Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan by J. Victor KoschmannReview by: George M. WilsonThe American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 4 (Oct., 1998), pp. 1301-1302Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2651309 .

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Asia 1301

The Manchurian Incident created an outburst of "war fever," Young argues, far beyond that of earlier wars. Why was popular reaction greater in 1931 than 1905? New media outlets and a more developed mass culture were key. Radio had just burst on the scene, joining movie newsreels as a mechanism for fueling war fever. The mass circulation of periodicals and newspapers created a popular culture on an unprece- dented scale. Nearly universal literacy meant that even the poorest Japanese shared in the new popular aware- ness.

This outburst of war fever was driven less by right- wing ideologues and more by commercial forces. Newspapers vied with one another for fresh reports from the "war." The Asahi and Mainichi sponsored fund drives to send relief packages to the front. Within months of the incident, enough toothbrushes had been sent to supply each soldier in the Kwantung Army with twenty-six.

A second factor contributing to "war fever" was the small number of Japanese casualties. Only 2,530 died in the incident, a fraction of the 81,455 deaths of the Russo-Japanese War. Whereas the earlier conflict had brought the hand of death into nearly every Japanese community, the Manchurian Incident was an easy victory. Ironically, press stories focused almost exclu- sively on bidan, individuals who had died gloriously on the battlefield. Often reporters altered accounts of actual events in order to fit the "correct" narrative.

Manchukuo became a reality-a government, an economy, a frontier. Building on the earlier scholar- ship of Michael Barnhart, Ramon Myers, and Joshua Fogel, among others, Young details much of this construction. Yet Manchukuo was simultaneously an imagined empire for many in Japan who saw it as fulfilling their particular goals. Right-wing fanatics viewed its creation as a tool to purify Japanese politics. Army planners saw the economic development of the colony as a way to restructure the relationship between state and capitalism. Rural reformers saw mass migra- tion to Manchukuo as a solution to Japanese agrarian woes. Leftist intellectuals joined the research division of the South Manchurian Railway (Mantetsu), hoping to forge a path toward a socialist utopia. As Young argues, "to a large extent Manchurian empire building took place in the realm of the imagination" (p. 17).

These dreams failed, of course. The massive eco- nomic development plans for Manchukuo ran short of capital and forced Kwantung officials to make peace with Japan's zaibatsu. Leftist intellectuals undertook the village surveys of Mantetsu, only to realize that they were serving the interest of the occupying power.

Young's final chapters on the farm colonization program are perhaps the most striking, in part because so little scholarly work has been done on this topic. In 1936, the government of Japan announced a plan to move one in five Japanese rural households (one million families) to Manchukuo over a twenty-year period. This would not only solve Japan's agrarian

problems but spread the Yamato race to the mainland, where it could "lead and enlighten."

A massive migration machine was established, promising recruits farms and a new life on the main- land. The nearly quarter-million who actually emi- grated became the true "victims of empire," Young argues. Surrounded by hostile Chinese, the Japanese villages became armed outposts of the empire. Aban- doned by the military and government in the final days of the war, many emigrants fell victim to revenge attacks by Chinese or died in Soviet camps. Only sixty-three percent returned to Japan after the war.

Young's extraordinary book will force historians of Japan to rethink their treatment of Manchukuo. Young's study also joins the new comparative scholar- ship on imperialism, which analyzes its transforming power not only on the colony but also on the metro- pole. She has thus created an essential work of schol- arship for students of comparative imperialist history.

PARKS M. COBLE

University of Nebraska, Lincoln

J. VICTOR KOSCHMANN. Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1996. Pp. xi, 293. Cloth $48.00, paper $19.95.

The study of postwar Japan as part of world culture moves ahead smartly with the appearance of this book by J. Victor Koschmann. As World War II ended, fateful choices faced the country. The obvious problem was how to overcome the physical destruction of the urban environment and the industrial economy. A spiritual dilemma also arose: how to avoid future repetitions of imperialism and war, and to refashion the passive populace of the "emperor system" (tennosei) into an active and self-aware citizenry. Japanese intellectuals attacked the latter dilemma by way of ideological tendencies (Marxist, Weberian) inherited from prewar days. The central conundrum was "subjectivity" (shuttaisei): who were the agents of change (subjects) appointed to carry out the mandate of realizing a bourgeois-democratic transformation (revolution)? How would their identity as subjects be established?

Koschmann raises these and other key questions, concluding that Japan failed the postwar test of attain- ing "revolution and subjectivity." In the ensuing Cold War, a conservative consensus emerged with the sup- port of Japanese leaders as well as their American patrons. First under Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru and then under his Liberal Democratic Party succes- sors, this consensus effectively revived a prewar pat- tern whereby Japan forged economic prosperity at the cost of lasting political immaturity and the prevalence of the production system over the claim of individual rights and interests.

This disagreeable lesson emerges clearly from Kosch- mann's portrayal of Japan's effervescent intellectual scene immediately after the war. New directions were

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1998

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1302 Reviews of Books

staked out in a setting of chaos and want, basic needs such as food and housing went unmet, yet a lively debate arose over whether the subjective will could triumph. Arcane as it was, the subjectivity issue cov- ered multiple possibilities. If so revolutionary a trans- formation could occur amid the ruins, it seemed, some good might yet come of the devastation that had accompanied the demise of the Japanese Empire.

The heart of the book is a narrative of the avenues taken by intellectuals as they pursued democratic modernity during the occupation years (1945-1952). It is an irony lost on no Japanese thinker that the Americans came to democratize Japan by military means, exercising total authority from above and im- plementing reforms through a full apparatus of repres- sion (bases and weapons, press censorship, control of radio). But intellectuals spent little time criticizing the occupiers; their anger was directed at Japan's past for its lack of the creative forces of democracy and individualism. Both Marxists (Umemoto Katsuji, Takakuwa Sumio) and non-Marxists (Maruyama Masao, Takeuchi Yoshimi) are represented in the great subjectivity debate of the late 1940s, and their thinking about shutaisei forms the basis of Kosch- mann's chapter development.

Chapter one takes up the quest for democracy in 1946 with the leftist literary figures who founded the journal Kindai bungaku (Modern Literature). A sub- sequent chapter on the thinking of the Japan Commu- nist Party about philosophical issues in Japanese Marx- ism leads to a chapter on the modern ethos as sketched by University of Tokyo professor Maruyama Masao and his senior colleague, Otsuka Hisao, whom Kosch- mann labels a Mukyokai (non-church) Christian with "exceptionalist" views (even referring to "Otsuka's Orientalism"; pp. 150, 157, 166). The quest closes with a chapter on the reemergence of Japanese nationalism and its critique of subjectivity.

The book's overall effect is to reinforce notions of Japan as a sophisticated site of critical and philosoph- ical disputation in recent world history. Readers will find here a wide range of theoretical positions con- cerning democracy and individualism, but it is subjec- tivity that the author sees as the key to the postwar ideological scene. His account of the exchange be- tween the Weberian political scientist Maruyama and the romantic neo-nationalist Takeuchi suggests that the subjectivity debate boiled down to a distinction concerning individual responsibility and private initia- tive as opposed to collective self-discipline (a la Maoist China) and national identity, although other contem- porary perspectives on subjectivity are also explored.

The technical apparatus deployed in this book is admirable. Bibliography and index lack obvious flaw, and the author is consistent throughout in his use of macrons (long marks over vowels to aid pronuncia- tion). It is too bad, however, that in a work dedicated to the life of the mind, featuring a struggle over political concepts, there is no kanji glossary to facili- tate further inquiry.

Koschmann's study marks a kind of maturation on the part of postwar Japanese intellectual history as practiced in the West. The book offers a profound analysis of an inward tendency in Japanese spiritual life just after the war. It may nonetheless be mistitled, for it is not about a "revolution" that ever took place but rather about democracy, conceived by Japanese thinkers as a behavioral system challenging individuals to reach their ideals through continuous refinement of criticism and practice. Koschmann deals with subjec- tivity in a caring and eloquent way, revisiting some of the work he did for the edited collection, Authority and the Individual in Japan (1978). Pointing out that shutai- sei refers to the "subjective engagement" of agents of historical change (p. ix), he says that he now views the postwar debate as part of an intellectual continuum that carries on to the present time (pp. ix-x). Still, Koschmann remains convinced of the central role that subjective engagement must assume in creating-or failing to create-the model citizen.

GEORGE M. WILSON Indiana University, Bloomington

RICHARD H. MITCHELL. Political Bribery in Japan. Ho- nolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 1996. Pp. xvii, 206.

Political bribes in Japan are as ancient as the state itself (Prince Shotoku first proscribed them in 604 C.E.) and became commonplace, although illegal, when par- liamentary elections were instituted in 1890. This useful volume by Richard H. Mitchell brings together previously scattered information about election laws, vote buying, and influence peddling in Japanese na- tional politics from the late nineteenth century to the present. His main argument is that Japanese politics imposes no ethical sanctions on taking bribes, so "political bribery will continue to flourish" because new leaders and reform laws "will not alter the basic political culture ... meaningful reform must be di- rected at changing cultural values" (p. 157). Chief among these values is continuing reliance on personal ties rather than institutionalized relationships, so that bribes to politicians are often seen as gifts.

Mitchell packs a warehouse of detail into this slim study. He pores over such episodes as the Siemens- Vickers-Mitsui scandal over naval contracts in 1914- 1915; universal male suffrage in 1925 and its ramifica- tions for vote buying; bribes from the Teijin Corporation that brought down the Saito Makoto cabinet in 1934; and the Showa Electric Company scandal of 1948, which destroyed the cabinet of Ashida Hitoshi. These cases show that "the dark side of party politics: the incessant search for funds" (p. 91) was not confined to the spectacular scandals of recent decades in Japan (Lockheed, Recruit, Sagawa Kyutbin, Bank of Japan). Despite American efforts to change Japan's political values during the occupation of 1945-1952, the rise of the postwar "construction state" offered

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1998

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