Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan

Introduction

Nationalism, Everyday Life, and the Myth of Eternal Return

And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.

—Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852)

After an initial period of euphoria, the establishment of the Meiji state in 1868 gave way to the sentiment that the revolution was a betrayal. At the root of this sense of betrayal was the contradiction between the elitism of the Meiji oligarchy and the expectation of popular political participation. E. H. Norman described the Meiji Restoration as an “incomplete revolution” owing to the persistence of “feudal remnants” that enabled the ruling class to manipulate the masses through traditional appeals.1 In general, the susceptibility of the masses to manipulation by the state has been central to interpretations of the failure of revolutionary action in modern Japan. Though the state was engaged in the production of ideology that included appeals to tradition, the effectiveness of ideology cannot be simply reduced to a process of willful deception. Moreover, ideology in modern Japan was a multivocal text, wherein the strongest views often originated from outside the government.2 Owing to this monolithic view of ideology, the critique of the “incompleteness” of the Restoration encouraged critics of the Meiji state to envision reform only through the rejection of the state. Although critics of the state promoted popular political participation as a way of preventing the government from being dominated by an elite ruling faction, their antistate rhetoric partook of a broader cultural critique that has important implications for understanding the rise of popular nationalism in modern Japan. In contrast to Norman, who argued that “the ‘success’ of the Meiji state was, almost invariably, the tragedy of the Japanese people,”3 I contend that the popular nationalism invoked in opposition to the modern state was the greater tragedy.

Following Norman, historians of modern Japan have promoted an oversimplified view of the Japanese state as an oppressive regime that suppressed the self-expression of the people in its consolidation of national power, through a conflation of the modernizing state of the Meiji period

and the militarist state of the early Shōwa period (1926–1989). In the historiography of modern Japan, a narrative of resistance to state authority has been recycled to explain the people’s victimization by the state during the prewar period. Since the subjectivity of the people is enunciatively performed as victims of state oppression, historical scholarship can only rescue the subjectivity of the people by valorizing their resistance to the state. Such terms as “victims,” “oppression,” and “resistance” are part of the standard vocabulary for narrating modern Japanese history. Part of this vocabulary also has been the centrality of the emperor as embodied in the monolithic notion of the emperor system (tennōsei) ideology. As the dominant ideological apparatus of the state, the emperor system ideology has functioned to explain the manipulation and subordination of the people.4 In this narrative, the state is explicitly conceived as a repressive apparatus that denies the subjectivity of the people.

Recently, political historians have criticized this characterization of the Meiji state as inattentive to the political competition and internal divisions within the government.5 As opposed to the view that the Meiji state acted as a consolidated apparatus unified in its mutual concern for the oppression of the people and modernization of political and social institutions, attention has turned to how the policies of the state were often ad hoc responses to conflicting parties, shifting coalitions, and entrenched opposition to reform. Despite claims by some historians to the contrary, the ruling Meiji officials lacked any “master plan” of modernization and social totality. The extension of state power in everyday life and the concomitant mobilization of the emperor as a symbol of national authority were calculated responses to entrenched interests and political obstinacy. Moreover, in contrast with the emperor system ideology, political discourse in modern Japan was a “plural and dynamic field of ideas and practices,” wherein intellectuals and the press opposed the state and acted as the “self-appointed spokesmen for the people.”6 In contesting the state with its legitimacy rooted in Western forms, these self-appointed spokesmen for the people appealed to the idea of wider political participation articulated in terms of the state’s estrangement from the people whose practices and beliefs were upheld as the essence of the nation. Though I do not doubt that the Meiji state radically transformed state and society or that the exercise of state power had an extraordinary effect on the basic structures of Japanese life, I am skeptical of sweeping claims that the Meiji state was the sole purveyor of nationalist ideology.

From the late Tokugawa period, the legitimacy of the Tokugawa shogunate was tested through its ability to resist Western encroachment. A xenophobic antiforeignism had provided a rhetorical strategy for criticizing the bakufu in the antishogunate movement. Yet when the Meiji state came to power, its leaders embraced Western institutions and forms in their attempt to build a modern government. From the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement (Jiyū Minken Undō, 1874–1889), which called for democratic political reform, opposition to the government drew upon this lingering antiforeign discourse to criticize and condemn the state.7 Through the intentions of these critics was to create a more inclusive national political system, their attack on the “otherness” of the Meiji state led to the invention of an essential national culture with which to contest the state. Through the identification of the nation with the people, opponents of the state sought to define the cultural essence of the nation in terms of the “timeless” and “enduring traditions” of everyday life.

While perhaps rooted in the ideals of liberal democracy, the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement provided the motivation for antistate political activism that gave birth to the dream of a “second Restoration” (dai-niishin). According to the historian Miyazawa Sei’ichi, the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, which called for the establishment of a national Diet as a site for the protection of the rights of the people, was the starting point for the “second Restoration” movement of reclaiming the meaning of the Meiji Restoration for the people based on the notion that the extension of state power necessitated the broadening of people’s rights.8 This dream structured revolutionary action in modern Japan by invoking the past, particularly the Meiji Restoration, to sanction radical political action in the name of the people. In the historiography on movements opposed to the centralization of power by the Meiji state, scholars have mostly celebrated the popular protests originating from the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement as an expression of liberal democratic values. As a result, historiography has presented a unified image of healthy opposition to the state that fails to account for the internal differentiation and ideological diversity of those critical of the government. While some criticized the Meiji state for its reluctance to permit broader political participation, others attacked the Meiji leadership for their imitation of the West and excessive concern with fashion and appearances.

The dream of a “second Restoration” didn’t end with the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, but has persisted throughout the history of Japan as a justification for radical and illiberal solutions to modernity. Calls for revolutionary action in prewar Japan conjured the past to provide models in the present. The discourse on heroes in Meiji Japan invoked great men from the past in order to bring order to the chaos and dislocation of modern times. In imitating the actions of heroes in history, the time of the past and present fuse in order to justify direct political action (see chapter 2). As Svetlana Boym notes, “[t]he word revolution . . . means both cyclical repetition and radical break. Hence tradition and revolution incorporate each other and rely on their opposition.”9 To affect a radical transformation, one must first invoke the past, such that revolutionary action is tied to the past as an expression of eternal return and renewal.

During the Meiji period, resistance to Western cultural hegemony was directed against the modern state, whose identification with the West allowed its critics to claim the mantle of colonial oppression and popular support. Beginning with the critique of the Westernized Japanese “gentle-

man” (shinshi), who was an early advocate of the idea that fashion is a means of self-expression, I will elucidate the cultural dimensions of popular nationalism in modern Japan though an analysis of the diverse and popular forms of opposition to the state (see chapter 1). In addition, I will relate these forms of opposition to what John Breuilly calls “governmental nationalism” by evaluating how antistate movements narrowly defined Japanese national identity, with precarious consequences for the individual to explore and self-fashion identity.10 As opposed to the artificial and external idea of the nation imposed through the state’s program of “civilization and enlightenment,” Japanese popular nationalism was articulated as a rejection of Western ideas and a celebration of the primitive, authentic, and masculine.

Popular nationalism, though but a fiction, attempts to promote the congruity between the nation and its people by locating the essence of the nation in the abiding customs and beliefs of the people. In this way, the people function as a metonymy for the nation, and the identification of

the people with the nation establishes a connection based on the imagined continuity between everyday life and national culture. To the extent that the Meiji leadership’s style differed from the inherited practices of the past that are deemed to adhere within the culture of everyday life, they were condemned for appearing foreign, shallow, and inauthentic. Paul R. Brass argues that the formation of ethnic identities and the creation of modern nationalisms is the product of the interaction between the leaders of modernizing states and elites from nondominant ethnic groups.11 Though Japan lacks the competition between ethnic groups that characterizes the multiethnic state, Brass’ theory of elite competition is suggestive in the case of modern Japan, which experienced regional competition between an entrenched leadership from Satsuma and Chōshū (hanbatsu) and their opposition, who resented the domination of political power by a minority from these provinces. The identification of the state with the exclusive control of a distinctive regional group, whose authority was invested in Western ideas and institutions, allowed the opponents of state authority to criticize the government as unrepresentative of the Japanese people.

In appealing to essentialist notions of history and tradition, the critics of state authority in the Meiji period invoked a popular nationalism that promoted a narrow definition of Japanese national identity. Concurrent with this move to construct a common cultural identity was the process of “othering” the Meiji state and its leadership by identifying the state as complicit with the Western powers. The Meiji leadership’s enthusiastic embrace of Western dress and forms, for the instrumental purpose of revising the unequal treaties,12 made them vulnerable to charges of being superficial and profligate. As a result, the state was condemned as collaborators with the West in the subjugation of the sovereignty of the Japanese people.

This construction of national identity is not only about differences in cultural forms and practices, but about a particular relationship to the past that permits these differences to be interpreted as essential to one’s sense of self. One way in which elites manipulate cultural markers of identity to

construct a shared cultural origin is through the writing of history. The invention of Edo as the cultural essence of the Japanese nation was a product of historical writings and commemorative movements during the Meiji period. Because history always imagines a collective subject that de-

fines the boundaries of the nation, history is closely tied to the process of nation-state building. In narrating the history of the nation, the historian does not objectively record the past, but represents it in such a way that it reflects the present and serves the concerns of a particular group. This constructionist view of the past emphasizes that history is not essential, but socially produced by particular groups with certain interests and ambitions. In the manipulation of cultural symbols to reinforce a collective identity, cultural forms and practices are placed in a relationship to the past that seeks to dispel the artificial nature of national identity. The construction of Edo as a sign of difference from the Meiji government’s program of “civilization and enlightenment” (bunmei kaika) permitted former bakufu retainers and other critics of the Meiji state to invent everyday

life as a cultural tradition to reinforce a shared sense of national identity (see chapter 3).

The intensification of rapid change in modern Japan reveals how the thirst for novelty and the seduction of the ephemeral came to penetrate social and cultural life in modern Japan. With the development of capitalism, the intensification of rapid social change in Meiji Japan was perceived

as having disrupted inherited practices and national identity. Fads (ryūkō) promoted the process of Westernization and, by atomizing the experience of everyday life into discontinuous moments, disrupted the authority of “tradition,” since novelty represents the negation of the power of tradition through the process of forgetting the past. As these fads exhausted themselves through a constant process of striving for novelty, however, modern Japan compensated for the effect of forgetting by constructing a new awareness of the timeless and the quotidian as an expression of an authentic national identity.

The invention of everyday life is the process by which attempts to overcome the modern and to create an authentic experience of reality produce the effect of valorizing the quotidian as the timeless object of desire.13 As Henri Lefebvre notes, everyday life is often defined in the negative. Lacking a distinct form and expression, everyday life becomes the vessel into which one’s desires, dreams, and fantasies supplant history’s other. Although Lefebvre seeks to define everyday life as “the ethics underlying routine and the aesthetics of familiar settings,” he is careful to note that everyday life and the modern are bound together in a relationship of mutual signification.14 In the routine of everyday life, the destruction of history is forestalled by the ritual of repetition to produce continuity. Yet the thirst for novelty in modernity, fueled by rapid social change, disrupts the customary routine of everyday life. “Because of its reliance on cyclical time, everyday life is belated; it lags behind the historical possibilities of modernity.”15 In its aestheticization of the familiar, it seeks to make visible those traditional, disappearing forms threatened by rapid social change.

This embrace of the culture of everyday life was predicated on notions of ethnicity and difference that sought to displace the West by openly countenancing ideas of history, tradition, and everyday life. Yet these attempts to define one’s own ethnicity could not be satisfied by a mere return to the past, but instead witnessed the invention of tradition in a new context that was constrained by the very modernity it sought to overcome. The invention of Edo, for example, was contingent upon imagining the pre-Meiji past as a site of cultural authenticity. Central to this project was the construction of the myth of the Edo period as a “closed country” (sakoku) isolated from the rest of the world. In order to invent a convincing alternative to the present, it was necessary to construct a self-contained and convincing interpretation of the past.

For the critics of Westernization, the process of forging a new national identity in modern Japan required salvaging the vestiges of the past from the wreckage of modern capitalism. Representations that claim to reproduce an authentic cultural past are not, despite even a high degree of verisimilitude, a mimetic representation of external reality, but a recoding of new meanings in a different context. It is therefore the difference in the context of reproduction that transforms the meaning of the past. Any attempt to locate an essential meaning in the past is subject to the concerns of the present. Representations of the past when evaluated on their own terms are rich cultural sources for interpreting the anxieties, desires, and ideals of a particular historical moment. In the context of modern Japan, where the intensification of rapid social change transformed the experience of everyday life and altered perceptions of time, nostalgia became an expression of desire for continuity. With the development of new and sophisticated means of cultural reproduction that allowed for the proliferation of representations and images of the past, the production of nostalgia reveals a particular relationship to the past that is distinctly modern in its attempt to overcome the dislocations of rapid social change.

Far from the re-emergence of traditional values bequeathed by a feudal legacy of collectivism and oppression resulting from the contradictions inherent in the process of “late development,” the tragedy of modern Japan was a response to modernity that was not pathological but wholly consistent with the rationalizing tendencies of modernization. Japan’s modernization, far from being incomplete, was rather conditioned by the relentless attempt to resist Western cultural hegemony by establishing a separate ethnic identity rooted in history, tradition, and everyday life.16 Modernity is only incomplete insofar as the attempt to free one’s nation from the bonds of modernity persists as an enduring struggle that sustains itself by redefining the source of oppression from the political to the cultural.

The process of reinventing ethnic identity through remembering the past is important in understanding how modern Japan has negotiated modernity, first in the prewar period and then again in the postwar period. As Kevin M. Doak argues, ethnicity is an essential component of identity that is always being reinvented and reinterpreted in Japanese history.17 Because ethnic anxiety accompanies the erosion of tradition and the loss of historical rootedness in modernity, questions of cultural invention can never be separated from issues of ethnicity. Recent work in postcolonial studies has championed the idea of history, tradition, and everyday life as the privileged grounds for contesting imperial power or subverting the authority of the modern state. Such inventions and transformations of the past are justified by the claim that the historical imagination of Western modernity imposes an oppressive and discriminatory narrative of the past on alternative narratives and oppositional modes of representing the past. Regardless of their intent, appropriations of the past are about the political power to control particularist myths and symbols to create a common national identity. National resistance to forms of colonial oppression and state authority do not eliminate those forms of oppression and discrimination, but merely displace them on to others, especially women. This is the other side of popular or ethnic nationalism, which promotes the shrinkage of political space and the reduction of identity to the category of gender and nation. The purpose for interrogating the appropriation, invention, and reification of the past is to avoid becoming enchanted by its poetic power. The reality of the past may elude us, but it must not lead us to become accessories to its process of mystification.

In modernity, women are a potent symbol around which the struggle for identity is contested. Women are meant to represent origins and the immutability of identity in a way that makes the body of the female an important site for defining the nation. In contrast to the ephemerality of urban mass culture (to which women are often pejoratively aligned), women are expected to embody the timeless and eternal qualities of the past. In the denunciation of mass culture as feminine, the fear of emasculation through the triviality of fashion, imitation, and reproduction expresses anxiety about modernity.18 The denunciations of the “high-collar” (haikara) schoolgirl of the Meiji period for her transgressive style anticipated the “modern girl” (moga), who represented the danger of mass culture in the eyes of some Japanese intellectuals and social critics.19 In this anxiety about the transformative dimension of identity in modernity, particularly for women to self-fashion through the consumption of goods, the discourses of gender ascribe pejorative feminine characteristics to mass culture. In the nostalgic longing for women to embody the timelessness and continuity associated with the eternal feminine, the ideologies of gender condemn female desire and restrain female subjectivity.

In modern Japan, the struggle against the domination of Western material culture—epitomized by the proliferation of fads, growth of consumer culture, and the adoption of Western tastes and styles—had resulted in a profound sense of loss. In mourning a loss, Sigmund Freud notes the loved object is taken into the self and idealized.20 The absence is represented symbolically in memory or fantasy as a means of coping with separation and loss. Since the essence of the Japanese nation had been lost, severed through the process of modernization, it could only be restored through fantasy, as a memory of an idealized epic past. In other words, modernity was a traumatic recognition of separation and loss of the idyllic harmony of the premodern community that could only be expressed as desire. Once the return to the edenic condition of premodernity had been effectively foreclosed, its desire could only be displaced into other symbolic forms, such as women, countryside, home, and nation.

As the locus of desire for return and a symbol of the trauma of separation and alienation, gender and nation are closely intertwined in the experience of modernity. In discursive form, the conflation of women, countryside, and home structure representations to naturalize ideologies of gender and nationalism. The desire for both change (transitory) and continuity (eternal) are thus fundamental to the experience of modernity, and they take expression in gendered terms through the representation of masculinity and femininity in popular culture, media, and intellectual discourse. In the overlapping of the ideologies of gender and nation, two distinct characters of the feminine archetype appear in symbolic form in cultural representations.21

The first is the “eternal” character of the feminine that is associated with the “Great Mother,” who brings forth all life and who nurtures, protects, and sustains. This nostalgic image of femininity is connected to the land as a symbol of fertility. In this expression, women are identified with agriculture and the preindustrial condition. The mythology of the “eternal feminine” embraces an idealization of women as embodying “everything that modernity was not, the living antithesis of the ironic self-estrangement of urban man.”22 The countryside, as the maternal home, “offers a redemptive haven for those fleeing the chaos and instability of the modern world.”23 This image of women is located outside of history as timeless and essential in order to construct it as a redemptive refuge from the instability and disorder of modernity. As Susan Stewart writes, “the prevailing motif of nostalgia is the erasure of the gap between nature and culture, and hence a return to the utopia of biology and symbol united within the walled city of the maternal.”24 In Japan, this character of the feminine has been fundamental to the structure of representations of women that extends from the Meiji period to the rise of the notion of maternal society (bosei shakai) in the postwar period.25

The second character of the feminine is the “transitory” dimension of the female body (e.g., pregnancy, menstruation, and lactation) that aligns women with change and deception: she is other than what she appears. In premodern literature, the association of women with metamorphosis is seen in the transformation of beautiful women into mountain witches (yamauba) or vengeful ghosts.26 Rather than disappearing with the emergence of new forms of literature, these depictions remained important to prewar fantasy and adolescent fiction. Even in naturalist fiction, images of women ranging from the schoolgirl to the modern girl were not immune from equating women with transformation and masquerade. In her capacity for self-fashioning and disguise through the adornment of the body with goods, she is depicted as attracted to the chaos, spectacle, and artificiality of modern urban life. In such cultural representations, women are monstrous in their capacity for change and threatening to the social order of the all-male community of the nation. These anxieties about the monstrous-feminine are equally central to representations of women in contemporary Japan, ranging from transgressive female criminals described as “poison women” (dokufu) to the metamorphosis of female characters in anime.27

These two characters, however, are not merely oppositional but complementary.28 The rapid changes in modernity restructure time-space relations in a way that not only intensifies the desire for novelty but also creates desire for union with the past symbolized by the maternal body. Rita Felski explains this relationship between the idealization of the past and the dislocation of modernity that helps to situate nostalgia at the very heart of the experience of modernity. “If the experience of modernity brought with it an overwhelming sense of innovation, ephemerality, and chaotic change, it simultaneously engendered multiple expressions of desire for stability and continuity,” writes Felski. “Nostalgia, understood as a mourning for an idealized past, thus emerges as a formative theme of the modern: the age of progress was also the age of yearning for an imaginary edenic condition that had been lost.”29 In modern Japan, for example, the moral panic over the schoolgirl in the debate over the corruption of modern urban life in Japan served as a nostalgic expression of longing for the stability and harmony symbolized by the idealization of the countryside (see chapter 4).

In the chapters ahead, by focusing on the discourses of the transitory and the eternal in modern Japan, I hope to disrupt narratives of Japanese history that emphasize the march of progress and the rationalization of everyday life as “disciplining” the nation, as well as interpretations that equate the Meiji state with the rise of militarism. In short, the goal of this book is to explore the phenomenon of rapid social change in order to understand the construction of gender identity and the invention of national culture in modern Japan. To this end, I emphasize how the impact of capitalism and the intensification of rapid social change created a longing to return to history, tradition, and everyday life. By analyzing the way in which a peripheral elite disaffected with the government criticized the excessive Westernizing tendencies of the Japanese state and promoted the congruity of everyday life and national culture, I will demonstrate how acts of resistance to state power and official history were productive of narratives of longing and eternal return. Through the aestheticization of the culture of everyday life, production of masculine national heroes, valorization of the culture of the Edo period, and the idealization of the Japanese

countryside, they reinvented the past as a cultural tradition to reinforce a shared sense of national identity. My analysis thus centers on a process of contesting nationalisms whereby the cultural nation was imagined in opposition to the modern, rational state. As a consequence, a shared cultural identity was invented in modern Japan by invoking the myth of an eternal return to timeless notions of gender and nation.