The Art of Persuasion: Audiences and Philosophies of History

This debate had a somewhat unconventional history. I originally wrote my comments as one of two double-blind reviewers addressing a draft manuscript submitted to this journal. Subsequently, since my review raised several broad questions about political theory and history, the editor proposed publishing it alongside the essay. The journal sent my review to the author and, after considerable negotiation, the double blind was eventually removed. The journal then decided to invite further contributions from J. Victor Koschmann and Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, neither of whom, it turned out, had been reviewers of this essay’s original draft. While I can guess what they are likely to say, I have not read their comments. In any case, the consequence of this process is that both the essay, “From the ‘People’ to the ‘Citizen’: Tsurumi Shunsuke and the Roots of Civic Mythology in Postwar Japan,” and the intended audience for my own comments have been moving targets.

My original strongest complaint about “From the ‘People’ ” was that it set up a two-part straw man argument. While these flimsy individuals are still present and still provide the first justifications for the essay encountered by the reader, they have now been pared down to much smaller proportions. The anonymous author I first encountered staked his main claims to significance on the observations that the 1960s citizen movements 1) were not as spontaneous as is often claimed and 2) that the opposition of citizen vs. state does not capture postwar leftwing thought.

My original response focused on the underlying assumptions behind those arguments, both of which seemed insufficiently informed by either real-world power relations or sociological theory. I noted that no one with experience of political organizing of any kind thinks that social movements are ever entirely spontaneous. Should I encounter a situation that looks purely spontaneous, I assume that many people have labored long in a variety of coordinated ways to set up that outcome. So I would prefer an analysis that acknowledged this universal political reality and looked at the ways that political activists deployed the concept of spontaneity, i.e., what they did as well as what they said. Moreover, just because popular movements have been theorized in print or political activists have issued a call to action doesn’t mean they aren’t spontaneous in the sense that many different people coming from many different places converge to protest the same thing at the same time. Mass movements only work if people respond to activists, and the fact that so many did is the key significance of the Anpo movement.

Similarly, to take on 2), if one imagines the state as a monolith, then implacable opposition to it makes sense. But if it is at all porous, as it surely has been in Japan since 1945 — and is claimed to be in most of the sociological literature — then of course sometimes political protest means working with the state as well as against it. In fact, the example of Tanaka Shōzō brought up in this essay shows that the state was penetrable in 1900, too, since he was a Diet member. Moreover, the individuals under review all deployed a more nuanced concept of the state than was originally offered here. While I encouraged publication, I asked for more careful consideration of these two issues.

Confronted with these somewhat grumpy comments, the author, whom I now know to be Simon Avenell, cut back these two weakly supported claims and settled more firmly into his true subject, the ways in which noted scholar-activist Tsurumi Shunsuke thought about the concept of shimin, or citizen. The essay no longer proclaims that it is about one topic while really pursuing something else. Excellent move.

Indeed, this is now a far more nuanced and intelligently argued essay. Responding to yet another of my crabby complaints, Avenell’s revised draft extends the essay substantially beyond its initial fascination with abstracted concepts to study how Tsurumi Shunsuke and others deployed these concepts in postwar Japan. At first glance, it seems unlikely that Tsurumi would have had any hope...