Organizer: Hiromi Mizuno, University of California, Los Angeles
Chair and Discussant: Nobukuni Koyasu, University of Osaka
Placed between the cosmopolitan Taisho period and nationalistic Pacific War years, the 1930s is a contested decade in modern Japan. This panel seeks to examine the 1930s, not as one step in a linear progress of militarization and colonial expansion, but as a contested sphere where various ideas, ideologies, and discourses co-existed. Often, politically opposing groups and thinkers shared a discursive space, which makes it hard for historians to place them in a clear-cut political and intellectual spectrum.
The aim of this panel is to explore the complexity of the 1930s intellectual and cultural world by re-examining discourses that are central to an understanding of Japan’s modernity: discourses on colonial space, Marxism, and science. All papers argue that simple categorizations by postwar historians to characterize these discourses—for example, the Rono-Koza dichotomy, the Nanyo as primitive, and prewar Japan as unscientific—obscures the complexity and subtle yet lasting political significance of their claims. Thus, this panel is as much about the 1930s as about postwar historiography. By revisiting the 1930s, we hope to attempt a critical re-examination of prewar, wartime, and postwar discourses on Japan’s modernity.
A New Perspective for the Debate on Japanese Capitalism
Yasushi Hamada, University of Tokyo
The aim of this paper is to deconstruct the conventional framework of the debate on Japanese capitalism during the interwar years (the 1920s and 1930s) that is based on the opposition between the Koza faction and the Rono faction. Instead of seeing the debate through the opposition between the two factions as previous works on the debate have done, this paper attempts to reveal differences within each faction and articulate the common discursive space that the two shared.
There are two problems in the conventional framework. First, focusing on political ideology, such as the Commintern’s connection, has made factional differences central to the understanding of the debate and other important issues peripheral. Second, postwar studies of the debate have explained differences between the Koza and Rono factions over such issues as the Meiji Restoration and the emperor system as a corollary of different methodological stances—i.e., internalism and externalism; however, the internalism vs. externalism dichotomy obscures the fact that both factions shared the meta-narrative that fixated the nation-state as a unit of time and space. Articulating the shared discursive space of the two factions also urges us to rethink other interwar discourses, such as those on literature, that were directly and indirectly based on the debate on capitalism.
"Nanyo" for Japan: The Total Shift in Japan’s Conception of "Nanyo" Through the 1930s to 1945
Kousuke Kawanishi, Sophia University
The main purpose of this paper is to make clear what was "Nanyo" (former Southeast Asia) for Japan through 1930s to 1945, comparing it with "the West," analyzing some reports and books published by anthropologists and foreign minister officers. It points out the total change in Japan’s recognition of "Nanyo" that occurred during this period. Previous studies of "Nanyo" and "Nansin" (Japan’s southward advancement) has hardly examined "Nanyo-kan" (conception of Nanyo). They assume that "Nanyo-kan" was totally discriminative and the peoples in Nanyo were called "Do-jin"(the primitives) before 1945. However, I argue that more than discriminatory image was present in Japanese discourses on Nanyo.
My research shows that both discrimination and nostalgia coexisted in Japan’s conception of Nanyo. Since the latter half of 1930s, politicians and foreign ministry officials took advantage of the nostalgic side of Nanyo; they used a thesis supported by anthropologists and linguists, such as Sinzi Nisimura and Izuru Shinmura, who claimed that Japanese ancestors had come from Nanyo and justified Japan’s intervention to Nanyo. After 1940 when Japan had to present "the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" as superior to "the West," its Nanyo-kan shifted from discriminatory to nostalgic. Accordingly, peoples in Nanyo were regarded as highly cultured and the usage of the discriminatory term "Do-jin" was banned, for they had to be justified as an anti-Western partner of Japan. When Japan needed to degrade "the West," "Nanyo" gained its positive image: it became an important antonym of "the West" for Japan.
Saigusa Hiroto and the Discourses on "the Scientific" in the 1930s: Science, History, and Ideology
Hiromi Mizuno, University of California, Los Angeles
This paper explores discourses on the concept of "the scientific" in the 1930s, focusing on the newly emerging field of the history of Japanese science. It reveals that science was not only an intellectual but also political space where various ideologies such as nationalism, colonialism, and Marxism crashed.
The field of the history of Japanese science was first developed by leftist intellectuals in the early 1930s such as Ogura Kinnozuke and Saigusa Hiroto. To leftist intellectuals, the concept of "the scientific" provided a means to challenge what they saw as the rise of unscientific state fascism in 1930s Japan. However, in the 1930s, various other efforts to define "the scientific" also existed and served to justify Japanese colonial expansion and elaborate cultural particularism; for example, Sakuta Shoichi’s Kokumin kagaku, Sugi Seisaburo’s Buddhist science, and technocrats’ kagaku gijutsu policies. These efforts attempted to reconcile the universality of science and the specificity of Japanese culture. When the history of Japanese science became something of a fad in the late 1930s and early 1940s among the popular readership, it had lost its original critical stance and celebrated Japanese "scientific" past.
The intellectual history on the 1930s has often ignored discourses on science. By examining science journals and magazines as well as history texts, however, I will show that the concept of "the scientific" was a contested, pervasive aspect of the intellectual and cultural space of the 1930s.