Peter Duus

Presidential Address: Weapons of the Weak, Weapons of the Strong—The Development of the Japanese Political Cartoon

I Approach my topic—the development of the modern Japanese political cartoon—with some trepidation. Humor is a fragile product that can easily be damaged by academic scrutiny. As Evelyn Waugh once remarked, analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog—much is learned but in the end the frog is dead. Waugh was right. Most analyses of humor cannot be read for amusement. On the other hand, why should they be? If Shakespeare scholars are not expected to write in iambic pentameter, why should students of humor be expected to keep their readers in stitches? As the editor of the International Journal of Humor Studies recently told a reporter, “We are not in the business of being funny” ( New York Times , 19 December 2000).

Politics and mobilization in Japan, 1931–1945

INTRODUCTION As Taichirō Mitani showed in Chapter 2, Japans conservative political parties (kisei seitō) surmounted the obstacles to parliamentary influence in the Meiji constitution and during the 1920s occupied a prominent position in both the lower house of the Diet and the cabinet. From 1924 to 1932, the two conservative parties monopolized the premiership and extended their influence among other political elite groups. Between 1932 and 1940, however, party influence declined swiftly and steeply. In its wake, the opinions of administrative specialists in the civilian and military bureaucracies, joined by the views of a newly emergent business elite, became paramount in the determination of Japans foreign and domestic policies. Ironically, both the successes and failures of party politicians in amassing political influence were predicated on the development of a political culture in late Tokugawa and Meiji Japan that supported the proposition that those with a demonstrated practical ability to govern should be given the reins of political power. This conviction was first manifested in the bakumatsu era, when the muffled ideological tensions erupted between the hereditary principle of power transfer and the Confucian concept of “rule by the talented.” The leaders of the Meiji Restoration also believed in the principle of meritocracy. They recruited talented young followers into their personal political factions (hanbatsu) and established institutions of higher learning (Tokyo Imperial University, the Army and Navy war colleges) to teach future leaders the expertise requisite to Japans survival in the modern world. By 1910, these institutions had become the primary sources for the nations civilian and military administrative leaders.

Depression, recovery, and war, 1920–1945

INTRODUCTION The Japanese economy experienced great changes as a result of World War I. With the disappearance of European and American products from Asian and African trade, these extensive markets suddenly became wide open to Japanese products. Export volume and prices shot up, and Japans industries reveled in an unprecedented boom. A spate of new firms appeared in rapid succession; stock prices soared; and the whole country rang with the sound of hammers at work on new-factory construction. Products like steel, machinery, and chemicals, for which Japan had been dependent on imports, began to be produced domestically. From its status as a debtor nation to the tune of ¥1.1 billion on the eve of the war in 1913, Japan had, by the end of 1920, transformed itself into a creditor nation with a surplus exceeding ¥2 billion. Despite social unrest such as the 1918 rice riots and the intensification of the labor and peasant movements that accompanied the galloping inflation produced by the war boom, the Japanese economy expanded as a result of the war. When the war ended, however, so did the boom. Because of the renewed export competition and the resumption of imports that had long been suspended while Europe was at war, the international payments balance reverted to a deficit, and holdings of gold and foreign exchange began to diminish. This chapter will trace the path of the Japanese economy from the 1920s to the end of the Pacific War.

Whig History, Japanese Style: The Min'yūsha Historians and the Meiji Restoration

With these stirring lines Takekoshi Yosaburō opened the preface to the 1893 edition of his Shin Nihonshi {History of New Japan) . It is difficult to imagine a more enthusiastic celebration of the Meiji Restoration than one likening it to the epochal founding of the Chou dynasty. Yet those who read beyond the confident affirmation of the preface soon encountered a rising note of anxiety, concern, even alarm in the pages that followed. For it was clear that however highly Takekoshi regarded the ideals of the “great revolution of the Restoration,” he also saw them in jeopardy. “Today,” he wrote, “slightly more than twenty years since the Restoration, the general public has begun to tread the path of unrighteousness. Ministers in power err in their policies, and those in opposition err in their views, and together both make pronouncements that give comfort only to themselves. That is why the author has taken up his brush in indignation to narrate a general outline of the changing times since the Restoration.” The revolution, in short, was a revolution betrayed, or at least unfulfilled.

Nagai Ryūtarō and the “White Peril,” 1905–1944

It is often said that the nationalism of the 1930s was more “narrow,” more “parochial,” more “isolationist,” and more “pathological” than the nationalism of Meiji. In the earlier period, men like Fukuzawa Yukichi and Ōi Kentarō, who had ingested the liberalism of the late Victorian West, defined Japans identity and role in the world in cosmopolitan, even revolutionary terms. By contrast, it is said, the nationalists of the 1930s were “frogs at the bottom of a well,” whose vision of the nation was clouded by folkish myths of national superiority or who were moved at most by narrow concern for national self-interest. The men of Shōwa, unlike those of Meiji, lacked a conception of Japans role in the world which admitted the claims of higher goal or value than the nation itself.

The establishment of party cabinets, 1898–1932

The year 1924 marked a turning point in the history of Japanese domestic politics. In January, Kiyoura Keigo, the incumbent president of the Privy Council, was nominated as prime minister and chose all his cabinet except for the military service ministers from the membership of the House of Peers. The House of Representatives had been by passed in the selection of cabinets since the fall of the Takahashi Korekiyo cabinet in June 1922. Angered by this, the leaders of the three major opposition parties in the lower house – Katō Takaaki (Kenseikai), Takahashi Korekiyo (Seiyūkai), and Inukai Tsuyoshi (Kakushin Club) – met in February 1924 to organize a united front to bring down Kiyouras “cabinet of peers.” Because the first Labour Party government had been organized in England just a few weeks before, the general public as well as many party politicians felt that the Kiyoura government was swimming against the tides of history. In the general election of May 1924, the three-party coalition, brandishing the slogan of “protecting constitutional government,” won a majority in the House of Representatives. Faced with the prospect of intransigent opposition in the lower house, Kiyoura chose to resign. In June the three opposition parties formed a coalition cabinet under the premiership of Katō Takaaki, president of the Kenseikai, the plurality party in the House of Representatives. The formation of this “cabinet to protect constitutional government” (goken sanpa naikaku) was of great significance. For the first time in modern Japanese history, the result of a general election, that is, a change in the majority in the House of Representatives, had brought about a change of cabinets in Japan.

The Pacific War

HYPOTHETICAL ENEMIES The general staffs of the Japanese armed forces, like those elsewhere in the world, devised contingency plans each year to cope with the possibility of hostilities against one or more powers. The Japanese armys war plans, reflecting emphases rather than strict numerical priorities, ascribed first importance to the Russians as the potential enemy from the time of the Russo-Japanese War until the birth of the Soviet Union. With the increase in American influence in the Far East attending a deterioration in U.S.-Japanese relations, the United States replaced Russia after 1918 as the main national enemy. The Japanese army was never as serious as the navy was concerning anti-American operations because hostilities did not appear imminent. Nevertheless, as early as 1918, Japanese war plans included an army-navy seizure of the Philippines to deny advanced bases to the United States Fleet in the western Pacific. In the mid-1920s, civilian politicians pushed forward a program of reduction and budgetary retrenchment. Ugaki Kazushige, war minister between 1924 and 1927, feared that the lions share of the limited national defense budget would go to the navy if the United States remained the prime national foe. To counteract this domestic pressure, the Japanese army began to draft new operational plans against the Soviet Union. In the late 1920s, however, the army general staff became more serious about the “northern threat.” The first Soviet five-year plan was begun in 1928, and the Red Armys offensive against Chang Hsueh-liangs forces in Manchuria in 1929 was unexpectedly successful.

Introduction: History Wars in Postwar East Asia, 1945–2014

Since the end of World War II the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans have embraced different narratives about the war, its origins and its consequences. But it was not until the 1980s that “history wars” over those differing narratives became a central diplomatic issue that has led to the erosion of trust. Not only had the generation with direct memories of the war begun to fade away but neo-nationalist tendencies in all three countries emerged as their economies flourished and competed with one another. The political consequence was an intensification of mutual recrimination over distorted narratives and historical “revisionism.” While some gestures toward reconciliation have been made, unless there is a deep political will to sustain them, the “history wars” are likely to continue in the foreseeable future.

‘Punch Pictures’: Localising Punch in Meiji Japan

The earliest Japanese term for political cartoon—‘Punch picture’ (Ponchi-e ポンチ絵)—was invented in 1868 by a Japanese language news journal, the Kōko shinbun 江湖新聞 (the public news) published in the treaty port of Yokohama. The word endured until the early 1900s when it was slowly supplanted by the more familiar manga (cartoon), a broader term that came to mean not only single panel political cartoons but also four panel cartoons, comic strips, comic magazines and eventually animated cartoons.

Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945 (review)

talist power directly into the human nervous system: neuropolitics” (p. xiii). As capitalist power extended into colonial bodies abroad, it extended into Japanese metropolitan minds at home, most vividly in ero-guro “image commodities” produced and disseminated in sexological and revolutionary pornographic discourses as well as in hardcore ero-guro fi ction such as that written by the prominent detective novelist Edogawa Ranpo. Vampiric, these erotic-grotesque commodities colonized the human sensorium and in so doing “inculcated a fascination with murder and suicide” (p. xiv) which presumably complemented if not actively encouraged the necropolitical practices in 1930s Manchukuo. On its own, Driscoll’s reading of metropolitan ero-guro culture is as fascinating as the subject matter itself, perhaps the most trenchant treatment of this material to date. And yet, if a weak link in this ambitious book is to be found it is in this second punch of Driscoll’s argument, specifi cally in the linking of the outer and inner circles of imperial Japan through the triad of biopolitical/neuropolitical/necropolitical. Because the discussion of the change in colonial administration/exploitation from the earlier biopolitical to the later necropolitical regime follows so clearly and their connections are so concretely buttressed and documented by the end of the book, the integration of the section on the neuropolitics of the metropole into the overall economy of empire seems by comparison more suggestion than demonstration. I think that links that are more than rhetorical are there, but I feel them more than see them in the text. Regardless, I am moved by the argument. Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque is, like Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow cited above, an audacious book. Bold, challenging, and refreshingly unrestrained by snooze-inducing generic conventions, Driscoll unapologetically shoves you into the muck of Japan’s modernity, breaches those vast colonial silences that “absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets,” and somehow makes the experience pleasurable. I can’t help but desire to be shoved further, past 1945, to trace vampiric revenants of the bio/ neuro/necropolitical in postwar Japan. Perhaps there’s a sequel to be made.