Japan and the Specter of Imperialism (review)

This study of the relation between the national and the modern in "Anseitreaty era Japan" is a bracing revision of late nineteenth-century intellectual history. Anderson's examination of the vitalist ontologies that supported competing modes of governmentality during the period draws on postcolonial studies, recent histories of Western and Japanese imperialism, and research on the gendered creation of national identities but moves beyond all three to pursue a stimulating new approach to the period, informed by self-reflection on how the field of Japan studies has typically produced its object of knowledge.

The proposition of the Ansei-treaty era as a historical period is central to Anderson's innovations. Neither Bakumatsu nor Meiji, the era Anderson sketches begins in 1858, when the Tokugawa state agreed to trade treaties with the United States and four European countries, and ends in roughly 1910 with the colonization of Korea. The treaties established a regime of "differentiated sovereignty"-the simultaneous imposition and suspension of international law, on the grounds of Japan's civilizational inferiority-that was not changed by the founding of the Meiji state (p. 16). The Korean annexation imposed similar conditions on the peninsula. The Ansei-treaty era puts Japan in a large transnational frame by showing the role that the international law of the era of free-trade imperialism played in the creation of Japan as a sovereign state. Anderson demonstrates that many of the intellectual currents of the era were informed not only by the effort to "regain" full sovereignty (which had not previously existed) but also by the concepts and logic of the international legal regime, even in representations of love and erudite disquisitions on aesthetics. This is a radical follow-through on efforts to de-naturalize the nation in Japan studies, which often fail because the Japanese nation-state still defines their empirical bounds. Anderson, in contrast, begins with the transnational conditions behind the emergence of "Japan" in the modern sense of the word, follows their consequences through the intellectual combat that invented the Japanese nation, and arrives finally at turn-of-the-century "yellow-man's burden" legitimations of Japan's colonial project. By confronting the contradictions of a colonialist state originating in semicolonial domination, whose colonialism moreover was both pro- and anti-Western, Anderson moves beyond the paradigms of South Asia-focused colonial and postcolonial studies, the inspiration for much dynamic research on Japan for the last 15 years but whose limits the history of East Asia easily reveals.

Anderson's examination of the ontologies that appeared in the Ansei-treaty era and the competing governmentalities they supported draws on rich material. He defines a vitalist ontology as a construction of the nation "in terms of an opposition between national life and death" and relies on Foucault's concept of governmentality as a mechanism through which individuals and populations are harnessed by state and economic regimes (p. 3). Hegemonic views of the nation and its relation to state and capital emerged through conflict between rival arguments, presented initially here through the educational doctrines of Mori Arinori, which he made state policy, and the aesthetic definitions of the nation advanced by writers associated with the Seikyōsha in response. Each relied on a contrast between states of life and death, with Mori using physiological language connecting education to the strength of the national body and Shiga Jūkō (or Shigetaka) and other Seikyōsha writers opposing the life-giving characteristics of harmony and appreciation of beauty to the morbid influence of reason. Japan and the Specter of Imperialism also ranges across disputes over the implementation of the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890), the melodramatic moral economy of Ozaki Kōyō's novel Konjiki yasha (1897-1903), and the performative creation of a national subject in the scholar Haga Yaichi's "discovery" of traces of the nation in Japanese literary history.

The initial argument suffers from a careless presentation, but as Anderson examines the successive debates over national identity he shows that they returned repeatedly...