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114 5 Naturalizing Nationhood: Ideology and Practice in Early Twentieth-Century Japan JULIA ADENEY THOMAS Modern nationhood has been portrayed as profoundly unnatural. Whether analyzed by Hegel or Maruyama Masao, Benedict Anderson or Ernst Gellner, the creation of modern nationhood has been deemed an artificial act. Neither the natural bonds of kinship nor rootedness in the soil impelled its creation; rather, the impetus behind nationhood has been ascribed to the working out of the Hegelian Ideal in History, to invention (sakui) in Maruyama’s theory, to exile and hybridity in Anderson’s, or to a particular type of industrial culture in Gellner’s. The nation (as opposed to the state) in these analyses emerged in the nineteenth century not as an evolutionary outgrowth of the past but as a form of discontinuity—a new relationship with time and space, with fellow citizens, and with nature itself, an overcoming of nature’s dictates in favor of those of human beings. But not all twentieth-century nations have celebrated conscious selfcreation , nor have they embraced the existential responsibilities inherent in such an identity. In the early decades of the twentieth century, many nations, including Japan, sought to reinscribe the nation as natural. Nature and nationhood became so closely bound that this process of restructuring national identity might be described with equal justice as nationalizing nature and as naturalizing nationhood. In Japan, immemorial tradition was evoked in support of this newly constructed identity, but, as I will argue, the naturalized nationhood of the Taishò period is more correctly understood as a reaction against Meiji conceptions of nature and the form of semimodernity they represented. I shall analyze the category of nature as precisely as space permits in order, first, to suggest the way Japan’s naturalization of nationhood circumscribed legitimate political discourse, augmenting oligarchic power, and, second, to place Japan’s engagement with modernity in a global perspective beyond the dichotomy of East and West. As is often the case with developing ideologies, the first formulations of Japan’s new naturalized nationhood appeared in a piecemeal but concrete fashion. Elements of the new vision emerged through governmental policies directed at land use and religious shrines, government-sponsored textbook depictions of community, and governmental economic exhortations. Together , these documents laid the literal and figurative groundwork for the new relationship between Japan and nature. This relationship would be fully systematized only later during the war years when paeans to the coalescent intimacy between Japan and nature ring forth in works such as Kokutai no hongi and texts by Kyoto School philosophers like Watsuji Tetsurò (1889–1960). Although the earlier documents are diverse, the concept of nature (shizen)1 that emerges is anything but diffuse. In other words, while ideological production was piecemeal in the early decades of the century, the cumulative definition was coherent. Indeed, through these documents, the concept acquires precise material referents and theoretical parameters. It is possible, in fact, to understand the power and distinctiveness of this new approach to nature both as the concrete lived experience of Taishò villagers and as an abstract formulation. Turning first to the new ways nature was experienced, let us imagine a village scene during the early decades of the twentieth century when the population was still predominately rural. In those years, a schoolboy might have sat disconsolately on the stump of a venerable old tree that used to shade his village’s shrine. The tree has been cut and sold for lumber as part of the central government’s “one shrine per village” consolidation policy. On this imaginary afternoon, however , what worries the boy is not the desacramentalization of the old shrine ground where he played in early childhood but rather the tediousness of his ethics textbook proclaiming him and his school fellows to be children of the paternal emperor.2 The boy’s more immediate father, a local farmer, stands gossiping with his friend, and this lengthy conversation also makes the boy impatient. His father reiterates his long-standing complaint about the Hòtoku (Repayment of Virtue) Society, which had been a locally controlled rural economic improvement society until 1906, when the Ministry of Home Affairs took charge. The farmer’s frugality no longer repays his own ancestors’ sacrifices but is instead directed by and toward Tokyo. “It’s not the same anymore,” grumbles the boy’s father. “We’ll soon be calling it the Hòtoku Naimushò (Home Ministry Repayment) Society,” he says, repeating the worn-out joke that has been making the...

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