ABSTRACT
War guilt and elite responsibility: the Early Enlightenment project As I already indicated in the previous section, one of the common concerns among postwar Japanese intellectuals was to plant the seeds of postwar Japanese recovery. Their investigations began just after the arrival of the Occupation Forces in 1945. At the beginning, this seemed to be a relatively promising project because of the consistently democratising policies enforced by the Occupation Army throughout 1940s. For example, US General Headquarters (GHQ) ordered former soldiers and secret police off the political scene, and stipulated the exceptionally idealistic principle of disarmament in the new constitution. Likewise, they ordered the dismantling of trusts and monopolies in order to decentralise economic power. Above all, the most important change was the
constitutional status of the Emperor which reduced his omnipotent position to that of merely ‘a symbol of the Nation’. As postwar democratic reform progressed, scholars searched for a theoretical tool to apply to this postwar situation in response. On the one hand, there emerged some traditionalist theorists who denied the necessity of postwar reforms. Soukichi Tsuda, for instance, maintained that the prewar totalitarian regime had emerged accidentally out of the panicky mood during the war, and concluded that it would not affect the legitimacy of the rule of the Emperor (Tsuda, 1946). On the other hand, Marxists maintained that it was not the superficial political reforms but the more structural economic revolution that would bring about genuine postwar democracy. For example, Koza School Marxists and Rono School Marxists debated seriously as to whether Japanese capitalism was mature enough to progress to a bourgeois revolution or not (Maruyama et al., 1948). Postwar Enlightenment thinkers, by contrast, attempted to provide a positive justification for postwar Japanese democratic transformations. For example, Hisao Otsuka provided a sort of capitalist defence of postwar democracy and civil society. He argued that free human transactions in a capitalist economy would bring about human rationality in the Weberian sense by breaking down the communal ties of traditional society (Otsuka, 1955); Otsuka maintained this line for more than ten years. Likewise, a Kantian legal theorist, Takeyoshi Kawashima, sought the causes of prewar totalitarian rule in patriarchal hierarchy within the family, and maintained that postwar family law should be organised along the lines of a contractarian agreement between free and equal family members (Kawashima, 1946). The most powerful Enlightenment argument from a political perspective, however, can be found in the works of Masao Maruyama (b. 1914, d. 1996). As a representative figure not only among Postwar Enlightenment thinkers but also among postwar Japanese academics as a whole, Maruyama focused on the role of political elites in prewar totalitarian rule. In his essay, ‘Theory and Psychology of Ultra-Nationalism’, and elsewhere, Maruyama presented his epochmaking analysis of the evils of prewar Japanese totalitarian elites (Maruyama, 1946, 1969). At this early stage, Maruyama’s discourse seemed to share much in common with the formal and institutional version of postwar Japanese civil society arguments. He began his argument, first, by pointing to the institutional defects of prewar regime. He contended that the most decisive defect of prewar Japanese nationalism, compared with its European counterparts, was that it had failed to secure a proper distance between the state and its citizens. Maruyama attempted to clarify this point by borrowing some insights from the concept of the ‘neutral state’ taken from Carl Schmitt. Whereas Schmitt employed this concept to reveal the moral weakness of contemporary European nationalism, Maruyama did so to highlight its moral strength (for a detailed comparison of Maruyama and Schmitt, see Gonza, 1999). Maruyama defined the concept as a state adopting ‘a neutral position on internal values, such as the problem of what truth and justice are’ (Maruyama, 1969: 3).
