The Space of Historical Discourse: Ishimoda Sho's Theory of the Heroic Age

Postwar Thought and Ishimoda Sho

Subjectivity and the Theory of the Heroic Age

The collapse of the 1950s debate on the Heroic Age cast a dark shadow over subsequent research on the Kojiki and Nihonshoki as well as, I daresay, the study of Japanese history. The departure point of this debate was an article by Ishimoda Sho titled “Kodai kizoku no eiyu jidai: Kojiki no ichi kosatsu” [The heroic age of the ancient nobility: A study of the Kojiki]. According to this article, democratic communities ruled throughout Japan at the end of primitive times, but were defeated by the tenno-state that had newly gained power. The Heroic Age refers to the final stages of the primitive era, which were marked by rivalry among these democratic communities. This era was not, however, a pastoral one. What confronted the formation of the ancient state was rather a period of disorder and upheaval, from within which emerged a national (minzoku) spirit. Although epic poetry is generally the form in which such heroic ages are later recounted, this genre never crystallized in Japan. Instead, memories of the past can only very dimly be glimpsed within the Kojiki and the Nihonshoki, texts that were produced in the early 700s on behalf of the tenno-state as an attempt to consolidate records and genealogies. The subsequent Heroic Age debate was what developed around the question of the validity of Ishimoda's views.

Beginning in the postwar era, Ishimoda—who was also a Marxist—consistently engaged in historical research focusing on “the tenno system, which is the greatest task [of criticism].” This research did not simply point out the hegemonic nature of the tenno system; it attempted to explore the “issue of confronting the Japanese people (jinmin), most of whom were under the spell of the tenno system.”¹ While Ishimoda saw the people as a force that shapes history, this view was by no means an optimistic one:

The knowledge that the people are the driving force behind historical progress and revolution remains unchanged. When this correct principle is seen from a negative perspective, however, it must be said that the stagnation or regress of the people's strength and consciousness has brought about the stagnation and regress of historical development…. As can typically be seen in the case of state power, domination always rules over the people by means of a powerful framework. Yet no political power could survive if this domination were merely naked force. The particular conditions of a people who permit such survival must correspond with that domination.

²

Ishimoda's statement that one pay attention to such historical stagnation emerged from his “experience of that era ruled by the prewar tenno system.” Emancipation from this system was brought about externally by means of the Occupation army. Painful memories lingered of the Japanese who were unable to oppose tenno fascism in and of themselves, as could be seen in such phenomena as grassroots fascism and the tenko-conversions of intellectuals. It was in order to overcome this failure that Ishimoda set out to explain the “various conditions and contradictions of the people, who made possible the maintenance and survival of this tenno rule itself.”

3

Ishimoda's project can be seen as of a piece with those movements that went beyond the genre of scholarship. These included the modernism of the political scientist Maruyama Masao and the economic historian Otsuka Hisao, who together published “Chokokkashugi no ronri to shinri” [The logic and psychology of ultranationalism]; the theory of the “nation” as set forth by the Chinese literature scholar Takeuchi Yoshimi; the subjectivity debate of the philosopher Umemoto Katsumi; and the tenko-conversion theories of the Shiso no Kagaku Kenkyukai (Research Association for the Science of Thought). Convinced of the need to go beyond a simplistic theory of infrastructure, these thinkers...