An Imperial Path to Modernity: Yoshino Sakuzō and a New Liberal Order in East Asia, 1905–1937 by Jung-Sun N. Han (review)

Yoshino Sakuzō is an icon in prewar modern Japanese history whose name is familiar to almost all Japanese. He is invariably presented in junior and senior high school history textbooks as the icon of Taisho Democracy. Within Japanese academia, the focus on Yoshino and the linked concept of Taisho Democracy has often included a fierce debate on how to position the man and how to evaluate the concept. Whereas some herald Taisho Democracy as the indigenous roots of postwar Japanese democracy, others would rather be found dead than using the contagious TD phrase. Nor is it helpful that there is little consensus about its main criteria among those who advocate Taisho Democracy as the roots of postwar democracy. Accordingly, there is no agreement on the date of its start (1905, 1912, or 1918?) or its end (1925, 1931, 1932, or 1937?). The vehemence of the debate is of course due to its inextricable link to some of the most fundamental questions concerning modern Japanese history. What was “the true nature” of prewar Japanese politics and society, and how do we explain Japan’s participation in the post–World War I new world order in the 1920s and its aggressive rejection of this same world order in the 1930s and early 1940s?

Yoshino Sakuzō and the Taisho generation he represented are critical to research on these questions. Compared to the vigor of the debate and the number of publications on Yoshino and Taisho Democracy in Japanese, the relative dearth of attention to Yoshino in English has been mystifying. Only four book-length publications feature the words Taisho or prewar Japan and democracy, three of these dating back nearly 50 years and the most recent one more than 20 years. Authorities in the field of prewar Japanese political history such as Tetsuo Najita and Peter Duus have written essays on Yoshino, but apart from two unpublished dissertations by Walter Scott Perry (1956) and this reviewer (2007), there has been no full-length publication in English on this figurehead of Taisho Democracy. Considering that these do exist in the Chinese, Korean, Indian, and Indonesian languages, and that biographies have been published in English on many of Yoshino’s contemporaries, a full-length biography of Yoshino has been the biggest lacuna in the English-language scholarship on Japan’s prewar intellectual history.

In this sense, the publication of Jung-Sun Han’s book on Yoshino should be welcomed as a most auspicious development. However, in the introduction the author makes a few statements that fundamentally undermine her credibility. She presents Matsuo Takayoshi as an example of a group of Yoshino scholars who have failed to recognize his work on foreign affairs (p. 9). Because Matsuo is the scholar who has worked most extensively on Yoshino, this is a serious misrepresentation. The author downplays publications of Japanese research on Yoshino’s voluminous work on international and regional affairs as few in number and Marxist in methodology. Yet most of the research in Japan over the last 15 years has focused on Yoshino’s international and regional outlook, and the last Marxist contributions to the debate were made in the 1980s. Han singles out the work of her Japanese mentor Matsumoto Sannosuke as an exception to the liberal bias on Yoshino’s internal discourse and the Marxist bias on his external discourse. But Matsumoto’s research is not recent, and Han does not consider the work of Fujimura Ichirō, the most prolific and prominent scholar on Yoshino today. Fujimura stresses the dialectic of realism and idealism in Yoshino’s thought more effectively than Matsumoto has.¹ Han also ignores the publications of this reviewer.²

Her outdated, biased, and incomplete overview of the research history on Yoshino leaves the impression that her research is not as innovative as she maintains. And she...