A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan: Placing the People (review)

Kevin Doak’s new book, A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan: Placing the People, is an admirable synthesis of his thinking about the relation between nationalism and modernity in Japan. Much of it is consistent with what he has been writing about for a decade, especially the theme of the protean character of ethnic nationalism, and the surprising entanglements it has led to among thinkers on the left. The organization, too, resembles that of his earlier book Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity (University of California Press, 1994). Both works, after lengthy framing chapters, are arranged as a sequence of synchronic “moments” (keywords or discourses), with the substantive analysis circling back, repeatedly, over the same terrain. But I notice a distinct turn of argument in the new effort. Doak now defines the core notion of nationalism as a “principle that asserts the people as a privileged principle of political life,” “an ideology that upholds the people as the sole legitimate subject of politics” (pp. 2, 127). This perspective enables him to begin with the bold assertion that “much of what is written about Japanese nationalism is not really about nationalism at all” (p. 1), but rather about aligned but fundamentally different matters: what Japanese nationalism is, is in part a function of what it is not.

Laying out this position, along with a survey of theoretical writings on nationalism by a range of twentieth-century Japanese analysts, is the concern of the opening chapter on “representing the people.” It is useful in that it goes beyond a “Western theory, Japanese reality” polarity to emphasize the contemporaneity of Japanese and Western attempts to theorize what was, after all, a work in the making. Perhaps even more so than capitalism and its “laws of motion,” the “nation” assumed license to dominate the minds and hearts of those who made it. Nationalism was nothing other than the ideology—a vision held to be real—of modernity. Doak’s point is that from its very inception, Japanese nationalism was conflictual, having developed along two opposing lines: the étatiste, which seeks to absorb society and nation into the state or treat them as lesser projections of itself; and the “populist,” which posits the “people” as the absolutely necessary basis of the collective that is the “nation” and one that no state can create by fiat.

In the chapter on “preconditions of nationalism,” Doak shows that the “state versus people” tension in Japanese nationalism arose out of conflict over the persistence of aristocratic claims to political privilege. As he notes, the term minzoku was coined as a counter to kazoku as a way of distinguishing the two and resisting the precedence given to the latter. The point, of course, is that history subsequently took this rather circumscribed notion of minzoku for a wild ride indeed. Doak also explores the intellectual careers of Mitsukuri Rinshō and Miyazaki Muryū, using their work (respectively) on a draft civil code and selective translations of French revolutionary history to demonstrate the emergence of “civic” notions of the nation as grounded in the people and their rights. The role of this latter notion in Doak’s account is to wait in the wings, so to speak, until 1945, when the fateful contest between statist and ethnic populist versions of nationalism had run its course and its violent energies could be constitutionally contained.

With this fundamental opposition—and hints as to its resolution—in place, it is easy to follow the sequence of chapters. Two deal with what the nation is not or cannot be reduced to (tennō, shakai) and two with what it essentially is (minzoku, kokumin). For Doak, the tennō, elevated to an object of worship in a state-promoted religio-political cult, certainly impressed a unity, or apparent uniformity, on Japanese life. In fact, the monarchical institution both raised and suppressed nationalist aspirations (p. 34). On the former side, Doak points to...