Marxist History and Postwar Japanese Nationalism (review)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels paid relatively little attention to nationalism, focusing instead on class conflict, which they assumed—as suggested in their assertion in the Communist Manifesto that "the working men have no country"—would ultimately transcend national boundaries. Of course, Marxist revolutionary leaders were eventually forced to come to terms with nationalism, and among them Joseph Stalin produced the most influential general concept of the nation. In his 1913 pamphlet, "Marxism and the National Question," Stalin described a nation as a "historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture" (p. 4). He generally believed that peoples that met these criteria deserved political independence.

According to Curtis Gayle, in this much-needed study of "ethnic nationalism" in Japanese historiography, Stalin's formulation played an important conceptual role in helping Marxists to identify in the Japanese past a nation that was independent of, and capable of resisting, the state and imperialism. The term they often used for this nation was minzoku, which generally implied an ethnic (or racial) rather than politically contrived collectivity, although it was used in a wide, and often confusing, variety of ways.

Gayle's main focus chronologically is the 1950s broadly defined, because some Marxist historians—generally members of the Rekishigaku Kenkyūkai (Historical Science Society)—began to think and write in terms of ethnic nationalism as early as 1948, paralleling the Japan Communist Party's turn away from "democratization" under the U.S.-led occupation toward a strategy of "Democratic Ethnic-National Unification Front" (Minshu Minzoku Tōitsu Sensen) in opposition to American imperialism. In other words, the critical contemporary need for a national liberation movement against the United States forced leftist intellectuals to reconsider the nation as a potential vehicle of historical subjectivity and resistance. They came to believe that there had long existed in Japan a submerged nation of people united by economic life, language, and "psychological make-up manifested in a common culture" (p. 4) that was relatively independent of the Japanese state and imperialism, and capable not only of mounting a resistance movement against American neocolonialism but of maintaining relations of solidarity with other anticolonial Asian nations.

Gayle is well aware that a nationalist focus on the Japanese ethnic nation, or minzoku, was hardly unique to the 1950s. In a particularly interesting chapter, he explores debates on the ethnic nation that took place in the 1930s among Marxists and other leftists, including Hayakawa Jirō, Ōyama Ikuo, Matsubara Hiroshi, and Tosaka Jun, who often wrote for the journal Yuibutsuron kenkyū (Studies in materialism). They sought to distinguish the ethnic nation from the state, capitalism, and imperialism, but they also distanced it from multiethnicity which, in the context of Japanese colonialism and assimilationist ideology, they associated with Japanese imperial expansion. Gayle concludes that

members of the Yuibutsuron Kenkyu debate often focused during this period upon the inherent legitimacy of ethnic and cultural distinctions among Japan and other East Asian ethnic nations. If Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and China were each individuated according to their respective traditions the Japanese state's hidden claim to racial superiority, based upon a Yamato Minzoku that alone could become the center of cultural advancement and assimilation, would be undercut.

(p. 35)

Thus, in the context of Japan's wartime drive to "assimilate" colonials and other Asians into a regional empire, an ethnic nationalist emphasis on racial and cultural homogeneity could be seen as progressive. Of course, in the wake of Japan's surrender, the occupation stripped it of empire and encouraged a narrow approach to Japanese nationality (that excluded resident Koreans), so by the 1950s the implications of Marxist ethnic nationalism differed considerably.

The decade of the 1950s in East Asia was inaugurated by communist victory in China and war in Korea, while in Japan there were crackdowns on labor activism, the Red Purge, and then peace and security treaties that locked Japan into the cold war structure...