The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan by Katsuya Hirano (review)

The interaction between cultural production and politics is one of the most fascinating topics in early modern Japanese history. One of the things that make it so fascinating is the lack of consensus on the basic contours of this relationship. Was the Tokugawa state obsessed with controlling and repressing cultural expression, as a literal surface reading of some of its edicts might suggest? Or was cultural production comparatively unfettered and free, as the volume and social penetration of cultural production might suggest? The uncertain truth lies somewhere in between. Trying to get at it opens up more questions. Was there a political edge to culture at all? Was the Tokugawa state even capable of using coercive force in the cultural sphere over sustained periods? Is a state versus nonstate paradigm (the dominant paradigm in contemporary American analyses) at all relevant to the way Tokugawa artists and politicians thought about the nature of politics and discourse?

I certainly don’t have any definite answer to these questions. But they are fascinating to discuss and good for stimulating debate across the Japan studies field—equally of interest to specialists in literature, history, art, religion, and politics. The book under review does not ask any of these questions. Instead, it uncritically accepts an old-fashioned assumption that the Tokugawa state and Confucian intellectuals were repressive and sought to strangle cultural expression, especially expression related to human emotion, irrationality, and sensual physicality (pp. 2, 7). The book at times focuses on “the body—its desire and excesses” (p. 4) as the primary object of the state’s repression. But at other times the focus is expanded to “the structure of feeling” (p. 27), a phrase author Katsuya Hirano attributes to the New Left scholar Raymond Williams (1921–88), but which I in this context associated with a different figure, neither new nor left: Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), and specifically his idea of nasake.

The idea that Neo-Confucianism in Japan, and possibly by allusion or association also the Tokugawa state, sought to suppress expression or “feeling” was first introduced by late Tokugawa National Learning scholars such as Norinaga in their criticism of Confucianism. After the Meiji supplantation of the Tokugawa order (and as part of the imperial state’s diminishment of Confucianism and elevation of National Learning), this idea became a trope of modern nationalist historiography. It became a core element in the historical narrative that equated the Tokugawa past with backward Sinitic despotism and the glory of modern Japan with a freer, emotive, and thus simultaneously romantic and rational nationalist spirit. In other words, the ideas underlying this assumption have a very dark and dense history, one clearly associated with anti-Chineseness and ultimately with the early twentieth-century ideas of modern Japanese cultural supremacy which anti-Chineseness fed. This historical outlook was also adopted by non-Japanese-language historians (based mainly in Europe and the Anglophone world) just as readily as they accepted most of the rest of Meiji historiography. After all, many of the contours of Meiji historiography, particularly its inherent anti-Chineseness, were constructed in part to conform and appeal to the particular prejudices emergent in nineteenth-century European thought.

The uncritical acceptance of this historical outlook means Hirano’s book is based on an assumption never argued, and which in the blanket terms it is asserted would (I guess) not be accepted by most professional historians of this period. But need that matter? After all, the most influential book in Japanese intellectual history, Maruyama Masao’s Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (Princeton University Press, 1974), was also based on a huge assumption that today no one accepts: the idea that Song Neo-Confucianism functioned as an orthodox state ideology throughout the Tokugawa regime. Maruyama later admitted he was wrong, even as the book was reprinted and retranslated...