese history had meantbefore 1945 and how it would need to be radically transformed inorder to serve the needs of the present and future. However, ratherthan directly reclaim Japan’s past, certain Marxist historians soughtto redirect the question of Japanese history towards a present markedby China’s independence and its departure from an Anglo-Americansystem of hegemony that had driven western imperialism since thenineteenth-century. Convinced that Japan’s past and its history hadbeen completely discredited, they began once again to develop forms ofcultural Marxism that ignored domestic traditions of pre-war culturalresistance. Even though it would have been possible to reclaim a ‘past’from the Taisho era, which contained elements of interaction withChinese Marxists and cultural movements against Imperial Japan,Ishimoda and other historians sought to substitute China’s recentpast for their own and quietly suppress modern Japanese proletariantraditions that had been an important part of the Taisho and earlyShowa periods.

Claiming the past as a kind of foreign country, Marxist historianshad thus set their feet upon new historical ground. Unlike MeijiJapan, where many liberal intellectuals such as Fukuzawa Yukichi,as well as some socialists, often sought out European enlightenmentand forms of middle-class material culture, after World War IIChina was no longer a feudal ‘Other’ languishing in the backyardof a modernising Japan. The end of foreign colonization in Chinaand the larger movement towards decolonisation in Asia helpedprovide a springboard for Japanese Marxists to reassess China’soverall contribution to modernity through the lens of Chinesecultural resistance to Japan’s own imperial modernity. While Japanesepre-war romanticism towards China primarily took the form ofOrientalist designations of Manchuria as a pristine vessel for Japanesecolonization, Japanese romanticism of the early post-war varietyfocused more upon the flip-side of how Chinese cultural and politicalresistance to this colonisation eventually brought Chinese modernityonto a plane above that of Japan. Yet the post-war transference ofthis romanticism back onto Japanese cultural Marxism ultimatelyled to intellectual frustration—not over the direction of Mao’sChina, but instead over the direction of post-war Japan itself. Eventhough Japanese Marxists rarely criticized Mao’s attempts at culturalcampaigns after the founding of the People’s Republic of China,nevertheless, they soon aimed for their own constructions of cultureand romanticism towards China.




When compared with Meiji-era Orientalism towards China from allquarters, and early Showa-era romanticism of China by progressiveintellectuals, post-war efforts to resolve the problem of the pastbrought China into a wider historical lens. At the same time, however,they also glossed over the problem of how Japan’s past was in factquite different from China. The post-war era was for Japan a post-colonial age, much as it had been for China. But the difference lay inwhere each had historically stood regarding the original problem ofcolonialism. The present ‘amnesia’ of the early post-war era did notbelong only to those who wished to turn away from Asia but also tothose who turned directly toward it. Or, without acknowledging thepost-colonial moment of Japan in the past, it became difficult to solvethe problem of how to reach an imagined (though in some ways quitereal) stage of (post) neo-colonialism in its relationship with the USA;many of the issues discussed by early post-war Marxists remain salientsocial and political problems in twenty-first century Japan.

The first signs of overall disillusionment with the historical approachof these Marxists came with Ishimoda Sho’s 1956 repudiation ofthe national liberation theme for Japan, which had seen in China’swartime past the key to Japan’s present. There were two importantsub-texts within the self-critiques of Ishimoda and other Marxists,one to do with the compatibility of Japan and China, the other morewith how history-writing had lost its intellectual moorings after WorldWar II. Regarding compatibility, even though Mao’s China continuedto be held in high esteem, historians like Ishimoda now concededthat there were, after all, fundamental differences between Japanand China. Ishimoda saw that part of the problem with historicalcampaigns for Japanese national liberation was that they had nottaken Chinese history as an important metaphor, but had insteadtried to graft Chinese history onto the Japanese social and culturallandscape.83 Although during the late 1950s and 1960s earlier ideasof revolutionary culture and proletarian nationhood continued tothrive in China, many intellectuals on the Japanese Left, includingsome Marxists, began to think about how to re-conceptualize ‘themasses’ (taishu) in ways that represented considerable departures

83 A detailed description of why Ishimoda and others turned their backs on theirearlier approaches can be found in Okuda Shuzo and Nakatsuka Akira, ‘KokumintekiRekishigaku no Hanketsu to Hansei’, in Toma Seita (ed.), Koza Rekishi, vol.1: Kokuminto Rekishi (Tokyo: Otsuki Shoten: 1956), pp. 227–86.




from more proletarian-based conceptions.84 Another sub-text withintheir self-critique lay in the idea that, due to the Movement for aPeople’s History, history-writing had lost its professional lustre andintellectual respectability. Ishimoda and his colleagues now chargedthat devolution of history-writing, so that it could be practiced at alllevels of Japanese society, had sensationalised and overly politicisedthe discipline of history. At the same time, however, Ishimoda andothers continued to hold fast to the notion that the mobilizationof the working-classes required a kind of cultural independencefrom, yet vigorous engagement with, the more deleteriousinfluences of domestic conservative politics, global capitalism andimperialism.

While not successful in achieving revolution, Japanese Marxistsduring the early post-war years did help to set in motion a ‘tectonic’change in the historical landscape. The initial post-war push byMarxists to create history-writing movements for the benefit ofall classes and regions within Japan, gradually set in motion thedeconstruction of Japanese historical narratives and approacheswithin the imaginary boundaries of the nation. For instance, fromthe late 1950s their approach began to resonate in the developmentof various kinds of ‘small histories’ such as local women’s history,and social and cultural history. The early post-war nationalisationof cultural narratives, therefore, eventually helped bring about thede-centring of Japanese history and the true democratization ofhistory-writing beyond national narratives or macro socio-politicalobjectives.85 Although perhaps not foreseen in 1950, Marxist-ledcultural movements involving history-writing activities and groupsdid help to usher in a historiographical revolution of sorts, eventhough this has yet to be acknowledged in much of the literature onpost-war Japan.86 Ultimately, then, the approaches discussed in thispaper contributed less to making Japan in the image of China, andmore to bringing Japanese history into a potentially self-critical and

84 See for instance Matsushita Kei’ichi, Shimin Seiji Riron no Keisei (Tokyo: IwanamiShoten: 1959).

85 For an overview of the development of social and cultural history in contemporaryJapan see Nagahara Keiji, 20 Seiki Nihon no Rekishigaku (Tokyo: YoshikawaHirobunkan: 2003), pp. 185–89.

86 I take this position in my forthcoming monograph entitled, NarrativeUnbindings: the emergence of local women’s history in early post-war Japan (unpublisheddata).




deconstructive phase, even though this was not the explicit intentionof their approaches.

Early post-war Marxism in Japan also reminds us that its view ofChina reflected larger discourses and trends that were taking shapeon the world stage, such as decolonization, regionalism and globalcapitalism. Yet, it is also true that Japanese views towards China in theearly post-war era allow us to expand the way we view modernity as awhole. This is because early post-war Marxist perspectives on Chineseresistance to Japanese imperialism, and the formation of the People’sRepublic of China, were very much bound up with the Japanese desireto provide a response to many of the perceived problems associatedwith modernity after World War II. It was, in fact, from this kind ofself-reflection that the Frankfurt School sought to rethink the notionsof progress and development, based upon a critique of instrumentalrationality that had historically sanctioned, among other things, theproject of empire, colonial domination and even genocide.87 Withinthe overall goal of reaching a historical stage that lay beyond powerpolitics and instrumental reasoning, it is possible to locate critiquesof modern nationalism and internationalism (i.e., imperialism) thathistorically characterised, for example, German reflections upon thepast and present. In fact, Dennis Dworkin draws some importantparallels between cultural Marxism in post-war Great Britain and theFrankfurt School in Germany—analogies that may also be extendedto the Marxist example in early post-war Japan.88

During the past several decades, however, arguments have comefrom a number of different quarters about the historical compatibility,or dissonance, of Japan and China in relation with each other. Incontrast to both the Meiji era and the early post-war years, whenmany in the Japanese conservative political leadership saw China asthe antithesis of Japanese modernity, it has been the intellectual,political, and economic elite in Japan who have begun to see modernChinese synchronicity with Japan. This has recently developed intoa double-edged political narrative whose borders are marked on oneside by a return to the discourse of common cultural practices in thequest to find in China a long-term ally, and, on the other side, by thosewho see China as a rising empire in East Asia that will one day devour

87 See for example, Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential FrankfurtSchool Reader (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group: 1982).

88 Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain (Durham and London: DukeUniversity Press: 1997), pp. 4–6.




Japan. Yet, views of China by the Japanese elite today represent lessof an inward gaze towards what ails Japanese modernity but more toa series of responses to shifts on the East Asian political landscape.It was, ironically, these kinds of shifts that half a century ago helpedto bring about Japanese resistance to elements of globalization andAmerican imperialism—trends in world history that are, arguably,still with us today.


china in the japanese radical gaze, 1945–1955

Documents