Becoming Apart: National Power and Local Politics in Toyama, 1868-1945 (review)

Becoming Apart: National Power and Local Politics in Toyama, 1868-1945. By Michael Lewis (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2001) 340 pp. $47.50

This major work focuses on the experience of one prefecture—Toyama—as a window on the development of center-region relations during the establishment of the modern Japanese nation-state initiated by the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Lewis' findings contribute a number of important insights to an understanding of state building and social movements during the modern era in Japan and elsewhere.

State building often involves national decisions that privilege a center at the cost of outlying regions or a periphery. Toyama was transformed from a relatively prosperous prefecture with a distinct regional identity into a periphery integrated with the nation but lagging in development because of both national policies that favored the Pacific Coast region (particularly the Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka corridor) over the Sea of Japan prefectures (Ura Nihon or "backside Japan"), and economic forces unleashed by Japan's opening to international markets and the increasing integration of the domestic economy. The peripheral prefectures faced demands in the form of taxes, military conscription, and conformity to national standards. But central programs in the building of modern transportation, communications, and industrial/educational systems benefited primarily such large urban areas as Tokyo and Osaka.

The forging of national identity becomes an urgent aspect of state building not only because of the strong hold of local identities rooted in geography, language, and culture but also because of the aforementioned asymmetrical distribution of benefits in national programs with potentially dangerous centrifugal consequences. Japan was successful in the creation of a strong sense of national identity through its educational and military programs, but at the cost of fomenting militant expansionism, seen by both the government and local elites as a means of healing the breach between center and periphery. Grassroots imperialism ensued as expansionism provided to the people of Toyama a sense of unity with the rest of Japan and the perceived economic benefits of empire for a depressed region.

Despite the disparities in power between the center and the region, people in the periphery do not always passively acquiesce with demands imposed from above. The people of Toyama, particularly those injured by imperial programs and underrepresented by party politicians, engaged in various forms of popular protest. In Lewis' formulation, such social movements constituted as much a part of the state-building process as revolution, party and electoral politics, and policymaking and implementation, as protesters renegotiated the boundaries of permissible political participation imposed by the central government.

Elegantly written and persuasively argued, Lewis' monograph draws mainly on, and contributes to, the methodologies of social history and political culture. Nonetheless, it could have benefited from quantitative time series analysis, given the availability of extensive economic, social, and political data for Japan at both the national and prefectural levels since the Meiji period. Lewis makes the case for Toyama's relegation to periphery mostly by citing qualitative evidence and by making snapshot references to social and economic indicators—for example, the tenancy rates of Toyama being the highest in Japan in 1884 at 51.5 percent. But time series analysis of prefectural data in production and export volumes and composition, tenancy rates, demographic and welfare indicators, and political variables, especially in comparison to those of the nation or other prefectures, would yield a more precise picture of social, economic, and political change over time, allowing the pinpointing of when and by how much the gap between Toyama and the central core widened. Despite its quantitative shortcomings, however, Lewis' book provides stimulating perspectives on the process of state making, particularly with reference to core-periphery relations and popular participation from below.