What is Japan? This question itself only truly swelled into a critical issue following the contact and friction with a new entity—the West—after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, marking the end of the Edo period that had persisted for some three hundred years. With the inception of the new era named Meiji, the nation entered a new current, tasked with constructing its own positioning within the vast axis of the world. Approximately one hundred and sixty years have passed since then. We have arrived at this point having lived through countless turning points of the era at a ferocious velocity. Yet, if asked whether we can now, after a mere century and a half, provide an appropriate answer to the question “What is Japan?”, surely everyone would find themselves at a loss for words.
In general perception, there is a deep-seated tendency to view Japan as a nation rare even on a global scale, possessing a mono-ethnic population of one hundred million; the evaluation stands out that its original culture, nurtured in the soil of this island nation, has been sublimated by a unique spirit while accepting complex external influences. Indeed, such evaluations are still rampant, and one frequently encounters them. Certainly, I believe these contain a measure of fact, but at the same time, in the modern age, such frivolous ways of thinking serve well enough as mere pastimes, yet they fail to truly move the life force to gratitude or awe. Therefore, for me—an independent researcher who has spent the last eight years traversing the various regions of Japan, exploring without regard to disciplinary boundaries—answering this question has become of critical importance. Of course, the answer I present is, after all, only provisional. However, as I am soon to reach the age of thirty-five, I feel that facing this question with sincerity over the next fifteen years or so has become more important than ever before.
Thus, we have decided to establish a new serialized section within Shitsurae titled Communal Illusion, and here I shall release essays that approach the theme of “What is Japan?” through a unique lens. There is a decisive awareness of the problem in titling this Communal Illusion. While there have been voluminous inquiries into the question “What is Japan?” heretofore, the one who influenced me most intensely was the philosopher Yamamoto Tetsuji. And it was through Yamamoto that I came to confront Yoshimoto Takaaki, hailed as the greatest thinker of the post-war era. In fact, theories of Japan prior to Yoshimoto’s arrival were basically premised on the theory of the State as an ideology constructed before the war, and had not been able to break free from it. This State theory, in essence, positioned the Emperor at the apex and discussed Japan from the perspective of an image of the State characterized by an unbroken imperial line spanning over two thousand years and a single ethnicity. In my personal interpretation, the “unbroken imperial line” [万世一系説] is the unification of bloodlines. The “single ethnicity” [単一民族説] is the unification of tribes. By unifying this bidirectional movement within the modern State of Japan, the State reclaimed the origin itself, establishing a structure wherein Japan was discussed within that reclamation.
In reality, the academic system imported from the West upon entering the Meiji era was extremely complex, engaging in a syncretism where systems from multiple countries were simultaneously adopted in Japan, rather than emphasizing a relationship with any specific nation. However, at least when founding scholarship in Japan at the time, it was almost without exception under the influence of this ideology. Rather, scholarship and scholars pandered to the ideology of this new era. That is to say, they entered into the architectural work of reinforcing the real image of “Japan”—which until then had only been spoken of ambiguously—by enlisting Western academic techniques.
What requires caution in this instance is that the majority of the results released in this era were thought out with the new modern ideology, with the Emperor at its apex, as a premise. In other words, because thinking was conducted on the premise of erecting a modern ideology crowned by the Emperor, inevitably, no scholar could deviate from this stipulation. Because they concentrated so heavily on the construction of this ideological structure, the function possessed by thinking itself was slighted; eventually, this caused a misalignment, where the new image of the State—the Japanese ethnicity centered on the Emperor—was produced as an ideology in a form different from the initial design. The struggle surrounding this misalignment unfolded particularly across the three domains of the Meiji, Taisho, and early Showa periods. Countless political bodies and activist groups arose one after another—numbering in the hundreds—so one cannot discuss it monistically. However, what we must grasp here is the fact that, at the time, the real image of “Japan” did not possess that much intensity. Because the erroneous premise is held today that a solid State image of Japan has flowed continuously through history, I feel this viewpoint is often overlooked. At that time, the real image of Japan had not yet been established.
However, once the 1930s began, the situation started to metastasize. The turning point was a change in the quality of military personnel. Conventional soldiers did not possess much political voice, but here, fanned by the waves of accumulated State ideology, a new existence called “political soldiers” appeared. In short, these were people who, while being soldiers, actively involved themselves in politics; in the process of the rising power of these political soldiers, the Army seized hegemony. Thus, the voice of the Army’s political soldiers came to surpass that of conventional bureaucrats and politicians, and eventually, a militaristic ideology positioning the Emperor himself as the supreme ruler was established. This was adopted as a technology of State governance. Passing through the tumultuous era of the Second World War in this manner, upon the defeat in 1945, most people had no composure to summarize and think about what “Japan” had been—a concept propagandized at the time. Since everything had burned down, they were fully occupied with starting everything from zero. Under conditions where survival was the highest priority, ideology held no meaning. As a result, the conclusion to the inquiry “What is Japan?”, which had intensified from the pre-war to the wartime period, was postponed. Moreover, because a new ideology called democracy, transplanted from the chaotic intervention of the victor nations, intervened there, the answer to the problem was extended even further.
This era continued for a long time, but the atmosphere began to change with the heightening of the leftist movements that intensified in the 1960s. Having already escaped the situation where there were no material goods, and welcoming an era where a new generation lived in high spirits without the threat of war, the question “Come to think of it, what was the Japan of that time?” manifested in the generation born and raised in the shadow of the war. in this case, during the first Anpo Protests (security treaty struggles) of 1960, the people participating in this social movement were in a situation where this question arose relatively easily, as they had been born and raised in the era when the war was occurring, even if they did not have the experience of directly entering the military and fighting. On the other hand, by the late 1960s—the time of the second Anpo Protests—the pivot was a new generation born post-war, so they possessed no direct experience of war. However, in the psychology of the youth of this later period, there was one decisive malfunction. That was: “The older generation, including our parents, executed that war, yet not a single one of them has summarized (reckoned with) it.” This question turned into irritation toward their elders; it presented a fierce doubt toward a State system that, while causing the death of multitudes of its own citizens and devastating the country through war, was building a new era without reflection.
At this time, the entity against which they took a particularly reactionary stance was the academic system. Those among the youth of the time who could go to university had a privileged aspect; the majority of their generation had no such opportunity. Therefore, they harbored feelings of inferiority rather than superiority regarding the situation where they were fortunate enough to advance to university while many friends of the same generation could not. This was because it was common for friends more excellent than oneself to be unable to go to university due to their parents’ financial circumstances. The conviction that “I must study for their share as well, since I can go to university despite being inferior to those friends” was a relatively common sentiment among the urban youth of the time. Another important thing is that, because they were born and raised under the influence of the democracy of the victor nations, the attitude that “Japan must not cause war again” was quite strong. However, at the same time, this later fragmented into leftist movements, while on the other hand, the attitude of those believing “Japan should suffuse its armaments and rise again” also strengthened reactionarily.
Because they were studying with such seriousness, scholarship appeared meaningless to them unless it confronted the problems of the real in a practical manner. Of course, not all students were like this, but a certain number held such an attitude. However, a problem existed here. The university professors they learned from at the time were, without exception, people who had experienced the war, and among them remained many scholars who had enlisted scholarship in the service of the wartime regime. Yet, they merely spoke the sophistry of scholarship; while soldiers and politicians were judged by international law, the scholars’ own responsibility was hardly questioned, and many remained in their professorial positions at universities after the war. Against this, the students of the time began to press intensely: “Do you truly have the aptitude to teach us?” What was being questioned here was not social rights or such foolishness, but how that person themselves had summarized the war and lived through it. This point of contention is extremely important.
It is not often considered, but in truth, the ones who first self-domesticated into the post-war system were these scholars, such as university professors. The students of the time saw through this inconvenient fact, but because the scholars had self-domesticated into the system, they shielded themselves with democratic rights and the like, and would not answer the students’ questions at all. The students were questioning the person themselves, but the scholars answered with the regulations, norms, and rights of the system. Enraged by this, the students began to explode, feeling that being taught by such professors would serve no purpose whatsoever. In fact, in the leftist movement rising at the time, it was rampant that professors teaching Marx by jumping on the bandwagon had not actually read Marx’s Capital. In short, they had looked through related books by Marxists, but had not read the works of Marx himself. Ambitious students rebelled against this. Because they hungered to build a new era, the students of the time read more books than the scholars, and they pondered how the knowledge gained from those books connected to the problems of the real. However, a troublesome problem lurked here. That was their failure to see that the residue of Zhu Xi (Neo-Confucianism)—which places absolute value on knowledge-centrism and the overemphasis on knowledge, a topic I frequently handle in Shitsurae—was intervening in the system.
Scholars and politicians who had self-domesticated into the indescribable edifice of the system could not respond properly to the youth who were trying to face the reality of the time seriously. A fierce, unidentifiable anxiety that their assertions merely echoed within a sealed concrete room, reaching nowhere. Because the youth harbored pent-up feelings that could not objectify the true nature of this anxiety, they provisionally called it “power” or “authority,” but in truth, the opponent they were facing was not something that could be dismissed as mere power. Yet, the leftist ideology the youth were enthusiastic about offered no solution either. Because they were being defeated one after another in the university struggles, they were nearly crushed by the sense of crisis that they, too, would be defeated like the losers of the leftist movement of 1960, and eventually end their lives by self-domesticating into the system like their elders. In this desperate spiritual crisis, at the end of 1968 when the final thread of the youth was about to snap, a single shocking work suddenly appeared. That was Communal Illusion [共同幻想論] by Yoshimoto Takaaki.