Session 12: Individual Papers: Japanese Imperialism and Nationalism

Organizer and Chair: Ross Paul King, University of British Columbia

Exhibiting Japanese History: The Politics of Art and Architecture in the Phoenix Hall at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago

Lisa K. Langlois, Oakland University

Japanese exhibits at the 1893 Exposition were designed to increase trade and support the Meiji government’s call for treaty revision. By participating in discourses of "progress" and "just rule," officials justified the abrogation of the "unequal treaties" and explained its colonial expansion. Exhibits of Japan’s industrial, military and commercial development complemented its cultural achievements. Japan’s national pavilion, the Phoenix Hall, legitimized the sovereignty of Japan’s new constitutional monarchy and Japanese judicial and tariff autonomy in new treaties, signed by 1894.

The emerging academic disciplines of Japanese history and art history informed the building’s design. Possession of a distinct history was perceived to be a prerequisite for joining the family of dominant nation-states in a global imperialist system. Thus exhibits in the Phoenix Hall helped consolidate a recognizable identity that spanned time and transcended political disjunction through the ideology of an unbroken line of imperial succession. Okakura Kakuzô, author of the Phoenix Hall’s guidebook, constructed a progressive history of Japan that validated the Meiji regime. Art objects simultaneously illustrated that history and the vitality of art in Japan.

Japanese ambassadors to the United States had warned that Japan, like China, faced exclusion and by 1892 the first anti-Japanese movement erupted in California. Fair commissioners endeavored to separate Japan from China in the American popular imaginary and to counter negative stereotypes of Japanese immigrants. Deftly promoting an identity that drew on Euro-American ideologies, the Phoenix Hall’s planners designed an image of Japan as an alternative to "the West" and leader of Asia.

The Ethics of Empire: Protestant Thought, Moral Culture, and Imperialism in Meiji Japan

Yosuke Nirei, University of California, Berkeley

This is a study of Japanese Protestant intellectuals who led the thought and journalism of their country during the Meiji period (1868–1912). In developing their social critique and domestic reformism, Protestant thinkers worked within a dual framework, formed on the one hand by their acute awareness of international conditions, specifically, the rise of imperialism; and on the other by their acceptance of and commitment to notions of secular providence, that is, of social progress and national development. Protestants, it is argued, were not mere "religionists" or transcendental critics entirely independent of the imperatives of the Meiji state or their times, but struggled to maintain a credible position amid the dominant social discourses and cultural attitudes of the day concerning national ethics, religion, education, liberalism, and imperialism.

This paper specifically discusses in a form of overview the thought and praxis of a host of the Protestant intelligentsia (and those of Protestant lineage) including Niijima Jô (1843–1890), Uchimura Kanzô (1861–1930), Ebina Danjô (1857–1937) Tokutomi Sohô (1863–1959), Ukita Kazutami (1859–1946), Yamaji Aizan (1864–1917) and explains the rise of Protestant-style national reformism and its commonly noticeable characteristics such as social elitism, intellectualism, progressivism or "modernism" by retracing the origins of the early-Meiji Protestant conversion of young samurai. The paper also considers the imperialist and anti-imperialist writings of the Protestant intelligentsia and discusses important connections between their sociopolitical praxis and the influence of new moral and religious thought, particularly occasioned by the introduction of liberal and "modernist" theology in the late Meiji period. Ultimately, the larger significance of Meiji Protestantism lies in the fact that it accommodated the historical rise of the Japanese Empire by leading its domestic reformism and progressivism, thereby seeking to supply the empire with moral and providential significance.

The Word Is Mightier Than the Throne: Bucking Colonial Education Trends in Manchukuo

Andrew R. Hall, University of Pittsburgh

Japanese officials within the Manchukuo education bureaucracy stood out from their contemporaries in other Japanese colonial education organs in their opposition to the teaching of militaristic and Japan Emperor-centered materials in the schools. As late as 1942 they persisted in publishing textbooks which focused on the students’ daily lives, rather than on encouraging respect for the military or reverence for the Japanese Imperial family, defying the trend in Japan and occupied Korea. While they participated in a shift of emphasis from teaching Chinese language and tradition to teaching Japanese, they kept language instruction largely free of Japanese nationalistic material.

A core of Japanese educators who were active participants in the liberal "New Education movement" led this defiance. They saw in Manchukuo an opportunity to implement school reforms which had become impossible in the increasingly conservative atmosphere in Japan. A major influence was Yamaguchi Kiichirô (1872–1952), a leading colonial educator, who held that non-Japanese could be best won over to the Japanese cause by language immersion, rather than by ideological training.

This, paper examines the efforts of Japanese officials to create a "Manchurian" national consciousness which they hoped would replace Chinese nationalistic identity among the majority Han Chinese, through an analysis of Manchukuo’s Chinese-language elementary and secondary schools. Using textbooks, education journals, and postwar memoirs, my paper examines the background of the policymakers, the nature of the ideology they constructed, and the role they assigned language in the dissemination of the ideology.

Settler-Colonialism in Manchuria and Palestine: Linking Japan and Israel in Their Colonial Contexts

John de Boer, Stanford University

This article aims to construct an alternative narrative regarding the flow of ideas about settler-colonialism by establishing that the Japanese and the Zionists implemented analogous systems of colonial expansion and exclusion in their attempt to secure permanent agricultural settlements in Manchuria and Palestine respectively. In doing so, the paper positions aspects of Japanese and Zionist settler-colonialism as having developed in cooperation with each other and not in isolation, as is commonly understood. The focus of this study is aimed at understanding why both cases exhibited a fusion of the farmer settler-soldier identity and demonstrated a clear progression toward cooperative forms of agricultural settlement. By uncovering the conditions that promoted Japanese colonial planners to adopt what have long been considered "typically" Israeli structures of domination, this approach allows us to better understand how socio-economic and demographic realities in the colonies shaped colonial institutions in various parts of Asia. It also allows us to depict a process through which overlapping systems of meaning enabled the Japanese and the Zionists to assume the category of the "civilized" and distinguish themselves from the "barbarians" as they proceeded to colonize already inhabited lands in Asia.

Competing Nationalisms in Postwar Japan: New Year’s Day Editorials in National Dailies, 1953–2004

Shunichi Takekawa, University of Hawaii, Manoa

During the last decade, Japanese nationalism has attracted considerable attention. Scholars, journalists and practitioners wondered: Is contemporary Japanese nationalism a revival of pre-1945 fanatic nationalism? Or is it a reaction to ongoing globalization? To answer these kinds of questions, my paper examines New Year’s Day editorials of three national dailies—the Yomiuri, Asahi, and Mainichi—from 1953 to 2004 (after the occupation to the present). My findings demonstrate that the reconstruction of Japanese nationalism in the postwar era already began in the 1950s. Since then, many New Year’s Day editorials attempted to mobilize the Japanese with political concepts like internationalism and pacifism while presenting their views on Japanese and international politics. This tendency is particularly strong in the cases of the Yomiuri and Asahi. In the 1950s the Asahi argued Japan should promote world federalism. And in the sixties, the daily contended that the pacifist constitution should be the essence of atarashii nashonarizumu or "new nationalism." The daily has repeated pacifism and constitutionalism for the nation since then. Meanwhile, until the seventies the Yomiuri argued Japan should be a welfare state. In the eighties the daily suggested that Japan should be a more active ally of the West while criticizing pacifists. The daily has contended Japan should amend the constitution and be kokusai kokka or "an international state" that is responsible for the world order. However, the Mainichi has been ambiguous, although it seems to subscribe to pacifism. The paper discusses how well their discourses reflect postwar nationalisms in general.