A Response to Reviews by Frederick Dickinson and Joshua Hotaka Roth

Volumes 28-29 carried reviews by Frederick Dickinson and Joshua Hotaka Roth respectively of my most recent books, Army, Empire and Politics in Meiji Japan and The Japanese Community in Brazil 1908-1940. These two reviews demand a response.

The comments by Dickinson are heavily characterized by indolence. With blithe indifference, he dismisses out of hand each of the principal sections of the study. For example, on my analysis of late Meiji policy toward Korea, his sole comment is to insist that Hilary Conroy over four decades ago proved there was no long-term plan to annex the peninsula. The theme of this section of my book is to show how Japan attempted, and failed, to apply the informal model of control then being used by Britain in Egypt. This is a theme entirely ignored by Conroy, whose merits lie elsewhere, and by Dickinson, whose merits remain invisible to me.

Dickinson is equally dismissive of my interpretation of the Meiji army. He ignores, for example, my presentation of the events and arguments surrounding the Getsuyōkai affair of the 1880s and, instead, cites a 1978 work by Kitaoka Shin'ichi to denigrate as outdated my statement that the Meiji army was never a monolith. In this, Dickinson seems to have trouble with the meaning of the word "never." Kitaoka's study, as Dickinson notes and as any "serious" student of Japanese military history well knows, commences from 1906. This, one might aver, is a somewhat late date from which to understand an army created more than three decades earlier.

Dickinson condemns my presentation of General Katsura Tarō as virtual hagiography. The three examiners of the thesis on which this book is based are some of the most eminent historians of modern Japan, including one former president of the Association for Asian Studies and one past president of the American Historical Association. They clearly did not share Dickinson's view on this or any other of his criticisms. Perhaps, however, he knows better than all of us. What I do find distasteful is that Dickinson praises other studies that cover aspects of Katsura's career, including one by Kobayashi Michihiko, yet he does not have the honesty to note my own comments on Kobayashi's study on page 1 of my work.

Dickinson's review is regrettably trivial and trivializing. Roth's, however, is considerably more irresponsible. In fact, his comments are less a review than a denunciation of what he sees as a belligerent attack by me on a senior Japanese cultural anthropologist, Maeyama Takashi. In his words, "Lone criticizes Maeyama on a series of related charges" (JJS, Vol. 29, No. 2 [2003], p.493) and, in so doing, depicts among other things, Maeyama as being "completely blind" (p.494) about Japanese migrant desires to settle in Brazil. Moreover, the basis of my alleged "combative" (p.496) assault on Maeyama is "primarily two articles published in English" (p.495). From this, Roth concludes, "it is unfair to characterize the corpus of Maeyama's work, let alone all Japanese scholarship, on such a basis" (p.495). As if this were not enough condemnation, he then adds that, in my apparent "eagerness to attack Maeyama," my book gives the "impression that Brazil was a tropical paradise free of racial prejudices" (p.495).

As Roth notes but does not emphasize, my book is based on an intensive reading of more than two decades of Japanese-language migrant newspapers. It is an explanation of migrant life as migrants themselves observed and understood it. So few scholars have written on the pre-1940 Japanese in Brazil that one is enormously indebted to Maeyama for the pioneering work he has done in this area. His writings, however, are those of a cultural anthropologist, not a historian. It is, therefore, not only inevitable but also desirable that a historian should reach different conclusions. Yet...