‘Weak ally’ or ‘strong enemy?’: Japan in the eyes of Russian diplomats and military agents, 1900-1907

Abstract

At the dawn of the twentieth century, ignorance towards the growing military power of Japan led Imperial Russia to her unexpected and decisive loss of the war of 1904–1905. Just ten years earlier in 1895, Japan was almost half-robbed of the spoils of her victory over China by the Western Powers (including Russia), which insisted on revising the Treaty of Shimonoseki. The Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901 stopped this confrontation and turned Japan and Russia into allies for a short time: Russian and Japanese soldiers fought together against the Chinese, constituting the two largest units among the five allied troops with Russians playing the leading role on the battlefield and the Japanese being their loyal deputy (as it was viewed by Russian media of the time). All these circumstances led Russia to underestimate the Japanese army in the following years. However, the Russo-Japanese War itself changed that attitude, turning it into a sort of ‘a-next-war-to-be-hysteria’ among the Russian officials who served in Japan after the war. The reports by Russian military agents and diplomats from special collections in the Hoover Institution of War, Columbia University, and other archives used in this paper show us that despite being their government's only ‘eyes’ watching the Orient, sometimes those eyes were ‘blinded’ by the loss in the recent war and by their own experiences. One major reason for this was that many Russian diplomats, military agents and spies had long been serving in the Far East, and for some of them the transformation of Japan from ‘weak ally’ to ‘strong enemy’ status happened so swiftly, they came to overestimate this new ‘peril.’ Another problem was Japanese language skill. In the same way that Russia could not properly predict the growing power of Japan before 1904, she wanted after the war to obtain all possible information about her neighbor and, thus, paid special attention to educating a new generation of oriental specialists.     

Contemporary art and unconditionality: ‘the genus of art’ in the art criticism of Chiba Shigeo

This article examines art criticism of the 1980s that sought to address the context and continuity of postwar Japanese avant-garde art. The emphasis is placed on the notion of ‘the genus of art [rui to shite no bijutsu]’, which the art critic Chiba Shigeo discussed in his Gendai bijutsu itsudatsushi (1986). Chiba argued for an autonomous current of postwar Japanese art separate from Western art history but the argument has been largely overshadowed by his ostensible nihonjinron. The term ‘the genus of art’, therefore, has not yet received an adequate critical treatment. The article rephrases this notion as a call for a more inclusive definition of art designed to challenge the conditions that regulate non-Western art. Rather than simply being a nationalist polemic against Western art history from a marginalized place, Japan, ‘the genus of art’ was intended to revitalize and redefine the aims of the avant-garde within the context of ‘contemporary art’. By fleshing out the textual details of ‘the genus of art’ and situating the notion within a larger discourse that interrogated the semiotic role of ‘Japan’ in a global exhibition context, the study repositions Chiba's writing as a potential argument for unconditional acceptance, or unconditionality, as one important ethical contribution of contemporary art.     

Japanese revisionists and the ‘Korea threat’: insights from ontological security

Abstract

This article contributes to the debate on Japanese security. Drawing on insights from ontological security, it challenges conventional understandings that China and North Korea are Japan’s main security threats. It argues that South Korea poses a powerful threat to the Japanese right-wing revisionists’ perception of Japan. The revisionists have attempted to secure Japan’s identity from the ‘Korea threat’ by labelling South Korea a ‘non-democracy’, and this tactic has been taken up by the Japanese government as well. The article concludes by pointing out that such moves could unwittingly result in the emergence of security dilemmas between the two main democracies in Northeast Asia.     

Crisis ideology and the articulation of fascism in interwar Japan: the 1938 Thought-War Symposium

In early 1938, the newly formed Cabinet Information Division (Naikaku jōhōbu) held a closed-door Thought-War Symposium (Shisōsen kōshūkai) in Tokyo with over 100 bureaucrats, military officers, media executives and academics in attendance. While the ostensible purpose of the symposium was to discuss propaganda following Japan's full-scale invasion of China in July of 1937, the presentations had very little to do with the practical coordination of information. Rather, the symposium participants brought their specific areas of expertise to bear on elaborating the curious term ‘thought war’ (shisōsen), a term that had only recently been used with any regularity but which had become invested with critical urgency following the invasion of China.

In the conventional literature, the term ‘thought war’ is understood as marking a new modality of state propaganda as Japan moved towards a total war system. However, this reading overlooks the ideological investments in thought war discourse, as well as how ‘thought war’ inherited a multivalent sense of crisis that had crystallized around thought and culture earlier in the 1930s. In this article, I explore how the 1938 symposium reveals a combined sense of historical crisis and an urgent call for the total overhaul of Japanese state and society, a combination which, I argue, underwrote the development of fascism in Japan. I trace how three earlier discourses of crisis – the ‘Manchurian Problem’, the ‘thought problem’ and the ‘movement to clarify the kokutai’ – converged within thought war discourse, thus investing it with fascist urgency.     

Ethnosexual frontiers in queer Tokyo: the production of racialised desire in Japan

Recent years have seen a worrying rise in anti-Korean and anti-Chinese xenophobia in Japan. This xenophobia has pervaded many aspects of Japanese society, and the gay male community in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ni-chōme is no exception. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of Ni-chōme and interviews conducted with Japanese, Chinese and South Korean men, this article utilises Nagel's theory of the ethnosexual frontier to examine how certain racial identities are rendered illegitimate in Ni-chōme. I argue that the stratification of Ni-chōme into spaces where only certain ‘racialised desires’ (minzokuteki na seiyoku) are legitimated reflects broader ideologies of racial identity that circulate throughout Japanese society. I discuss how Chinese and South Korean men understand themselves as ‘ethnosexual sojourners’ who visit Japan to form long-lasting romantic relationships with Japanese men, striving to adopt Japanese ethnosexual mores. I juxtapose the Chinese and South Korean men's narratives with the voices of Japanese gay men who ambivalently position Chinese and South Korean tourists as a threat to the status quo of the Japanese gay sub-culture. I suggest that these men draw upon neo-colonial discourses of China and South Korea as ‘backward’, which circulate throughout wider Japanese society to position Chinese and South Korean men as ‘ethnosexual invaders’.     

The daiku phenomenon: social and cultural influences of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Japan

In the rude awakening of western colonisations in Asia during the nineteenth century, Japan drastically embraced the ‘better and more modern’ western values towards the end of that century—which began with the Meiji Restoration (Meiji Ishin [ ]). Since the nation began frantically learning everything Western—while keeping its traditional values at heart, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony ‘Choral,’ or daiku as it is known in Japan, has been present throughout the turbulent twentieth century. The social and cultural phenomenon known as nenmatsu-no daiku ([ ] A countless number of annual year-end Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony concerts held throughout Japan each year.) is the subject under scrutiny in this paper. Japan’s almost desperate pursue toward westernization and the much-debated Japanese cultural trait, the ‘groupism’ mentality would make the existence of the daiku phenomenon appear to the bewildered outsider as a horrendous mix of the two elements, but is that simply so? Evidently, the sudden influx of western cultures and ideologies from Europe and the U.S.A. is in great part accountable for the continual and prevalent existence of the daiku in modern Japan. However, we must not overlook the underlying home-grown factors, which have kept the phenomenon well and alive even today. This paper intends to discuss the historical background leading to this phenomenon and present a summary of what daiku is, giving examples of different types of performances as a result of the phenomenon. An attempt will also be given to examine the significance Beethoven’s Ninth has for the Japanese in both social and cultural contexts.     

Rearranging the figures on the tapestry: what Japanese direct translation of European texts can tell us about kanbun kundoku

Abstract

From the earliest stages of reading and writing in the Japanese archipelago, the methodology of kanbun kundoku (vernacular reading of literary Sinitic) has been an important means of engagement with Chinese texts. The kanbun kundoku process of glossing and syntactic rearrangement transforms a literary Sinitic source text into a kind of ‘translationese’ that preserves as closely as possible the diction and structure of the original while making it accessible to readers who may have little or no competence in spoken varieties of Chinese. Yet whether this process should be understood as fundamentally a form of translation is a matter of debate among scholars. In this article, I argue that looking at the early modern phenomenon of ōbun kundoku, by which Japanese scholars applied kundoku methodology to European languages (including Latin, Portuguese, Dutch and English), can offer a valuable perspective. These forms of direct translation are an important although comparatively under-studied aspect of Japanese encounters with European texts and they offer an instructive perspective on kanbun kundoku: the longstanding Japanese method of engagement with foreign-language texts that was their inspiration. The theoretical writings of Japan’s early modern scholars of Dutch unmistakably acknowledge a basic commonality between these two forms of kundoku while also clarifying the ways in which the application of kundoku to European languages was distinct from application to literary Sinitic.     

Military frameworks: technological know-how and the legitimization of warfare

It is the elusive target of policymakers, ethicists and military strategists: the target of a ‘just war’. Since the advent of precision-guided munitions in the mid-1970s, commentators claimed that surgical-strike technology would advance the cause of jus in bello, ending the longstanding tension between effective military engagement and morality. Today, many policymakers accept that the ethical dilemmas that arise in the ‘fog of war’ can be negotiated by the technical precision of weaponry. This is, at best, only partially accurate. At worst, its misplaced optimism risks numbing the moral sense of strategists and, just as importantly, the sensibilities of the general populace. We argue that the development of precision guided munitions (PGM), stand-off weaponry and military robotics may force policymakers and strategists to experience new ethical tensions with an unprecedented sensitivity and may require them to make specific policy adjustments. In the move toward more quantitative approaches to political science and international affairs it is often forgotten that military ethics, and the ethics of military technologies, turn on the question of human judgment. We argue that the ethical implications of revolution in military affairs (RMA) are best investigated by way of a detailed discussion of the tenuous relationship between ethical decision-making and the workings of military technology.     

Not quite the ‘Great Britain of the Far East’: Japan's security,the US–Japan alliance and the ‘war on terror’ in East Asia

Japan, in responding to US expectations for support in the ‘war on terror’, has displayed a degree of strategic convergence on global security objectives, thus prompting policy-makers and observers to dub it the ‘Great Britain of the Far East’. This article argues, however, that Japan is far from assuming this role. For Japan, the ‘war on terror’ serves more as a political pretext for legitimating long-planned changes in military security policy that are often only marginally related to the US's anti-terrorism agenda. Instead, Japan has focused much more on using the terror threat rationale as a means to push forward its response to the regional and traditional security challenges of North Korea and China, even if at times it attempts to depict both as ‘new security challenges’ or as involving elements of counterterrorism. The final conclusion is that US military hegemony may be weakened by Japan's and the Asia-Pacific's potential divergence from the US global security agenda.     

Questioning western universality: Sōseki's Theory of Literature and his novel Kusamakura

Focusing on the relation between the literary theory and the novels of modern Japanese writer Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), this article argues that we need to include more ‘non-Western’ theories in the discussions of world literature. Furthermore, it concludes that a world literature contextualization of Sōseki's theory helps explain how his novels critically negotiate the influences from Western literature in Japan. By comparing Sōseki's theoretical and literary writing, this article shows continuity between his Theory of Literature and his novel Kusamakura, arguing that both question Western universality in defining literature. In other words, the comparison stresses Sōseki's continued preoccupation with understanding the transformation of literatures due to global interaction. During the modern period, such transformation was probably nowhere more conspicuous than in Meiji Japan, where not only society but also its literature was rapidly changing.     

The utopia of suburbia: the unchanging past and limitless future in Doraemon

The long-running Japanese children's media franchise Doraemon is commonly interpreted both inside and outside academic discourse as a representation of a positive vision of the future, an analysis based partially on its portrayal of a lovable robot. This view is supported by the series' use of ‘science’ to represent unlimited accessibility, and the branding of the series as a companion to children's scientific education. Doraemon's celebration of the future's boundless potential is complicated, however, by the impulse in recent works to reject the same notion of ‘progress’ on which the series relies. The works remain frozen in a romanticised vision of 1960s’ Japan, and have come to connote childhood nostalgia while presenting characters that do not grow or change over time. In the 2008 film Nobita to Midori no Kyojinden, the perpetual act of returning that defines much of Doraemon today is taken to a dramatic extreme, as a pre-modern ideal becomes the blueprint for both morality and might. Doraemon constructs temporal mixtures that simultaneously glorify both the past and the future.     

Addressing the Allied POW Issue in Japan: The Case of POW Research Network Japan

Since the mid-1990s the Japanese government has pursued reconciliation initiatives aimed at fostering understanding between Japan and former POWs. Nevertheless, the POW issue remains relatively unknown in Japan. This article describes the profile and activities of the POW Research Network Japan (POW kenkyūkai), a civil society group consisting of professional and shimin (citizen/non-professional) researchers as well as concerned citizens investigating the subject of Allied POWs in Japan. The article explores how POWRNJ participated in and contributed to the contestation of memory of the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) during the last decade. It describes the manner in which the group promoted its views and strived to achieve its goals. On the basis of these findings, the article identifies the kind of roles the group played, and how it mattered in the debates on Japan's wartime past.     

Shareholding characteristics and imperfect coverage of the Stewardship Code in Japan

Abstract

While the degree of cross shareholding among corporations, or between banks and companies (referred to as ‘insiders’ in this article) has been declining since the 1990s, the percentage of shareholding by institutional investors (‘outsiders’), or financial intermediaries, has been increasing in Japan. Studies show that both companies and investors are becoming more short-term oriented and are showing herd behaviour. With such a collective mentality, company–investor relations in Japan have experienced a vicious cycle and have thus lowered the market's rate of return. Meanwhile, conventional ‘insiders’ tend to hold shares in the longer-term, but lack engagement in investee companies’ corporate governance. Japan's Stewardship Code requests fund managers ‘engage’ more than ever in the governance of investees so that investor-company relations become longer-term and the risk of investors’ ‘exit’ decreases. However, the Code only covers the behaviours of ‘outsiders’ but not those of ‘insiders’, who still play certain roles among all shareholders. Due to its imperfect coverage, the expected effect of Japan's Stewardship Code in achieving stronger ‘engagement’ by investors should be limited. To cope with this issue, this article outlines a suggestion that a comprehensive rule covering all types of shareholders should be implemented in Japan.     

Disquieting growth: urban space in Kawashima Yūzō's film Suzaki Paradise Red Light

This article examines how Japanese postwar cinematic texts manifest and comment upon contemporary political and economic events, and considers the usefulness of cinema for a more complete historical understanding of the period. In particular, it argues for the significance of fūzoku eiga, or ‘films of customs and manners’ by analyzing a representative text of that genre, Kawashima Yūzō's 1956 film Suzaki Paradise Red Light. Although Kawashima's film has been treated as an apolitical melodrama, a close textual analysis reveals it to be a counter-narrative to the success story of postwar economic recovery and growth that the Japanese state sought to promote. Key to this analysis is an examination of the urban space of the Suzaki neighborhood in Tokyo, as depicted in the film. Kawashima's tour of Suzaki addresses the issues of the economic stagnation within the metropolis, uneven development, and the liminal space of muen, or ‘no ties,’ which offers a brief refuge from an increasingly disciplined everyday life.     

War, ‘strategic communication’ and the violence of non-recognition

Contemporary Western war-fighting is animated by the fictitious imagination of a war free from antagonism. In this logic, winning wars is about winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of local populations, about persuasion rather than confrontation. In recent years, the concept of ‘strategic communication’ (SC) has been elevated to the top echelons of strategic thinking in United States military circles, focusing attention on how to communicate ‘effectively’ with local populations. Via an analysis of the concept of SC, this article examines the ethico-political dimensions of contemporary Western-led ‘population-centric’ war. Through a reading inspired by Judith Butler's recent work in Precarious life (London: Verso 2006) and Frames of war (London: Verso 2009), and an analysis that turns on the link between ethics and ontology, I reflect on the significance of the ‘communications turn’ in warfare for our study of war in ontological terms.     

Invoking affect in Kawakami Mieko's Chihi to ran (Breasts and Eggs, 2008): Higuchi Ichiyô, playful words and ludic gestures

A slim and yet powerful novella, Chichi to ran (Breasts and Eggs, 2008) helped the author, Kawakami Mieko, launch her career in the Japanese literary establishment by winning her the Akutagawa prize. The novella revolves around a middle-aged single-mother, struggling to eke out a living for herself and her teenage daughter as a bar hostess in Osaka. The bond between them is severely tested under the pressure of the precarious living conditions in the post-bubble, neo-liberalist Japan of the 2000s. This essay explores the absorbing and affective aspect of the novella by drawing on Rita Felski's ‘positive aesthetics’ and Bruno Latour's concept of ‘nonhuman actors’. With a focus on the movement of affect/feelings, the analysis traces how ‘non-human actors’ of all kinds and shapes in the novella, from the female characters, chatty style of speech in Osaka dialect, the kanji used in them, the protagonist's obsession with breasts, images of Higuchi Ichiyô, to a carton of eggs, interact and connect in a way that make a difference, facilitating innovative life-adjustments as the narrative unfolds – the reading which should, in turn, enhance our understanding and appreciation of the text.     

Dandelions dancing in the snow

Abstract: This article is a translation of the keynote address delivered at the ‘Relire Kawabata au 21e siècle – modernisme et japonisme au-delà des mythes’ conference hosted by the Maison de la culture du Japon (Paris) and Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7 on 17–18 September 2014. It situates Kawabata Yasunari's late unfinished novel Tanpopo (Dandelions) within Japanese modernity and literary history, in particular drawing an array of connections between the work and the history of the rural northern mountain country of Japan.     

China’s Public Diplomacy Rhetoric, 1990–2012: Pragmatic Image-Crafting

During Hu Jintao’s period of leadership, careful public diplomacy language was deployed by the People’s Republic of China from 2000–2012 to describe the international system and China’s role within it. The terms looked at in this analysis are those introduced in the 2000s to recalibrate the ‘multi-polarity’ [shijie duojihua] emphasis of the 1990s. These terms have been deployed within a general ‘reassurance diplomacy’ that emphasised concepts like ‘responsible Great Power’ [fuzeren da guo], ‘multi-lateralism’ [duobian zhuyi], ‘good neighbourhood policy’ [mulin zhengce], ‘democratisation of international relations’ [guoji guanxi mingzhuhua], ‘peaceful rise’ [heping jueqi], ‘peaceful development’ [heping fazhan] and ‘harmonious world’ [hexie shijie]. Ambiguities, implications, impact, and tensions surrounding these terms are considered, and China’s deliberate adjustments pinpointed. China’s soft power intentions emerge from its instrumentalist use of diplomatic rhetoric, though a credibility gap also emerged between actions and words by 2012.     

‘A question between empires’: the restriction of Japanese immigration in British Columbia and the reassessment of Japan's foreign policy, 1907–1908

Abstract

Great Britain was the first of the major Powers that revised its unequal treaty with Japan, recognizing the success of Japan's modernization and its growing role in the international arena. However, British Columbia perceived Japanese residents as a threat to ‘the British character’ of this regions' population profile. After the movement against Japanese residents in British Columbia peaked during the anti-Japanese riots in Vancouver in September of 1907, Canadian Minister of Labor Rodolphe Lemieux headed a diplomatic delegation to Tokyo to negotiate the restriction of Japanese immigration to Canada. The dispatch of this mission revealed some of the complexities in relations between the Colonial and Foreign Offices in London on the one hand and the Dominion's and British Columbian governments on the other. Based on previously unused primary sources, this article will examine the interplay between the policy towards Japanese migrants in the British Dominion of Canada and the British policy towards Japan as a nation.     

Gerald Fitzmaurice (1865–1939), Chief Dragoman of the British Embassy in Turkey by Berridge,G.R

Nixon was one of the first American politicians to advocate the building of a strong US‐Japan economic alliance and the Nixon administration laid the foundation for the healthy post‐Vietnam dialogue that the Carter and Reagan administrations cultivated with Tokyo. This article examines that foundation, and its contribution to the general post‐World War II US‐Japan relationship. Vietnam changed America, and it even changed the way a once arch‐cold warrior, Nixon, viewed the significance of US‐Japan relations. After years of Washington's scoffing at or ignoring Japanese interests, this American ‘discovery’ of Japan was an important development in itself. Hence, this article also examines a relationship in transition which, for Nixon's America, was an important first step in the construction of a post‐Vietnam view of Asian/Pacific cooperation.