Has Democracy Ever Existed in Japan?
Yosano Akiko and the Modern History of Its Absence
Looking at the current state of Japan, a question left to rust in the margins of history rises to the surface of my mind.
Has democracy ever existed in this country?
The standard narrative about postwar Japan runs something like this. The nation rose from defeat, passed through a period of high economic growth, became one of the world’s advanced industrial democracies, and now stands as a country in which democracy has been realized. If you think about it calmly the connection is forced, but the question is never posed, and to this day Japan continues to be regarded as a democratic nation. To put it bluntly, one might ask who exactly is looking at what part of Japan and detecting the embodiment of democracy. There is no sign that anyone has seriously thought this through.
No one has thought it through, yet the designation of Japan as a democratic state persists and stirs. But no matter where I look inside the fabric of that narrative I cannot find the ideals of democracy. The truth is that even now, thirty-five years after being born in Japan, I still do not know where in this country the ideals of democracy have taken root. To go further, I do not even understand what this thing called democracy, imported from somewhere beyond our shores, actually means. And I suspect every Japanese person shares this sense. They have simply never thought deeply about it. If they paused to reflect they would all notice the strangeness.
I will be honest. I have no idea what democracy is. The nuance of that not knowing is this. As long as I have lived in Japan I have never once felt it, never touched it, and never once been moved or stirred or persuaded by anyone’s words about it. Perhaps democracy exists in some distant country. But my recognition is that nothing of the sort exists in Japan.
To Western readers a question like this may seem absurd. You presumably know democracy intimately. You know what it is and you carry the self-assurance of living inside it. So when a question this strange and seemingly foolish is raised from within Japan, a country generally assumed to share the same democratic values, it may look unbearably immature. Yet I feel this is precisely where the problem reveals itself. The ideals of democracy cannot be embodied without indigenous rootedness in a given place. To put it in different terms, democracy can attach itself to the communal illusion in which the interests of the collective override individual alienation, but in the other forms of illusion, the personal and the paired, the ideals of democracy simply do not exist on the Japanese side. And this absence is not something negative. What exactly is it?