ABSTRACT
Introduction In 1948, the public intellectual and sinologist Takeuchi Yoshimi published an impassioned essay, “What Is Modernity?” in which he compared the case of Japan and China. 1 Takeuchi evaluated what he called Japan’s “slave mentality” toward Western civilization negatively as compared with China’s resistance against it, and he expressed particular irritation with the apparent success that the “master student” Japan had shown in adopting Western civilization and using it for its own gains. Takeuchi complained:
[W]hen in Europe a concept becomes discordant (i.e., contradictory) with reality . . ., a movement occurs in which accord is sought by the overcoming of that contradiction, that is to say by the development in place. Hence it is the concept itself that develops. However, when in Japan a concept becomes discordant with reality . . . one abandons former principles and begins searching for others. Concepts are deserted and principles are abandoned. . . . There is no failure of Japanese ideology, for it perpetually succeeds by perpetually failing. It is an infinite repetition, which has been conceived of as progress. 2
As someone writing just three years after war’s end, Takeuchi’s frustration is understandable. He was not the only person to protest against, as he saw it, the all too facile transition of Japan from the war period into the postwar period. Ibuse Masuji (for example, in the 1950 story “Yōhai taichō” (translated as “Lieutenant Lookeast”) and Ōe Kenzaburō (in the majority of his works), show a similar rueful skepticism concerning the instant democratization of a nation that at least in public had supported the war effort with high-minded rhetoric until the bitter end. 3 But almost overnight, after surrender, former advocates of war began to pepper their conversations with the new watchwords of “peace” and “democracy.” 4 The outward trajectory of Japan seemed to confi rm Takeuchi’s claim that for Japan even the most catastrophic failure is the mother of success. As is well known, already by 1955, Japan’s GDP exceeded its prewar level, and
the country was preparing for its economic takeoff into high growth in the 1960s. The “reverse course” policy taken by the United States after the rise of the Cold War greatly facilitated Japan’s political rehabilitation: the late 1950s saw Japan fi rmly embedded as the United States’ closest ally in East Asia; Japan became a U.S.-sponsored participant of GATT in 1955 and a member state of the United Nations in 1956. Moreover, the legal narrative of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (1946-1948, hereafter IMTFE) had portrayed the Japanese military as the villain of World War Two: the imperial Japanese military had hijacked the Japanese state and seduced and bullied the “common people” into a self-destructive war. The question of war responsibility had been swiftly dealt with, and the “common people” were going to be able to start afresh in their economic-driven pursuit of postwar security. 5
As plausible and convincing as Takeuchi’s complaint about the fi ckleness and facileness of modern Japanese thought may appear, it is still misleading. Nature does not make jumps in Japan, any more than anywhere else, and the laws of gravity and momentum apply there equally. Ideas follow certain paths and do not easily disappear, but they may change their outward appearance and live to fi ght another day. The sudden shifts of political tactics and creed that we can see among Japanese intellectuals in the postwar, which were the main target of Takeuchi’s vitriol, may have been less a turn of conviction than the result of a radical turn of perspective. The ideas remained fundamentally the same, but their meanings changed with the August 1945 “revolution” as the political context transformed from the Japan-centered Greater East Asian order into a U.S.-centered Cold War order.
