Going to bookstores when I’m back in Japan is one of my favorite things to do. Along with going to my favorite ramen noodle shops, hole in the wall cheap udon shops, and meeting friends, bookstores are right at the top of my Tokyo to-do list. Today I took a fellow historian and my host while I’m here to lunch in Shibuya. I spent most of the afternoon studying in a coffee shop and then went to the large Book First bookstore nearby.
Sometimes though I leave the bookstore with really mixed feelings. In fact, I feel a rant coming on… The sections of the bookstore I spend most of my time in (Modern Japanese history, Modern China/Korea history, and the 文庫 paperback section) inevitably have a range of offerings that just disgust me. I can’t help feeling like Shibuya Book First’s selection has gotten worse since when I lived here last in 2004.
Book First is not like the more heavily populist/right-wing smaller bookstores and does have a decent selection of materials. Today I bought the new introduction to modern history of East Asia (『未来を開く歴史』） written cooperatively by historians from China, Korea, and Japan who are trying to develop educational materials for the future. I was also pleased to see several volumes of a new series of books published by the joint Japan-Korea history group with some great looking articles in them (a bit pricey, I’ll get them at the library). Today there was even a full display dedicated to Edward Said translations which included some kind of showing of a documentary about him.
On the same floor though, as you approach the history books, I couldn’t help but notice a whole slew of new editions of Nitobe Inazô’s Bushido and various silly books on how contemporary Japanese should recover their Bushido warrior spirit and a pride in their people.
For the love of Lugalbanda, why can’t the nation just roll over and die…please…doesn’t the 21st century have enough to deal with? What I would give to be alive the day when we can all tear up our passports and laugh at how nonsensical the whole national project was. Those of us who wish to destroy the nation find ourselves continually narrating its violence in the tragic mode, but no one has mastered the tragic mode better than the nationalists themselves. At some point we have to embrace the comic mode and highlight the resounding stupidity of it. We have to move from celebrating the creative and imaginative nature of these communities to a more focused effort at reminding ourself of its farcical core. When it is someday finally severed from the state and that unholy union is finally broken, leave it be…but until then I say spare it no satirical sting; offer it no shred of credibility.
Ok, where was I? The history section seemed to have gotten a bit worse. Maybe it is just me but the selection for nationalist revisionists seems to have expanded somewhat. While not a very scientific measure, to give you an idea, in the standard “Nanjing incident” (Nanjing massacre) section, 4 out of 12 books were of the “what massacre?” variety. This despite the fact that three of the remaining volumes were compilations of interviews with Japanese soldiers who admitted participating in the slaughter (two of them) and of interviews of victims. I have written about one of these important works here at Muninn. I just cannot understand how, with such excellent empirical material out there, any major publisher can still put out such crap. What made it worse was that both of the books about the Nanjing occupation out on display were of “what massacre?” variety. One was a whole book dedicated to talking about the problematic pictures of the massacre (there are indeed many pictures used in Chinese materials about the massacre which have nothing to do with the occupation of Nanjing in 1937 or are otherwise problematic), and the other was a work discussing KMT party archives showing how they mobilized propaganda to spread anti-Japanese sentiment in the aftermath of the occupation of Nanjing. I don’t have any problem with either of the central claims at work in these two prominently displayed books (that there are many problematic pictures about the massacre and that the Nationalists and later Communists milked the massacre for all its propaganda potential) – it is just that neither of these facts prove a damn thing in the face of a mountain of evidence about the widespread slaughter.
Another really well-done right-wing book out by the fascist PHP publishing company I saw prominently displayed was a guide to “Must-know history facts about modern Japanese history” This book was essentially a well-organized manual for those sympathetic to any and all Japanese nationalist silliness. Divided into about fifty short and very concise chapters, it covers all the most controversial themes in modern Japanese history (with bonus chapters on the Dokdo/Takeshima crisis, all of Japan’s other “indisputable” disputed claims, etc.) There was about as much nuance and balance in these books as there is blue in the Japanese flag. Unfortunatley, unlike the many other babbling works by various nut jobs out there, what I think makes this kind of book highly effective was its “executive summary” approach – kind of a briefing booklet. For example, to take the Nanjing massacre chapter as an example, it provided nice one-paragraph summaries of the key arguments of the opposition and counter-arguments so that the defensive nationalist reader will be well-prepared for any debates they might get into with “masochistic” and unpatriotic countrymen. For example, it had one paragraph with pre-war Nanjing population estimates (to prepare the reader for a triumphant take-down when Chinese casualty estimates are shown to be higher, no mention of course of the swelling population of the city due to refugees), it counters the “Safe Zone” violation arguments with the classic “Chinese soldiers were throwing off their uniforms and pouring into the zone [Implied follow-up: so what was the poor Japanese military supposed to do if not charge in and start grabbing/killing males at random]” Of course, there is no mention of the fact that captured soldiers were gunned down by the thousands (Of course, if they had to admit this fact, which many Japanese soldiers there at the time do, they would respond with the classic and feeble, “But we had no food to feed them, and no resources to detain them indefinitely…it is the Chinese military which must take responsibility for leaving its forces in Nanjing to die while its commanders fled.”)
It is so exhausting to see this kind of crap. I’m so tired of it. It is so distracting. I wish I could just ignore it, as I usually do, but the fact that this kind of material reaches a growing audience, in ever more effective formats means that it would be irresponsible not to keep myself relatively familiar with the kinds of vacuous claims being made. Of course, the best way to deal with this is not always to get into the trenches and lower ourselves constantly to their level of repetitive and simplistic discourse, but it remains important for historians in our field to issue the occasional royal smack-down. I am happy to report, however, that what I saw today confirms that they don’t seem to have produced any significant new material other than their regular score of long-ago refuted or irrelevant nonsense. The demand for their drivel though, seems to continue unabated, and I suspect it will grow if nationalist sentiment continues to grow. Ultimately, any time spent thinking about this distracts those of us interested in Sino-Japanese relations history or wartime/colonial history in modern East Asia from the more challenging and, I believe, important work of moving beyond the huge shadow of some of these (non-)controversies. It is not just for the sake of reconciliation in the region, but because the violence of war goes well-beyond a few symbolically important events. There are so many questions to ask, so many issues worth addressing and I so wish we could finally get to the stage where the study of violent wars and imperialism can move beyond the perpetual national mudslinging and nationalist whitewashing that continues today.
[...For the love of Lugalbanda...]
So we severe the Nation from the State. Fine – how then does the State operate? From where will it derive its laws, mores, norms, etc? Nations are the repository of intangibles of this sort and one might as well hope to severe a fetus from its mother.
[...the nation find ourselves continually narrating its violence in the tragic mode...]
The \”tragic mode\” is a Statist franchise. Nations dont kill people. States do.
“Nations are the repository of intangibles of this sort and one might as well hope to severe a fetus from its mother.” – Spoken like a true nationalist. I’m afraid that this demonstrates a profound lack of imagination and the first step to making progress will be instilling a sense of shame in all of us that it has become so widespread. States have existed for thousands of years without nations and nationalism, and there are plenty of state-like bodies and governmental institutions which function without any recourse to identity politics. One’s conception of human worth and basic respect for each other needs no nation as a repository.
“Nations dont kill people. States do.” – I would recommend reading any book with a decent discussion of the impact of nationalism on state violence and inter-state violence. The horrors and atrocities of pre-nation violence simply can’t hold a candle to it.
Like I said, though, I’m happy to leave nationalism be once it is severed from the state, unfortunately, nationalism severed from the state and not in a position of wanting to become a state is not really nationalism any more. It would become like any other regional or ethnic idenity. We could then at least then move on to focus on (the already widespread but smaller scale) ethnic violence in the world which doesn’t have professional military or the powerful institutions of the modern state at its call.
Did you know that there are some elementary schools that give grades on 愛国心 of students in Japan? http://www.asahi.com/politics/update/0527/002.html 悲しすぎる。
Another article about this:
http://www.asahi.com/national/update/0526/TKY200605260086.html
I’m afraid the record of utopian universalist political or religious ideology married to states is not much better. You get politicide, democide, witch-hunting, or class-cleansing rather than genocide or ethnic cleansing.
I’m just starting on a book I picked up in my last visit to a Tokyo bookstore, Manus Midlarsky’s The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge UP, 2005). Looks to be a provocative, though drily analytical, take on a subject no one can regard with placid equanimity.
Scattered bits of aesthetic impressions have recently combined to plant the seeds of a suspicion about hanami and nationalism in Japan. I wonder whether you could either sprinkle a bit more fertilizer on them, or uproot them and cast them out. On a visit to the Soun Museum in Ashikaga, I noticed that Soun (who exhibited a painting of Mt. Fuji at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in the 1880s IIRC) seems to have depicted many stands of ume in bloom, and none of sakura. Even in that bastion of nationalist ideology, Mito, the Tokugawa-era Kairakuen is awash in ume, not sakura (except for the more recently landscaped surrounding areas outside the old garden). Although I’m far from being conversant in Chinese painting, the smidgen I’m familiar with frequently depicts ume, but rarely sakura. Is it no coincidence that one of the nationalist groups before the war called itself the Sakurakai and that wartime propaganda involved much sakura imagery? (When I was inducted into the US Army 1969, I remember seeing the Sakurakai on a list of organizations that I had to affirm I did not belong to.) Did hanami make a transition at some point, starting perhaps in early Meiji times, from elitist, Sinocentric umemi to populist, Japanocentric sakurami, as Japan attempted to exit the Sinosphere and join the Eurosphere? Has someone already studied this putative trend, or are my speculations off base?
Joel, I wish I knew the answer to your question. My suspicions are with on this but I have nothing to back it up. The importance of ume to not only Japan but Chinese art and culture is well known. I don’t know the details however of sakura’s place in hanami or for that matter, the history of hanami.
That is really interesting that Sakurakai, which is a famous and important organization (a military officer I looked into once because of his connection to the traitor Kawashima Yoshiko was a member), was listed!
As for the failure of “universalist political or religious ideology married to states” up until now, the past attempts (the biggest being of course Communism) that is certainly true, although it may be noted that Communism never succeeded in getting rid of nationalism anyways (thus the ironic fact that a global scheme based on class solidarity still managed to have plenty of national conflicts). It shares with nationalism though, a tendency towards the absolutist thinking of the modern enlightenment.
I am a radical anti-nationalist – but don’t have any illusions that the destruction of the nation-state system will result in some happy anarchy or a benevolent world government. I don’t think either are necessarily possible or desirable. I’m just sick and tired of people assuming that the principle that “democracy is the worst political system – except for all the others” which I am perfectly willing to subscribe to, also somehow holds true for the nation-state “nation-states suck, but the alternatives are worse” – I simply don’t by that at all! Which is why, at some point when I can devote the time and muster the resources and support for it, I plan to create a “society for the study of alternatives to the nation state”
I think, however, the disentegration, for all the bad news of late, is already well on its way, and this will be something of an organic process that needs gentle but firm prods in “safer” directions.
I think an important part of the process though is education, and even before that a “decentering” or a loosening of the naturalized status that nation has.
Before nations could rise, the lack of a strong nation had to be recognized as a blight, a shame, and an obstacle to the advancement of the people.
Before nations can fall, they must be recognized for the malignant cancer that they are.
Joel: I recall reading somewhere (yeah, great reference, I know) that ume were THE flowers, the one meant by “hana”, up until about the the end of the Nara period, and from Heian times on “hana” (in the absence of a modifier like “ume no”) strongly implied sakura, and so “hanami” did too.
Before the Heian period most Japanese people never really saw sakura up close — they were mysterious, short-lived, ghostly pink clouds in the mountains, which probably helped their association with the spirit world… that goes back to before they became the It Flower, IIRC.
Still, we all know how the sakura were co-opted (or would you just say “modernized”?) in the early-mid 1900s, and it would be very interesting to learn how hanami changed during that time as a result…
[...] This is wonderful news and allows me to make another rambling follow-up on my recent anti-nationalist rant. While I don’t have any good data on hand, my impression is that Korea’s move to allow foreign participation in local elections is part of a broader trend in this direction and it is not the only country to permit this. There a number of ways to interpret this. On the one hand, it can be seen as a very careful and limited step towards allowing a form of political participation on the part of non-nationals. The numbers who qualify are usually quite small and the fact that the elections are local minimizes the impact. Even moderate nationalists might approve the move as a pragmatic way to provide a kind of harmless political pressure valve through which long-term foreign residents can vent their grievances and feel like semi-members of the community. [...]
Thanks, Matt. I wish your sources were less anonymous, but I’ll have to tentatively hypothesize that, as in most nationalist projects, the expansion of long-observed sakurami beyond the aristocracy seems to have involved the propagation of a more xenophobic internal elite’s tastes as they vie for dominance with a more xenophilic elite. In either case, the elites are looking after their own interests more than anyone else’s.
Muninn, I just posted a more equivocal take on utopianism from the book I’m reading on the etiology of genocide.