Entre nonchalance et désespoir: Les intellectuels japonais sinologues face à la guerre (1930-1950) (review)

The "nonchalance" and "despair" of the book's title represent a contradiction that lies at the heart of this fine study: on the one hand, Japanese China scholars around the time of the Fifteen-Year War (1931–45) found themselves in a situation in which the national culture that constituted their object of study was violently threatened by the military expansionism of a foreign power; on the other hand, that foreign power was none other than Japan, to which these scholars believed themselves to bear foremost allegiance in their status as Japanese citizens. Guex confronts this contradiction by focusing specifically on two China specialists, the writer and critic Takeda Taijun (1912–76) and the Sinologist and critic, as well as Takeda's lifelong friend, Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910–77).

Both Takeda and Takeuchi felt themselves to be torn between their attachment to Chinese culture—an attachment that was in equal parts intellectual and emotional—and their affiliation with Japan. This sense of contradiction explains the "despair" that tormented these two men, but Guex admirably complicates matters by describing how both in fact benefited from the Japanese invasion. In other words the "nonchalance" or ease of their lives while in China was based on their complicity with Japan's wartime regime and its imperialist policies. For example, Takeda spent the final year of the war in occupied Shanghai, living quite sumptuously in a house expropriated from a British resident who had been placed in a Japanese internment camp while working in a job that consisted of leading a team of Chinese employees in the translation and editing of patriotic Japanese works into Chinese. Takeuchi, for his part, spent the years 1937–39 in occupied Beijing, where he embraced a dissolute lifestyle (drunken evenings, brothel visits, etc.) while teaching Japanese-language courses at Beijing University and the Library of Modern Science, thereby revealing his active—if unwitting—participation in the government's kōminka seisaku, or imperialization policies, the goal of which was to effectively transform Chinese citizens into Japanese imperial subjects. Takeda's and Takeuchi's complicity with Japanese aggression in China was not limited to such material circumstances, as Guex carefully documents. What is in any case most significant here is the quandary whereby those Japanese intellectuals who were by all accounts the most supportive and favorably disposed toward China could so easily allow themselves to be seduced into cooperating with the Japanese military authorities against Chinese interests.

The engagement with this quandary provides the political and ethical force of the book. Guex wishes to show that the postwar reputations of both Takeda and Takeuchi as intellectuals of the highest integrity, whose works reveal an abiding commitment to questions of responsibility and justice, were indeed well founded. Yet Guex also understands that, particularly in light of the historical circumstances of Japan's wartime aggression in which these individuals found themselves, such integrity could not but be severely tested, compromised, and, at times, betrayed. One of the underlying messages of this book, I believe, is that there can be no real participation in political life without the experience of moments in which one's ethical principles are dangerously put at risk and in which one's actions as based on these principles are revealed by subsequent events to have been mistaken, regardless of how well intentioned they were originally.

It is in this light that one must read a footnote that can be said to encapsulate the aim of Guex's project as a whole:

In his Riben zhongguoxue shi (The history of Japanese Sinology), Yan Shao-dang praises Takeuchi and the members of the Chinese Literature Research Society for being the first to have accorded contemporary Chinese literature the same importance as that of classical literature. If, in order to underline Takeuchi's integrity, Yan mentions his refusal to participate in the Greater East Asia Writers' Congress, he nevertheless...