ABSTRACT
It is common among chroniclers of Japan’s recovery from World War II to observe that the late 1940s was uniquely a time when the capacity for autonomous, creative action that is evoked by the term shutaisei (active subjectivity) was of central concern to intellectuals. They generally note that creative spontaneity and individuality had been suppressed during the “dark valley” of totalitarianism and war. Thus, they see it as natural that the earlypostwar period should be the moment in which shutaisei was most fully theorized, reflected upon, and debated.2 The problem with this periodization is simply that it ignores the prevalence of extended discussions of shutaisei in books and journal articles published between the mid-1930s and 1945. Wartime publications are filled with controversy over and theories of shutaisei and the need for it in a period of crisis. The historiographical lapse is noted by the intellectual historian Iwasaki
Minoru in a provocative essay on wartime Japanese theories of subjectivity/ shutaisei that focuses on wartime technology theory as a major predecessor to the postwar debate. Indeed, according to Iwasaki the postwar debate was merely a “poor and emaciated repetition” of the more sophisticated and extensive wartime discussions (Iwasaki 1998: 160). The present chapter will expand on Iwasaki’s study by investigating another wartime approach to the problem of shutaisei that was related to the discussions of technology but quite distinct from it: the debate on “economic ethics.” In tune with the purpose of this volume, it is appropriate to note briefly
how much the argument of this chapter owes to Naoki Sakai’s multifaceted influence over the many years of our intellectual and personal association. I did not originally intend this chapter to be an illustration or exemplar of Sakai’s approach, so whatever marks it bears are there because his influence has been pervasive and often profound. That influence tends to be of a certain kind, reflecting a particular relationship to Sakai’s work that is only one among many possible ones. As Meaghan Morris suggests in her foreword to Sakai’s Translation and Subjectivity, his work has an “involving” quality and an openness that allows it to “send readings off in many directions unanticipated ‘in’ the text” (Morris 1997: xiii, xv). My own reading of Sakai’s work is attentive primarily to its ramifications for the practice of the
intellectual history of empire, especially wartime Japan in Asia and Japan-U.S. relations. Of all the interrelated facets of Sakai’s work to date, the ones that have
most directly influenced this chapter are his analyses with respect to Japan and the U.S. of the universal/particular binary and especially its implications for the relationship between West and East (Sakai, Naoki 1997: Chapters 3, 4, and 5). Accordingly, the chapter attempts, among other things, to show that Japanese thinking and planning in regard to the New Order in East Asia was coeval and deeply implicated with contemporary thought in the US and Europe. That is, one could say that major dimensions of Japanese fascism were cosmopolitan in their intellectual origins and reference points. At the same time, however, this chapter seeks to take seriously the particularistic, self-orientalizing side of Japanese fascism as well, giving it more play than Sakai typically does. Among the many processes stimulated by the Japanese invasion of China
in 1937 were intense efforts among Japanese intellectuals to make their academic knowledge and insight relevant to the contemporary crisis. War demanded the massive expansion of economic production which, in turn, would require not only resources and machinery but the national mobilization of human talent and effort. It would also require that new economic controls be imposed at the national level. That is, as a result of the military crisis the state was given new salience as an economic unit, and new intensity was injected into discussions of how the national economy should be organized and what measures were needed to expand the productive forces, allocate labor power, and reproduce the means of production. The resulting controversies were scarcely limited to price and wage controls,
resource procurement, consumption limits, and other strictly economic issues. Discussion of the urgent need to mobilize human beings directed attention to questions of subjective intentionality and motivation. What sorts of appeal would be effective? Was narrow self-interest the only effective motivational mechanism? Historically aware economists and social policy experts responded by raising the issue of “economic man” (keizaijin) and his or her relationship to the ethics of action. The result was a debate on what came to be called “economic ethics” and, more broadly, the subjective relationship between ethics and interest. This chapter will extract from the works of several of the major participants in this wartime discussion the main outlines of the “new economic ethic” (and the “new human being” that was to be its bearer) that they proposed, while also outlining some of the various traditionalist/Japanist alternatives. The chapter will conclude with some tentative observations about the continuities and discontinuities between wartime and postwar theories of active subjectivity.
