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China in the Japanese Radical Gaze, 1945–1955

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2009

CURTIS ANDERSON GAYLE
CURTIS ANDERSON GAYLE*
Affiliation:
Japan Women's University, Tama-ku, Kawasaki-shi, Japan Email: cagayle5@gmail.com
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Abstract

Japanese images of China have much to tell us about the way Japan sees its own modernisation and its place in the international system. Contrary to popular belief, Japan did not turn unabashedly toward the USA after 1945. During the first decade after World War II, a number of important Japanese radical historians and thinkers decided that modernisation could be accomplished without the help of the West. Just when many in Japan were looking to America and Europe as exemplars of modernisation, others looked instead to revolutionary China and its past struggles against Japanese colonialism in the construction of a very different historical position from that ordinarily associated with the early post-war years. Certain Japanese historians, inspired by the push toward decolonisation in Asia, set about writing the history of the present in ways that aligned Japan with modern Chinese history. Even though China had just been liberated from Japanese colonial rule, Japanese Marxists saw their own position—under American imperialism—as historically and politically congruous with China's past war of resistance against Japan (1937–45). Through campaigns to develop a kind of cultural Marxism on the margins of Japanese society, they sought to bring about post-war Japanese ‘national liberation’ from American hegemony in ways that consciously simulated past Chinese resistance to Imperial Japan. Replacing Japan's own cultural Marxist traditions from the pre-war era with the more palpable and acceptable example of China, they also hoped a new form of Asian internationalism could remedy the problem of Japan's wartime past. The historical irony associated with this discursive twist deferred to future generations the problem of how the Left* would come to terms with the past.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 5 , September 2009 , pp. 1255 - 1286
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

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

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

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49 There are a number of works in English covering various aspects of this, including Crump, John, The Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan (London: Palgrave MacMillan: 1983)Google Scholar and Scalapino, Robert A., The Japanese Communist Movement, 1920–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press: 1967)Google Scholar.

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

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

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

53 Following the pre-war Kōza Faction position, many of the Marxists discussed in this paper adhered to the two-stage theory of revolution, first a bourgeois democratic revolution and then a revolution that would bring Japan into socialism. This formula was, however, not so hard and fast as is usually assumed, especially during the early 1950s.

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

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62 This kind of realism depicted and dramatised through cultural forms for revolutionary political change is often known as ‘proletarian realism’ in Japan, China and within proletarian cultural movements more generally. See, for instance, Heather Bowen-Struyk, ‘Proletarian Arts in East Asia’, Japan Focus (online journal, 1 May 2007).

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71 For an introduction to the influence of Japanese intellectuals on Chinese development of proletarian culture, see Xu Mei-Yan, ‘The Japanese Influence on Chinese 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.

73 Ibid. p. 32. See also Dagfinn Gatu, Village China at War: The Impact of Resistance to Japan, 1937–1945 (University of British Columbia Press: 2007). However, During the 1920s and early 1930s in Japan there was much debate by writers, thinkers and artists of various persuasions as to whether proletarian art should utilize ‘old’ forms of traditional culture, or whether it should instead develop new kinds of artistic practice and 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 and material manifestations of cultural Marxism is Hidehiko, Soda, Minshu Gekijo: mo hitotsu no Taishō Demokurashi (Tokyo: Shozansha: 1995)Google Scholar.

75 Matsumoto, Shinpachirō, ‘Kakumeiteki Dentō ni tsuite’, in Tōma Seita et al. (eds.), Rekishi ni okeru Shomondai: Kōza Rekishi, Vol. 4 (Tokyo: Otsuki Shoten: 1956), pp. 190–91.

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

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

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

81 The general discourse of uniquely ‘Asian values’ in Japan and Asia has been around since the Meiji era. See, for example, Takahiko, Tsubouchi, Okakura Tenshin no Shisō Tanpō (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō: 1998)Google Scholar. To reiterate, the Marxist version of this was rooted in a different historical perspective to that of the mainstream of modern Japanese discourse on this topic.

82 Lowenthal, David, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1988)Google Scholar.

83 A detailed description of why Ishimoda and others turned their backs on their earlier approaches can be found in Okuda Shuzō and Nakatsuka Akira, ‘Kokuminteki Rekishigaku no Hanketsu to Hansei’, in Tōma Seita (ed.), Kōza Rekishi, vol.1: Kokumin to Rekishi (Tokyo: Otsuki Shoten: 1956), pp. 227–86.

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86 I take this position in my forthcoming monograph entitled, Narrative Unbindings: the emergence of local women's history in early post-war Japan (unpublished data).

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